Clay model of a wheeled cart from a grave at Szigetszentmárton, Hung., end of the 4th …
© Hungarian National Museum, Budapest; photograph, Kardos Judit
history of European peoples and cultures from prehistoric times to the present. Europe is a more ambiguous term than most geographic expressions. Its etymology is doubtful, as is the physical extent of the area it designates. Its western frontiers seem clearly defined by its coastline, yet the position of the British Isles remains equivocal. To outsiders, they seem clearly part of Europe. To many British and some Irish people, however, “Europe” means essentially continental Europe. To the south, Europe ends on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Yet, to the Roman Empire, this was mare nostrum (“our sea”), an inland sea rather than a frontier. Even now, some question whether Malta or Cyprus is a European island. The greatest uncertainty lies to the east, where natural frontiers are notoriously elusive. If the Ural Mountains mark the eastern boundary of Europe, where does it lie to the south of them? Can Astrakhan, for instance, be regarded as European? Can even the Crimea or the Ukraine? The questions have more than merely geographic significance.
These questions have acquired new importance as Europe has come to be more than a geographic expression. After World War II, much was heard of “the European idea.” Essentially, this meant the idea of European unity, at first confined to western Europe but by the beginning of the 1990s seeming able at length to embrace central and eastern Europe as well.
Unity in Europe is an ancient ideal. In a sense it was implicitly prefigured by the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages, it was imperfectly embodied first by Charlemagne's empire and then by the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic church. Later, a number of political theorists proposed plans for European union, and both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler tried to unite Europe by conquest.
It was not until after World War II, however, that European statesmen began to seek ways of uniting Europe peacefully on a basis of equality instead of domination by one or more great powers. Their motive was fourfold: to prevent further wars in Europe, in particular by reconciling France and Germany and helping to deter aggression by others; to eschew the protectionism and “beggar-my-neighbour” policies that had been practiced between the wars; to match the political and economic influence of the world's new superpowers, but on a civilian basis; and to begin to civilize international relations by introducing common rules and institutions that would identify and promote the shared interests of Europe rather than the national interests of its constituent states.
Underlying this policy is the conviction that Europeans have more in common than divides them, especially in the modern world. By comparison with other continents, western Europe is small and immensely varied, divided by rivers and mountains and cut into by inlets and creeks. It is also densely populated—a mosaic of different peoples with a multiplicity of languages. Very broadly and inadequately, its peoples can be sorted into Nordic, Alpine or Celtic, and Mediterranean types, and the bulk of their languages classified as either Romance or Germanic. In this sense, what Europeans chiefly share is their diversity; and it may be this that has made them so energetic and combative. Although uniquely favoured by fertile soils and temperate climates, they have long proved themselves warlike. Successive waves of invasion, mainly from the east, were followed by centuries of rivalry and conflict, both within Europe and overseas. Many of Europe's fields have been battlefields, and many of Europe's cities, it has been said, were built on bones.
Yet Europeans have also been in the forefront of intellectual, social, and economic endeavour. As navigators, explorers, and colonists, for a long time they dominated much of the rest of the world and left on it the impress of their values, their technology, their politics, and even their dress. They also exported both nationalism and weaponry.
Then, in the 20th century, Europe came close to destroying itself. World War I cost more than 8 million European lives, World War II more than 18 million in battle, bombing, and systematic Nazi genocide—to say nothing of the 30 million who perished elsewhere.
As well as the dead, the wars left lasting wounds, psychological and physical alike. But, whereas World War I exacerbated nationalism and ideological extremism in Europe, World War II had almost the opposite effect. The burned child fears fire; and Europe had been badly burned. Within five years of the war's end, the French foreign minister Robert Schuman, prompted by Jean Monnet, proposed to Germany the first practical move toward European unity, and the West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer agreed. Others involved in that first step included the statesmen Alcide De Gasperi and Paul-Henri Spaak. All except Monnet were men from Europe's linguistic and political frontiers—Schuman from Lorraine, Adenauer from the Rhineland, De Gasperi from northern Italy, Spaak from bilingual Belgium. Europe's diversity thus helped foster its impulse to unite.
This article treats the history of European society and culture. For a discussion of the physical and human geography of the continent, see Europe. For the histories of individual countries, see specific articles by name. Articles treating specific topics in European history include Byzantine Empire; Steppe, the; World War I; and World War II. For the lives of prominent European figures, see specific biographies by name—e.g., Charlemagne, Erasmus, and Bismarck. Related topics are discussed in such articles as those on religion (e.g., Celtic religion; Greek religion; Germanic religion; Christianity; and Judaism), literature (e.g., English literature, Scandinavian literature, and Russian literature), and the fine arts (e.g., painting, history of; and music, history of).
The appearance of anatomically modern humans in Europe about 35,000 BC was accompanied by major changes in culture and technology. There was a further period of significant change after the last major Pleistocene glaciation, which included the widespread adoption of farming and the establishment of permanent settlements from the 7th millennium BC. These laid the foundation for all future developments of European civilization.
Knowledge of these early periods of the European past is entirely dependent on archaeology. The evidence, which has almost all been collected since the middle of the 19th century, varies greatly from region to region and is limited by what was deposited and by whether what was deposited has survived. The archaeological evidence has also been disturbed by a range of human and natural processes, from glacial activity to farming and modern development. Modern techniques have greatly increased the amount of information available, but many parts of the story of the past may be difficult or impossible to recover, and the evidence that has been revealed needs to be assessed in the light of all these factors.
Dating depends on scientific methods. Cores through deep ocean-floor sediments and the Arctic ice cap have provided a continuous record of climatic conditions for the last one million years, but individual sites cannot easily be matched to it. Radiocarbon dating is effective to 35,000 years ago, and prior to that other scientific methods can be used with varying degrees of precision. Tree rings give precise dates for wood as early as the 5th millennium BC. Detailed typological studies, especially of pottery and stone tools, can be used to establish the relative sequence of material. The dates cited in this section are based on various scientific methods. For the earliest period, to about 35,000 BC, they are derived from absolute determinations by potassium-argon and thorium-uranium dating, together with correlations to the deep-sea and ice-core sequences; for the later period, they are derived primarily from radiocarbon determinations, calibrated where appropriate to give actual calendar years.
The period of human activity to the end of the last major Pleistocene glaciation, about 8300 BC, is termed the Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age); that part of it from 35,000 to 8300 BC is termed the Upper Paleolithic.
The climatic record shows a cyclic pattern of warmer and colder periods; in the last 750,000 years, there have been eight major cycles, with many shorter episodes. In the colder periods, the Arctic and Alpine ice sheets expanded, and sea levels fell. Some parts of southern Europe may have been little affected by these changes, but the advance and retreat of the ice sheets and accompanying glacial environments had a significant impact on northern Europe; at their maximum advance, they covered most of Scandinavia, the North European Plain, and Russia. Human occupation fluctuated in response to these changing conditions, but continuous settlement north of the Alps required a solution to the problems of living in extremely cold conditions.
By 1,000,000 years ago hominids were widely distributed in Africa and Asia, and some finds in Europe may be that early. The earliest securely dated material is from Isernia la Pineta in southern Italy, where stone tools and animal bones were dated to about 730,000 BC. Thereafter the evidence becomes more plentiful, and by 375,000 BC most areas except Scandinavia, the Alps, and northern Eurasia had been colonized.
Fossil remains of the hominids themselves are rare, and most of the evidence consists of stone tools. The simplest were chopping tools made from pebbles with a few flakes struck off to create an edge. These were replaced by more complex traditions of toolmaking, which produced a range of hand axes and flake tools; these industries are referred to as Acheulian, after the French site of Saint-Acheul. Some of the tools were for woodworking, but only rarely do any tools of organic material, such as wooden spears, survive as evidence of other Paleolithic technologies.
The subsistence economy depended on hunting and gathering. Population densities were necessarily low, and group territories were large. The main evidence is animal bones, which suggest a varied reliance on species such as rhinoceros, red deer, ibex, and horse, but it is difficult to reconstruct how such food was actually acquired. Open confrontation with large animals, such as the rhinoceros, is unlikely, and they were probably killed in vulnerable locations such as lake-edge watering spots; at La Cotte de Sainte Brelade in the Channel Islands, rhinoceroses and mammoths were driven over a cliff edge. Scavenging meat from already dead animals also may have been important. Food resources such as migratory herds and plants were available only seasonally, so an annual strategy for survival was necessary. It is not clear, however, how it was possible to store food acquired at times of plenty; carcasses of dead animals frozen in the snow would have provided a store of food.
From the beginning of the last major Pleistocene glaciation about 120,000 BC, the hominid fossils belong to the Neanderthals, who have been found throughout Europe and western Asia, including the glacial environments of central Europe. They were biologically and culturally adapted to survival in the harsh environments of the north, though they are also found in more moderate climates in southern Europe and Asia. Finds of stone tools from the Russian plains suggest the first certain evidence of colonization there by 80,000 BC. Despite their heavy skeletons and developed brow ridges, Neanderthals were probably little different from modern humans. Some of the skeletal remains appear to be from deliberate burials, the first evidence for such careful behaviour among humans.
From about 35,000 BC, anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens sapiens, the ancestor of modern populations—were found throughout Europe, and the following period was marked by a series of important technological and cultural changes, in marked contrast to the comparative stability of the preceding hundreds of thousands of years. These changes cannot be simply explained as the result of the sudden appearance of modern, intelligent humans. The preceding Neanderthals differed little in brain size, and some Neanderthal remains are associated with tool assemblages of the new technology as well as with behavioral practices such as burial. The problem of the relationship of the Neanderthals to the sudden appearance of modern humans is difficult; possible explanations include total replacement of Neanderthals by modern populations, interbreeding with an immigrant modern population, or Neanderthals as ancestors of modern humans.
The technological changes of the Upper Paleolithic Period include the disappearance of heavy tools such as hand axes and choppers and the introduction of a much wider range of tools for special purposes, many of them made from long, thin blades. Tools made of antler, bone, and ivory were also widely used, apparently for the first time. After 18,000 BC there were further innovations. Flint was pretreated by heating to alter its structure and make flaking easier, and new tool types included harpoons, needles for sewing fur garments, and small blades for hafting in spears and arrows. The new technologies and more complex and specialized tool types suggest a major change in the pattern of energy expenditure. Much more effort was devoted to the careful use of resources, and tools were prepared in advance and retained, rather than made and discarded expediently.
Sites of this period are found throughout Europe, though at the height of the last major Pleistocene glaciation (about 35,000 to 13,000 BC) much of the North European Plain was abandoned as populations moved south. There is a greatly increased number of sites, many of which show evidence of more permanent structures such as hearths, pavements, and shelters built of skins on a frame of bone or wood. Some of this increase may be due to the greater likelihood of finding sites of this more recent period, but it may also indicate a growing population density and a greater investment of energy in construction.
Subsistence still depended on hunting and gathering, but the role of plant foods is difficult to estimate. As population increased, group territories may have become smaller, and the increasingly harsh environments of the last glaciation necessitated appropriate strategies for survival. Some sites show a concentration on particular large animal species (horse and reindeer in the north and ibex and red deer in the south), but there is also evidence for the increasing use of other food resources, such as rabbits, fish, and shellfish. In comparison with large animals, these produced small amounts of food, but they were an important addition because of their greater reliability. Settlement patterns reflect these social and economic strategies, which allowed most of the population to stay at one location for long periods while others left to procure distant resources.
Some of the most important evidence is for change in social organization and human behaviour. There is increasing evidence for deliberate and careful burial, sometimes with elaborate treatment of the dead. At Sungir in Russia and at Grotta Paglicci in Italy, for instance, the dead were buried with tools and ornaments, indicating a respect for their identity or status. Personal ornaments, especially bracelets, beads, and pendants, are common finds. They were made from a wide variety of materials, including animal teeth, ivory, and shells; some appear to have been sewn onto garments. Such ornamentation not only shows an elaboration of clothing and an interest in display but may also have been used as a means of signaling individual or group identity.
The earliest art objects in Europe also date from this period. There are small figurines of animals and humans made from finely carved bone or ivory. Among the most striking are the so-called Venus figurines, stylized representations of females with large breasts and buttocks, which show a marked degree of similarity from France to Russia. There are also thousands of small stone plaques engraved with representations of humans and animals.
Art is also found in caves, particularly in France and Spain, in caves such as Lascaux and Altamira, though there is one cave at Kapova in the Urals with decoration in a similar style. In some cases, reliefs of humans or animals are carved on rock walls, but the most spectacular artworks are the paintings, dominated by large animals such as mammoth, horse, or bison; human figures are rare, but there are many other signs and symbols. The precise meaning of this art is impossible to recover, but it appears to have played a significant part in group ceremonial activity; much of it is in almost inaccessible depths of caves and may have been important for rituals of hunting or initiation.
The similarity in style over great distances—seen most clearly in the case of the Venus figurines—is evidence for the existence of extensive social networks throughout Europe. Material items also were transmitted over long distances, especially particular types of flint, fossil shell, and marine mollusks. Such networks were most extensive at the height of the last glaciation and were an important social solution to the problem of surviving in extreme climates; they provided alliances to supply food and other material resources as well as information about a far-flung environment. Human developments during this so-called Ice Age thus included not only technological, economic, and social solutions to the problems of adaptation and survival but also an increased awareness of individual and group identity and a new field of symbolic and artistic activity.
The extreme conditions of the last Pleistocene glaciation began to improve about 13,000 BC as temperatures slowly rose. The Scandinavian Ice Sheet itself started to retreat northward about 8300 BC, and the period between then and the origins of agriculture (at various times in the 7th to 4th millennia, depending on location) was one of great environmental and cultural change. It is termed the Mesolithic Period (Middle Stone Age) to emphasize its transitional importance, but the alternative term Epipaleolithic, used mostly in eastern Europe, stresses the continuity with processes begun earlier.
As the ice sheets retreated, vast areas of new land in northern Europe were opened up for human occupation. Resettlement began in some short warmer episodes at the end of the last glaciation. In the longer term, the melting of the Arctic glaciers produced a rise in sea levels, though this was to some extent offset by a rise in land levels as the weight of the overlying ice was removed. The combined effect of these processes was to flood large areas of land in the Mediterranean and especially in the North Sea basin. Britain was isolated from the continent during the 7th millennium, and the modern coastline was broadly established by the 4th.
The changes in physical landforms were accompanied by similarly major changes in the environment. The rising temperature and humidity led to the increased growth of plant life, including birch and pine as well as smaller trees and bushes that produced nuts and fruit. Continued climatic amelioration meant further environmental change, and the initial open forest progressively gave way to climax forest dominated by oak and elm, which crowded out many of the smaller species. There were similar changes among animals. The large animals of the Ice Age such as bison and mammoth disappeared, either because of climatic change or from overhunting, and reindeer herds moved northward in search of colder conditions. The European forests were dominated by smaller animals, such as wild cattle, pigs, and deer, with ibex in the south.
The evidence for human exploitation of these changing environments varies considerably, depending on the precise range of regionally available resources. As the reindeer moved north, so did some human groups. Others adapted to the new animal and plant resources available. Wild cattle, deer, and pigs were widely hunted, as well as many types of bird. Fish were also caught, including river species such as salmon and carp and many sea species. On the western coasts, shellfish also were exploited. The role of plant foods is difficult to estimate, but there is evidence for the use of many species, including hazelnuts and various berries.
These new patterns of economy needed new technologies. Stone tools increasingly took the form of small blades for tipping or hafting in arrows and spears. Where conditions allow their survival, it is possible to see many new tools and equipment made of organic materials, though some, such as the bow and arrow, may have been made in earlier periods. Hooks, nets, and traps for fishing; birch bark containers; and textiles made from plant fibres are all known. Canoes and paddles also have been found.
Though subsistence was dependent on hunting and gathering seasonally available resources, those resources could be managed in elementary ways. Hunting strategies concentrated on taking adult males, preserving the young and female animals needed to maintain the herds. Dogs were a source of meat and fur, but they may also have been used in hunting. It may have been possible to control the movement of herds by making clearances in the forest, thus attracting animals to the new growth; the evidence for fire and repeated small-scale clearances supports this theory. Plants may have been husbanded. In these ways, human control was exercised over the environment and its resources.
Human occupation expanded throughout Europe, and many areas show a pattern of settlement with base camps occupied by all members of the group for some part of the year and small sites used for the exploitation of some particular resource. Wide social networks continued to exist, as shown by the long-distance exchange of some raw materials such as special types of rock. Mobility may have been important for ensuring an adequate annual subsistence, but some environments, such as the coastal regions of the Baltic and the west, may have allowed the possibility of more permanent settlement. Reliance on fish and shellfish there might be thought a last resort; alternatively, it could have been a purposive choice of resources that would allow permanent residence. Denmark and western France have traditions of deliberate human burial that support this theory.
Thus the environmental changes were met with a variety of social, economic, and technological responses, but human society did not adapt passively. Opportunities existed to manage the environment more actively and to make choices for social rather than purely survival purposes.
From about 7000 BC in Greece, farming economies were progressively adopted in Europe, though areas farther west, such as Britain, were not affected for two millennia and Scandinavia not until even later. The period from the beginning of agriculture to the widespread use of bronze about 2300 BC is called the Neolithic (New Stone Age).
Agriculture had developed at an earlier date in the Middle East, and the relationship of Europe to that area and the mechanism of the introduction of agriculture have been variously explained. At one extreme is a model of immigrant colonization from the Middle East, with the agricultural frontier pushing farther westward as population grew and new settlements were founded. A variation of this model denies the uniformity of such a “wave of advance” and stresses the possibility of a more irregular pioneering movement. At the other extreme is a model of agricultural adoption by indigenous Mesolithic groups, with a minimum of reliance on any introduced people or resources.
In favour of the intrusive model is the nature of the crops that formed the basis of early agriculture; the main cereals were emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, and barley, together with other plants such as peas and flax. These had all been domesticated in the Middle East, where their wild progenitors were found. The material culture of the earliest farmers in Greece and southeastern Europe also shows great similarity to that of the Middle East. On the other hand, the animals important to early agriculture are not so clearly introduced; wild sheep and goats may have been available in southern Europe, and cattle were probably domesticated in southeastern Europe at least as early as in the Middle East. There also were definite European contributions; the dog was domesticated in Europe in the Mesolithic Period, and evidence suggests that the horse was first domesticated on the Western Steppe.
The process of agricultural adoption, furthermore, was neither fast nor uniform. It took at least 4,000 years for farming to reach its northern limit in Scandinavia, and there it was the success of fishing and sealing that allowed agriculture as a desirable addition to the economy. In many areas of western Europe, it is likely that domesticated animals were used before the adoption of agricultural plants. It is also possible to argue for a considerable Mesolithic contribution, especially in the north and west. Not only did some areas continue to rely on hunting and gathering in addition to farming but there was also continuity of settlement location and resource use, especially of stone for tools. Despite the disappearance of the small blades previously used for spears and arrows and the appearance of heavy tools for forest clearance, there was some continuity of tool technology.
The adoption of farming is unlikely to have been a simple or uniform process throughout Europe. In some regions, especially Greece, the Balkans, southern Italy, central Europe, and Ukraine, actual colonization by new populations may have been important; elsewhere, especially in the west and north, a gradual process of adaptation by indigenous communities is more likely, though everywhere the pattern would have been mixed.
The consequences of the adoption of farming were important for all later developments. Permanent settlement, population growth, and exploitation of smaller territories all brought about new relationships between people and the environment. Mobility had previously necessitated small populations at low densities and had allowed only material items that could be carried, with little investment in structures; these restraints were removed, and the opportunity was created for many new crafts and technologies.
The earliest evidence for agriculture comes from sites in Greece, such as Knossos and Argissa, soon after 7000 BC. During the 7th millennium, farming was widespread in southeastern Europe. The material culture of this region bears a strong similarity to that of the Middle East. Pottery making was introduced, and a variety of highly decorated vessels was produced. Permanent settlements of small mud-brick houses were established; continuous rebuilding of such villages on the same spot produced large settlement mounds, or tells. Clay figurines, mostly female, are common finds in many houses, and there may also have been special shrines or temples. The precise beliefs cannot be ascertained, but they suggest the importance of ritual and religion in these societies. By the 5th and 4th millennia, some of these sites, such as Sesklo and Dhimini in Greece, were defended. From the early 5th millennium, there is evidence for the development of copper and gold metallurgy, independently of Middle Eastern traditions, and copper mines have been found in the Balkan Peninsula. Metal products included personal ornaments as well as some functional items; the cemetery at Varna, Bulg., contained many gold objects, with large collections in some graves. Control of ritual, technology, and agriculture, as well as the need for defense, all suggest the growing differentiation within Neolithic society.
In the central and western Mediterranean, the clearest evidence is from southern Italy, where a mixed farming economy was established in the 7th millennium. Many large villages, often surrounded by enclosure ditches, have been recognized. Elsewhere in the region, domesticated crops and animals were adopted more slowly into the indigenous economies. New technologies also were adopted; pottery decorated with characteristic impressed patterns was made, and by the 4th millennium copper was being worked in Spain. The major islands of the Mediterranean were colonized. The general picture is one of small-scale regional development. One such regional pattern was on Malta, where a series of massive stone temples was constructed from the early 4th millennium.
In a band across central and western Europe, the earliest farmers from 5400 BC onward are represented by a homogeneous pattern of settlements and material culture, named the LBK Culture (from Linienbandkeramik or Linearbandkeramik), after the typical pottery decorated with linear bands of ornament. The same styles of pottery and other material are found throughout the region, and their settlements show a regular preference for the easily worked and well-drained loess soils. The houses were 20 to 23 feet (6 to 7 metres) wide and up to 150 feet long and possibly included stalling for animals; in some areas they were grouped in large villages, but elsewhere there was a dispersed pattern of small clusters of houses. Some cemeteries are known; they show a concentration of objects deposited with older males. About 4700 BC the cultural homogeneity ended, and regional patterns of settlement and culture appeared as the population grew and new areas were exploited for farming. Some of the best information comes from villages on the edges of lakes in France and Switzerland, where organic material has been preserved in damp conditions.
Farming also spread northeastward into the steppe north of the Black Sea. Before 6000 BC domesticated animals and pottery were found there, but in societies that still relied heavily on hunting and fishing. By about 4500 BC a new pattern of villages, such as at Cucuteni and Tripolye, was established with a mixed farming economy. Some of these villages contained many hundreds of houses in a planned layout, and they were increasingly surrounded by massive fortifications. Farther east across the steppe as far as the southern Urals, pottery, domesticated animals, and cereals were progressively added to an indigenous hunting-and-gathering economy, and the horse was domesticated. Nomadic pastoral economies developed by the 2nd millennium.
Farming extended from central to northern Europe only after a long interval. For a millennium, agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers were in contact and pottery was adopted or exchanged, but domesticated animals and crops were only introduced into northern Germany, Poland, and southern Scandinavia about 4200 BC, apparently after a decline in the availability of marine food resources. Farming was rapidly adopted as the mainstay of subsistence and expanded to its maximum climatic viability in Scandinavia. By the middle of the 4th millennium, large communal tombs were being built, frequently of megalithic (large-stone) construction.
In western Europe, there was a similar delay in the spread of farming. In western France, domesticated animals were added to hunting and gathering in a predominantly stock-based economy, and pottery was also adopted. In Britain and Ireland, forest clearance as early as 4700 BC may represent the beginnings of agriculture, but there is little evidence for settlements or monuments before 4000 BC, and hunting-and-gathering economies survived in places. The construction of large communal tombs and defended enclosures from 4000 BC may mark the growth of agricultural populations and the beginning of competition for resources. Some of the enclosures were attacked and burned, clear evidence of violent warfare. The tombs, of earth and timber or of megalithic construction, contained communal burials and served as markers for claims to farming territories as well as foci for the worship of ancestors. Some, such as the tombs of Brittany and Ireland, contained elaborately decorated stones.
From the late 4th millennium a number of developments in the agricultural economy became prominent. They did not, however, begin all at once nor were they found everywhere. Some of them may have been in use for some time, and there also are distinct regional variations. Cumulatively, however, they add up to a new phase of agricultural organization.
One of the most important developments was the management of animal herds for purposes other than the provision of meat. In the case of cattle, there is some evidence for milk production earlier, but dairying appears to have taken on a much more significant role from this time. Oxen were raised to provide traction. Sheep were managed not for meat but primarily as a source of manure and wool. Textiles in the early Neolithic Period were predominantly made of flax, but from the early 3rd millennium wool was widely used, and spinning and weaving became important crafts and new ways of exploiting agricultural resources. New crops also were introduced. The most important were the vine and the olive, found in Greece from the early 3rd millennium. These tree crops represented an important addition to the range of agricultural produce and formed the basis for later developments in the Aegean.
Clay model of a wheeled cart from a grave at Szigetszentmárton, Hung., end of the 4th …
© Hungarian National Museum, Budapest; photograph, Kardos Judit
There were also new technologies, especially the use of animal traction for the plow and for wheeled vehicles. The earliest evidence for plowing consists of marks preserved in the soil under burial mounds and dated to the end of the 4th millennium. A clay model of a wheeled cart of the same date is known from a grave at Szigetszentmárton, Hung., and actual wheels from northern Europe by 2500 BC. In southeastern Spain, the most arid area of Europe, irrigation systems were probably introduced. These all represent important new technologies applied to agriculture and an intensification of energy expenditure in that field.
The innovations outlined above marked the development of early agriculture toward a system more specifically adapted to the European environment and capable of producing a much wider range of outputs, especially of nonfood products. Some, such as wine and cloth, had a particular social significance, and others, especially the wheeled vehicle, led to further developments. The new agricultural regime also showed a better adaptation to the wide variety of regional environments in Europe and permitted expansion into new ecological zones. Whereas the earliest farmers mostly preferred the prime arable soils, such as the loess of central Europe, it was now possible, especially with the use of sheep, to exploit many less fertile soils.
The period from the late 4th millennium also saw many important social changes. They varied from region to region but laid the foundations for the society of the Bronze Age, which followed.
In southeastern Europe about 3200 BC, there was a major break in material culture and settlement patterns. The old styles of decorated pottery were replaced with new plainer forms, and the evidence for ritual, such as the figurines, ends. Many of the long-occupied tell sites were abandoned; the new settlement pattern shows many smaller sites and some larger ones which may have played a central role. In Greece there were similar changes, with population expansion especially in the south and the emergence of some sites as centres of authority; this period marked the beginning of the Aegean Bronze Age.
Elsewhere in the Mediterranean the changes are most marked in parts of Iberia. At Los Millares in southeastern Spain and in southern Portugal at sites such as Vila Nova de São Pedro, strongly fortified settlements accompanied by cemeteries containing rich collections of prestige goods suggest the appearance of a more hierarchically organized society. Similar trends toward the emergence of sites of central authority took place in southern France, but there is little sign of such developments in Italy.
In central and northern Europe, changes of a different nature began about 2800 BC. The most obvious feature is two phases of new burial rites, comprising individual rather than communal burials with a particular emphasis on the deposition of prestige grave goods with adult males. The first phase, characterized by Corded Ware pottery and stone battle-axes, is found particularly in central and northern Europe. The second phase, dated to 2500–2200 BC, is marked by Bell Beaker pottery and the frequent occurrence of copper daggers in the graves; it is found from Hungary to Britain and as far south as Italy, Spain, and North Africa. At the same time, there was an increase in the exchange of prestige goods such as amber, copper, and tools from particular rock sources.
Both of these burial rites have been attributed to invading population groups. On the other hand, they may also be seen as a new expression of an ideology of social status, emphasizing control of resources rather than ancestral descent. Such an explanation fits better with a picture of slow internal development within European society. The new ideology did not prevail everywhere, however, and in Britain, for instance, the 3rd millennium saw the construction of massive ceremonial monuments such as Avebury and Stonehenge, before the introduction of individual burial rites at the end of the millennium.
When there is evidence for the languages spoken in Europe at the end of the prehistoric period, it is clear that with few exceptions, such as Basque or Etruscan, they belonged to the Indo-European language group, which also extended to India and Central Asia. This raises the question of when these languages, or their ancestral prototype, were first spoken in Europe. One theory links these languages with a particular population of Indo-Europeans and explains the expansion of the languages as the result of invasion or immigration; their origin is sought in the east, perhaps in the area north of the Black and Caspian seas. The invasion is associated with the new patterns of settlement, economy, material culture, burial, and social organization seen about 3000 BC. These innovations, however, may be better attributed to internal developments. An alternative explanation for the origin of Indo-European languages associates it with the immigration of the first farmers from Anatolia at the beginning of the Neolithic Period, but the spread of farming does not seem to have been a uniform process or to have been achieved everywhere by population migration. There is, however, no single archaeological pattern that might correspond to a migration on an appropriate geographic scale throughout Europe, and all these explanations raise fundamental questions about the development, spread, and adoption of languages, the relationship of language to ethnic groups, and the correspondence of archaeologically recognizable patterns of material culture to either language or ethnicity.
The period of the 3rd, the 2nd, and the 1st millennia BC was a time of drastic change in Europe. This has traditionally been defined as the Metal Ages, which may be further divided into stages, of approximate dates as shown: the Bronze Age (2300–700 BC) and the Iron Age (700–1 BC), which followed a less distinctly defined Copper Age (c. 3200–2300 BC). At this time, societies in Europe began consciously to produce metals. Simultaneous with these technological innovations were changes in settlement organization, ritual life, and the interaction between the different societies in Europe. These developments and their remarkable reflections in the material culture make the period appear as a series of dramatic changes.
Local developments were long thought to have been caused by influences from the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East and by migrations. Thus it was suggested that the segmented faience beads from the rich early Bronze Age graves in Wessex were Mycenaean products or that development of bronze working in central Europe was due to the Aegean civilization's need for new bronze supplies. New methods of absolute dating, including radiocarbon dating, revolutionized the understanding of this phase in prehistoric Europe. They showed that many supposedly interdependent developments had in fact developed independently and been separated by centuries. The Metal Ages of Europe thus must be understood as indigenous local inventions and as an independent cultural evolution. There were influences from, and contact with, the Middle East, and there were some migrations of people, especially from the Russian steppes; but the Metal Ages in Europe were in general far more locally independent phenomena than had been recognized. They grew out of conditions created in the Neolithic Period and the Copper Age, followed their own trajectory in Europe, and resulted in a range of new expressions in material culture and in new social concerns.
Changes in metal objects, in styles, and in burial rituals have been used to subdivide the period. The most basic division uses the same criteria as Christian Jürgensen Thomsen's Three Age system, in which the material used for producing tools and weapons distinguishes an age. This has resulted in a distinction between the Copper, Bronze, and Iron ages, each of which has been further divided. In temperate Europe all these subdivisions consist of relative chronologies, and in such systems synchronizations and comparisons among regions are vital. For the Bronze Age, synchronization is possible, since this was a period of long-distance contacts and trade between different regions. The period had in many ways a remarkable coherence, and it has been likened to the Common Market. On this basis a general chronological framework has been developed that, using the changes in burial rites and metal assemblages, divides the Bronze Age into either Early, Middle, and Late phases or into the Unetician, Tumulus, and Urnfield cultures. Synchronizations of the more detailed local subdivisions, which were based on typology of metal objects and cross-associations, have employed schemes of Paul Reinecke and Oscar Montelius. Oscar Montelius' chronology was developed on the basis of Scandinavian bronze objects and resulted in a division of the Bronze Age into Montelius I–VI, while Paul Reinecke used south German material to divide it into shorter time sequences known as Bronze Age A–D and Hallstatt (Ha) A–D, with Hallstatt C marking the transition to the Iron Age in central Europe.
The Iron Age chronology is detailed and regional. Although the Iron Age was a Pan-European phenomenon, its regional variability, together with its fragmented and tribalized cultural landscape, makes its chronology complex. In addition to typology and cross-association, the Iron Age chronology is also built upon historical events and Mediterranean imports of known date; the development of artistic styles also plays a major role in its subdivision. It is again central Europe that provided the most commonly used general chronology. The Hallstatt Period, named after an artifact-rich cemetery next to late Bronze and Iron Age salt mines in the Austrian Salzkammergut, is divided into Early (Ha A–B) and Late (Ha C–D) phases, with the former marking the end of the Urnfield Culture in Europe and the latter being the first phase of the Iron Age in areas such as central and southern Europe but the transition to the Iron Age in other regions. The second phase of the Iron Age, when it extended throughout Europe, is named after La Tène, a site at Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. The exact function of this site is not known, but it contained thousands of swords, spears, shields, fibulae, and tools. These were distinctive in shape and beautifully ornamented in a style different from that of the objects from the Hallstatt period. This, the La Tène style, was found from the 5th to the 1st century BC throughout most of Europe, and its development and change over time are the basis of the chronological division into La Tène A–D. Other evidence, such as southern imports, has increasingly become incorporated into the La Tène chronology, and the time from the end of the Hallstatt Period until the spread of the Roman Empire is divided into a number of short phases, each with distinct material expressions. The stylistic basis of this chronology stresses the common heritage, the Celtic art style, which developed over large areas of Europe during this time.
The transitions between the three phases of the Metal Ages are primarily defined by a change in the metal used, but they also reflect economic changes and transformations of social organization. It is within these larger concerns that the character of this part of European prehistory can be found.
Also known as the Chalcolithic or Eneolithic Period, the Copper Age was a time of diffuse and sporadic use of copper for a limited number of small tools and personal ornaments. If the age is defined simply as the time when copper first began to be used, then localized Copper Age cultures existed in southeastern Europe from the 5th millennium BC. On the other hand, if it is defined as the time when copper was an established element in the material culture, then it must be dated from about 3200 BC in the Carpathian Basin and southeastern Europe, slightly later in the Aegean, and later still in Iberia.
In these early copper-using societies, copper had no importance in subsistence production, and the tools made could hardly compete with those of flint and stone. The new material had prestige, however, and was used to adorn the deceased. It was at this early stage of metal use that one of its important roles was established: to mark and articulate social prestige and status. The Copper Age as a distinct stage developed only in a few regions; these included groups in areas as far apart as Bulgaria, Bohemia, the Aegean, and southeastern Spain.
One of these remarkable centres of early copper use was in southeastern Spain. Situated in the Almerian lowland, in an area confined by the coast and the mountains, it was a densely settled region with large nucleated and often fortified hilltop settlements of surprising architectural sophistication and with a rich and inventive material culture known as the Millaran Culture, after the site of Los Millares. Like contemporary sites in the region, Los Millares was located so as to overlook a river from a promontory in the foothills of higher mountains. The sides and plateau of the hill were fortified with massive stone walls, regularly placed semicircular bastions, and outlying towers. These created a well-defined and protected space of approximately 12 acres (5 hectares), with several occupation phases and of some complexity. The settlement was townlike, with rows of stone houses, alleys, and a central communal place within the walls. An artificial watercourse may have led to the settlement. There was specialization of production between households. Outside the settlement was a cemetery containing more than 100 megalithic tombs with corbeled chambers used as collective burial places.
Simultaneous with such Copper Age cultures were a number of late Neolithic cultures in other regions. The Early Bronze Age had, therefore, various roots. In some areas it developed from the Copper Age, while in others it grew out of late Neolithic cultures. In western and part of central Europe, the Bell Beaker Culture continued into the Early Bronze Age. It had introduced the use of copper for prestigious personal objects, individual burial rites, and possibly also new ideological structures to the Neolithic societies over vast areas of Europe. These new elements were the basis of the transformation that took place during the Early Bronze Age and became prominent within the emerging societies.
In the rest of central and in northern Europe, the Corded Ware Culture was an important component of the late Neolithic, and some local Early Bronze Age characteristics can be traced to these roots. For example, this is seen in terms of burial rituals. Burials of the Corded Ware Culture were usually single graves in pits, with or without a barrow. The deceased was placed in a contracted position, men on their left side, women on their right, both facing south. This differentiation of body position according to sex was maintained in the earliest Bronze Age in many areas, but at times the orientation was reversed, such as at Branc, in Slovakia, where 81 percent of females were on their left side and 61 percent of males on their right. As the period progressed, grave forms began to diversify, and, though inhumation in pits remained the commonest form, it was elaborated in different ways. The position of the body became stretched rather than contracted, and sex and age were not expressed by body position but were reflected through elements such as grave goods or location within the cemetery.
The characteristics of, and the dates for, the Early Bronze Age vary regionally in central Europe. Some areas, such as the Saarland, even appear either to have had continuous Neolithic occupation until as late as 1400 BC or to have been uninhabited during the Early Bronze Age. Most of these areas were enclaves, however, and it was only in Scandinavia, where the Bronze Age began about 1800 BC, that the transition to the Bronze Age was substantially delayed for a whole region.
Such local delay of the earliest Bronze Age cannot simply be seen in terms of retarded cultural development; rather, it reflects that different cultural trajectories were followed by various societies. Scandinavia illustrates this well, since the period preceding the Bronze Age was a time not of devolution but of new flint technologies and new material forms, with a wealth of beautifully manufactured flint daggers and a conspicuous display of local craft. This constituted a distinct local Late Neolithic phase, interspersed between the Corded Ware Culture and the Bronze Age proper. The flint daggers show clear influences from bronze daggers, and examples of flint swords reflect the emulation of new ideas. This indicates the degree of contact with bronze-using societies. When bronze was introduced and incorporated into the local culture, its role in terms of the cultural manners of manufacture and behaviour was rapidly established, and it quickly reflected a distinct local tradition: the Nordic Bronze Age. At this point, the absence of local raw material did not prevent the society from integrating bronze as a basic material in its culture nor did the dependency on trade partners for bronze mean that the local material culture developed without its own distinct character. The Nordic Bronze Age illustrates the ability of local cultures to maintain their independent character in spite of dependency on other, larger systems. This characteristic can be observed in different forms throughout the Metal Ages, and, in an essential manner, this qualifies the impression of an overall common cultural heritage developing during these millennia.
Although the dates and the cultural roots of the Early Bronze Age vary, it is similarly defined by the use of copper alloys for tools throughout Europe. During the Bronze Age, the techniques of metalworking increased in sophistication. A range of new working methods, such as valve molds, cire perdue, and sheet-metal working, were developed. The development of molds made it possible both to mass-produce objects and to produce more elaborate items, including hollow objects. One of the most spectacular objects produced in this fashion was the lur, a musical instrument of great precision and beauty. The later Bronze Age and Iron Age method of sheet working facilitated the production of large objects, such as caldrons and shields, and a similar working method was used for the boss motif of bands of raised circles, which became a favoured element on many Urnfield Period objects such as horse harnesses and situlae (bucket-shaped vessels).
The manner of decorating the objects expressed regional as well as chronological styles. Among these, the most noticeable stylistic developments were the widespread use of the combined sun-bird-ship motif of the Urnfield Culture and the later break in stylistic tradition indicated by La Tène, or so-called Celtic, art. Most important, however, may be the invention of new types of objects. While objects made of ceramics, gold, stone, and organic materials during this period differed from those of previous periods, they did not represent drastic changes in the employment of a particular medium, but this was not true of bronze. Bronze is an artificial material made by alloying copper with different metals, in particular tin, through which a new material with its own distinct properties is produced. The production of bronze was an invention in its true sense, and the potentials of this material were increasingly revealed and exploited during the Bronze Age. The effect of this was a range of new objects, of which some were new shapes for old concepts but others introduced new functions and concepts into the societies.
Among the latter, one of the most important new elements was the invention of the sword. With the sword there was for the first time in European history an object entirely dedicated to fighting and not doubling as a tool. Fighting is evident from earlier periods as well, but during the Bronze Age it was formalized. Toward the Late Bronze Age the warrior emerged, sheathed in an assemblage of defensive items: the armour. To have been a warrior during the Iron Age must have been an established role, and the importance of warfare led to monumental defensive structures and further evolution of swords and shields. The latter development shows changes in the fighting technique, and in the Early Iron Age the stabbing sword of the Bronze Age was replaced by a heavy slashing sword, indicating fighting from horseback. The actual importance of warfare is difficult to establish, and a distinction between the symbolic representation of aggression and real aggression must be kept in mind. The presence of swords and armour does, however, represent a concrete expression of aggression and of the concept of warfare.
The increased importance of fortified settlements and villages further shows that aggression was a major component of life. Professional soldiers, as they were known at the time of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, are unlikely to have existed at this time, but group warfare existed from the Iron Age onward, and other related professions developed. For example, the location of fortified sites in strategic places, such as near mountain passes and river crossings, suggests that these sites were not primarily defensive but were based on the ability to control certain resources, including access and passage. This is illustrated by the rich Early Bronze Age fortified site at Spišský Štvrtok, Slovakia, strategically located to control the trade routes running through a mountain pass across the Carpathians along the Hornád River, and by the Late Bronze Age Lusatian hilltop site in the Moravian Pforte passes. The development of aggression and its formalization played a role in providing middlemen and entrepreneurs with opportunities and helped to establish them in the position of power they gained in the Iron Age.
During most of the Middle and Late Bronze Age, iron was present, albeit scarce. It was used for personal ornaments and small knives, for repairs on bronzes, and for bimetallic items. The Iron Age thus did not start with the first appearance of iron but rather at the stage when its distinct functional properties were being exploited and it began to supplant bronze in the production of tools and weapons. This occurred at different times in various parts of Europe, and the transition to the Iron Age is embedded in local cultural developments. The reasons why iron was adopted differed among regions, but generally a similar pattern was followed. After an introductory period, iron quickly supplanted bronze for the making of tools and weapons. It was at this stage that metal, in spite of the earlier presence of bronze tools, replaced stone, flint, and wood in agricultural production. New and more effective tools were developed during the last centuries BC, and subsistence production must have increased drastically. Along with these domestic changes, there were changes in the traditional routes of contact and trade. These routes had been established during the Bronze Age, and through them copper, tin, and other commodities had traveled throughout Europe. With the appearance of the rich Late Hallstatt communities of south-central Europe, the orientation of contact changed. The northern links were increasingly ignored, and trade became concentrated on, and dependent upon, commodities from the south. South and west-central Europe were now included in the periphery of the expanding Mediterranean civilization; and the previous network of contact was broken. In the rest of Europe, regional diversity increased, a tribalized landscape emerged, and new types of social organization developed. During the Iron Age, the roots of historic Europe were planted. Proto-urban settlements, hierarchical social orders, new ideological structures, and writing were parts of this picture. It was also a time during which the difference between the Mediterranean world and temperate Europe became even more pronounced and new degrees and forms of dependency developed in the sociopolitical systems.
The Metal Ages were periods of discovery, invention, and exploitation of various metals and metallurgical procedures. New elements were introduced into the societies, which played a role in their further development. In the later 5th and earlier 4th millennia BC, copper from easily worked surface deposits was used for relatively simple items in southeastern Europe and the Carpathian Basin. The Transylvanian copper ores were particularly important. For example, copper was extracted from the quarry at Varna, Bulg., about 4400 BC in an area near a rich Copper Age cemetery. After this initial exploitation, metal objects again became rare until they reappeared in the late 4th millennium BC. The reasons for this change are unknown but may in part relate to the depletion of surface ore deposits. At this early state, the technique of copper manufacture consisted of smelting in an open one-faced mold and hammering. Later, when copper of different compositions from deeper deposits was used, the properties of copper in combination with other metals were explored. The copper sulfide ores from these deep mines were more difficult to procure, since they relied on more sophisticated mining techniques and needed initial roasting before smelting. At the same time, they were more widely available than surface deposits, and there were sources in both central and western Europe—ores in Germany, Austria, and the Czech and Slovak Republics were exploited from the early 3rd millennium BC. This long initial phase of sporadic use of copper was finally replaced by a period of copper alloys, which began about 2500 BC in southeastern Europe, slightly later in the Aegean, and later still in Iberia. Bronze industries were widespread in Europe by 2300 BC, but copper-tin alloys were first used toward the end of the 3rd millennium, with renewal of the centres of metallurgical production in Austria, Germany, and neighbouring areas. The raw material needed was available only in a few regions, and tin, particularly restricted in its distribution, was found only in eastern Portugal, Sardinia, Tuscany, Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly, and the Bohemian Ore Mountains. The latter site, on the border between the Czech Republic and eastern Germany, was one of the rare instances of close proximity between copper and tin. This region, together with the copper areas of the Harz Mountains, the Alps, and central Slovakia, became one of the most important regions of the Early Bronze Age. With the progression of the Bronze Age, local metallurgical traditions developed throughout Europe, including areas lacking both tin and copper sources; but the chief metalworking centres continued to influence the material culture of larger areas. This was an important factor behind the trade and exchange network that came into existence.
The discovery of iron was most likely a by-product of bronze working, and much of the earliest iron use is not culturally distinct from the use of bronze. At its early stage, iron may have been monopolized and produced by those individuals or groups who controlled bronze. Iron, however, is different from bronze in many respects. It is found widely in Europe either as iron ore or as bog iron. To be usable, iron does not need alloying with other metals, and the demands are mainly the fuel and labour needed to smelt or roast the ore. This process involves high temperatures and skilled control of pyrotechnology. To produce a usable iron, the bloom must be hammered while red-hot to reduce the impurities and to change its internal structures. Only then can the shaping of the final object begin. Thus, the production of an iron object consists of several distinct stages, each different from those involved in bronze production.
Iron appeared in Romania about 1700 BC and in Greece shortly after. During the Middle and Late Bronze Age, it occurred infrequently except in Iberia, Britain, and some other parts of western Europe. The earliest iron was used for small knives, pins, and other personal objects and for repairs on bronze items. Only in Romania was iron used for heavy tools during the Bronze Age; toward the end of the Bronze Age, tools and some weapons made of iron appeared generally in Europe. With Ha C, iron swords were being made, and, in the following La Tène Period, iron had clearly become a material important in its own right, being used for a range of new functional items, including plowshares, carpentry tools, and nails. At this point it is likely that the previous monopolies on metal production and trade were severely challenged, and iron became a common material, produced and procured anywhere in Europe.
The intensity of metal use varied regionally, and the centres of innovation and wealth moved over time. During the Metal Ages the communities of Europe can be studied through their reaction to, and adoption of, their inventions. It is a phase in prehistory that raises cultural questions about the nature of innovation and of its consequences for society. Metal brought several important new items to the communities, but, more importantly, it changed the nature of society itself. The production of bronze was an important step in human history, indicating a point at which the limits imposed by natural materials were broken by human invention. The behavioral impact of this cannot be measured, but it was likely substantial. It may have altered attitudes to nature and created the activities that resulted in deep mining of metals and salt and caused experimentation with new materials, such as glass.
Metal also had social impact, and one of its important roles came from its involvement in the articulation of prestige and status and thus its ability to assign power. Scarcity usually implies preciousness, and control over scarce or precious resources often leads to power. The production of both bronze and iron objects involved scarcity of either resources or knowledge or both. Control of metal production was a relevant factor in prehistory, as shown by the location of important Copper Age and Early Bronze Age communities in close proximity to copper or tin ores or by the breakdown of trade alliances that occurred in the Early Iron Age. The wealth and outstanding material culture of the Copper and Early Bronze Age communities were probably related to the trade in, and prestigious value of, copper and bronze. It is also a characteristic of these communities that this wealth was not consolidated by other activities, and some of the centres were short-lived and declined quickly. The lack of ability to invest and rechannel wealth in absolute terms is one of the most basic differences between these communities and those of both the Mediterranean civilizations and the Iron Age. Only some of the Copper Age centres developed into flourishing communities in the earliest Bronze Age. Those that did remain became the Early Bronze Age centres of wealth, contact, and trade, with dense populations. These centres were widely spaced and were internally extremely different, ranging from places such as El Argar in Iberia to Wessex in southern England. Of these, the Argaric Culture in southeastern Iberia comprised nucleated village settlements similar to those from Los Millares but with even greater sophistication and with a changed funerary rite. The deceased, richly adorned with diadems, arm rings, and pins and accompanied by metal tools, were individually entombed in large funerary urns placed under the house floors. At the other extreme was the group of rich Early Bronze Age graves in Wessex. The objects found in them are comparable in wealth to the Argaric ones, and, although the exotic items were unique to each area, they shared a range of tools and some ornaments. There was essential divergence in other respects, however, and at Wessex there was no association with elaborate domestic structures. The rich graves served as the ritual centre for a dispersed community living in relatively simple constructions of wattle and daub and without demarcations of the limits of their settlements. These Early Bronze Age centres developed in different environmental zones, ranging from semiarid to lush temperate, and they are at different distances from copper ore. They all have possible links with areas containing tin ores, however, and they developed in regions that were local centres in the previous period. These two criteria may have been necessary conditions for this development; but such conditions in themselves did not result in rich centres in the Early Bronze Age, nor could they guarantee continuous survival of the centres. As in the case of the earlier Copper Age centres, these were without an additional stable foundation, and they disappeared at different rates and under varying local circumstances. Such situations were plentiful during the Metal Ages. They show not only that the scarce and prestigious resources could be controlled and could give access to power and wealth but also that a multitude of factors influenced whether that power was secured and how it was maintained.
Societies are dynamic structures that interact with each other. In this interaction, asymmetrical relationships frequently develop between areas or groups, with one partner assuming a central, and the other a peripheral, role. Such relations are not stable, however, and over time their internal asymmetry will change. These changes can be illustrated by two examples from the Metal Ages in western central Europe.
The first is from the Early Bronze Age, where a remarkable shift in cultural initiative took place. The earliest Bronze Age centre, Unetician A, consisted of a complex of flat inhumation graves with modest grave goods in copper and bronze that was found in Slovakia. During Unetician B this complex continued, spreading into Bohemia and much of Germany and Poland. In this process, the original centre was complemented by a number of extremely rich graves on its periphery, such as at Leubingen, Helmsdorf, and Straubing in central Germany and Leki Male in southern Poland. These graves were inhumations under large barrows, with elaborate chambers and rich grave goods. Leubingen, for example, was a 28-foot- (8.5-metre-) high barrow with an elaborately constructed 66-foot-wide central stone cairn delineated by a ring ditch. The cairn covered and protected a thatched tentlike wooden structure made of large oak planks with gypsum mortar in the cracks. The skeleton of an old man lay extended on the oak floor, and at a right angle across his hips lay another body, which appeared to be that of an adolescent or child. In the space around the deceased were a number of objects, including, a pot in a setting of stones, bronze halberds and tools, and a group of gold ornaments. These graves show that a new and radically different funerary ceremony had taken place in this area, although the material culture still remained related to that of the previous centre. Thus, this group of barrows constituted a complementary Unetician area on the periphery of the original complex, and it was from this area that much of the impetus for the development of the Tumulus Period came.
The second illustration of change in the relationship between areas is from the earliest Iron Age in southern Germany, as exemplified by the hill fort at Heuneburg and its satellite barrows and secondary sites. These sites show how the central position of southern Germany and Switzerland during the Urnfield Period was transformed in the course of the Late Hallstatt Period into a peripheral role on the edge of the Mediterranean world. Heuneburg had several occupation phases, ranging from the middle of the 2nd millennium BC to the late 1st millennium AD, but the climax of its occupation was in the 6th and early 5th centuries BC, the so-called IV phase. The site, on a promontory overlooking the valley of the upper Danube, consisted of seven acres enclosed within a defensive earthwork. During its IV phase, this defense included bastions and mud-brick walls, both of which were Mediterranean inventions. The site was densely populated, and it shows a range of activities taking place at the interior in workshops for bronze, iron, antler, and coral. Among the imports were Black-Figure shards from Greece, an Etruscan clay mold, and wine amphorae from a Greek colony in southern France. Some of the local pottery, which was among the earliest wheel-thrown pottery in central Europe, shows imitation of Greek ornamentation from southern France, while other examples copy Etruscan bronze vessels.
On the plateau behind Heuneburg are several large barrows with multiple burials, which are among the largest and richest in Europe. There were a number of farmsteads between these and the hill fort itself. This association between an important hill fort and rich graves for male and female leaders was present at other places during the 6th and early 5th centuries BC, particularly in eastern France, Switzerland, and southwestern Germany. Examples include the Hohenasperg oppidum and the rich burials at Kleinaspergle, in southern Germany, and the Mont Lassois oppidum in eastern France and the Vix grave. The latter contained a five-foot-high bronze wine krater of Greco-Etruscan workmanship, a gold diadem, and an exquisite bronze statuette, together with wine-drinking equipment, Greek pottery, a vehicle, and other ornaments. The complexity of the structural buildup in the landscape surrounding these hill forts is amazing. Many of the sites had several phases of occupation but, as with Heuneburg, the Late Hallstatt Period is a distinct phase, and the brief time it took for these centres to come into existence demonstrates the potential for power available at the time. Heuneburg was one of the wealthiest of all these sites, and it is important for many reasons. It provides evidence of emulation of another culture, and it clearly demonstrates the changes in its position vis-à-vis a number of cultural systems. This is shown most clearly in the construction techniques used in phase IV, which copied both plans and building techniques from Greece. The mud bricks were totally unsuited to this part of Europe, but they show the importance of the Mediterranean culture during this period, as does the adoption of wine-drinking ceremonies. Through these evidences of emulation, Heuneburg stands as a key site for appreciating the changes in the Early Iron Age in the relationship between the classical world and the rest of Europe.
The exceptional concentration of Late Hallstatt chieftain burials on the upper Danube and upper Rhine lasted only to the beginning of the 5th century BC, when decentralization set in, but it had played a role in a period when relations within Europe were transformed. During the Bronze Age, Europe was roughly divided into two worlds: the eastern Mediterranean and temperate Europe, each with a common cultural heritage. With the Iron Age, the fragmentation and diversification of temperate Europe began, while the eastern Mediterranean expanded through a burst of colonial activities that resulted in cultural dominance over an extended but internally diverse area.
The Neolithic was a period of remarkable communal enterprises. Against this background, the emphasis that the Bell Beaker and Corded Ware cultures placed on the individual constituted a radical change. The British archaeologist Colin Renfrew characterized the change as one from “group orientation” to “individualized chiefdom,” and this change was essential for the emerging Early Bronze Age communities. In the Late Neolithic, collective burials disappear from European prehistory in favour of individual graves. The form of the grave and the character of the funerary ceremonies changed substantially during the Bronze and Iron ages. The common and widespread use of cremation introduced by the Urnfield Culture is an important indication of the potential for radical changes within this realm. Throughout the period, the individual remained the focus of the funerary ceremony, and the evidence suggests that prestige and status often were communicated through the wealth and types of objects found in graves. It is debated whether the differences between individuals that this suggests were classlike and absolute, were expressions of sex, age, and lineage differentiation, or were assigned through deeds rather than ascribed at birth. The changes through time suggest increased social differentiation, but there also are periods, such as the Urnfield Culture, in which social differentiations are less obviously expressed in graves. The grave can, therefore, be used mainly to establish relative differentiation within one community rather than pronouncing absolute historical trends. One such study comes from the cemetery at Branc, where 308 inhumation graves spanning 200 to 400 years of the early Unetician Culture were analyzed. Within the graves there was clear evidence of internal differentiation, with some individuals having more elaborate grave goods than others. This suggests that in this type of community there would be leading families, marked by their grave goods, and that wealth and status would tend to be inherited through the male line (since male children had richer grave goods than female children). Females obtained rich costumes during adolescence and young adulthood, possibly at the time of their marriage. The status expressed at this period was to a large extent relational, placing each member of the community according to lineage, sex, and age. This differentiation was not directly based on access to power, possessions, or absolute wealth, and, in most areas of temperate Europe, social differentiation until the 1st millennium BC was likely moderate. The exception to this was short-lived local expressions of individual wealth or, more likely, prestige, such as the Wessex graves and the Leubingen-Helmsdorf group, since they suggest single leaders occupying sociopolitical roles, which were symbolized through emblems of power.
Throughout the Bronze Age, sex and age were the main components organizing the structures of daily life. Outside the Mediterranean area, there were few differences between the size and plan of most of the structures within individual sites, although the sites within a region often were internally ranked in terms of size and complexity, which suggests that they had different functions. Such “tiered” settlement systems came into being in the Early Bronze Age in areas such as southeastern Europe, and they were quite prominent during the Late Bronze Age in the Lusatian Culture of Poland and northeastern Germany as well as in the Urnfield Culture of central Europe. This settlement organization probably continued into the Early Iron Age in some regions, such as England, where the hill forts became central places for an agricultural, and possibly also political, upland.
A clear social and political hierarchy was, however, lacking from the Bronze Age settlement pattern. This was particularly true of northern, western, and central Europe, which saw a variety of settlement organizations during the period. There were extended farmsteads in northern and western Europe with a development of enclosed compounds and elaborate field systems in Britain. In central Europe the extended farmsteads were in time supplemented by both unenclosed villages and defended hilltop sites, as was also the case in the area of the Late Bronze Age Lusatian complex in Poland and neighbouring areas. The fortified settlements were usually large planned enterprises, rather than organic village sprawl, and they were often erected over a few years; an example is the Lusatian defended settlement at Biskupin, Pol., where a settlement of 102–106 houses estimated to shelter some 1,000 to 1,200 people was built in just one year. The fortified sites and enclosed villages of the European Bronze Age show centralized decision-making and capacities for planning and constructing grand enterprises. Their concern was the whole community rather than the individual household, and communal features such as paths, gates, and wells were well maintained and planned. The superbly preserved Late Bronze Age sites from the Swiss lakes show these communities vividly. The settlement at Cortallois-Est, on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, illustrates the main features of such sites: straight rows of equal-sized houses aligning paths and alleyways, with the whole complex contained within a perimeter fence. Each house had a fireplace with a decorated house-alter, or firedog. The rubbish accumulated in front of the entrance, and various activities took place within the house. The sites were densely inhabited, and minor internal differences of objects and structure existed between the houses; but they were not divided into different classes in terms of their wealth, size, or accessibility, although different crafts and trades may have made up quarters within the village. These Late Bronze Age villages did not contain any structures that could be interpreted as administrative centres or as religious offices.
A different form of organization is found throughout the Early Bronze Age in southeastern Europe and in southeastern Spain. Both areas had nucleated defended settlements during this period, and there appears to have been some differentiation of the houses in terms of function and size. A tendency toward centralization is demonstrated by the Early Bronze Age site at Spišsky Štvrtok. This was a fortified site of economic, administrative, and strategic importance. An oval area, enclosed by a ditch and rampart, was differentiated into an acropolis and a settlement area, with the houses of the acropolis built using a different technique. The amount of gold and bronze objects hidden in chests under the floors of the houses in the settlement area further suggests that there were economic and social distinctions among the inhabitants.
The important exception to this picture is the eastern Mediterranean, which underwent a rapid and dramatic social development during this period, permanently severing its cultural affinity with temperate Europe. At a time of modest stratification in the rest of Europe, the first European civilization—as defined by administration, bookkeeping, writing, urbanism, and the separation of different kinds of power—arose in the Aegean. Its background was the Neolithic cultures of the 3rd millennium BC, which were closely aligned with those of temperate and southeastern Europe. The Neolithic roots alone cannot explain the development in the Aegean, and there is no convincing evidence for external influences behind these changes in Greece nor is there basis for arguing for a migration. Local factors must have caused development to follow a different route in this area.
One of many possible factors was the marked population increase in the south Aegean during the Early Bronze Age. This led to the development of some extensive settlements, although the overall settlement pattern continued to be dispersed, with a majority of small hamlets and farmsteads. This could have caused a degree of settlement hierarchy at this stage, with some sites acting as regional centres. Central places provide opportunity for craft specialization and redistribution of commodities and thus lead to social hierarchy and a type of society known as the complex chiefdom. Another important factor was the change in agricultural production that followed the adoption of vine and olive cultivation during the 3rd millennium BC and the possible increase in the exploitation of sheep. These were commodity-oriented activities, which furthered exchange and redistribution. These products were more suitable for a redistributive economy than for a household economy. Olives, in particular, demand capital investment, since it takes several years before the crop produces. Within this setting, the palace economy, a complex bureaucratic organization based on a redistributive economy, developed. The first state had appeared in Europe.
This process can be followed from 1800 BC onward in Mycenae, in mainland Greece, and on Crete. The character of the society was distinct at each of these centres, but the palace economy distinguished them from the villages and farmsteads of temperate Europe. For reasons not clearly known but possibly related to subsistence crises and over-exploitation of dwindling metal supplies, these centres collapsed suddenly about 1200 BC, and thereafter Greece entered its Dark Ages. After a few centuries of restructuring, about 800 BC this was followed by a remarkable Greek expansion into the western Mediterranean, during which colonies were founded in southern Italy, Mediterranean France (Massalia), and along the southeastern coast of Spain. The Etruscan state, which developed in Italy from about 700 BC, competed for domination of the western Mediterranean, and during the Early Iron Age Etruscan as well as Greek influences reached beyond their Mediterranean neighbours.
During the Iron Age, stratification became common and marked throughout Europe. Differences in wealth and status in terms of both individuals and households were reflected in graves as well as settlements. Settlements reveal internal division of houses according to size and function, and the population of any village was divided by wealth in addition to sex, age, kinship, and personal characteristics. Socially differentiated settlements existed from Scandinavia to Italy and from Ireland to the Russian borders, although they were differently laid out and organized. This period saw the building of permanent fences and enclosures around fields and farms; the development of villages and, within these, increasing differentiation of the sizes of individual buildings; and increased stratification between settlements, with proto-urban centres coming into being. The rate of change varied in different parts of Europe, but toward the end of the 1st millennium BC all areas had undergone these changes. The end of this trend in northern Europe is vividly illustrated by the Hodde village in Denmark, where the community can be followed during the centuries near the end of the 1st millennium, revealing how a few farms within the enclosed village gradually grew bigger at the cost of the others. An unstratified village was replaced by a society divided into rich and poor in only a few centuries. In other parts of temperate Europe, social division was equally clearly present, and proto-urban characteristics such as commerce, administrative centres, and religious offices came into existence on some of these sites. In this process, the defended hilltop settlement of the Early Iron Age was increasingly replaced by more complex sites.
The proto-urban tendencies are particularly strongly suggested by the oppida of western, central, and eastern Europe. These were often densely populated enclosed sites, which housed full-time specialists, such as glassmakers, leather workers, and smiths. Manching, one of the largest oppida in Europe, contained many of these characteristics. The site, located at the junction of the Danube and the Paar rivers, was occupied from about 200 BC and developed rapidly from a small undefended village to a large walled settlement. The defense was an elaborate construction consisting of four-mile-long walls built of timber and stones and including four gateways. Some areas within the defense were never occupied but others (a total of about 500 acres) were densely settled. The organization of the settlement was preplanned, with streets up to 30 feet wide and regular rows of rectangular buildings in front of zones containing pits and working areas; other areas were enclosed for granaries or the stalling of horses. The site was divided into work areas for particular crafts, such as wood, leather, and iron working. Coins were minted and used on the site, and there is evidence of much trade.
A market economy, rather than a redistributive economy, is the hallmark of these sites, and they were important supplements to the regionally dispersed smaller villages and farmsteads. Commodities became direct wealth, and the exchange of different values was monitored through coins. A drastically altered society was the result, but the Roman expansion at the end of the 2nd century BC caused major changes and brought local development to an end. The Romans established their own towns and a new system of government, and the oppida were not given the opportunity of developing on their own into towns, for which they had laid the ground.
The beginning of the Iron Age was in many areas marked by change in burial rites. The extensive use of cremation during the Urnfield Period was replaced by inhumation graves with magnificent displays of wealth. During the Late Hallstatt Period these changes were most dramatically reflected by the group of so-called princely graves in west-central Europe. These were immensely rich burials in large barrows, in which the construction of grave chamber and barrow became monumental enterprises, reminiscent of the late Unetician barrows at Leubingen and Straubing. In each case the grave was a display of power and status, giving emphasis and prestige to an individual or a lineage at a time of overt disruption of the social order. One of these rich Hallstatt graves was Hohmichele, located within the complex around Heuneburg on the Danube. This barrow was one of the satellite graves surrounding the large hill fort. It covered a central grave and 12 secondary burials. The barrow was constructed in several stages, resulting in a large imposing monument on the level land behind the hill fort. The central grave was robbed in antiquity, but it had been an inhumation grave within a wood-lined chamber, which acted as the display area for the wealth of the deceased. The walls seem to have been draped in textiles with thin gold bands, and the deceased, dressed in finery including silk, was placed on a bed next to a four-wheeled wagon. These graves, while commemorating members of the society in a traditional way, also show new elements that had become part of the life of the nobility north of the Alps. The drinking set suggests the adoption and importance of the Greek drinking ceremonies, using the Greek jugs and Schnabelkannen (“beaked pots”) for pouring and serving wine, the kraters for mixing, and the amphorae for storage and transport. The implied wine-drinking ceremony, which was likely restricted to certain sectors of the society, and furniture directly imported from the south show the emulation of southern city life by the central European chiefs.
The rich princely graves were constructed in southwestern Germany during Ha C–D. Thereafter inhumation graves became more widespread in central Europe and neighbouring areas, and they were the main burial form until the 2nd century BC, when formal burial rites disappeared in many regions and cremation was reintroduced in others. The graves of the early La Tène Period remained very rich, but barrows and elaborate grave chambers ceased after their resurrection by the Hallstatt princes and princesses. Regional variations in rites and assemblages became prolific. In France, La Tène cemeteries contained rich flat graves that had two-wheeled wagons rather than the earlier four-wheeled ones. These graves held large amounts of beautifully manufactured Celtic objects such as swords and torques, as well as Roman and Greek imports, and there were clear distinctions drawn between the sexes. In central and eastern Europe a new regional complex had developed northwest of the Black Sea, in which there were both inhumation and cremation graves clustered in large cemeteries. This complex is often attributed to Scythian invaders, and the rich assemblages and warrior graves show their influence. In the area of the lower reaches of the Dnepr, Dnestr, and Don rivers, rich Scythian graves have been excavated in the form of shaft and pit graves; in these, the deceased was accompanied by a number of other humans and by horse burials. In northern Europe and Scandinavia, cremation in large urnfields continued during most of the Iron Age. In this area the social differentiation present in the settlements and the wealth displayed by a few large hoards were not expressed in the graves, and, while large numbers of the population were given formal burials, their social statuses were not explicitly expressed in this ritual. Roman and Greek imports and wine-drinking ceremonies also reached northern Europe, but it was not until the end of the Iron Age, when formal inhumation burials reappeared, that they were being used in ways similar to those in more southerly regions.
In Britain the sequence is even more complicated and shows both a strong indigenous tradition and clear local influences from western Europe. The greatest complication is the disappearance of formal burials in this area in the Late Bronze Age; they did not reappear before the last century BC and then only in a few regions, such as Yorkshire. The Late Iron Age inhumation graves in Yorkshire are almost identical to wagon graves in northern France, and there must have been very specific and personal contacts between the two areas to account for this.
Social differentiation existed throughout the Metal Ages but changed with time and in degree. This was not, however, a smooth process that can easily be followed through the centuries. There were odd kinks in the progression from the minimal ranking of the earliest Bronze Age to the proto-urban state of the Late Iron Age. There were also spatial variabilities and a number of different factors involved in the progression toward greater social complexity. Throughout the Metal Ages in Europe, new social institutions came into being and the relationships between people changed.
During the Middle Bronze Age, the landscapes of most parts of Europe were filled in. Nature became cultivated, and this had costs. It seriously affected social organization as the population spread over larger areas and adapted to local conditions. It also affected the environment, which during the later part of the Bronze Age began to change. This was in part due to climatic changes, but it was furthered by human activity. There was overexploitation of marginal lands; people had moved onto the dunes in areas such as Poland and The Netherlands and into the uplands of Britain, France, and Scandinavia. But, even on less marginal land, centuries of agricultural exploitation began to exact a price. Many areas in southeastern Europe were extensively overpopulated in comparison with their agricultural capacities in the Copper and Early Bronze ages. In Hungary, for example, the area around the large Early Bronze Age tell at Tószeg was so densely occupied that the villages were within sight of each other. Overpopulation and overexploitation caused peat formation to begin, heathland to expand, blanket bog to grow over established fields and grazing grounds, and fields to turn into meadows. How the people reacted to this is not known in detail, nor is it easy to establish the rate of change, but it is possible to detect a number of changes during the end of the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age that were associated with the strained economic and ecological conditions. These changes in the environment were not, as previously believed, an environmental catastrophe, but humans had influenced their surroundings to such an extent that they had to change their way of life in order to live with the consequences.
Throughout this period there were vivid and striking manifestations of religious beliefs, ritual behaviour, and artistic activities. One of the most remarkable phenomena was hoarding. Objects, usually in large numbers, were deliberately hidden in the ground or deposited in water in the form of a hoard. Hoards were known in a modest form during the Neolithic Period, and in some areas, such as Scandinavia and France, there continued to be a few large hoards in the Iron Age; but it was in the Bronze Age that hoarding became a common phenomenon of great social and economic importance. The contents of the hoards varied; they ranged from two to several hundred items or consisted of only one deliberately deposited object, such as the single swords found in the River Thames. They might contain several objects of the same type or of many different types. They were commonly placed in association with wet areas—such as rivers, bogs, and meadows—or located under or near large stones, including in old megalithic tombs. They were seldom parts of settlements, but they have been found in wells, such as at Berlin-Lichterfelde, in Germany. They also may have come to function as a foundation deposit for a later settlement, as was the case at Danebury, in southern England, where an Iron Age hill fort was placed at the location of a Late Bronze Age hoard. Hoards were relatively infrequent during the earliest part of the Bronze Age, when they were found mainly in southeastern Europe, Bavaria, and Austria and contained flat axes and neck rings. Hoarding reached its peak during the later part of the Early Bronze Age and the Middle Bronze Age, when the activity spread throughout Europe and became an established phenomenon in most of its communities. In the Middle and Late Bronze Age, large numbers of hoards were deposited, and a substantial number of bronze objects were in this way consumed and withdrawn from circulation. Late Bronze Age hoards from Romania, among the largest ever, contained up to four tons of bronze objects. At the same time, large collections of unused tools, newly taken from their molds, were deposited together in France.
Hoarding is one of the more unusual elements of Bronze Age Europe, and it is difficult to explain. The activity consumed large parts of the wealth of these societies without apparent benefits. Traditional explanations have divided them into different types with varying function. The lack of settlement association means that they were not originally foundation deposits, such as are known from the Roman period. They must, therefore, be explained either in terms of metalworking procedures or as having a ritual or religious meaning. Hoards that could have been retrieved from their hiding place have been interpreted, depending on their contents, as hidden treasure, merchants' stock, or items intended for recycling by the smiths. Hoards that could not possibly have been retrieved must have had ritual or religious significance, or, alternatively, they were acts of conspicuous consumption of wealth in a potlatch ceremony. This would enhance the position of the owner and, incidentally, would also ensure the flow of imports and the value of bronze. But a functional interpretation of hoards as a kind of stock cannot account for why these hoards were so often not retrieved. Thousands of hoards were made during the Bronze Age, and enormous riches were disposed of through these activities. In spite of their internal differences and variations in terms of location, composition, and amounts, it is likely that ritual behaviour and cultural meaning were always major components of this practice. There is, however, only little indication of what that meaning was. The association with water, which became more pronounced through time, could suggest water-related rituals and has been interpreted as relating to fertility rites and agricultural production. Because the location and composition of hoards vary locally as well as through time, however, they may embody more than one meaning.
Only a few areas saw instances of hoarding in the Iron Age, and their forms were distinctly different from those of the Bronze Age. The most obvious example is the votive deposit at Hjortspring, Den., where a large wooden boat equipped for war with wooden shields, spears, and swords was destroyed and deposited in a small bog. The events behind these hoards were known to classical writers such as Tacitus and Orosius, who gave accounts of war offerings by Germanic and Cimbrian tribes, respectively. They describe how the weaponry confiscated in war was destroyed and deposited in victory ceremonies. The Iron Age hoards of northern Europe had clear associations with war, the types and numbers of objects deposited together are incomparable with the Bronze Age hoards, and the ritual destruction of the entire assemblage was a new element.
The new hoarding ritual contained elements of conspicuous consumption, but its form and focus were different from previous activities. It developed shortly before the end of the 1st millennium, and it continued as a tradition among the Germanic tribes in northern Europe for several centuries. Another area with complex ritual ceremonies during the Iron Age is France. There are not many of these ritual places, but those that existed were large complex sanctuaries with continuous use over several centuries. One of these sites is Gournay-sur-Aronde, in northern France, a sanctuary used from 300 to 50 BC. The site consisted of a square enclosed by a ditch and palisade with a number of large pits for exposing and displaying offerings at its centre and a number of wood-lined ditches along the edges. In the ditches were found the remains of hundreds of iron weapons, all deliberately and systematically destroyed, as well as fibulae and tools. There were also the remains of 208 animals and 12 humans. These remains indicate some of the ceremonial behaviour that had taken place on the site. All cattle had the muzzle cut off during offering, and their skulls were displayed on top of pits and ditches. The humans had been beheaded, and the bones were at some points moved from the central pits to the ditches and rearranged there according to different prescriptions. The archaeology shows that both the Bronze and Iron ages were periods of specific and unique ritual behaviour but also that their beliefs and norms were not uniform throughout each period. As the socioeconomic structures of these societies changed, their ideological structures underwent transformation.
Societies reveal themselves through their art. These expressions are, however, difficult to interpret, and much of this evidence from the past has disappeared. It is at the same time an essential source, giving insight into the artistry and sophistication of the people of these periods. The development of styles can be followed through the decoration of metal objects and ceramics, while a more distinct pictorial art is found in the rock art from many parts of Europe, in the wall paintings from Minoan Crete, and in the odd figures and scenarios engraved on a range of materials. Stylistic developments show the existence of workshops and schools, and the degree of influence they exercised reached into far corners of the Bronze and Iron Age communities. In the stylistic development during the Metal Ages, two phenomena are of particular interest. The first is the development of the sun-bird-ship motif of the Urnfield Culture. The origin of this motif, which featured bird-headed ships embellished with solar disks, is not known, but over a short period about 1400 BC it became common both as incised decoration and as plastic art throughout a vast area of eastern and central Europe. The similarity in execution and composition is remarkable and suggests a shared understanding of its meaning and the intensity of contact between distant areas.
The second point of interest is the change in style between the Hallstatt and La Tène periods. Throughout the Bronze Age and the Late Hallstatt Period, there were two distinct types of decoration in temperate Europe: the dominant geometric design of various compositions, including curvilinear styles, and the less common naturalistic style portraying humans and animals and used, for example, in rock art. At the end of the Hallstatt Period, at the beginning of the second phase of the Iron Age, a new decorative style, the La Tène style developed, and it rapidly replaced the geometric decoration. This style, as abstract as the Bronze Age one, was nonetheless substantially different. It incorporated flowing curved lines of floral designs with zoomorphic motifs filling the surfaces of the objects and increasingly used settings of semiprecious stones and coral. During the Iron Age this style flourished and branched out into different schools of great beauty. The style reached its mature form in the 4th century BC with the Waldalgesheim style, and, after this point, its most interesting branch was found in Britain, which saw a very individual development and where La Tène art continued to flourish after this style had passed its zenith on the Continent. The La Tène style was used on a variety of artifacts, such as gold and silver jewelry, swords and scabbards, shields inlaid with enamel, bronze mirrors, and beautifully executed containers in wood and ceramics.
The origin and spread of the different art styles have been the subject of much debate. Early Bronze Age geometric and linear motifs, in particular the use of double-axe and spirals motifs, looked to be the result of Mycenaean influences. The art of the Urnfield Culture was thought to be the result of an invasion of people from the east, bringing cremation and a new art style into Europe. La Tène art was associated with the Celtic people, and their spread throughout large parts of Europe was assumed to have brought this art to different areas. The genesis of the various artistic developments cannot easily be established; but they were not as unified a phenomenon as has been assumed, and local variations are prolific. Different art styles influenced each other and were spread widely through copies, exchange, and communication; but this was interspersed with periods of greater local diversity and less desire for contact and emulation.
The Iron Age is often seen as the time of the appearance in history of the European peoples, the “barbarians” as they were seen by Rome. These people included a number of different tribes and groups, the configuration of which changed over time; all had more or less obvious roots in the Bronze Age. Ethnicity is not easy to establish, however, and the fact that, for example, the Romans ascribed an area to a particular people does not necessarily mean that those inhabiting that area constituted an ethnic and linguistic group. Continuous changes in the composition of tribal formation occurred in the Iron Age as groups bound together through alliances created by gift giving, trade, and aggression. From Greek, and later Roman, writers and from Assyrian texts, historical information about some of these people has been preserved. The main groups presented by these texts are the Celts in western Europe, the Germanic people of northern Europe, the Slavs from eastern Europe, and Cimmerians, Scythians, and, later, Sarmatians coming into southeastern Europe from the Russian Steppe. The texts describe what to their authors appeared as barbarous customs in cultures they did not understand, but they also provide historic insights into the movements of different peoples and tribes during this unrestful period.
It was also during the Iron Age that individually named people appeared for the first time in European sources, and the names of kings, heroes, gods, and goddesses have become known through legendary writers such as Homer. In the main, however, the Metal Ages were before literature began to immortalize individuals, and in general little is known about individual people or even groups from these periods. It remains up to the archaeologist to explain how the people lived and who they were, since they are known only through their art, their actions, and their own physical remains. Their art shows the people through figures and drawings, but always in a stylistic or symbolic way rather than as portraits. This is even the case in the wall paintings from Mycenaean Crete, which show detailed full-figure drawings of women and men in different costumes and involved in various, presumably partly ceremonial, activities. The figurative representations, whether drawings or statues, do not give accurate insight into the appearance, health, and mentality of these people, but evidence of this is provided by their physical remains and the things they made and used.
Their appearance can to some extent be reconstructed on the basis of skeletal materials from graves. Owing to changes in burial rites, these are better preserved from some periods than others, but in general there is good evidence. The people were close to the same height as people living today and were of a similar build. In some areas, as demonstrated by the Early Bronze Age cemetery at Ripa Lui Bodai, in Romania, people of different racial characteristics were buried in a similar manner within one cemetery, suggesting that the population was racially mixed. It is quite likely that such mixture was common in many areas, suggesting that the cultures correspond to social structures rather than ethnic or racial ones.
The mortality rate was high, and the average life expectancy was about 30–40 years, with high infant mortality and few very old members of society. At the Unetician cemetery at Tornice, Pol., the average age at death for men was 31 and for women 20, while that from the Early Bronze Age cemetery at Lerna, Greece, was 31–37 for men and 29–31 for women. Women would have given birth at an early age, and their lower life expectancy was likely due to death in connection with pregnancy or childbirth. The difference in life expectancy may be indirect evidence of girl-child infanticide. Generational time would have been short, and the nature of society was therefore drastically different. As an example, the estimate of the living population at Branc suggests that it consisted of 30 to 40 people, half of them children. This would have influenced social life, kinship systems, and subsistence activities. The bodies often show signs of heavy physical labour, and the wear on the bones suggests that many activities took place in a squatting position.
Generally, social divisions of labour and resources did not in the Bronze Age reach such degrees that this affected the bodies, but this changed with time. Analysis of the human bones from the Early Iron Age cemetery at Mount Magdalenska, Slovenia, shows such divisions. The males of some clans or leading families had more access to animal products than any of the other members of the community, and the women generally had a more restricted and homogeneous diet. With the advent of the Iron Age, the society had become so differentiated that some people lived a life protected from hard labour and physical toils while others worked extensively and had a poor diet.
Throughout the Metal Ages, humans were victims of various diseases, such as rheumatism and arthritis, which complicated life and crippled the body. Tuberculosis also has been observed, as have periodontal disease, caries, and bone tumours. Some of these diseases caused joint changes or vertebral deformities—such as were seen on a Copper Age skeleton found in Hungary—which resulted in restricted working and even walking capacities for the individual concerned. Badly crippled and handicapped people often survived, and they must have been taken care of and fed by other members of their community.
There is also evidence to suggest that people took great care with their appearance. The hairstyles were often sophisticated, with braids, hairnets, and ornaments being used by women or with the hair cut straight at the shoulder in a bob as for the girl in the grave at Egtved, Den. Manicure equipment was common in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age graves, and the mirror was a favoured object among both the Celtic people and Scythian warriors. These objects and evidence from well-preserved graves show people as well-groomed individuals who shaved regularly, braided or cut their hair, and had well-cared-for, manicured hands.
In addition to how the people looked, there is also evidence of the clothing and ornaments they used. There are a few scattered wool textiles from the Neolithic, but the first well-documented evidence of wool textiles dates from the Bronze Age. At times the textiles themselves have been found, but more commonly it is the equipment used in textile production that shows their presence. Spindle whorls, loom weights, and combs became increasingly common components of settlement debris, showing weaving as a household task performed at any settlement. With the Iron Age, new weaving techniques developed, and embroideries, dyes, and more complicated designs were introduced, as were textiles of materials such as linen and silk. At this point, it also became common to have specialist weavers, and in some oppida the weavers lived in certain designated quarters within the settlement. The increase in textile production meant that the raising of sheep intensified in many regions during the Bronze Age. In the Aegean, this happened early in the Bronze Age, and Linear B tablets that give accounts of trade in textiles certify the economic importance of this commodity for this area. In other parts of Europe, it took a little longer, but, toward the end of the Bronze Age, changes in the fleece of sheep in England demonstrate how substantially the use of sheep had grown.
Remains of Bronze Age costumes are limited, but they show various relatively simple wool garments adorned with bronze ornaments and attachments. In many areas, hats of different kinds—possibly with a clear distinction in style between those worn by men and women—were used. Bronze statues show similarly prominent headpieces, and they often gave great attention to depicting hairstyles. In the course of the Early Bronze Age, pins became common elements of costumes, and with the Tumulus Culture they became prominent pieces, at times exceeding 12 to 16 inches (30 to 40 centimetres) in length, with elaborate heads that often reflect regional patterns. At this time, the pins lost much of their original functional role and became primarily display items. Their regional diversity suggests how people used elements of their dress to express their group identity. During the Late Bronze Age, the pin remained in use and of importance. Thousands were found in the Swiss lake sites, but these are small elegant pieces that at times were composed into complex breast pieces by connecting chains and pendants. Iron Age textiles are found much more frequently, and clothing at that time became an elaborate and colourful medium of regional and social variability. Metal attachments became less common; but the fibula (a brooch resembling a safety pin) replaced the pin, and it became an object of fashion widely adopted and undergoing much regional development and elaboration.
These were the people who lived with and created the Metal Ages of prehistoric Europe. The conditions of their lives had undergone considerable changes during the centuries of the Copper, Bronze, and Iron ages; but these were gradual changes initiated and managed largely internally and at a rate dictated from within. Roman expansion into temperate Europe during the last centuries BC changed this, and new social and ideological structures were imposed from above upon local communities. Long-established links of contact and previous cultural affinities were broken, and a new Europe came into being.
Infrastructure and influences of the Roman and Greek civilizations of old can still be seen in the …
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The main treatment of classical Greek and Roman history is given in the article Aegean civilizations; ancient Greek civilization; Hellenistic Age; ancient Italic people; and ancient Rome. Only a brief cultural overview is offered here, outlining the influence of Greeks and Romans on European history.
Of the Indo-European tribes of European origin, the Greeks were foremost as regards both the period at which they developed an advanced culture and their importance in further evolution. The Greeks emerged in the course of the 2nd millennium BC through the superimposition of a branch of the Indo-Europeans on the population of the Mediterranean region during the great migrations of nations that started in the region of the lower Danube. From 1800 BC onward the first early Greeks reached their later areas of settlement between the Ionian and the Aegean seas. The fusion of these earliest Greek-speaking people with their predecessors produced the civilization known as Mycenaean. They penetrated to the sea into the Aegean region and via Crete (approximately 1400 BC) reached Rhodes and even Cyprus and the shores of Anatolia. From 1200 BC onward the Dorians followed from Epirus. They occupied principally parts of the Peloponnese (Sparta and Argolis) and also Crete. Their migration was followed by the Dark Ages—two centuries of chaotic movements of tribes in Greece—at the end of which (c. 900 BC) the distribution of the Greek mainland among the various tribes was on the whole completed.
From about 800 BC there was a further Greek expansion through the founding of colonies overseas. The coasts and islands of Anatolia were occupied from south to north by the Dorians, Ionians, and Aeolians, respectively. In addition, individual colonies were strung out around the shores of the Black Sea in the north and across the eastern Mediterranean to Naukratis on the Nile delta and in Cyrenaica and also in the western Mediterranean in Sicily, lower Italy, and Massalia (Marseille). Thus, the Hellenes, as they called themselves thereafter, came into contact on all sides with the old, advanced cultures of the Middle East and transmitted many features of these cultures to western Europe. This, along with the Greeks' own achievements, laid the foundations of European civilization.
The position and nature of the country exercised a decisive influence in the evolution of Greek civilization. The proximity of the sea tempted the Greeks to range far and wide exploring it, but the fact of their living on islands or on peninsulas or in valleys separated by mountains on the mainland confined the formation of states to small areas not easily accessible from other parts. This fateful individualism in political development was also a reflection of the Hellenic temperament. Though it prevented Greece from becoming a single unified nation that could rival the strength of the Middle Eastern monarchies, it led to the evolution of the city-state. This was not merely a complex social and economic structure and a centre for crafts and for trade with distant regions; above all it was a tightly knit, self-governing political and religious community whose citizens were prepared to make any sacrifice to maintain their freedom. Colonies, too, started from individual cities and took the form of independent city-states. Fusions of power occurred in the shape of leagues of cities, such as the Peloponnesian League, the Delian League, and the Boeotian League. The efficacy of these leagues depended chiefly upon the hegemony of a leading city (Sparta, Athens, or Thebes), but the desire for self-determination of the others could never be permanently suppressed, and the leagues broke up again and again.
The Hellenes, however, always felt themselves to be one people. They were conscious of a common character and a common language, and they practiced only one religion. Furthermore, the great athletic contests and artistic competitions had a continually renewed unifying effect. The Hellenes possessed a keen intellect, capable of abstraction, and at the same time a supple imagination. They developed, in the form of the belief in the unity of body and soul, a serene, sensuous conception of the world. Their gods were connected only loosely by a theogony that took shape gradually; in the Greek religion there was neither revelation nor dogma to oppose the spirit of inquiry.
The Hellenes benefited greatly from the knowledge and achievement of other countries as regards astronomy, chronology, and mathematics, but it was through their own native abilities that they made their greatest achievements, in becoming the founders of European philosophy and science. Their achievement in representative art and in architecture was no less fundamental. Their striving for an ideal, naturalistic rendering found its fulfillment in the representation of the human body in sculpture in the round. Another considerable achievement was the development of the pillared temple to a greater degree of harmony. In poetry the genius of the Hellenes created both form and content, which have remained a constant source of inspiration in European literature.
The strong political sense of the Greeks produced a variety of systems of government from which their theory of political science abstracted types of constitution that are still in use. On the whole, political development in Greece followed a pattern: first the rule of kings, found as early as the period of Mycenaean civilization; then a feudal period, the oligarchy of noble landowners; and, finally, varying degrees of democracy. Frequently there were periods when individuals seized power in the cities and ruled as tyrants. The tendency for ever-wider sections of the community to participate in the life of the state brought into being the free democratic citizens, but the institution of slavery, upon which Greek society and the Greek economy rested, was untouched by this.
In spite of continual internal disputes, the Greeks succeeded in warding off the threat of Asian despotism. The advance of the Persians into Europe failed (490 and 480–79 BC) because of the resistance of the Greeks and in particular of the Athenians. The 5th century BC saw the highest development of Greek civilization. The Classical period of Athens and its great accomplishments left a lasting impression, but the political cleavages, particularly the struggle between Athens and Sparta, increasingly reduced the political strength of the Greeks. Not until they were conquered by the Macedonians did the Greeks attain a new importance as the cultural leaven of the Hellenistic empires of Alexander the Great and his successors. A new system of colonization spread as far as the Indus city-communities fashioned after the Greek prototype, and Greek education and language came to be of consequence in the world at large.
Greece again asserted its independence through the formation of the Achaean League, which was finally defeated by the Romans in 146 BC. The spirit of Greek civilization subsequently exercised a great influence upon Rome. Greek culture became one of the principal components of Roman imperial culture and together with it spread throughout Europe. When Christian teaching appeared in the Middle East, the Greek world of ideas exercised a decisive influence upon its spiritual evolution. From the time of the partition of the Roman Empire, leadership in the Eastern Empire fell to the Greeks. Their language became the language of the state, and its usage spread to the Balkans. The Byzantine Empire, of which Greece was the core, protected Europe against potential invaders from Anatolia until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. (The main treatment of the Byzantine Empire from about 330 to about 1453 is given in the article Byzantine Empire.)
The original Mediterranean population of Italy was completely altered by repeated superimpositions of peoples of Indo-European stock. The first Indo-European migrants, who belonged to the Italic tribes, moved across the eastern Alpine passes into the plain of the Po River about 1800 BC. Later they crossed the Apennines and eventually occupied the region of Latium, which included Rome. Before 1000 BC there followed related tribes, which later divided into various groups and gradually moved to central and southern Italy. In Tuscany they were repulsed by the Etruscans, who may have come originally from Anatolia. The next to arrive were Illyrians from the Balkans, who occupied Venetia and Apulia. At the beginning of the historical period, Greek colonists arrived in Italy, and after 400 BC the Celts, who settled in the plain of the Po.
The city of Rome, increasing gradually in power and influence, created through political rule and the spread of the Latin language something like a nation out of this abundance of nationalities. In this the Romans were favoured by their kinship with the other Italic tribes. The Roman and Italic elements in Italy, moreover, were reinforced in the beginning through the founding of colonies by Rome and by other towns in Latium. The Italic element in Roman towns decreased: a process—less racial than cultural—called the Romanization of the provinces. In the 3rd century BC, central and southern Italy were dotted with Roman colonies, and the system was to be extended to ever more distant regions up to imperial times. As its dominion spread throughout Italy and covered the entire Mediterranean basin, Rome received an influx of people of the most varied origins, including eventually vast numbers from Asia and Africa.
The building of an enormous empire was Rome's greatest achievement. Held together by the military power of one city, in the 2nd century AD the Roman Empire extended throughout northern Africa and western Asia; in Europe it covered all the Mediterranean countries, Spain, Gaul, and southern Britain. This vast region, united under a single authority and a single political and social organization, enjoyed a long period of peaceful development. In Asia, on a narrow front, it bordered the Parthian empire, but elsewhere beyond its perimeter there were only barbarians. Rome brought to the conquered parts of Europe the civilization the Greeks had begun, to which it added its own important contributions in the form of state organization, military institutions, and law. Within the framework of the empire and under the protection of its chain of fortifications, extending uninterrupted the entire length of its frontiers (marked in Europe by the Rhine and the Danube), there began the assimilation of varying types of culture to the Hellenistic-Roman pattern. The army principally, but also Roman administration, the social order, and economic factors, encouraged Romanization. Except around the eastern Mediterranean, where Greek remained dominant, Latin became everywhere the language of commerce and eventually almost the universal language.
The empire formed an interconnected area of free trade, which was afforded a thriving existence by the pax romana (“Roman peace”). Products of rural districts found a market throughout the whole empire, and the advanced technical skills of the central region of the Mediterranean spread outward into the provinces. The most decisive step toward Romanization was the extension of the city system into these provinces. Rural and tribal institutions were replaced by the civitas form of government, according to which the elected city authority shared in the administration of the surrounding country region; and, as the old idea of the Greek city-state gained ground, a measure of local autonomy appeared. The Romanized upper classes of the provinces began supplying men to fill the higher offices of the state. Ever-larger numbers of people acquired the status of Roman citizens, until in AD 212 the emperor Caracalla bestowed it on all freeborn subjects. The institution of slavery, however, remained.
The enjoyment of equal rights by all Roman citizens did not last. The coercive measures by which alone the state could maintain itself divided the population anew into hereditary classes according to their work; and the barbarians, mainly Germanic, who were admitted into the empire in greater numbers, remained in their own tribal associations either as subjects or as allies. The state created a perfected administrative apparatus, which exercised a strongly unifying effect throughout the empire, but local self-government became less and less effective under pressure from the central authority.
The decline of the late empire was accompanied by a stagnation of spiritual forces, a paralysis of creative power, and a retrograde development in the economy. Much of the empire's work of civilization was lost in internal and external wars. Equally, barbarization began with the rise of unchecked pagan ways of life and the settlement of Germanic tribes long before the latter shattered the Western Empire and took possession of its parts. Though many features of Roman civilization disappeared, others survived in the customs of peoples in various parts of the empire. Moreover, something of the superstructure of the empire was taken over by the Germanic states, and much valuable literature was preserved in manuscript for later times.
It was under the Roman Empire that the Christian religion penetrated into Europe. By winning recognition as the religion of the state, it added a new basic factor of equality and unification to the imperial civilization and at the same time reintroduced Middle Eastern and Hellenistic elements into the West. Organized within the framework of the empire, the church became a complementary body upholding the state. Moreover, during the period of the decline of secular culture, Christianity and the church were the sole forces to arouse fresh creative strength by assimilating the civilization of the ancient world and transmitting it to the Middle Ages. At the same time, the church in the West showed reserve toward the speculative dogma of the Middle Eastern and Hellenic worlds and directed its attention more toward questions of morality and order. When the Western Empire collapsed and the use of Greek had died there, the division between East and West became still sharper. The name Romaioi remained attached to the Greeks of the Eastern Empire, while in the West the word Roman developed a new meaning in connection with the church and the bishop of Rome. Christianity and a church of a Roman character, the most enduring legacy of the ancient world, became one of the most important features in western European civilization.
The wanderings of the Germanic peoples, which lasted until the early Middle Ages and destroyed the Western Roman Empire, were, together with the migrations of the Slavs, formative elements of the distribution of peoples in modern Europe. The Germanic peoples originated about 1800 BC from the superimposition, on a population of megalithic culture on the eastern North Sea coast, of Battle-Ax people from the Corded Ware Culture of middle Germany. During the Bronze Age the Germanic peoples spread over southern Scandinavia and penetrated more deeply into Germany between the Weser and Vistula rivers. Contact with the Mediterranean through the amber trade encouraged the development from a purely peasant culture, but during the Iron Age the Germanic peoples were at first cut off from the Mediterranean by the Celts and Illyrians. Their culture declined, and an increasing population, together with worsening climatic conditions, drove them to seek new lands farther south. Thus the central European Celts and Illyrians found themselves under a growing pressure. Even before 200 BC the first Germanic tribes had reached the lower Danube, where their path was barred by the Macedonian kingdom. Driven by rising floodwaters, at the end of the 2nd century BC, migratory hordes of Cimbri, Teutoni, and Ambrones from Jutland broke through the Celtic-Illyrian zone and reached the edge of the Roman sphere of influence, appearing first in Carinthia (113 BC), then in southern France, and finally in upper Italy. With the violent attacks of the Cimbri, the Germans stepped onto the stage of history.
These migrations were in no way nomadic; they were the gradual expansions of a land-hungry peasantry. Tribes did not always migrate en masse. Usually, because of the loose political structure, groups remained in the original homelands or settled down at points along the migration route. In the course of time, many tribes were depleted and scattered. On the other hand, different tribal groups would sometimes unite before migrating or would take up other wanderers en route. The migrations required skilled leadership, and this promoted the social and political elevation of a noble and kingly class.
In 102 BC the Teutoni were totally defeated by the Romans, who in the following year destroyed the army of the Cimbri. The Swabian tribes, however, moved steadily through central and southern Germany, and the Celts were compelled to retreat to Gaul. When the Germans under Ariovistus crossed the upper Rhine, Julius Caesar arrested their advance and initiated the Roman countermovement with his victory in the Sundgau (58 BC). Under the emperor Augustus, Roman rule was carried as far as the Rhine and the Danube. On the far side of these rivers, the Germans were pushed back only in the small area contained within the Germano-Raetian limes (fortified frontier) from about AD 70.
The pressure of population was soon evident once more among the German peoples. Tribes that had left Scandinavia earlier (Rugii, Goths, Gepidae, Vandals, Burgundians, and others) pressed on from the lower Vistula and Oder rivers (AD 150 onward). The unrest spread to other tribes, and the resulting wars between the Romans and the Marcomanni (166–180) threatened Italy itself. The successful campaigns of Marcus Aurelius resulted in the acquisition by Rome of the provinces of Marcomannia and Sarmatia, but after his death these had to be abandoned and the movement of the Germanic peoples continued. Soon the Alemanni, pushing up the Main River, reached the upper German limes.
To the east the Goths had reached the Black Sea about AD 200. Year after year Goths and others, either crossing the lower Danube or traveling by sea, penetrated into the Balkan Peninsula and Anatolia as far as Cyprus on plundering expeditions. Only with the Roman victory at Naissus (269) was their advance finally checked. Enriched with booty and constituted imperial mercenaries in return for the payment of a yearly tribute, they became a settled population. The Romans, however, surrendered Dacia beyond the Danube.
In 258 the Alemanni and the Franks broke through the lines and settled on the right bank of the Rhine, continuously infiltrating thereafter toward Gaul and Italy. Everywhere within the empire, towns were fortified, even Rome itself. Franks and Saxons ravaged the coasts of northern Gaul and Britain, and for the next three centuries incursions by Germanic peoples were the scourge of the Western Empire. Nevertheless, it was only with German help that the empire was able to survive as long as it did. The Roman army received an ever-growing number of recruits from the German tribes, which also provided settlers for the land. The Germans soon proved themselves capable of holding the highest ranks in the army. Tribute money to the tribes, pay to individual soldiers, and booty all brought wealth to the Germans, which in turn gave warrior lords the means with which to maintain large followings of retainers.
In the West, however, among the Alemanni and Franks, the beginnings of political union into larger groups did not go beyond loose associations. Only in the East did the Gothic kingdom gather many tribes under a single leadership. Above all, the development of the eastern Germans was stimulated by their undisturbed contact with the frontiers of the ancient world. Their economy, however, was still unable to support the needs of a steadily growing population, and pressure from overpopulation resulted in further incursions into the Roman Empire. The imperial reforms of Diocletian and Constantine the Great brought a period of improvement. The usurpation of the imperial title by a Frankish general in 356 let loose a storm along the length of the Rhine and subsequently on the Danube, but the frontiers were restored by the forces of the emperors Julian and Valentinian I, who repelled attacks by both the Franks and the Alemanni.
At that time, a new force appeared. In 375 the Huns from Central Asia first attacked the Ostrogoths—an event that provoked serious disturbances among the eastern Germans. The Huns remained in the background, gradually subjugating many Germanic and other tribes. The terrified Goths and related tribes burst through the Danube frontier into the Roman Empire, and the Balkans became once again a battlefield for German armies. After the crushing defeat of the Romans at Adrianople (378), the empire was no longer in a position to drive all its enemies from its territories. Tribes that could no longer be expelled were settled within the empire as “allies” ( foederati). They received subsidies and in return supplied troops. The Germanization of the empire progressed, that of the army being nearly completed. None of the tribes, however, that had broken into the Balkans settled there. After the division of the empire in 395, the emperors at Constantinople did all in their power to drive the Germanic tribes away from the vicinity of the capital toward the Western Empire.
From the beginning of the 5th century, the Western Empire was the scene of numerous further migrations. The Visigoths broke out of the Balkans into Italy and in 410 temporarily occupied Rome. In 406–407, Germanic and other tribes (Vandals, Alani, Suebi, and Burgundians) from Silesia and even farther east crossed the Rhine in their flight from the Huns and penetrated as far as Spain. The Vandals subsequently crossed to Africa and set up at Carthage the first independent German state on Roman soil. In the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (451), the Roman commander Aëtius, with German support, defeated Attila, who had united his Huns with some other Germans in a vigorous westward push. The Balkans suffered a third period of terrible raids from the eastern Germans; and Jutes, Angles, and Saxons from the Jutland Peninsula crossed over to Britain. The Franks and the Alemanni finally established themselves on the far side of the Rhine, the Burgundians extended along the Rhône valley, and the Visigoths took possession of nearly all of Spain. In 476 the Germanic soldiery proclaimed Odoacer, a barbarian general, as king of Italy, and, when Odoacer deposed the emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna, the empire in the West was at an end. In the East, imperial rule remained a reality, and Constantinople, also called “New Rome,” survived many sieges until its fall in 1453. In comparison, “Old Rome” declined into an episcopal centre, losing many of its imperial characteristics.
By the end of the 5th century, however, most of the non-Roman peoples settled in the West were adopting Roman customs and Christian belief. Intermarriage with established Roman families, the assumption of imperial titles, and, finally, conversion assisted a process of acculturation among their leaders, for instance, in the case of Clovis, the Frank. Theodoric the Ostrogoth established an impressive “sub-Roman” kingdom based on Ravenna, where public buildings and churches served by an Arian clergy competed with imperial monuments. Increased Roman influence can also be seen in the law codes promulgated by the Visigoths Euric (late 5th century) and Alaric II (the Breviary of 506) and the Burgundians, Bavarians, Ostrogoths, and Franks (Lex Salica, 507–511). Christianity often provided the medium for incorporation into old imperial structures. While the Goths were still in the Danube basin, they had embraced Arian Christianity (which denied that the Son was of the same substance as the Father), and their first bishop, Ulfilas, translated the Bible into Gothic. Given its heretical nature, this religious literature in a written vernacular could not survive, and, with conversion to orthodox (“catholic”) Christianity, the barbarian languages gradually gave way to Latin.
Nonetheless, the Germanic tribes brought into Europe their own tribal institutions, ethnic patterns, and oral and artistic traditions, including a highly developed epic poetry. Their influence was strongest in central Europe, where the Romans had had the least impact; less marked in the northern and eastern parts, where Romano-British and Gallo-Roman cultures were established; and weakest in the highly Romanized southern regions. Linguistically, Old High German developed in the first zone and Anglo-Saxon in Britain, while farther south medieval Romance languages developed from their common Latin inheritance.
In the southern zone, imperial traditions were reinforced by the reconquest, albeit brief, of North Africa, Italy, and parts of Spain by forces from Constantinople under Justinian's general Belisarius. Despite the restoration of Roman administration between 533 and 554 (celebrated in the mosaics of Ravenna and the Pragmatic Sanction of 554), imperial forces could not prevent the Lombards from moving inexorably into northern Italy, which they occupied in 568. The reconquered parts of the Western Empire were thus reduced to a narrow strip of territory from the head of the Adriatic to Ravenna, the exarchate, Rome—now governed effectively by its bishop—plus small duchies. In addition, Sicily, Bruttium, and Calabria remained subject to Constantinople and were Greek-speaking for many centuries.
In contrast to previous invaders, from the 6th century onward, newly arrived barbarian forces clung to their pagan culture and resisted assimilation. The Saxons established themselves east of the Rhine in the north. The Avars and their Slav allies, who moved steadily westward from the Vistula and Dnepr river basins, disrupted weak imperial defenses at the Danube and pressed south and west into the Balkans and central Europe. By 567 the Avars established control over the Hungarian plain, where they remained until their defeat by Charlemagne in 796. After successfully besieging Sirmium and Singidunum in the 580s, the eastern Slavs infiltrated the Balkans, while others moved north and west to settle eventually along the Elbe beside the Saxons. The failure of the combined Avaro-Slav siege of Constantinople in 626 ended this pagan expansion. Although Slavs occupied the Balkan Peninsula for two centuries or more, disrupting east-west communication along the ancient Via Egnatia, they were eventually evangelized and absorbed into the Eastern Empire.
The term middle age (medium aevum) was first used in the late 15th century by humanist scholars as a description of that period of western European history between the collapse of Roman civilization in the 5th century AD and the revival of civilized life and learning in which the humanists believed themselves to be participating. Those centuries saw the emergence of Europe as a cultural unit and the rise and decay of a distinctive civilization within it.
The materials from which this civilization was molded were essentially threefold: the inheritance of classical antiquity, Christian tradition, and Germanic and Scandinavian social patterns. Classical antiquity, which set the standards of learning, culture, and government by which medieval no less than Renaissance scholars measured their own achievements, passed into Europe by several routes. Over part of Europe, most notably Italy, Spain, and southern France, the Germanic invaders entered a society in which Roman social and political organization, urban life, and even local government continued—much enfeebled, but never totally interrupted. In northern Gaul, always more thinly Romanized, this was much less true; in Britain, little but the roads and crumbling walls survived as witness to the secular presence of the empire. The Roman Catholic church was able to play an essential role in preserving literacy and even some classical learning in its liturgy and literature, in maintaining some of the forms of public administration in its diocesan government, in perpetuating the tradition of corporate responsibility for peace and the relief of want, and perhaps most of all in creating a new universal society to replace that once provided by the fallen empire. It was ultimately the Latin church rather than the Roman imperial tradition that determined the frontiers of modern Europe.
Between the 5th and 8th centuries AD, the early Middle Ages, the imperial government of Europe was replaced by separate Germanic tribal states imbued by Christian faith. This transformation was accompanied by the rapid spread of Christianity, which gradually established a cultural and linguistic unity throughout Europe. In this way, paradoxically, the ancient pagan capital of Rome became the chief Christian centre, as the see founded by St. Peter, to whom Christians everywhere were devoted. But it was now deprived of significant political or military authority, which meant that successive bishops of Rome regularly called upon other Christians for protection. The failure of the Eastern Roman Empire to respond to these appeals marked its isolation from the West.
The early history of medieval Europe is dominated by the alliance between the pope (papa; i.e., “father” of Rome) and the descendants of Clovis I, king of the Franks. This alliance was sealed by the coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day, 800. It also represented a revival of some of the imperial traditions of ancient Rome, in turn transformed by Christian faith. The Holy Roman Empire of the West, in contrast to the Eastern Roman Empire of Constantinople, thus became a lasting ideal in Christian Europe.
To account for this process of Christianization, it is necessary to survey the forces working to extend and deepen the faith in Europe. In the late 5th century, when non-Roman forces effectively took over the Roman Empire, several forms of Christian authority were known: the urban hierarchy of bishops, established in or near the major cities and ranked according to geographic diocese; monastic communities, dedicated to spiritual perfection; and isolated holy men unattached to other groups. The faith was represented by a variety of monuments, ranging from cathedral churches, some with magnificent decoration, to isolated rural shrines, often containing the relics of martyrs and saints reputed to work miracles. Overall, the character of each Christian region differed according to the history and method of its evangelization.
Perhaps the most effective episcopacy was based in the highly developed cities of Italy, though Ostrogothic clergy imposed Arian beliefs in some of them. Along the coasts and on isolated islands, monastic communities represented the ascetic traditions of the Desert Fathers. In Gaul, St. Martin combined this monastic training with episcopal office, though he refused to wear the bishop of Tours' official costume. After his death, his relics made his shrine a major centre of pilgrimage. Elsewhere the local Gallo-Roman aristocracy provided many well-trained bishops, such as Sidonius of Clermont, who grafted Christian learning onto traditional Roman education. In Ireland, St. Patrick had less lasting success in setting up an episcopal organization, which never took strong hold. Although these churches were united in their respect for St. Peter's foundation at Rome, each pursued its own separate trajectory.
Christian monks also participated in the process of evangelization. The appeal of monasteries such as Lérins in Provence, often founded on Pachomian (cenobitic) models, was heightened by the wide circulation of histories of saints and martyrs, particularly the 4th-century Life of St. Antony attributed to Athanasius. Such tales inspired individuals to practice asceticism, visit the Holy Land, and dedicate their family wealth to the church. Other associations existed in the form of family foundations, house monasteries, and groups of dedicated women, such as the one for whom Egeria (Etheria) wrote her pilgrim diary, the late 4th-century Peregrinatio Etheriae.
Paganism was only one of the forces hostile to the expansion of Christianity. Intense opposition to official belief derived from heretical movements, in turn condemned by ecumenical and local councils and by emperors. The most widespread of these was Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ. Traces of Pelagianism (which denied the concept of original sin and emphasized free will) and Priscillianism (a dualistic doctrine denying the humanity of Christ) continued to inspire wrong beliefs, and, in remote areas where Christianity was little known, the worship of the old gods was sometimes combined with Christian practice in a syncretic attempt to ensure protection.
In this profoundly non-Christian Europe, the major achievements of the 6th century were the establishment of Western monasticism, the conversion of the Arians and pagans to orthodox Christianity, and the elaboration of methods of sustaining correct Christian belief.
Although many monasteries had been set up in the West before the 6th century, that founded by St. Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–c. 547) established new methods for the organization of religious communities, which proved immensely influential. Benedict's Rule provided celibate Christians with a clear daily timetable of prayer, manual work, and study. At Monte Cassino in central Italy monastic self-sufficiency was wedded to Christian devotion, as spiritual training was combined with agricultural activity. This routine represented a less stringent asceticism than Celtic traditions and offered less intellectual stimulus than did more scholarly foundations. But, in its simplicity and moderation, the Rule of St. Benedict proved a most effective medium for spreading celibate asceticism.
In the 580s the monastery of Monte Cassino was attacked by Lombard forces, and its precious copy of the Rule had to be carried to safety in Rome. Although the community was later refounded, the attack emphasizes the fragility of early medieval monastic institutions. In southern Italy, Cassiodorus established his own monastery of Vivarium with an unusually rich library and scriptorium; he wrote a guide, the Institutes, for monastic scribes and copyists. But after his death the community could not sustain his high aims, and his collection of books was dispersed. Similarly, many older monasteries did not endure into the medieval period.
On the remote northwestern coasts of Ireland and Scotland, a highly ascetic monasticism had developed, directly inspired by Egyptian holy men. These monks lived in individual cells, observing a strict penitential discipline, and displayed a missionary zeal that effectively replaced St. Patrick's episcopal church during the 6th century. By developing links with local magnates, they sought to secure secular protection. When St. Columba founded a community on Iona in 563, he intended not only to convert the Picts but also to secure his own princely position against rivals in Ulster. When St. Columban set out from Ireland with a group of companions to evangelize Europe, he actively sought lay patronage and protection for his remote foundations at Luxeuil in Burgundy and Bobbio in the Apennines.
Some conflict between Celtic and Benedictine monasticism was probably inevitable. In the early 7th century, it was fought out in Columban's quarrel with Pope Gregory I over the correct method of calculating the date of Easter, rather than in disagreement over monastic organization. But, in the long run, the Rule of St. Benedict proved a more accessible and practical guide for European monasticism than the less routine and more stringent Celtic traditions. Nonetheless, many Celtic communities flourished, and the foundation of Columban's disciple Gall in the Alps survives to this day, identified (as Sankt Gallen, or Saint-Gall) only by its founder's name. And the fact that both approaches could coexist reflects the strongly felt need for Christian ascetic practices in early medieval Europe.
In this matter, the attitude of the military leader, normally the king, was decisive, so bishops and monks usually directed their efforts toward the ruler. If he or his wife could be persuaded to abandon the ancient beliefs, the chiefs and magnates would often follow suit.
Among the Germanic tribes established in the West in the early 6th century, the Franks clung to their pagan beliefs and did not adopt Arianism. To win over Clovis, their leader since 481, Bishop Remigius of Rheims indicated that he would bring the young king ecclesiastical support and legitimation if he would convert. Remigius was assisted by Clovis' wife, Clotilda, who was an orthodox Burgundian Christian. Finally, after an important victory over the rival Alemanni, Clovis agreed, and, at the turn of the 5th/6th century, he was baptized by the bishop (the actual date is disputed). His son and heir and allegedly 3,000 men of his army adopted Christianity in a mass ceremony.
By his conversion Clovis won the support of many influential Gallo-Roman families as well as bishops, and he advanced south against the Arian Visigoths, who were established around Toulouse. At the battle of Vouillé in 507 the Visigoths were defeated and their king Alaric II was killed. Frankish and Christian control was thus extended far to the south, while the Visigoths retreated over the Pyrenees to Spain. The following year, Clovis received the honorary title of consul from the Eastern emperor, Anastasius I, and entered Tours wearing a purple tunic and scattering gold to the crowd, who acclaimed him consul or emperor. In the last year of his life (511), Clovis summoned his bishops to a council at Orléans and directed the proceedings. The Franks thus forged a close relationship with Gallo-Roman scholars who had entered the church in Gaul and acquired from them some classical learning and legal expertise. The Germanic principle of partible inheritance, however, meant that Clovis' sons divided his kingdom and continually fought each other to extend their own regions.
At the end of the century, another momentous conversion occurred. When Pope Gregory I the Great (590–605) heard about the northern Anglo-Saxons, who had introduced their own gods to the British Isles and driven the indigenous Celtic Christians into distant western regions, he sent a high-powered missionary team to convert them. Led by Augustine, the prior of a Benedictine monastery in Rome who became the first archbishop of Canterbury, they succeeded in baptizing King Aethelberht of Kent with the assistance of his Frankish wife, Bertha. The subsequent establishment of Christian institutions according to Gregory's organization combined an effective episcopal church with monastic training, but it provoked hostility among the Celts.
The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons must owe something to Gregory's detailed instructions, which accompanied his second mission, sent in 601. In these letters addressed to its leader, Abbot Mellitus, the pope answered Augustine's questions about the conversion process. He dealt with troublesome issues, such as prohibited degrees of marriage, and the most basic problems of paganism, particularly what should be done with the pagan temples and their idols and shrines. From the original order to destroy them, Gregory changed his mind and recommended that these sites should be transformed into churches and reconsecrated for Christian use with nearby houses where feasts could be held. Of course, idols had to be removed, but places sacred to pagans could be reemployed by Christians.
Despite papal sanction for such careful procedures, the Celtic Christians, in particular the Welsh monastery of Bangor, refused to recognize Augustine's authority. This clash, in 603, prefigured later ones and drew up the battle lines of monastic versus episcopal churches. But the bishops, monasteries, and schools established at Canterbury, Rochester, London, and York laid the basis for a particular loyalty to the church of Rome among the Anglo-Saxons.
A similar procedure of conversion was employed in many areas of the West, where the Goths had established their own Arian bishops; in others, such as Ravenna, they disputed control with an orthodox clergy. Again, orthodox bishops found it best to try to convert particular rulers rather than their clergy. In Burgundy, Avitus of Vienne won over King Gundobad; among the Sueves, it was Martin of Braga; and, in Visigothic Spain, Leander of Sevilla (Seville). Thus the Burgundians (517), Sueves (561), and Visigoths (589) were finally won to orthodoxy.
In the wake of mass conversions from both Arianism and paganism, the churches of the West tried to develop ways of preserving the correct faith. Instructions were drawn up, often in question-and-answer form (for instance, by Martin of Braga), and collections of sermons by celebrated bishops, such as Caesarius of Arles, were made to assist bishops. (Christian learning was often transmitted in collections of excerpts, called florilegia—“gatherings of flowers.”) In Spain, King Recared insisted that the creed should be recited during the liturgy so that everyone would learn it correctly, a novelty in the West. This initiative was accompanied by a change in the wording of the creed to reflect the belief that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. As St. Augustine had sanctioned this additional clause, Filioque (“and from the Son”), the Spanish bishops relied on the highest Western authority. Even this, however, did not guarantee acceptance of their form of the creed.
While the circulation of model sermons and question-and-answer texts provided bishops with material, Pope Gregory I gave attention to the fundamental problem of training bishops. His Book of Pastoral Care (Regulae pastoralis liber), addressed to John of Ravenna, instructs bishops as to their duties, their dignity, and their need for the monastic virtues of humility, chastity, and obedience. Gregory urged his bishops to set an example of Christian living that would influence others. The text shows how intimately monastic and episcopal training was linked in his mind. A similar concern about Christian standards is evident in Gregory's attitude toward ancient learning, which was to be subordinated and harnessed to Christian belief, not pursued for its classical content. Only then could its pagan origin be rendered safe for Christians.
In the Frankish state set up by Clovis, his descendants continued to feud among themselves and against local rivals. Gradually, the northern regions of Neustria and Austrasia and, farther south, Aquitaine became identifiable kingdoms ruled by separate members of the Merovingian dynasty (named after the 5th-century leader Merovech). But only rarely did one ruler, such as Dagobert I (629–639), unite these areas under his personal rule and defend them against Avar attacks from the east.
Amid these disturbed conditions, while both episcopal and monastic leaders exercised spiritual authority, power was vested in the magnates with armed retainers, who could rival nominal Merovingian kings. It was from one of these families—the Arnulfings, established in the Ardennes—that a significantly stronger leader would eventually emerge. The process extended from Dagobert's death through three generations, as the Arnulfings secured their control over Austrasia by monopolizing the role of mayor of the palace. In 687 Pippin II defeated the Neustrians and established his authority in the north, fighting off Burgundian, Franconian, and Frisian attacks. Throughout, Merovingian kings ruled but became in fact less and less effective. This imbalance in real power set the stage for Pippin's grandson to argue that, as effective ruler, he should also be king.
A rather different development prevailed among the Visigoths, who established a strong monarchy in Spain. Unlike all the other Germanic tribes, they managed to sustain a centralized kingdom, with a capital at Toledo and an efficient administration. In this the Visigoths were aided by an exceptionally powerful church, run by highly educated bishops such as Isidore of Sevilla, who also patronized monastic foundations. The Christian monarchy of Spain assumed the Eastern tradition of summoning and presiding at councils that legislated for the entire country; it also persecuted the Jews.
Among the Anglo-Saxons, conflicts between Roman and Celtic forms of Christian worship continued to weaken the northern kingdoms. The vitality of Irish and Scottish monasticism, clear from the foundation of Lindisfarne in 635, exacerbated tensions that were only resolved at Whitby in 664. At this synod the Celtic party, led by Colman, was worsted in the argument about the dating of Easter, and King Oswiu of Northumbria adopted the Roman system. From this time onward, England benefited increasingly from closer relations with Christian Europe. Monastic and regal pilgrims to Rome deepened the devotion to St. Peter and persuaded Pope Vitalian in 668 to send a further missionary effort to England. St. Benedict Biscop, an indefatigable pilgrim and founder of the monastery of St. Peter at Wearmouth, accompanied Theodore of Tarsus back to Canterbury, where he revived the traditions established by Augustine. Subsequently, Roman building styles, chant, vestments, icons, and liturgical books enhanced local Christian traditions in England. They contributed to the flourishing Anglo-Saxon culture documented in the writings of the Venerable Bede, a monk of Wearmouth, whose intellectual curiosity and scholarly achievements were exceptional. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People inspired later generations of scholars, including Alcuin, and made York a centre of learning.
Throughout the 7th century, increasing Roman influence north of the Alps was counterbalanced by an ever more precarious military situation in the city of St. Peter. The Lombards pressed southward, determined to capture Rome, while the protection promised by the exarch of Ravenna proved singularly ineffective. In addition, Pope Honorius I was drawn into the Eastern debate over the wills and energies of Christ that provoked a schism between Rome and Constantinople. From the middle of the century, however, a series of able popes, elected largely from Greek-speaking communities, provided skillful diplomatic leadership.
Under Agatho (678–681), Emperor Constantine IV expressed the desire to end the schism by an ecumenical council, and the pope made careful preparations for the Western churches to be properly represented. He obtained the support of ecclesiastical leaders from England, Spain, and probably other regions for the condemnation of monotheletism (the theory of Christ's one will) before dispatching an impressive team to the East. At the sixth ecumenical council, in Constantinople (680–681), these Western representatives were accorded seating precedence and signed the acts first. The resumption of ecclesiastical unity did not greatly increase communication between East and West, but it enhanced Roman claims to represent the Latin-speaking churches of the West within the much larger medieval Christian world.
This sense of Christian identity was particularly important because Europe was about to be challenged by a new monotheistic religion, armed with ferocious military power, in the form of the Muslim faith. The rise of Islam is much debated. Because the sources that describe its origins date from centuries later, it is especially difficult to account for the rapidity of Islamic conquest. However, during the 630s and 640s, the followers of the Prophet Muhammad advanced from Arabia, captured large areas of the Eastern Roman Empire, and destroyed the ancient empire of Persia. By 680 the Arabs had mastered naval skills, occupied Cyprus and Rhodes, and besieged Constantinople. Their impact in the East was soon to be repeated in the West, as they marched across North Africa, capturing Carthage (698) and crossing over into Spain (711).
At the turn of the 7th/8th century, therefore, Europe was faced by a completely novel invader from the south, while its internal conflicts were by no means resolved. The Visigothic kingdom collapsed without a struggle, and only in the northwestern corner of Galicia did an independent church survive. Under Islamic toleration, however, the Mozarabic Christians and Jews continued to develop their own faiths. Some of the Visigothic achievement was sustained to inspire later generations.
Given the speed with which Islam had overrun vast imperial territories in the East, it is quite surprising that the Arabs did not succeed in occupying more of Europe. The fact that they were checked at the natural frontier of the Pyrenees is largely due to an untypical cooperation between rulers in Aquitaine and Austrasia. Under Charles, the illegitimate son of Pippin II, mayor of the palace, a united force defeated the Arabs at a battle traditionally dated to 732 and located at Poitiers. (In fact, it probably occurred near Tours in 733.) This victory endowed Charles with his nickname, Martel (“the Hammer”).
Although, like his father and grandfather, he held the title of mayor of the palace, Charles was king of Austrasia in all but name, and, after the death of the Merovingian ruler Theodoric (Theuderic) IV in 737, he simply took over. For many years he had protected Anglo-Saxon monks, such as Boniface, who had devoted their energies to converting the pagan Saxons in the East. This had brought him to the notice of Pope Gregory III (731–741), who also supported the missionaries. In 739 Gregory wrote asking Charles as subregulus (under-king) to come and defend Rome against the Lombards. Although the appeal was not successful, Charles did return the papal embassy. In contrast, the Eastern emperor, Leo III (715–741) not only refused to fight the Lombards but also supported the heretical practice of iconoclasm (destruction of religious images) and removed ecclesiastical property in southern Italy to Constantinopolitan control. From 731 to 786 this provoked another schism between East and West.
Charles Martel divided his territories between his two sons, Carloman and Pippin, but they agreed to restore King Childeric III, who was brought out of a monastery. When Carloman retired from the world to become a monk at Monte Cassino in 747, his brother Pippin assumed full power. Under these new circumstances, the Austrasian mayor inquired of Pope St. Zacharias (741–752) if it was right for the man who had no power to govern the kingdom to be called king. With papal approval, Childeric and his son were sent into a monastic exile. Pippin was elected by the nobles, anointed by the bishops, and enthroned as King Pippin III in 751. The Carolingians (so called from Carolus, or Charles) had finally replaced the Merovingians.
Pippin was almost immediately called upon by Rome, for in the same year Ravenna fell definitively to the Lombard king, Aistulf, marking the end of the Byzantine exarchate. Pope Stephen II (752–757) thought that only drastic action could save the city, and he set off to cross the Alps—the first time a bishop of Rome had journeyed to northern Europe—to make a personal appeal to Pippin. At the royal palace of Ponthion, an alliance was sealed in 754. This final resolution of the early medieval papacy's problem of secular protection was tested in Pippin's Italian campaigns of 755 and 756. Carolingian military forces defeated Aistulf and freed Rome of Lombard pressure for the first time in centuries.
The alliance was further deepened by a spiritual bond of compaternitas (co-paternity) that made bishops of Rome godfathers of royal Carolingian infants. Franco-papal friendship thus became the most significant alliance in the West and influenced later political developments. Enhanced by his role as protector of the bishop of Rome, Pippin proceeded to support reform of Frankish religious institutions under the guidance of Chrodegang, bishop of Metz. He also revised the Lex Salica in 763–764, adding a prologue that reflects pride in the Franks, a most Christian people. At his death in 768, however, his two sons, Charles and Carloman, inherited rather unequal shares in the kingdom.
Charles, later identified as Charlemagne (“Charles the Great”), took advantage of his brother's death in 771 to unite the Carolingian territories, to which he added many conquests, notably Saxony, Aquitaine, and Septimania. He again campaigned on behalf of Rome and secured the return of territories in central Italy to the see of St. Peter. During his long reign, the core of western Europe for the first time had one ruler, a fact that recalled the universal rule claimed by ancient emperors. Many other factors—including his concern for administration, justice, education, founding of a capital city at Aachen, and patronage of the arts—led contemporaries to compare him with Roman rulers. He also was identified by Alcuin as “the father of Europe,” a title that brought the term Europe into common use. So the action of Pope Leo III in crowning Charles as Holy Roman emperor was quite apposite, if apparently unwelcome to the king.
The creation of an emperor in the West, however, raised problems in the East, where Empress Irene (797–802) had restored the veneration of icons and ruled in place of her son, Constantine VI. At Constantinople, emperors considered themselves the sole legitimate heirs of ancient Rome. Charles' imperial title was to prove a stumbling block in all subsequent East-West relations, but the papal coronation created a lasting ideal in the West, pursued by rulers for centuries.
At the beginning of the 9th century, western Europe appeared strong. Politically united under Charlemagne, spiritually directed by the bishop of Rome, with a flourishing and varied monastic culture stretching from Scotland to Sicily, the intellectuals of the Carolingian Renaissance manifested vitality and confidence. These strengths were essential for Europe to combat the Scandinavian Vikings, the eastern Bulgars, and Arab pirates, whose devastating raids would set back European development for many years. Yet the Vikings would be driven off, the Bulgars would eventually be converted and absorbed by Byzantium like so many other invaders, while Arab control of the Mediterranean would prove limited. In this process the long reign of Charlemagne proved crucial, for it permitted the growth of medieval European identity and culture. And this in turn fostered the development of feudal ties and economic development that characterize the later Middle Ages.
For most of the medieval period in most of Europe, the structure of society was determined by the difficulties of providing an adequate and continuous supply of food and raw materials. The proportion of grain reaped to seed sown was generally low; acute difficulties of transport made agricultural specialization hazardous and prices local and unstable. Hence, particularly between the 8th and 11th centuries, the proportion of the population freed of all agricultural tasks was low, and the materials of luxury or warfare were rare and highly prized.
The aristocracy that could be supported by such a society was both in form and origin a blend of Roman and Germanic elements. Late Roman society was marked by the existence of an aristocracy of wealthy landowners whose estates were worked by slaves either maintained in the household or housed on small plots about the great house. Other dependents, of rather higher status, might be freedmen or formerly independent cultivators, such as the coloni, whom war or financial distress had brought under the landowner's protection. Well before the formal end of the empire in the West, such landowners had been accustomed to deal out a usurped justice even over their free clients and had maintained armies of bucellarii (bodyguards) in their own defense, though rarely placing a high value on military accomplishments. With difficulty they retained their contacts with the towns and with the traditional urban education of their class.
Earlier Roman government had depended upon these towns, which were almost universally in decline by the 5th century. Vandal and, later, Muslim piracy disrupted the vital sea routes to Africa and the East; on land the impotence of local government made communications dangerous; and ever-heavier taxation crippled trade. Long-range commerce and the more local urban industries declined, until even wheel-turned pottery became scarce or vanished. The retreat toward economic self-sufficiency and a barter economy was reflected in the near collapse of Western coinage. Over this society, rapidly retreating into a pre-Roman localism, there presided, with ever-feebler effect, an emperor or emperors who attained office at the head of an army and according to no settled principle of succession. Once in power, the emperor exercised an absolute authority over the army, the courts, and the administration, limited only by prudence and the likelihood of mutiny or assassination. Emperors were hailed as divine before the conversion of Constantine early in the 4th century; thereafter, even a Christian emperor who enforced the precepts of the church readily took on a quasi-priestly character.
The Germanic invaders who settled in or along the frontiers of this empire lived very differently. Not all seem to have had kings, at least permanently, but the majority, whether as allies or invaders, entered the empire as warrior bands led by chiefs who depended for power on their continued capacity to win battles and to retain followers with gifts of present wealth and hope of more. Kings were ring givers, holders of great feasts, lords of men. Yet their authority rested on other grounds too—their descent from the gods and a belief sometimes current that divine favour was assured the people through the royal lineage. Some of the pagan kings (such as the Ynglings of Sweden) acted as priests, and a king's subjects usually followed him to the font for baptism as they followed him to war. Very special measures, including the earliest recorded Frankish consecration by a bishop, were required to legitimize the succession of a king from outside the ruling dynasty.
The politically active element in the people was represented by the warriors—the freemen—who formed the army; when this was gathered, it represented the people for war or peace, and it was the army that acclaimed each new king by raising him upon their shields or enthroning him upon some sacred stone. Among these freemen there was a group of special importance and standing, set apart by their birth and their lord's favour—the comitatus, or gasindi, already known to the Roman historian Tacitus in the 1st century AD. For them, loyalty to their lord was the supreme virtue, celebrated in epic verse from Beowulf on. From their ranks were drawn the barbarian officers of post-Roman and Germanic society, though the highest such posts seem to have been monopolized by a restricted number of noble kin groups, distinguished by their descent and deeds rather than by any set title to property.
The last emperor of the West in direct succession to Augustus was Romulus Augustulus, a shadowy figure deposed in 476. On Christmas Day, 800, a new empire began with the coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III in Rome. Even geographically, this empire was very unlike that of antiquity. The first empire had grown out from the city of Rome to embrace the entire Mediterranean coastline, with varying amounts of the hinterland. In the realm of Charlemagne, Rome was a frontier city, at the southern limit of an empire that extended from the Atlantic to the Elbe and from the border with the Danes into central Italy. The centre of Charlemagne's empire lay at his palace at Aachen (outside the limits of the old empire) rather than in Rome. Of his successors, only Otto III (983–1002) spent any length of time in Rome. Charlemagne was incomparably the most powerful Christian king of the West, but even he enjoyed no formal authority over other kings, before or after 800. Although the title remained in his family (the Carolingians), the lands were often divided up among its members.
The imperial coronation of Otto I, king of the East Franks, in 962 marked a further change. Otto enjoyed political power little less than that of Charlemagne but had no claim to direct authority among the West Franks. From his reign onward, the imperial title became the prerogative of the kings of Germany, though one they could only enjoy once crowned by the pope.
The content of the imperial office was always confused and uncertain. It could be considered a recognition of facts—the attribution of a supreme title to the most powerful of the Latin kings—and many saw Charlemagne or Otto I in this light; but none of their successors enjoyed the same authority as did these founders of empire. The more general view, dominant by the end of the 10th century, was that the empire was specifically Roman, but in several possible senses. Because it was Pope Leo III who had recognized Charlemagne as the first emperor in the West in 300 years and because Leo's successors had the undoubted right to consecrate later emperors at Rome, it could be claimed that the empire was an office within the Christian community, or ecclesia. The chief duty of the emperor would then be the protection of the church and the enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline. When Henry III summoned the synod of Sutri of 1046, which ratified the withdrawal of three rival popes, he fulfilled one interpretation of this role; when Pope Gregory VII declared Henry IV deprived of his kingship in Italy and Germany for offenses against the church in 1076, he was employing another. After the Investiture Controversy between the papacy and the Salian kings of Germany, and its resolution at the Concordat of Worms in 1122, the extent of imperial claims to authority over the church was considerably reduced, at least in theory.
However, Rome had been the city of the Caesars as well as of St. Peter, and some claimed that the emperors were the heirs of Augustus and the pagan emperors as well as of Charlemagne, with a universal authority that owed nothing to the church. This view was asserted notably by the apologists of Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–90), supporting their claims upon the revived study of the Roman civil law; modified by the doctrines of Aristotle, it survived in the writings of Dante and among the courtiers of the emperor Henry VII (1308–13).
Without effective control in Rome, any version of these views lacked substance. From the beginning of the 9th to the end of the 12th century, the emperors enjoyed substantial rights, and even larger claims, in Lombardy, Tuscany, and central Italy. Imperial control in Lombardy, particularly over the church, was often effective until the Investiture Controversy, and by no means negligible after that. The defeat of Frederick Barbarossa by a league of Lombard towns at Legnano in 1176, the papacy's determination to establish an independent state in central Italy under Innocent III and his successors, and the consequent wars with Frederick II (1220–50) saw the imperial rights in Italy dwindle toward insignificance. After the death of Frederick II, who had united the crowns of Germany, Italy, and Sicily in his own person, prolonged succession disputes on both sides of the Alps ruined the foundations of central authority in northern Italy and Germany. By the time of the last imperial coronation in Rome, that of Frederick III in 1452, the universal and ecclesiastical pretensions enshrined in the ceremony had long been a fiction. Frederick was to spend the bulk of his reign (1440–93) trying to maintain a foothold even in his own duchy of Austria. For much of the period between 800 and 1500, the empire is best considered as only the most prestigious, and often not even the strongest, among the kingdoms of the Latin West.
The immediate successors of the old empire were a number of unstable kingdoms. Their origins lay in the widespread movement of peoples from Asia westward, which had threatened the empire from the 3rd century. In the course of the 5th century, the defenses of the empire collapsed. In 410 an army of Visigoths, first discernible on the northern shores of the Black Sea, sacked Rome itself under their leader Alaric. In the course of the next century, they moved north and then west to establish a Visigothic kingdom on either side of the Pyrenees. Though under attack from the Franks, they maintained themselves in Spain until the Muslim invasion of 711. The Vandals under Gaiseric invaded North Africa in 429 and established a short-lived kingdom there until it was destroyed by Belisarius, the general of the eastern emperor Justinian, in 533. The Burgundian kingdom on the Rhône and the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy, founded by Theodoric, lasted little longer. The armies that created these kingdoms were relatively small and usually of mixed composition; there was no very sharp break in the life of the provinces they settled. There were serious religious difficulties with the Roman population, since the new rulers were all formally followers of the Arian heresy. Roman Catholics were liable to occasional persecution and much discrimination, at least until the conversion of the Visigothic king Recared in 589. Nevertheless, an outstanding means for the transmission of the learning of antiquity was to be found in the writings of Cassiodorus and Boethius in Ostrogothic Italy and Isidore of Sevilla under the Visigoths.
The more enduring kingdoms were established by the Franks on either side of the lower Rhine; by smaller groups of settlers, imperfectly defined as Saxons and Angles, in Britain; and by the Lombards in northern Italy.
The Lombard kingdom, established by degrees at the end of the 6th century over modern Lombardy with semi-independent duchies at Spoleto and Benevento farther south, survived as a loose-knit entity until the defeat of its last king, Desiderius, by Charlemagne in 774. The kingdom of Lombardy, with its capital at Pavia, retained much of its distinctive character, but as a part of the Frankish empire.
The Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms, notably in Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, and Kent, were established by the beginning of the 7th century, and hegemony was disputed between them until the 9th century invasions of the Danes destroyed all but Wessex, which held out under King Alfred (871–899). Under his successors, a united kingdom of the English was created by the reconquest of the lands taken by the Danes, a process completed under King Eadred in 954.
By far the most important of the successor kingdoms, however, was that of the Franks. Unlike the other Germanic peoples, the Franks expanded from their earlier territory without abandoning it and had only the briefest of flirtations with Arian heresy. North of the Loire they were a numerous people, and throughout their realm assimilation with the earlier Gallo-Roman population seems to have been relatively easy and complete.
The empire of Charlemagne broke up soon after his death. Its great extent left it vulnerable to a new wave of attacks from the Vikings of the north and the Magyars from the east. Even so, it was to exercise incalculable influence on the later history of Europe. The later shape of the political map was determined partly by the pattern of the disintegration of the empire and partly by the creation of new kingdoms along its periphery.
In the 10th century, the eastern and western halves of the empire parted decisively. In the east Louis IV, the last Carolingian king, died in 911. The Saxon kings from Henry I (919–936) onward reestablished royal authority among the East Franks, attached the “middle kingdom” of Lotharingia (Lorraine) to their crown, beat off the last great assault of the Magyars at the Battle of the Lechfeld in 955, extended their lands east of the Elbe, and after 951 claimed the crown of Lombardy as well. In the west the Carolingian line lingered on until the death of Louis V in 987. He was succeeded by the greatest of his subjects, Hugh Capet, whose descendants in the direct line ruled France until 1328.
Over succeeding centuries, the boundaries of Christian Europe expanded, by both conquest and assimilation. The reconquest of Muslim Spain, beginning in the mid-11th century and completed with the capture of Granada in 1492, saw the rise of the kingdoms of Navarre, Leon, Castile, Aragon, and Portugal. To the north, the three distinct kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had acquired a measure of internal unity and external independence by the mid-11th century, when the rulers of all three were formally Christian. To the east, Poland (by 1076), Hungary (999), and Bohemia (1085) were recognized as independent kingdoms by the emperors and the church (though Bohemia remained a fief of the empire). In southern Italy, Norman adventurers carved out new lordships at the expense of the Muslims of Sicily and the Lombard and Byzantine rulers of Apulia and Calabria; united under Duke Roger II, these were formally acknowledged as a kingdom by 1139. The Crusades created a series of similar, though short-lived, kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean and a more enduring lordship in the lands of the Teutonic Knights along the shores of the Baltic.
The elements from which these kingdoms were created varied widely, but some general properties can be discerned. Most medieval kings were raised to office by a combination of ritual acts that revealed the origins of their power. Until the principle of primogeniture became dominant in the late 12th century, the king would first be “chosen” in an assembly from among the kin of the last ruler, whose designation would carry great weight in cases of doubt; this choice was often not complete until the new king had traveled through his kingdom in what has been called a continuous election. After the consecration of Pippin III the Short, it became increasingly common for the king to be consecrated with a liturgy carefully modeled upon the Old Testament precedents of Saul and Solomon and to be invested with such insignia as crown, sword, helmet, or sceptre. Before or after this ceremony, the leading men of the kingdom came to declare their allegiance, often performing symbolic acts of domestic service at the coronation feast. In these ceremonies, the king secured both rights and duties. As the anointed of the Lord, he had a special claim on the obedience of the church and a measure of physical security; the murder of King Canute II of Denmark in 1086 was widely reckoned a martyrdom, and the violent deaths of kings continued to be regarded as striking at the fabric of the divine and human order. This process, whereby the church sharply distinguished the king from the chieftain, in part explains an important transition of the 9th and 10th centuries. Thenceforward, the creation of new kingdoms, common among the descendants of Clovis or Charlemagne, ceased; only a formal act of the papacy under rare conditions was thought capable of legitimizing such later kingdoms as Hungary (1000), Sicily (1139), or Portugal (1143).
The church, which played so large a part in creating such a king, was active in prescribing duties; the coronation oaths and prayers insisted upon his obligation to protect the church, the defenseless, and the poor, to make war upon the heathen in the service of Christ, and to ensure that justice was done. It was chiefly in church councils that the king's duty to the whole people was emphasized against his relations with his warriors.
Even where, as with the Capetian dynasty between 996 and 1316, son succeeded father in unbroken descent, it was conventional to refer to the king as chosen by his people, and this became an active principle where there was no obvious claimant, as at the end of the Saxon or Hohenstaufen dynasties in Germany or in such exceptional cases as the founding of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099. Among the larger kingdoms of the 13th century, only Germany, beset by frequent changes of dynasty and by the papacy's hostility to a hereditary empire, was still in practice an electoral state. Charles IV's Golden Bull of 1356 formally defined the procedures of election that remained in force in the empire until 1806, although after 1437 the throne was monopolized by the family of Habsburg. In Denmark, Sweden, and Poland the kingship was also formally and often practically elective, though hereditary right became absolute in France, England, and Spain.
If the imperial authority became progressively more confined, that of the popes made great advances, partly at the empire's expense. The foundation of papal authority lay, first, in the claim to inherit all the powers conveyed to St. Peter by Christ and, second, in the special position of the bishop of Rome. Until the 8th century, papal preeminence was complicated by the existence of jealous patriarchates of the East, not least the new Rome at Constantinople, whose emperor remained the nominal and sometimes the effective overlord of the city of Rome. By 700, however, most of the other patriarchs were subject to Muslim rulers, and Byzantine military weakness had forced such popes as Gregory I to take on most civil responsibility for the city of Rome. Dogmatic disputes in the Byzantine Empire over the veneration of icons (725–843) hastened a process of estrangement between the Greek Eastern and Latin Western churches that was to deepen eventually into near permanent schism. Rome then was left in solitary eminence in the West. Missionaries from Anglo-Saxon England, which had been converted by Roman agents, came to exercise a dominant influence upon the Frankish kings of the early 8th century; under Pippin III the Short, Charlemagne, and the latter's son Louis I the Pious, strenuous efforts were made to enforce a single liturgy, canon law, and monastic observance, the authenticity of which was guaranteed by its use at Rome.
Until the 11th century, this confirming and legitimizing of action begun elsewhere was the predominant if not exclusive role of a papacy largely under the control of a series of such local Roman noble houses as the Crescentii and counts of Tusculum. The papacy favoured rather than led movements of active reform in the monastic and secular church. With the accession of Gregory VII, however, the papacy assumed the leadership of a movement that saw the inertia of the bishops and archbishops as the chief obstacle to ecclesiastical reform and as a consequence of excessive lay influence on their appointment and conduct. Accordingly, Gregory and his successors aimed at reducing the authority of the secular princes over the church (so provoking the long and bitter Investiture Controversy with the emperors Henry IV and Henry V) and at replacing secular authority with an ecclesiastical government based upon the written canon law and directed from Rome. By the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216), substantial successes had been achieved. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, attended by more than 400 bishops and 800 abbots from the whole of the Latin obedience and by representatives of all the greater princes, disposed of secular and ecclesiastical business on the widest scale.
The relation of papal primacy to the powers of kings and emperors was full of ambiguities. When there was a formidable imperial presence in Italy, the popes might claim a general responsibility for the souls of the emperor and his subjects that would entitle them to intervene widely in the affairs of the empire or even the right to direct every aspect of temporal life toward salvation. More widely, they claimed a special authority over those temporal princes whose lands lay within the papal sphere of temporal lordship (as with Sicily, recognized as a papal fief in 1139) or who had accepted papal overlordship in more than spiritual affairs (as with Portugal in 1143 or England under John in 1213).
The difficulties that beset a full realization of the papal vision of a Christian and priestly monarchy were both internal and external. Internally, the process of centralization of authority made for slow and expensive decisions and was thought to demand a political independence in Italy that, in turn, involved long and costly wars with the Hohenstaufen and their successors north and south of the Papal States. Both centralization and the need to levy taxes on the church at large aroused the distrust and resentment of the local hierarchy, which could be exploited by kings (such as Philip IV of France in his contest with Boniface VIII) who were determined to secure their own right to tax their clergy and to submit them to the royal law.
The rise of national consciousness that accompanied this resistance, as well as the exile of the popes at Avignon after 1309, made the pope's universal role as arbitrator in secular or ecclesiastical affairs harder to sustain. The double election of 1378 created a schism and weakened the position of the papacy. Because neither contestant would give way, the schism could be ended only by an external agency—a general council of the church held at Constance in the presence of the emperor Sigismund between 1414 and 1418. The energies of the abler reformers of the next 30 years or so were largely diverted to disputing the rival claims to authority of a monarchical papacy and a general council. With the failure of the most ambitious of these at Basel (1431–39), the papacy emerged from the struggle again in Rome and again enjoying the plenitude of power; but the chief beneficiaries of the struggle were the secular princes, who had secured valuable concessions of control over their clergy as the price of their support.
By 1100 a greater aristocracy had evolved over almost all the Latin West, marked by a combination of three elements. First, its members were normally the lords of a number of men bound to them by an oath of fealty and an act of homage, while they were themselves so bound to a king, a prelate, or the pope; the obligations such bonds involved were various, but the performance of military service was the most widespread and characteristic. Second, this aristocracy commonly exercised a large measure of judicial, financial, and administrative authority over its dependents. Third, this was a landowning aristocracy that rewarded its dependents with grants of lands (fiefs), much as its own wealth had been enhanced by grants from kings, and maintained large households from the proceeds of the estates retained in the lord's own hand—the domain.
To this combination, or some elements of it, the term feudalism is commonly though inconsistently applied; Marxists sometimes further apply it to a particular form of agricultural exploitation, the manorial system. But none of these elements necessarily supposes the others: in England, it could be said that all land was received from the king, yet public authority remained unusually concentrated in his hands; in Germany, the greatest princes came to hold rights of jurisdiction from the emperor rather than land, and their reciprocal duties were very slight; in southern France and Italy, tenure for homage and service was rarer, but political authority was exceptionally fragmented.
Within the ranks of the greater aristocracy, certain distinctions came to exist. Originally, there seem to have been a limited number of very great families in Germanic society, defined by birth and sometimes uniquely described as free, but this division slowly gave way to others whose titles derived from “public” functions rather than birth alone. The term duke was widely applied to the lords of certain areas, which were incorporated in the Frankish empire without wholly losing their identity—e.g., Bavaria, Burgundy, Brittany, Aquitaine, Saxony—and also to the lesser lords of the loosely constructed kingdom of the Lombards; the Scandinavian jarls or Anglo-Saxon earls after the reign of Canute (d. 1035) were similar. In origin the word duke (from Latin dux) meant military commander, and it was on the basis of military need that the majority of 10th-century duchies emerged; for similar reasons, there appeared the margraves of Italy and Germany, lords of borderland with a wider military authority. In Germany, duchies multiplied in the 12th century, as in the creation of Austria in 1156, when the title implied membership of the highest rank in the social and tenurial scale; in 13th-century France and 14th-century England, the term was revived for great lordships (appanages) created for the cadets of the royal family.
The most widespread of such titles originally denoting public office and only later social rank or landed wealth was the Latin comes (German Graf, Anglo-Saxon ealdorman), or “count.” Comes originally meant companion or member of the king's household of specially trained warriors; the appointment of members of the Frankish king's inner circle to the earlier administrative districts of gau or pagus caused the word to be applied to an officer of Carolingian government, then to a hereditary holder of office and rights, and finally to the head of a noble landed family. The terms duke, marquis, and count were themselves no necessary guide to relative wealth or prestige, because some duchies were almost empty titles while the powerful lords of Flanders or Champagne were only counts. The institution of the Reichsfürstenstand, the class of imperial princes in late 12th-century Germany, was conceived as defining the highest rank of lay and church princes standing immediately about the throne. While the greater aristocracy of France of the 15th century enjoyed its rights only under the supervision of the Valois kings, the German class was buttressed with important privileges that gave it enduring importance and near sovereign powers.
The origins of this greater aristocracy and its privileges were diverse. Some Roman senatorial families survived or absorbed their invaders; some descendants of independent chieftains of war bands that did not secure lasting kingdoms entered the Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, or Scandinavian nobility; the descendants of some specially favoured royal companions were able to hold onto the gains of their ancestors. Birth was from the outset probably an essential element of both exalted rank and access to royal favour, but important modifications to this took place between the 9th and the 12th centuries; slowly, the emphasis upon patrilineal descent and primogeniture became ever stronger, and the extended kin group gave way to the dynasty. The passing of public offices into hereditary possession, the growing importance of military considerations, and a concentration of wealth and influence upon a limited number of indivisible castles all contributed to this effect. Whereas the great Carolingian families of the 9th century derived their names from an ancestor, their successors named themselves after the area of their rule or their principal stronghold.
Entry into this later aristocracy was possible by a variety of routes. Throughout this period, the enduring hazard of central authority was that those appointed to maintain its interest would succeed in converting this representation into a right. In Germany even the unfree class of ministeriales sometimes succeeded in establishing such claims to the imperial fiefs and castles entrusted to their care and thus forced their way into the aristocracy. In France and England in the later Middle Ages, royal servants were commonly enriched by the opportunity to deprive or buy out those outside the circle of royal favour. There, too, in the 14th century a certain number of great merchants in the service of the crown were able to enter the ranks of the nobility; in Italy, however, the incompatibility of merchant adventure with noble birth had broken down much earlier. In later medieval Europe the emergence of more professional armies (especially in Italy and France during the widespread disorders of the 14th century) provided opportunities for successful soldiers of modest birth to rise into the ranks of an aristocracy coloured by ideals of an elaborate knightly code.
It was of the essence of high social rank that the aristocrat should have a large following of men who were themselves of free birth. Every great man, like every king, was made great by his capacity to maintain a retinue and reward his followers. An estate was valuable less for its revenues in money and goods than for the men whose services could be secured from it. The noble retinue was held together by gifts of gold, horses, weapons, or hawks, while those who served their lord well might hope for a gift of land. The numbers of such followers were swollen by freemen who were driven by need to surrender their own land to the lord and to receive it back as a conditional grant; in return they received a protection modeled upon that extended to the lord's own blood kin. With increasing specialization of warfare, free birth tended to give way to the skills of cavalry warfare as the essential qualification for noble service; these knights (French chevaliers, German Ritter) might live as retainers in the lord's household or hold land from him—a knight's fee, or fief—coming only at an exceptional summons to his feasts, courts, or wars. Many enjoyed a large freedom in the government of their estates and came to form a lesser nobility, bearing arms, using their own seals, and living in more or less fortified manor houses. As the apparatus and conventions of knightly warfare became more elaborate and the influence of the courtly romances more pervasive, there was a marked convergence of the ethics of noble birth and knighthood. In the 14th century, the Flemish chronicler Jean Froissart saw nothing incongruous in referring to King Edward III of England as a noble knight.
The rise of the knight to this more exalted status was in part a function of the dissolution of the tight bonds of dependence his land tenure would once have imposed. This was a general phenomenon of the later Middle Ages, for the complexity of tenurial obligations made them increasingly inadequate either for defining status or for providing the lord with his honorable retinue. The later medieval principalities therefore owed their legal constitution to the powers of the lord in the exercise of his sovereign rights rather than to his personal claims on the services of his vassals; by a parallel development, the lord's household and following were commonly then paid for their services. Even at the lower levels of society, the same movement can be seen at work. In the 9th century, a great estate would normally have a proportion of household slave labour; by the 13th century, almost all the household servants would receive some wages, though food, lodging, and security still formed the bulk of their payment.
The greater aristocracy throughout Europe included a number of churchmen, for the sees of bishops and many monasteries had received wide grants of land, over which they often exercised more extensive rights than did their lay fellows, both as lords of tenants and as royal officers. Under Charlemagne and later princes, the state intervened to enforce universal acquiescence in the form of spiritual government over the whole body of the laity, and this could be burdensome or even oppressive. High office in the church remained almost wholly the prerogative of the aristocracy and later of the knightly classes. Between the 8th and the 15th century it has been calculated that not much more than one-third of the 2,000 bishops appointed to German bishoprics came from nonnoble families, and only five are known to have come from the dependent peasantry that formed the great bulk of the population. Certain monasteries and colleges of cathedral canons were explicitly reserved to those of the most carefully authenticated noble birth. Yet access to the highest church offices was in part dictated by other considerations; from the 11th century onward, royal or papal service and mastery of the disciplines of theology and canon law provided the means for men to rise on their ability alone. Suger—abbot of Saint-Denis, a monk of modest origins who became chief adviser to Louis VI of France and regent for Louis VII and died one of the most powerful men of Europe—and Thomas Wolsey—a butcher's son who rose to be cardinal and archbishop of York and chief minister to Henry VIII of England—illustrate the advancement that the church could provide, however rarely.
The original nucleus of church organization had lain in the bishoprics, groups of which, from the end of the 8th century at least, formed provinces normally presided over by an archbishop or metropolitan. The special interest of the church in political concord, which derived not merely from its dedication to charity but also from the vulnerability and wide extent of its property, made it for long the natural ally of kings and emperors; the anathemas of the bishops were regularly employed to reinforce the sword of the Lord's anointed. Being, if aristocratic, at least not hereditary magnates, the bishops were the allies upon whom the Saxon and Salian emperors of Germany and the early Capetian kings of France largely depended as a counterpoise to their greater secular subjects. The royal administration was staffed and directed by the clergy, and the church's endowments were used to reward them. In return the bishops secured great privileges; the archbishops on either side of the Rhine—at Reims, Sens, Mainz, Trier, or Cologne—were at once powerful landowners and lords exercising a wide measure of delegated royal authority, and these were only among the most visible examples of a movement in progress throughout Europe. A leading object of the Gregorian reform movement in the 11th and 12th centuries had been to distinguish between the bishop's absolute obedience to canon law and his conditional obligation to the prince. In practice, the bishops continued to depend on royal authority for defense against grasping lay neighbours, for the enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline (particularly in matters of heresy), and, in the later Middle Ages, for protection against the growing anticlericalism of some of the educated laity and even the financial demands of the papacy.
The original constitution of the diocese rested upon the bishop and a small group of clergy living with him at the church where he had his cathedra, or seat. Over the years, this pattern altered substantially. Subordinate centres grew up within the diocese, some large and early ones served by groups of resident clergy but the great majority caring for only a small parish and served by a single priest. In western Europe, at least, the network of parishes was largely complete by the mid-13th century. Recruitment to these was wide; some houses of canons and wealthy parishes provided revenues for men of high birth and influence, while others were served by men drawn from the peasant population, who might be little more than domestic servants of the landowner whose family had built the church. The widespread grant of parish churches to monasteries and religious communities (as many as one-third of the parishes of a diocese could be so granted) and the prevalence of absentee clergy, such as pluralists holding several benefices or scholars engaged in study at the universities, meant that many churches were served by substitutes—vicars, who enjoyed only a proportion of the revenues of their office, often a quite inadequate one. Besides these, most parishes also provided some employment for a floating population of clerks in minor orders. With a rapid decline in the creation of new parishes in western Europe after the 12th century, it was the endowment of chantries, the setting aside of money and buildings exclusively for the saying of mass for the soul of the founder, that provided the greater number of new, if modest, benefices, though these were usually associated with other parochial or charitable organizations.
The determined efforts made first by the early Carolingians and then by the reformers of the 12th and 13th centuries to provide an efficient system of supervision and control over the local pastoral work of the diocese ultimately produced an administrative hierarchy parallel to, though partly distinct from, the pastoral one. The rise of the bishop's formal jurisdiction saw the appearance of a host of legal and financial agents, ranging from the powerful archdeacon to the humble summoner, whose task was to enforce attendance at the church courts. The increasing centralization of church government at Rome in the 13th and 14th centuries required the appearance of other officers, proctors of bishops and abbots at Rome, collectors of papal taxes, and, later, such disreputable figures as the itinerant peddlers in papal indulgences and dubious relics—the pardoners.
By the mid-13th century there existed beside this hierarchy another one, the regular clergy, living under a formal and corporate rule more demanding than the minimum canonical requirements of the seculars. Between the 5th and the 11th century this sector had been overwhelmingly monastic, composed of autonomous houses ruled over by an abbot with near absolute powers and devoted to the maintenance of the regular liturgical cycle; in early times there had been a great variety of rules of life for monasteries, but from the 9th century one became preeminent—that of St. Benedict, which envisaged a life of corporate self-sufficiency as the norm. In the 11th and 12th centuries a number of variations on this rule appeared, designed to heighten the emphasis upon manual labour and corporate poverty (such as the Cistercians) or solitary contemplation (as with the Carthusians); in a more striking departure, some houses of canons under the flexible rule of St. Augustine were, it was hoped, to combine monastic rigour of life with active parochial work, while military orders founded in the course of the Crusades in the Holy Land and Spain and on Germany's eastern frontier combined the yet more disparate profession of war with monastic ideals. All these were property-owning corporations, as were the houses of nuns and canonesses that lived under similar conditions. Their presidents, especially the abbots of the more well-to-do Benedictine abbeys, were often wealthier than many bishops and were drawn from a similar social background. Only among the Cistercian lay brothers was entry into the monastic life readily open to men of humble origin. The original followers of St. Francis of Assisi were often drawn from a much wider variety of classes, but by the end of the 13th century both they and the followers of St. Dominic, originally intended to be educated preachers trained to combat heresy, had become orders of friars with a strong academic tradition, excluding all but the most talented of the very poor. These men renounced all property (even corporate), were especially engaged in the work of preaching (notably in the towns), and traveled constantly. By 1300 the multiplication of religious orders had virtually ended; many of the most influential devotional tracts of the later Middle Ages were written by or for recluses, for groups seeking to live the devotional life outside the confines of conventional orders (as with the Beguines), or even for a lay audience.
Beyond the regular and beneficed secular clergy was a large body of clerks, in minor orders or in none, who had the crowns of their heads shaved in the tonsure without proceeding further, thus securing some of the legal immunities of the clergy with few of their duties. The clerks of the royal or imperial chapels who formed embryo civil services represented an exceptional group of such men, but many more were to be found at the universities of the 12th and 13th centuries, and a still larger number were loosely attached to a parish church or joined a vagrant body of “hedge-priests” that canon law struggled for centuries to regulate or abolish.
An important test for determining membership in the clergy was literacy. But in the 13th century (and occasionally earlier) there appeared in Europe a body of educated laymen of a kind that had not been seen there since the collapse of Roman secular education; lawyers and administrators in the royal service might have an entirely secular career, and most merchants were necessarily literate. The 13th century produced two celebrated author-kings, the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II and James I of Aragon (though even in the 14th century Edward III of England could barely write a few painful letters).
Between 1300 and 1500 the proportion of educated laymen rose steadily; in part, the change was manifested in the growing importance of lay patronage in architecture, poetry, and the production of devotional manuscripts, the latter only the most striking example of a much more general and active participation of the laity in the devotional life. On the other hand, the secular agents of government were jealous of ecclesiastical claims to privilege and immunity. Anticlericalism in western Europe was as old as the Christian state, but the lawyers who staffed the sovereign governments of the 14th century had an alternative theory of the state to set against that of the church, and clerks such as Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, and John Wycliffe were providing a theoretical justification for lay intervention in the affairs of the church as far-reaching as the claims of Pope Innocent IV for papal authority in the secular world had been a century earlier. At the opening of the 14th century, the French chancery was directed by two lawyers, Pierre Flote and Guillaume de Nogaret, who launched a virulent and largely effective attack upon the universal claims for the papacy that had been forcefully restated by Pope Boniface VIII. Though even the revolutionary Hussite movement in Bohemia (1419–36) failed to subvert the authority of the church, the autonomy of ecclesiastical government was under pressure throughout Europe, largely because there now existed an educated laity able to perform the tasks hitherto reserved to a uniquely literate clergy.
The urban society of the Roman Empire in the West was breaking down long before the deposition of the last emperor in the late 5th century, and it continued to fade with few interruptions until the 10th century. The estimated population of Rome fell from more than 1,000,000 in the 1st century AD to 40,000 in the 7th; nevertheless, it long remained the largest city of the Christian West, although tiny compared to the greater Muslim cities or Constantinople. Many Roman towns continued to be occupied, often because they remained, or became, the seats of bishoprics or abbeys and so centres at least of consumption or because their walls offered some shelter from a long series of invaders. Commercial activity continued in those ports of Italy still in touch with Byzantium and perhaps on a modest scale in some Lombard towns. It even increased in such northern ports as Duurstede in the Rhine delta, the Viking entrepôt at Hedeby (in Schleswig), and the Russian cities trading through the Black Sea. By the end of the 11th century, the recovery of urban life was more general. Merchants trading over long distances began to appear as an urban aristocracy, wealthy men anxious to secure a larger measure of control in the government of their towns. In Venice this development was already clearly visible, and the fleets and trade of this port stimulated a revival of town life throughout northern Italy. The origins of these early capitalists are much disputed: some may well have been fortunate peddlers, but more can be shown to have been members of the lesser aristocracy, or tenants or officers of great churches, with capital to invest in goods and transport. In Italy the participation of the landed aristocracy in the life and trade of the towns was shown by the presence of clusters of their tall stone towers within the city walls rather than on outlying hill tops.
Increasing political stability on land and contact with the Levant by sea saw the rapid increase of such trading communities in size and influence. The Italian cities of Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, and Siena rose to challenge the earlier dominance of Venice and Milan. In Germany the Rhineland towns were already a political force to be reckoned with in the civil wars at the beginning of the 12th century, but they came to be overshadowed by the great prosperity and activity of the Baltic towns of the Hanseatic League, such as Lübeck, Hamburg, and later Danzig, and subsequently by the prosperity of such South German towns as Augsburg and Nürnberg. In Flanders, textile manufacture, based in part on wool imported from Spain and Britain, produced from the 12th century a precocious industrial community with a large unstable proletariat concentrated in such towns as Ypres, Ghent, Bruges, and Arras; among the northern cities, only these could compete in influence with the greater Italian centres such as the manufacturing town of Florence (with a population of perhaps as high as 200,000 in the 13th century, largely supported by its textile industry) or the equally large Milan, celebrated for its metalwork and, most notably, its armories. Paris, with a population estimated at 80,000 by the end of the 12th century, was already acquiring most of the qualities of a capital city as the centre of the fast-growing Capetian royal government and the home of the greatest of European universities.
By the 13th century, the Italian towns commonly contained a group of aristocrats by birth or by wealth long possessed whose political dominance was challenged by the more substantial of the merchants. Below these were the retailers and masters of the smaller crafts and then the wage labourers, apprentices, and beggars, who were normally without a political voice but whose grievances sometimes broke out in violence and even bloodshed. The urban nobility of Italy was without true parallels north of the Alps, and it was the greater merchants, or merchant adventurers of the later phrase, who formed the directing elite in most towns. Although even at the end of the medieval period the towns' share in the wealth and population of Europe was still very limited (over most of the Continent perhaps not above one-tenth of the total), their influence was much greater. Access to the towns had long been an important agent in social change but became more so with the marked rise in the population of Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries. After the crisis associated with the Black Death, the continuing or growing prosperity of some 15th-century towns was in marked contrast to the widespread decline of agricultural production and profit. Politically, the merchant interests of the towns were of the first importance, for it was only they who could provide the large sums of ready cash with which the kings of the later 15th century established royal authority over the magnates. To the degree that the king could continue to enjoy the taxes of the burgesses of his towns, he could maintain or extend his authority; without them he was reduced to competing with his own magnates on little better than equal terms.
The countryside during the Roman period was chiefly cultivated either by the slaves of the great villa estates or by more or less free cultivators, sometimes bound by the government to remain on their land in order to maintain a taxpaying population but otherwise not labouring under grave personal disabilities before the law. In the Germanic societies of the invasion period, a threefold division of the agricultural population was common—the people par excellence (the karl, ceorl, or bôndhi), free peasants cultivating their own land, bearing arms, and so participating in the public assemblies of gau or hundred; a more obscure group often described as freedmen (aldiones for the Lombards and Bavarians; Leti among the Germans, Franks, Frisians, and also perhaps in Kent), possibly freed slaves, possibly the survivors of an earlier conquered population who enjoyed limited rights but did not usually play an active part in the courts; and the thralls, slaves either captured in war, condemned to their state by the law, or reduced to it by penury. Such bondsmen might sometimes have their own huts, plots of land, and houses and therefore enjoy a minimal independence.
These forms tended to merge so that over much of western Europe by AD 1000 the characteristic villager (villein) held a substantial plot in the village fields but equally was expected to perform such onerous services on a lord's domain as plowing, reaping, and carting and was subject to his lord's will in much the same fashion as the earlier landless slave. In addition, the village community would usually contain other men with smaller plots of land (cottagers), whose rents in labour and goods were correspondingly lighter, and also a small number of slaves, in the old sense of the word. All these unfree cultivators could be described as serfs, however diverse their economic conditions. In parts of Europe, notably in Scandinavia and northern Germany and in southern France, the free peasantry still formed an important element in the population, and by the 14th century their ranks were swollen by numbers of villeins whom changing economic conditions had allowed to commute their servile obligations for fixed rents in money. The settlers who had been persuaded to take up holdings in the planned land clearances of the 12th and 13th centuries by offers of considerable freedom of tenure had reached the same goal by different means. At the other end of the social scale, the landless wage labourer was now much more common.
The timing of this process, whereby many of the earlier free peasants were first assimilated to the legal if not the economic conditions of Roman slaves and then increasingly recovered their personal liberty to become rent-paying tenants, was extremely uneven. The cycle was complete for much of Italy by 1200 and for most of France and England by 1400, but the free peasantry of Scandinavia, parts of eastern Europe, and Castile was only beginning to feel the pressure of a serf-owning class of landlords in the 14th and 15th centuries, at a time when it was fast becoming obsolete elsewhere.
A society that was at best only just above subsistence level maintained a large body of vagrants. Economic disasters such as plague or famine forced a desperate population to attack the crops of more fortunate neighbours; in the late 12th century, freelance mercenaries roamed Europe in search of employers and booty, while the 14th and 15th centuries saw more organized (and so more formidable) free companies of professional troops whose favoured fields of operation were France and Italy, where their captains traded their services like sovereign princes. All large towns either generated or attracted their share of beggars and petty thieves; in François Villon, 15th-century Paris produced a universal poet to express the pleasures and much more frequent miseries of this vagrant life. Town and country alike lacked any effective police force, and therefore, although the majority of known or suspected criminals could be dispossessed of land and property, even murderers were rarely apprehended. At times in 13th-century England only one in 100 murderers was ever brought to trial and convicted. The rest fled, many apparently into the forest to live like beasts or find an organized band of outlaws, idealized tales of which became widely current in the later Middle Ages in the legends of Robin Hood. The local community protected itself as best it could against such bands, but the assistance of a local knight at the head of his retainers could rarely be distinguished from the nuisance it was supposed to abate. The fate of these outlaws was bound up with that of the forests, and both were in decline by 1500. With the first signs of a recovery of population, however, vagrancy and unemployment were probably increasing.
A society directed by warriors and celibate clergy was not one in which women would exercise extended rights very often. After about 1100, patrilineal descent was almost exclusively the test of nobility, while matrilineal descent was often the test of serfdom. The property rights of women, though protected by canon and secular law, were confined; it was a cherished freedom for widows to be allowed to refuse a second match proposed by lord or kin. Practice, however, did not altogether conform to this appearance. In barbarian society in the period after the invasions, and sometimes long after, matrilineal descent was often important—the house of Charlemagne traced its origins back to a daughter of Arnulf, bishop of Metz. Although few queens ruled in their own right, many exercised great political authority, as in the minority of their sons; the regency of Blanche of Castile for Louis IX in France was a notable and successful example. The remarkable Queen Margaret succeeded in uniting the three kingdoms of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway under her regency in the Kalmar Union of 1397, an act that influenced the future of all Scandinavia. Similarly, although debarred from the priesthood by their sex, a number of women played a leading role in ecclesiastical affairs. St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden played a major role in achieving the return of the papacy from Avignon to Rome in 1377; both were celebrated adepts of the spiritual life, the female contribution to which is also attested by the works of Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe in England. The influence of women was also felt in their role as patrons, sometimes of Christianity itself, as when a number of the invading chieftains of the 5th and 6th centuries were first married to Christian princesses and then converted. At the turn of the 11th/12th century, Queen Margaret of Scotland was responsible for the thoroughgoing reform of the church in her kingdom, which brought it rapidly into the mainstream of the Latin church; another notable lady, Matilda of Tuscany, had been the last refuge of the reforming papacy for almost a generation.
As patrons of the arts and, above all, of poetry, Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine and wife first of Louis VII of France and then of Henry II of England, and her daughter Marie, countess of Champagne, were the leading figures of their century. At Marie's request, Chrétien de Troyes translated Ovid's Art of Love and also wrote one of the first courtly romances to be based on Geoffrey of Monmouth's Arthurian history. In Marie de France the courtly romance found a skillful female writer—appropriately, because these tales, which evolved from the masculine world of the chanson de geste, reveal the growth of a new social convention in which women had a larger part and a higher function. Foreshadowed in the diffusion of the cult of the Virgin Mary in the 11th century, this new convention was developed in the Italy of Petrarch and Dante.
The most striking feature of medieval society was its peculiar diversity and complexity. Although scholars often conceived the world as a hierarchy in which all power was mediated from God according to a single ordered descent, in practice four distinct types of structure coexisted, overlapping and modifying one another profoundly but each with its own laws and objects. The first was the economic structure, essentially a diverse and inefficient agricultural society with islands of commercial activity. The second was the seigneurial, the structure by which this economic activity was adapted to provide a surplus for a small class of lords and occasionally for great merchants. The third was ecclesiastical, in theory an autonomous economy of salvation in which all forms of secular life had their spiritual counterpart. The fourth—and for long the most tenuous—was the centralized monarchical structure of the sovereign state. The triumph of this last over the earlier claims of the church and magnate government marks the end of medieval society.
Latin Europe by 1500 covered a great diversity of lands and climates. A first division was that between the heavy soils of Germany, northern France, and Britain and the predominantly lighter soils of the Mediterranean lands of Spain, Languedoc, and Italy, in which vines and olives formed an important adjunct to grain.
Both main types of agriculture were conducted by cultivators who lived, where possible, in large settlements, with their churches, mills, and barns, the whole settlement often walled, as in the bastides of southern France, or at least hedged against animal and human marauders. Both economies contrast with those that existed on their perimeters and in the less fertile or more broken country of the interior. In the Celtic lands of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales and in Spain and the foothills of the Alps, as well as in Hungary and the Latin Balkans, a largely pastoral economy flourished, depending on flocks of cattle, sheep, or goats and producing a quite different pattern of living. As oxen provided the essential power for the cereal farmer's plow, and as milk, cheese, salt, and meat were as important to his diet as a minimum of crops were to the most pastoral of societies, so most medieval communities represented a precarious balance of forces between the needs of crops and beasts. Beyond these types of communities there existed various types of highly specialized settlements, such as the fishing communities of the North Sea coast, the salt evaporators of southwestern France, the fenmen, and the miners, sometimes solitary and sometimes organized in tightly knit communities, as were the tin miners of Cornwall and Bohemia. With few technological resources and poor communications, all medieval communities were conditioned largely by their environment.
Some of the Mediterranean communities of Italian cultivators had been organized as great estates (latifundia) in the late and post-imperial period; each tenant held only as much land as could support the needs of him and his family while he worked on the lord's estate. Very early, however, the comparatively widespread use of coinage allowed landowners to abandon such direct exploitation, which was clumsy and time-consuming, in favour of a variety of leases for terms of years or lives. By such means, the community became one made up of independent cultivators, each with his own field. Similar tenancies prevailed over much of southern France, where Roman law, much modified by custom and the decay of the judicature, continued to regulate contracts and the functions of the market.
The triangle formed by the Loire and Rhine rivers contained the chief area of nucleated cereal-growing settlements, though there were notable extensions of this into Britain to the west and into Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria, and the German east. In the Loire-Rhine region, with its heavy soils and wet climate, most of the earlier small enclosed fields of the Iron Age gave way to the characteristic open fields of the medieval vill, where the arable land of the community lay in large blocks cultivated by heavy, ox-drawn plows. The mechanical difficulties of turning such an implement and the need for effective drainage produced a characteristic effect of long narrow parallel strips running down contours of the hills. Such cultivation required a regular alternation of crops because there were few means available for restoring the fertility of the soil except allowing either half or one-third of the land to lie fallow each year. Similarly, the other resources of the land in pasture, woodland, water, and common grazing needed careful annual regulation because there was constant tension between the needs of humans, crops, and beasts. Although therefore a village might be divided among several lords, the village itself had a regulatory function from early times. Some sets of village bylaws survive from the 14th century.
Until the 13th century, this open-field cultivation continued to support the classical manorial organization. The lord drew his profit partly from his possession of a share of the vill's arable land, which was exploited for him by his tenants for some of the week, and partly from the exercise of his right to compel his tenants to use his ovens and mills at a price and to control and exploit the use of the surrounding wasteland. In practice such communities had always maintained a population of landless men—slaves earlier and labourers later—and there usually were tenants who owed rent or personal services of a less strictly economic variety. (Such free tenancy became widespread with the clearing of outlying lands in the 12th and 13th centuries, especially in the planned colonies along the frontiers.) The more elaborately centralized manorial economy flourished only under suitable and limited conditions; even where it existed, increasing internal trade and a greater circulation of money encouraged a movement whereby the domain was leased out and the lord allowed his tenants to commute their labour dues into cash rents. The Black Death of 1347–50 and further visitations of the plague later in the century may have carried off one-third of the population of Europe. Even where its impact was less, the relation between land and labour shifted drastically in favour of the tenant. Over most of western Europe, the agricultural community organized to provide labour on the lord's estate almost vanished, though the need for common action in the agricultural cycle did not.
In contrast to these tightly knit, often productive, and vulnerable agricultural communities stood the much looser society of the higher lands, where settlement was necessarily dispersed and where social bonds rested much more exclusively upon the ties of the kin or clan than they did in the nucleated villages. Even the arable farmers in a scattered community had more independence than did their lowland fellows. The Icelandic sagas written down in the 13th century, in manuscripts typically preserved in farmhouses rather than in monastic libraries, provide a vivid picture of such communities.
The increasing economic specialization of the period between 1100 and 1500, which saw vine growing and sheep rearing rise to the status of basic rather than supplementary occupations for whole communities, was made possible by a great increase in the volume of exchanges, itself a function of greater political stability. These exchanges took place preeminently in three settings: the markets, chiefly for local produce, held at short and regular intervals; the trading communities of the towns; and the occasional great fairs, annual events to which merchants traveled from the ends of Europe and the proceeds of which enriched such fortunate princes as the count of Champagne, lord of the fair towns of Provins, Troyes, Lagny, and Bar-sur-Aube.
Early concentrations of population in settlements occurred for political, ecclesiastical, or defensive reasons as often as for commercial ones; but the period from the 11th century onward saw the widespread rise of classes of men engaged in the commerce of exchange or manufacture and settled for that purpose in urban groups. Many of these were originally only merchants in a subsidiary sense; and many towns were barely distinct from large villages, being surrounded by the town fields cultivated by the citizens and containing within their boundaries numerous livestock and small patches of cultivated ground. Yet, a common interest among merchants or craftsmen produced associations of considerable importance. Merchant guilds developed—groups of men whose interests extended far beyond the political horizons of the lords of most towns, anxious for the reduction of tolls and in need of their own courts of justice appropriate to the urgent demands of itinerant commerce. It was these who led the struggle for urban autonomy in Europe north of the Alps—a movement that almost always involved conflict with the local lords, especially bishops and abbots, but was often favoured by princes such as the counts of Flanders or Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, in the German east. In this way emerged the juridical phenomenon of the town as a corporate person living within a pattern of territorial lordships. Similarly, such towns acted corporately, much as if they were landed magnates, seeking to subordinate neighbouring communities to the authority of the city magistrates, to compel the countryside to acknowledge the legal and economic primacy of the urban centre, and to divert profitable trade routes to their own advantage. The 12th-century crusading movement reflected such local hostilities—the Byzantine monopoly enjoyed by Venice was challenged by the direct access to the trade of the East offered by the crusader states, often maintained by the rival fleets of Pisa, Genoa, or Lucca. Long intercommunal wars, such as those between Pisa and Genoa or between Venice and Ravenna and Pula (now in Croatia), saw the rise of a small number of city republics governed by elected consuls combining birth and commercial substance in a unique blend. Within such towns there existed other interests also driven by their common economic interests into corporate action.
Associations of craftsmen and retailers formed themselves in guilds that had many objects beyond the commercial. Among the earliest of such guilds were those of prayer. Many guilds had their own chaplains and churches; some were responsible for such distinctive religious pageants as the cycles of plays performed by the various mysteries (or crafts) at Wakefield in England. Many also maintained a form of insurance for their members, for the old, and for the widows and came to play a part in the regulation of their crafts—especially entry to them—and in the struggle for their interests against the competing ones of their suppliers or of related trades. The interests of the masters of these crafts were often opposed to those of the greater merchants, thus producing a struggle for control of the machinery of town government. Equally, however, other divisions cut across this classification by trades. Within the guilds there was a struggle between masters and men, between those anxious to reduce competition and those bent on a larger independence. Occasionally, and most strikingly in the industrial towns of Flanders in the 13th and 14th centuries, this produced proletarian risings of wide impact; at Courtrai in 1302 an army drawn largely from the Blue-Nails, the hired dye workers, defeated the combined forces of the king of France and the count of Flanders; frequently, the larger Flemish towns acted to free themselves from the power of the count or to maintain their communications with the English wool trade against the pressures of France.
Though an urban proletariat of this kind was rare in medieval Europe, conflict between an urban oligarchy of landowners or great merchants (the popolo grasso of Italy) and the lesser craftsmen and labourers (the popolo minuto) was extremely common; it was at its fiercest where the cities enjoyed great autonomy, especially in Italy, where there was no effective or extensive central authority to maintain order. Hence, there were frequent civil wars in the Lombard towns, complicated by their external relations with each other, with the papacy, and with the empire; and there was a wide variety of forms of communal government, ranging from such attempts at radical democracy as the rising of the Ciompi of Florence in 1378 to an increasingly dominant model of dictatorship such as that exercised by the Malatesta of Rimini, the Visconti of Milan, or even the Medici of Florence.
The independence of the Italian city-states, which was complete by the end of the 14th century, had rested in part upon the successes of the Lombard League against the empire in the late 12th century. North of the Alps, particularly in Germany and the German-settled lands of the east, towns established similar but rather more restricted liberties against the greater princes and formed into leagues of economic communal interest, of which the most notable was the Hanseatic League of Baltic towns, which secured a near monopoly of the profitable northern trade in timber, furs, wax, and amber. First clearly organized in the late 13th century, by the 14th the league was the dominant commercial force in northern Europe. In alliance with the Teutonic Knights and by an aggressive policy of embargo and blockade, it secured privileges superior even to those of the native merchants in Russia, Sweden, Norway, England, and Flanders. Only in the later 15th century did the league begin to decline, with the failure of the Knights, the increasing commercial activity of the western kingdoms, and the decline of the Baltic herring fisheries.
Urban independence on the Lombard or Hanseatic model was exceptional, however; in France, Spain, parts of Germany, and England the towns remained firmly within the framework of royal or princely government, not least because only the king could be relied upon to maintain political and fiscal stability at home and to negotiate commercial privileges abroad. Contingents from the towns formed a numerically formidable element in the royal army at Bouvines (1214), when Philip Augustus defeated a combination of Norman, Flemish, and imperial forces aiming to restore the earlier independence of some of the greater vassals. It was the financial support of the towns that was of importance in the triumph of the “new monarchies” of 15th-century France, Spain, and Tudor England.
Upon these economic structures there rested a variety of structures of lordship. The earliest that can be discerned in the centuries after the migrations were extremely complex, being functions of a power that was at once one of property, of kinship, of public function, and even sometimes of priesthood; only in the course of the later medieval period did these elements of authority come to be distinguished and sometimes divided.
The economic bases of lordship in its least complex form lay in the ownership of men: the large household of slaves was the lord's property, and they worked his land. They enjoyed no rights against their lord, and he was responsible for maintaining peace and regulating their duties; such households of slaves became rare quite early over most of Europe. Domestic slavery was still an active force in the Iberian Peninsula and southern Italy at the end of the Middle Ages, though only in Sicily and the Balearic Islands were slaves widely engaged in large-scale agriculture. The responsibility of the lord for his own domestic servants remained near absolute, and the successors of many household slaves were the serfs who settled on small plots of land. Like the Roman slave, the medieval serf had no public rights against his lord; he was adscriptus glebae—so bound to his land that he could not leave it, as much a part of its stock as the cattle. The lord, by virtue of holding the land, was responsible for all police jurisdiction over his unfree men in his own court. His serfs were unable to marry without the lord's consent; in theory, their goods were his to tax at will during their lifetime and to confiscate at their death; their children were born into serfdom; and in all disputes there was no appeal from the lord to any higher tribunal.
Practice diverged at least in part from this grim theory. The agricultural cycle in which these serfs lived was conservative and complex, and custom operated powerfully to maintain it. Correspondingly, the disputes of tenants with each other and with the lord were regulated essentially by local custom, which was proclaimed by the body of the tenants in the lord's court. The rights of the lord to the labour of his serfs through the year and at the chief seasons of plowing and harvest were also fixed by custom and were rarely (and slowly) altered except at times of sudden crisis. The rights of the lord to the property of the serf were equally confined, so that the serfs' duties were expressed as the obligation to render produce for the great feasts of the year or to take their grain to the lord's mill, their flour to his ovens, or their grapes to his wine press or to make fixed payments at the marriage of a daughter, a father's death, or entry into a peasant holding, whether by inheritance, marriage, or purchase. Any or all of the other services could be commuted for money payments also, and, in western Europe at least, the function of the lord's court in regulating serf labour on his demesne was becoming obsolete by 1500, though its other functions still had a long future.
In some parts of Europe, the duties of the serfs included services that are less comprehensible; the very intimate bond between serf and lord might contain elements more accessible to an anthropologist than to an economist or historian. In many cases, the autocratic power of the lord was mitigated not merely by force of custom but also by close and frequent personal contact. The plans of early manor houses and castles show no extensive private rooms for the lord's use; he dined with his servants in his great hall, where he meted out justice. There was, until the later Middle Ages, little provision for private gardens for the lord's use. All but very great men could be found working at their own harvest, and feasts in the hall brought together the whole village community.
The lord had need of other services beyond those of his house and arable land. The greater Carolingian estates had aspired to complete self-sufficiency with their complement of carpenters, smiths, potters, and weavers, free or unfree, as well as the usual haywards, shepherds, and beekeepers. Men personally as unfree as the serf might also undertake more responsible tasks; the ministeriales, preeminently of Germany, not only acted as bailiffs but even bore arms as knights, though in such cases the dignity of the occupation came ultimately to cancel the defect of birth.
Men of free birth were found throughout Europe, though in varying numbers, who recognized the authority of a lord for some purposes—holding land from him in return for rent or services less servile than those of the villein. Most areas of Scandinavian settlement, much of Saxony, and the Low Countries were marked by numbers of such men, who often pronounced judgments in their lord's court or escorted him through his estates, providing a contingent of men-at-arms in war and rent-paying tenants in peace. Lordship of this kind stemmed directly from the ownership both of land and of some of its occupants; the profits of lordship were, however, drawn from much wider sources than the labour of serfs or the rents of free tenants. Either by grant or by usurpation, a great variety of forms of indirect taxation were open to the lord. The levy of tolls on rivers, bridges, or roads was perhaps the easiest source of revenue open to any man. Permission to hold a market in a vill was a right to be paid for and could also involve further revenues in payments for the holding of stalls and even a tax on individual transactions. Very great men might even mint their own coinage. Manipulation of its weight and quality could bring in considerable revenues, and, consequently, the currencies of France, Germany, and Italy were extremely fragmented and often unstable.
The most distinctive form of medieval lordship, however, was that which is often called feudal, from the Latin feudum, meaning “fief,” which was its central feature. In essence this was a fusion of the earlier precaria, a grant of land made for a fixed term in exchange for services or rents, with the very general commendation by which a man placed himself under a lord's protection by becoming his man or vassal. Some of those who had served their lord well would receive from him a benefice of land or revenue as a reward; others in dire need of protection would surrender their own land to the lord to receive it back as a benefice from him. When the tenant's right to his land became hereditary and his tenancy, or fief, ceased to be a reward for past services and became the reason for services to be performed in the future, feudal tenure was fully developed. These processes can already be traced before the end of the 9th century in the Carolingian empire.
By the 12th century such tenure was to be found throughout Latin Europe. It was characterized by a number of symbolic acts. The first was homage, the process by which the man knelt and placed his hands between those of his lord, so putting himself at the lord's disposal and under his protection. The next was the oath of fidelity, sworn by the man to his lord, sometimes sealed with a kiss. Then came investiture, by which the lord handed over some token of the fief to his new man. This sequence was first fully described in the year 1127, but its various elements can be traced or inferred very much earlier, though they were not all necessarily found together. The bond so created was much more than a form of land tenure; it was first a human relationship, in which the lord assumed many of the rights and duties of a father and from which the man could escape only if the lord directly attacked his life or family. If the lord died leaving a child as heir, it was the duty of the tenants to maintain the heir's rights until he came of age; similarly, if a tenant died leaving children under age, their wardship was the lord's. Not the least of the man's obligations might be that of attending the lord at the great feasts of the year, which were at once parties, parliaments, and law courts.
The duties of the lord to the tenant were usually only generally stated; he was bound to protect his man in war and peace, in the field, and in the law court. Carolingian legislation sought to ensure that every man had a lord to answer for him; a lordless man was a man in danger himself and a danger to others. The duties of the man to his lord varied enormously. Sometimes, even very early, the terms of his tenure were minutely defined. More often the general phrases of aid and counsel were called on to cover every possibility. As in the case of the servile tenant of the vill, however, a general subordination to the lord first became fixed by custom and then often commuted into a money rent. The aid the man owed was primarily military aid, essentially service with the full equipment of a knight—lance, sword, helmet, mail hauberk, and powerful horse. A great man's household usually contained a permanent body of these knights, who were often landless young men of good birth but no fortune; but the obligations of the enfeoffed knights living in the estates they held of their lords were early restrained, by custom at least, to a period of service in the field of 40–60 days and sometimes a limited period of garrison duty or castle guard at the lord's fortress. Not all personal aid, however, was military: there were also the sergeanties—fiefs held in return for other services. These ranged from fulfilling regular duties in the lord's household, such as steward, constable, or marshal (or even jester), to picturesque or purely honorific obligations, such as providing the lord with an annual goshawk, a leash of hounds, or a pair of gloves. All such services might come to be commuted for money payments; by 1200 it was common for the bulk of the knights liable for royal and even magnate service to settle their obligations by the payment of sums of scutage (literally shield money). Because, by then, service was seen as a burden on land and because this land might be in the hands of a church, a minor, or a woman or might be divided up among many heirs, such payments were a convenience to the tenant. A longer campaigning season and the high costs of a changing pattern of warfare often made money payment just as attractive to the lord.
Sometimes the lord might need financial aid for less strictly military reasons; again, custom came to distinguish the aids that he could levy from his tenants by right from those extraordinary ones for which the tenant's consent had to be sought. Practice varied, but the four most frequent were the knighting of his eldest son, the marriage of his eldest daughter, his setting out on crusade, or the ransom of his body.
Although in all these cases custom tended to strengthen the tenants' right in their land, there were three important traces of the lord's continued interest in what his ancestors had once granted: the relief, payable by an heir on entering into his inheritance; escheat, by which the lord recovered control of a tenure for which no direct heir could be found; and forfeit in the case of a tenant's treason or failure to perform his duties. The financial exploitation of these incidents of tenure and of the rights of wardship and marriage was among the most widespread of grievances against kings and great magnates in the 13th and 14th centuries.
The counsel that a tenant owed his lord also acquired a formal sense. The tenant's duty to attend his lord's court was of the greatest importance to the lord: it was the number and dignity of the suitors to his court that gave its judgments authority and stability. Around this central institution of the lord's court grew much of the apparatus of a sovereign state. The greater officers of the lord's household, most notably the steward, or seneschal, played an active part in overseeing the lord's estates, and in the later Middle Ages they often formed a council with regular sessions to audit the accounts of their lord's estates and developed their own code of legal precedents. In the 13th century, treatises upon the customs of such tenurial courts appeared in considerable numbers side by side with studies in Roman or royal government (the Sachsenspiegel in Germany or the works of Beaumanoir in France may serve as examples). Only their homage to the king or emperor, with a variable liability to be summoned to his court, distinguished the greater magnates of France or Germany from sovereign princes.
Theoretically, society could be conceived as a hierarchy of such lordships, with the sovereign at its head; but the practice was usually very different. In Germany the obligations of vassalage long retained traces of their servile origins, so that great men assumed them only with reluctance. It was correspondingly rare for a man to be the vassal of more than one lord; hence, a hierarchy of homages could appear in the late 12th-century Heerschild (a formal definition of social standing according to the number of intermediate lords between a man and the emperor) with the emperor at its head, the greater churches beneath him, then the imperial princes, who had done homage only to the emperor or the church, then counts, then noblemen, and so on. Even here, however, the consent of the other princes (the Reichsfürstenstand) was necessary for admission to the highest ranks, and the obligations such homage entailed were relatively very slight. Elsewhere—in France particularly—homage to more than one lord was frequent (the count of Champagne acknowledged 10 different lords for parts of his county), so that no such organizing principle could operate. What determined the permanence and vitality of tenurial networks was in part political and military circumstance, in part the extent to which some higher authority was able to intervene between lord and vassal, and in part the extent to which this lordship over men or tenants was able to absorb earlier administrative or public authority.
Some scholars have held that this passing of public authority into the domain of private right was the most essential and characteristic element of feudal society; it was certainly extremely widespread. In the 9th century there existed two types of local government that might be described as public: first, the residual Roman institutions of Gaul and Italy, with such modifications as the Carolingians had introduced, and, second, the public assemblies in which Germanic and Scandinavian societies had long been accustomed to do justice. In practice, these institutions had largely fused in the period since the barbarian invasions, so that the bulk of Latin Europe could be divided up into pagi (German Gauen) roughly comparable to an English shire in size and function, each presided over by a count (comes, compte, or Graf) who was the king's representative, most notably at the local court (the mallus, or thing). To this court all freemen brought their disputes, the later distinction between civil and criminal justice being as yet unknown. The law of the court might derive from tribal custom, as it had been preserved in either such laws as the Salian, Ripuarian, Burgundian, and Bavarian codes or the collective memory, or, farther south, it might be in the vulgar Roman law. In any case, it was the suitors of the court who determined the procedure and prescribed the appropriate forms of proof, such as the swearing of solemn oaths in special form, the undergoing of an ordeal (carrying a red-hot iron a prescribed distance, being thrown into deep water, holding a hand in boiling water), trial by battle, or, exceptionally, the scrutiny of sworn or even written evidence. All but the last of these were means of securing God's direct judgment rather than a merely human decision, but every preliminary step was determined by the court and particularly by a group of men learned in the law—scabini, échevins, lagamen, or Rachinburgen. Only in the 13th century, when the ordeal was condemned by the church and largely abandoned by the laity in favour of sworn and written evidence, did these lawmen give way to lawyers with special training.
The pagus, like the shire, was a military and fiscal unit as well as a legal one: it was presided over by a count whose responsibility it was to assess revenues, summon warriors for the royal army, and maintain the peace. To assist him in this task, lands were attached to his office, but he was also encouraged to secure the allegiance of the leading men of his pagus. In this way, to his authority as a royal representative, he added his personal claims over the castellani, lords of the principal fortresses of the district. These in turn were often able to exploit their military importance to assume the direction of such subdivisions of the pagus as the centena, or hundred. Similar in procedure and competence to the courts of the pagus or shire, such lesser jurisdictions were early and generally in private hands; some may have been from their inception.
In the widespread fragmentation of authority of the 10th and 11th centuries, the offices of count and castellan became hereditary over most of Europe, so that it was often no longer possible to distinguish the authority of the count from that of the lord or the suitor of the mallus from the vassal of the count. Under such conditions, the jurisdiction and procedure of the public court merged with that of the court of vassals. Meanwhile, jurisdiction in the county, having become attached to property, could also be divided; thus it often passed into the hands of lesser men who held it from the count as absolutely as he held his from the crown. Within the county there now existed liberties, or franchises, islands within which more or less of the king's justice was in the hands of a local lord and from which the count's agents were excluded. The greatest holders of franchises were the churches; the lay advocate who exercised temporal jurisdiction on behalf of such a privileged abbot or bishop had a wide competence that made such offices one of the greatest prizes of magnate competition. Some of these franchises were larger than counties or even extended over several. At the opposite end of the scale, all public authority over an area no larger than a vineyard might pass into the hands of a local knight subject to no restraints except those involved in his homage to a lord.
While the fiscal, legal, and military unity of the county either disintegrated or was reconstituted along the frontiers of a count's personal honour rather than earlier administrative or tribal divisions, there also appeared between the count and the king a number of intermediaries—sometimes distinguished as dukes or margraves—holding several counties. The duchies and margravates of the 10th and 11th centuries had originated as military commands, conferring on their holders only those rights over the counties of their area that were required by the pressing needs of defense; between the 10th and 13th centuries, these intermediaries fought a desperate battle against their sovereigns, on the one hand, and their neighbouring counts, on the other, to make this military authority (often over a former tribal district) into a more or less universal and exclusive jurisdiction. The results were extremely uneven. Some of the German duchies that emerged from the civil wars of the 12th and 13th centuries were coherent units, though they were smaller than their predecessors. The duchy of Normandy was a tightly organized unit until it passed to the French crown under Philip II Augustus in 1202–04; but the dukes of Aquitaine and Burgundy had only a tenuous and formal hold on their outlying vassals.
The growth of such lordships had originally owed much to military considerations. The decline of the popular courts and public jurisdiction had been accompanied by the appearance of innumerable private fortresses, often little more than a wooden stockade upon an earth mound (the motte) with a larger enclosure at its foot for stock and dependents (the bailey). These proliferated in the Loire-Rhine triangle in the 10th and 11th centuries, though they did not spread widely in England or Germany much before 1100. These fortresses were as important to defensive warfare as the mail-clad rider was coming to be in offense, for the possession of such strong points was a protection against all but the most formal and deliberate assault; few commanders could maintain a force for the time necessary to conduct this type of campaign. In the 12th century, the increasing number of stone-built castles, a more widespread use of paid troops, and the evolution of improved methods of siege warfare (some perhaps learned from the Muslims and Byzantines during the Crusades) altered the terms of warfare. Successful offense and defense required greater expertise and more extensive resources; correspondingly, the units of military independence tended to be much larger. The early motte-and-bailey castles could probably be built in a matter of days, certainly weeks, and could be cast down yet more rapidly; but Château Gaillard, built by Richard I of England to protect Normandy from attack along the Seine valley, took years to build and cost more than three times the whole annual revenue of the duchy; it was still capable of resisting prolonged formal siege with artillery four centuries later. In the 12th and 13th centuries, series of these defenses were being put up by such princes as Frederick II in Sicily or Sancho I in Portugal, but, by the 15th century, gunpowder and engineering expertise were making such combinations of fortress and dwelling obsolete.
A parallel development began to affect mounted warfare about 1200. Although chain mail was expensive, it was far less so than the combinations of plate and mail (or finally plate alone) that appeared in the later Middle Ages; similarly, the horses needed to carry this heavier equipment were scarce and exceedingly costly. The fully armed knight of 1300 was a more formidable figure than his predecessor of 1100, but he was a rarer, a more expensive, and a more specialized commodity.
The military importance of the knight was reduced by the appearance of the more lightly armed men-at-arms or sergeants, and a trained infantry of pikemen and archers—crossbowmen, among whom the Genoese mercenaries excelled, and the longbowmen of English armies in Wales, Scotland, and France. The new armies of the 15th century were largely professional; they contained a high proportion of trained and well-armed infantry, which could be kept in the field for a whole campaigning season. The maintenance of such forces, with their extensive infrastructure of transport, victualing, and engineering, strained even the resources of a kingdom, and, over most of Europe, the near independent lordships of the great princes failed to survive. There were many great, rich, and privileged magnates in 16th-century Europe, but only in parts of Germany and Italy did they retain a complete local autonomy. It was rather by their influence on central government than their independence of it that they maintained political importance. By the 16th century, for the first time since the Roman Empire, centralized public authority covered much of Europe, though now within the frontiers of the national state.
Parallel with this structure of secular lordship stood that of the church, in which the opposing tendencies of central authority stemming from a single source and the collective authority of the community existed in a similar tension as in the court of a lord's vassals or in later royal councils.
At the head of this church stood the papacy in Rome. Around the pope, conducting an ever-increasing volume of business, there grew up all the institutions of a centralized monarchy. The cardinals, chosen by the pope alone, formed the papal council, or the consistory. The 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries saw the rise of specialized departments to deal with legal matters, matters of penance, and finance (the Apostolic Camera); and, most important of all, it saw the rise of an elaborate chancery to direct the issue of the various forms of papal documents (known as bulls from the use of the bulla, a leaden seal used to authenticate many of them).
The means of papal action beyond the immediate neighbourhood of Rome were provided by legates, either resident or specially commissioned, who enjoyed most of the sovereign authority of their master. The penalties of disobedience were excommunication (cutting off specific individuals from all human contact with the Christian community), interdict (the suspension of all the sacramental functions of the church—usually directed against an entire community or state), or, against princes, the launching of military expeditions with a papal blessing. The religious orders directly under papal protection, particularly the friars, provided a means of action and an intelligence service to set beside that provided by the collectors of papal taxes, often Italian merchants, and by the Inquisition. Founded in the early 13th century for the detection and extirpation of heresy, this institution was presided over by inquisitors drawn from the Dominican and Franciscan orders, but they answered directly to the pope and possessed an extensive staff of men outside the orders.
The local organization of the church depended essentially upon the bishops, grouped under an archbishop or metropolitan specially charged with the consecration of the bishops of his diocese. He might hold provincial councils or even visit bishoprics to examine their administration; on occasions he could hear appeals from a bishop or take disciplinary action against one.
The bishop, originally elected in theory by the clergy and people of his diocese, was, in practice, appointed by some kind of compromise between the claims of the secular lord of the area, of the clergy of the cathedral church and diocese, and of Rome. By the 13th century, most bishops possessed a central administration consisting of several offices: a specialized court for dealing with church affairs, a chancellor who kept the bishop's seal by which his formal acts were authenticated and under whose supervision the records of the see were maintained, and a treasury for collecting the revenues—both from his estates and from more specifically ecclesiastical dues, such as a proportion of the tithes of the faithful or charges arising out of the ordinary exercise of his office. All these offices were staffed from the clerks of his household, increasingly to be distinguished from the chapter of beneficed canons, headed by a dean, who served the cathedral church. Although these canons were originally the bishop's household, by the 13th century they formed a compact corporation, sharing the revenues of the diocese with their bishop but often not appointed by him or subject to his strict control.
Within the diocese, the bishop had wide responsibilities: he alone could ordain clergy, consecrate churches, receive children into full membership of the church at confirmation, or impose penances for the graver sins. No one could teach or preach in the diocese without his permission, and he alone could admit novices to religious vows or bless the heads of religious houses. All judicial authority in the diocese was exercised by him either in person or through deputies, and without his sacraments the liturgical life would cease. In a more positive sense, he would teach and regulate the whole diocese as well as act as guardian of all church property, which could be neither received nor given away without his consent.
Much work remained in the hands of agents. Of these, the chief were the archdeacons, called the “bishop's eyes” since their duties were essentially disciplinary. Like the bishops, they made visits throughout their archdeaconries and held courts to which they summoned delinquent clergy and lay offenders against the regulations of the church in marriage, usury, wills, heresy, blasphemy, and the observance of feast days. Their arbitrary procedures and frequent assessment of fines made them widely feared and resented. Most archdeaconries were subdivided into districts presided over by archpriests or rural deans, usually chosen from among the parochial clergy.
The chief centres of the devotional life of the medieval church were parish churches served by a priest and a variable number of assistants. The priest was normally appointed by the bishop on the presentation of the patron, whether a religious corporation or a layman. The parish was maintained out of the land attached to the church (the glebe) and the revenues from the faithful. From the 9th century, the payment of tithes, a tenth of the annual proceeds of agriculture and trade, had been obligatory for Christians; although many tithes passed to religious corporations or vanished into the hands of unscrupulous collectors, they remained the largest single element of many parochial revenues.
The parish clergy were principally charged with the salvation of their parishioners; this was to be achieved by the regular administration of the sacraments, baptism, mass, and, above all, the last rites. The priest was also expected to offer an example of good living, expound the basic precepts of the Apostles' Creed and Lord's Prayer, promote concord among his parishioners, admonish sinners, and denounce grave offenders to his archdeacon or bishop. Since the priest was often the only man able to read or write in his community, he would often have to act as an elementary teacher and village notary. At a time when the houses of the peasantry and even most manor houses were modest wooden structures with slight and crude decoration, the parish church was a striking contrast, an elaborate stone building with walls bearing paintings of the gospel narrative and the Last Judgment and with vestments and church ornaments of considerable splendour. As the building dominated the settlement, so the feasts of the church provided a rhythm of ritual and recreation that in part supplemented, in part reinforced that imposed by the seasons of the agricultural year.
Beside this hierarchy of the secular church stood the regular clergy. The earliest widespread communities of monks had been in theory strictly subordinate to their bishop. In practice, however, widespread recognition of the monastic life as the pattern of religious excellence, the active missionary work of such monks as St. Columban and St. Boniface, and the favour of great families gave the monasteries a position of substantial privilege. In the 11th century and later, such houses—led by Cluny—placed themselves directly under the protection of Rome as a means of excluding the bishop's authority; and, for the rest of the Middle Ages, quarrels over the bishop's right to secure an oath of obedience from the abbot, to visit the monastery to scrutinize its observance, and to exercise his office over the numerous churches and clergy attached to such abbeys were almost commonplace.
Parallel to the growth of such conflicts was the rise of congregations of regulars, in which houses of a common observance, such as those of Citeaux, Hirsau, or Prémontré, were organized in a hierarchy that allowed the order itself to discipline and correct its members, to legislate for the whole congregation, and to ensure a common rule of life among its far-flung membership. The way of life of the friars, with their dispersed and itinerant congregations, involved a more complex organization modeled upon that provided by St. Dominic in 1216. Under Dominic's organization, the order was divided and subdivided into provinces, ruled by masters, and chapters; elaborate regulations provided for the election of masters, and legislation for the order was promulgated in assemblies of elected representatives. Most of these features were taken over by the Franciscans before the end of the 13th century. Relations with the hierarchy of the secular church were sometimes strained because the friars were under the direct protection of Rome and enjoyed a correspondingly extensive, though much contested, immunity from episcopal jurisdiction. In this way, many of the religious orders were involved in a hierarchical system of centralized dependence parallel to that of the secular church.
Although ecclesiastical authority, even in the orders, was exercised on a largely monarchical pattern, the church also contained important elements of corporate authority. The earliest genuine law of the church was substantially contained in the decrees of the ecumenical councils of the 4th and 5th centuries; and such gatherings continued to be held in the East, though their authority was not accepted in the West. After the formal ending of the Investiture Controversy, Pope Calixtus II summoned the First Lateran Council (1123), claimed as the ninth ecumenical or universal council of the church and the first to be held in the West. The legislation of this and its successors up to that of Vienne in 1311–12 was given very wide currency, although, according to the general opinion of canonists, it was of no greater binding force than the decrees of the pope alone. In the 14th century, opponents of papal authority, such as Marsilius of Padua, viewed the pope as an officer of the whole church subject to its control when assembled corporately in a general council. The double election of 1378 and the prolonged schism that followed allowed such theories a wider currency. It was the Council of Constance (1414–18) that ended the schism, but that of Basel (1431–49) introduced another—in part as a consequence of the belief that the pope was subject to the constant surveillance of the council, standing in the same relation to it as an Italian magistrate stood to the city that appointed him. Such corporate doctrine failed because the council became itself less and less representative; the limitations upon central authority that emerged were those imposed by the enlarged rights of secular rulers over the national churches.
The value of councils of bishops to promulgate decrees and pursue reform for a kingdom or province was generally recognized, but their ecclesiastical authority was, in theory, extremely limited. In practice, the legislation of provincial councils and even synods sometimes allowed local customs or variations from the universal law of the church, but this was by way of dispensation. Councils, however, were sometimes summoned by the king to assert his divine authority over his turbulent subjects, to enforce his policies with the double sanction of the secular and spiritual sword, or to confront the pope with the consensus of local ecclesiastical opinion as a means of putting pressure on him to abandon a policy. Such gatherings, however, rarely claimed to constitute autonomous local churches; and the nationalist claims made on behalf of the French church under Philip IV the Fair or for the English church under Henry VIII rested on the authority of the sovereign in his kingdom, not the corporate sovereignty of a council of the national church.
The universal claims of the papacy, even if practically confined to the Latin obedience, were constantly threatened by the strong secular particularism of Europe's medieval history. Between the 5th and the 12th century, the gravest danger was one generally subsumed under the term simony—that is, the constant likelihood that ecclesiastical rights would be subordinated to temporal interests and then fragmented, like them, to become merely aspects of private property. The hereditary lay abbots of the 9th century, the parish churches built as financial investments by their founders and bought and sold amid general acquiescence between the 7th and 12th centuries, and a widespread trafficking in offices, never wholly eradicated, all illustrate the gravity of this danger. These abuses were formally abolished and actually much reduced by the reformers of the 11th and 12th centuries, largely by means of a centralized law. Between the 13th century and the Reformation, the danger was that the political and linguistic boundaries within which the new national states were growing up would also divide the church. Against this danger, the traditional weapons of papal authority proved much less effective, and new ones were not forged before the end of the period.
The growth of the centralized institutions of predominantly royal government required the rise of certain technical skills in the collecting and organizing of information. Until the 13th century there were no maps of great practical value; the statistics occasionally collected by medieval governments were often inconsistent and made according to erratic principles. Until near the end of the period, the usual methods of accounting and bookkeeping precluded most calculations performed by a modern government. The technology of transport was equally primitive; the best roads in the 15th century were still the Roman imperial streets, for all their thousand years of neglect, and winter flooding still affected most river systems in spite of some large-scale drainage works that had been undertaken in the Netherlands, Italy, and elsewhere. Under such conditions, a central government wholly free of “constitutional” restraints would still be obliged to leave its local agents a large measure of independence, and the custom of the neighbourhood was necessarily the chief regulator of political as well as social and economic relations.
The seed from which all medieval institutions of central administration were to grow was the immediate personal household of the king; its members were the only permanent staff he had. The essential elements of the early royal household therefore provided the framework of the first departments of state.
The chief elements of the royal household were four—the hall, the chamber, the chapel, and the courtyard, with its horses and stables. The whole household, but in particular the hall, which was at once palace, law court, and dining room, was directly governed by the steward (dapifer, seneschal, or drost), under whose direction the guests were seated and the feasting conducted, while the wine was under the charge of a butler (pincerna, or Oberschenk). Under the later Merovingians in Gaul, the mayor of the palace (literally chief of the house) became a figure so powerful as first to overshadow and then replace his king; elsewhere, though less powerful, the steward was the usual chief deputy of the king. Under the Capetians of France, he was charged with the annual scrutiny of the accounts tendered by the king's local bailiffs, the provosts; in Normandy, Jerusalem, and elsewhere he was the natural choice as regent in his lord's absence.
The chamber, the room in which the king slept or took private counsel, was also the natural place to store his treasure; hence, the chamberlains were often specially charged with the collection of revenue and handing it out as the king had need. The papal treasury was known as the Apostolic Chamber, and the papal chamberlains were widely entrusted with financial missions.
The chapel, containing the royal altar and relics (the term chapel derives from the capella, the short cloak of St. Martin preserved among the chief relics of the Carolingian royal treasury), was served by chaplains, to say the daily mass, assisted by a body of clerical assistants. As the chief and sometimes only literate members of the household, these men were responsible for drawing up such documents as the earlier kings required; among their number and often at the head stood the chancellor, whose special task was the authentication of royal acts, usually with the seal, which he kept.
This royal household was constantly on the move, carried on carts or packhorses—hence the great importance of the last two major household offices, those of the constable and marshal. The duty of the count of the stable (constable) was closely associated with the organization of the army, and hence the term came to be used of commanders of garrisons as well as the central household officer. The office of the marshal was originally more humble but shared the military fortunes of that of constable. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the constable and marshal came to a new importance as military commanders and correspondingly acquired judicial competence as presidents of the courts of chivalry, which dealt especially with military discipline, the division of ransoms, and the right to bear a coat of arms.
These early household offices, with characteristically unspecialized duties, changed greatly under the impact of two forces. First, they had a tendency to become hereditary, much as the local offices of count or duke had done. Since the domestic service of the king, at least on public occasions, was itself a very great dignity, the most powerful families claimed the right to perform it, so that the office came to be the prerogative of great magnates who were too preoccupied elsewhere to perform their duties in person. Even the chancellorship sometimes became attached to certain archbishoprics—Reims or Mainz, for instance. Since the king's domestic needs continued, a distinction evolved between the hereditary dignitaries such as high steward or archchancellor and the men of much humbler rank who actually performed the routine duties of the household. Second, the increasing volume of business done in the king's name—judicial, administrative, or financial—demanded ever more elaborate records and a more extensive staff; therefore, the offices of government were less mobile, and a physical distinction became common between the constantly itinerant household about the king's person and the more cumbrous (though rarely wholly static) departments of permanent officials. Furthermore, the processes of government, especially in the chancery or (particularly well documented) the English exchequer, became arts or mysteries that demanded a staff of financial or legal experts with a specialized training. Thus were born the chief departments of state; well beyond the end of the medieval period, however, their principal officers were still considered the king's servants in a literal sense. This household character of public office made the distinction between loyalty to the king's person and loyalty to the office extremely hard to draw and frustrated many early efforts at “constitutionalism.”
Of these departments of state, the chancery was perhaps the most essential, for, without a means of transmitting a number of recognizably authentic commands or recording the business already done, no large measure of centralized activity was possible. The papal chancery was the earliest office to develop this skill on a large scale; the rhythm of the text and the forms of authentication for papal bulls were already formalized before the mid-12th century. Similar tendencies are found in England in the reign of Henry II and in France only a little later. (The urban notaries of Italy and parts of southern France were already using formalized business documents, though for a much more restricted area.) The second sign is the appearance of a substantial collection of records; apart from financial records, the essential element was the keeping of copies of documents issuing from the chancery, distinguished according to their character. Papal registers had probably been kept from a very early date, and a later copy of the Register of Gregory I still survives; an imposing and ever more complex consecutive series of original registers survives from the early 13th century. These were in the form of books. In England, where the great period of initial expansion lay in the period between 1190 and 1216, and in France, where the early royal archives have suffered much graver losses at the hands of time, the characteristic record was a series of parchment membranes stitched together to form long rolls. These archives evolved rapidly through the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, with the preservation of many more classes of document, including informal memoranda. Such records served the purposes of both governor and governed, for they provided precedents and the material for the reform and improvement of administration for the king's servants. They also provided authentic copies of title deeds or privileges for a subject at odds with his fellow or even the king himself. The conventions of the chancery had a marked tendency toward autonomy; efforts at magnate control in England or extensive reform of papal administration in Rome were partly frustrated by the elaboration and conservatism of chancery procedures that might at other times offer a useful defense against arbitrary government.
Among the most immobile elements of medieval government were those connected with the collecting and checking of the royal revenue. Until the 13th century, the only coinage current was the silver penny (or denier), so that large sums could only be transported packed in barrels of great weight. It was therefore natural for royal treasuries to appear as places of permanent deposit from which the itinerant court or army could be supplied at need. Often the treasury would also be the first site of any permanent archives. The audit of accounts from the sheriffs, provosts, bailiffs, or seneschals who were local collectors of royal revenue was a matter that could not be performed at a wholly itinerant court. Not only was it necessary for auditors and agents to have a known place and time at which to meet, but all except the least sophisticated forms of accounting required the keeping of records of former debts and present liabilities. Under Charlemagne, a Capitulare de villis envisaged a wide inquiry into the estates of the emperor, though only fragments of the returns survive; similar surveys were being made in 11th-century France and Germany on a small scale, but no early text can rival the record of Domesday Book (compiled in 1086/87), a survey of almost all of England, drawn up for William I the Conqueror. It is still preserved among the English public records.
The rise of the Exchequer as a semipermanent office and court for the hearing of accounts and the adjudication of financial claims was an early and striking feature of Anglo-Norman government on either side of the Channel. Certainly in existence soon after 1100, its first surviving pipe roll (annual statement of accounts) of 1130 is the earliest record of receipts of its kind for all of medieval Europe. In France the Capetian kings for more than a century used the Knights Templar as their bankers, so that it was not until after the withdrawal of his treasure from their hands by Philip IV the Fair in 1295 that a fully independent Chamber of Accounts emerged, with a comprehensive staff of financial experts.
The cumbersome machinery of such financial bodies was a grave impediment in times of political, financial, or military crisis, although, as in the case of the chanceries, due process offered some protection against arbitrary government. The frequent wars of the English kings and their long absences in France, as well as their desire to escape the oversight of great officers approved by their magnates, encouraged the appearance of various financial systems within the household to compete with that of the Exchequer.
As these departments of state became more fixed, professional, and independent, royal councillors who gave a political direction to the government acquired a distinct existence. In the early 13th century, the king's more or less permanent advisers began to take on a more formal character as the king's council. This council, often given definition by the taking of a common oath, was as omnicompetent as the king it served, and correspondingly, in times of political crisis, magnates or great assemblies sought to impose their nominees—as in England in the crisis of 1258–65 or France in 1356–57 or Aragon under Alfonso III. The direct and personal nature of the council's functions made such efforts almost always abortive. Only in Scandinavia, where the union of the three crowns involved prolonged regencies and uncertainties of succession, did the Råd enjoy a large independence from its king, though many German princes of the 14th and 15th centuries were compelled by their estates to accept a nominated council. In the 15th century, the powers of last resort possessed by the king and exercised in consultation with his council allowed the formation of offshoots of this council as prerogative courts of justice, administration, and finance.
Over the same period, the larger assemblies in which some royal action had long taken place were also taking on a clearer form and defined functions, issuing in the assemblies of estates to be found over most of Europe in the 15th century. Three distinct influences lay at the origin of this development—ancient custom, feudal law, and administrative convenience. The Germanic tribes described by the Roman historian Tacitus in the 1st century AD gathered regularly in arms to determine matters of general importance. In some respects it was the size of such gatherings that decided the size of the kingdoms to which they elected chieftains; such gatherings of the warriors continued well into the period of Frankish rule, even in those areas where the powers of the king were very great. In Scandinavia, meetings of the thing never wholly passed into the power of magnates or royal officials, though elsewhere they changed radically.
Later, the king summoned his chief tenants by virtue of their obligation to give their lord counsel; the number of those who came was the critical test of the king's authority. The decline of French royal power in the 10th and 11th centuries or of German kingship in the 11th and 12th centuries can be plotted on maps by examining the composition of their great courts, especially at the chief feasts of the Christian year (or at principal landmarks in the life of the royal family, such as marriages and the knighting of the eldest son).
Since these large sessions of the tenants were also the most solemn courts a king could hold, great issues would be brought to it; since they were usually held at known times and places, those who desired the king's help in securing justice would seek them out. There were, however, further reasons why the king should try to enlarge the attendance at his courts or councils; the bonds of land tenure in most of Europe before 1300 had long ceased to articulate all the elements of society. To regulate the affairs of merchants, for instance, the feudal bond was worthless to secure counsel or consent. More important still, the obligations of feudal tenure no longer provided the forms of taxation needed for the defense of the state, and whatever methods of raising money supplemented them required the consent of the community in a new sense. The princes of the late 13th century claimed to be lords of states, not merely of associations of men; in their conflicts with the papacy, in their assertion of legislative authority, and in their claims to the financial support of the whole community, kings required a very general assent. Unless qualified representatives could be gathered, the king's will could not be known or the justification of changes publicized; the rise of the representative assembly is parallel to the rise of royal propaganda.
In the 13th and 14th centuries, these considerations produced a variety of experiments. In France after 1300, two meetings of the estates of magnates, churchmen, and burgesses were often held: one for the provinces of northern France (Languedoïl), another for the culturally different provinces of the south (Languedoc). Provincial gatherings of this kind were naturally prevalent in the states of Germany, where the dynastic disputes and poverty of many of the princes made them peculiarly subject to the pressures of their estates of knights, burgesses, and clergy; the imperial Reichstag, attended theoretically by the tenants in chief (chief vassals) of the emperor and representatives of the imperial towns, was intended to cover the whole of Germany but was as powerless as its central authority. In the kingdoms of Spain, signs of development appeared very early, representatives of the towns being summoned in 1188 in Leon; by the mid-13th century, the presence of townsmen in representative assemblies was customary throughout the country. In Aragon, magnates and knights were separate elements, but elsewhere the more usual pattern of the three estates of nobles, churchmen, and burgesses prevailed. The English gatherings to which the term Parliament came increasingly to be applied differed in important respects. From early in the 13th century, the king had summoned his tenants in chief to meet at the same time the central courts of justice and finance were in session; thus, royal officers, innumerable representatives of the shires and boroughs, and the magnates were gathering at one time. By the end of the 13th century, it was becoming common for special representatives to be summoned from the shires and the boroughs to attend these Parliaments; by the mid-14th century, their attendance had become the rule, but the clergy had largely withdrawn, except for the great ecclesiastical magnates who sat with the temporal lords, while the knights of the shire and the burgesses of the towns met together as a single body. Hence, there emerged a quite exceptional body with two chambers and a permanent representation of the nonnoble landowners to contrast with the much more widespread model of the three estates.
The business undertaken by these gatherings was extremely various. For reasons essentially of convenience, it was customary to publish legislation at such assemblies, as church councils had done for centuries. In Aragon and Catalonia, Scandinavia and much of Germany, the consent of the assembly was required to legitimize such enactments; custom produced much the same effect in England, and the Aragonese kings of Sicily (who replaced the Angevins there during the War of the Sicilian Vespers, 1282–1302) proclaimed the same principle. Yet more frequently they were assembled to assent to taxation, sometimes, though never wholly, saving the prince the difficulty of negotiating with each town or community for a contribution to the common need; they continued to constitute also the most weighty public court for the hearing of great causes. Though summoned essentially to consent to decisions made by the king and his inner council, such assemblies necessarily possessed a potential power to refuse or demand a precedent redress of grievances; and, as the powers of central government became greater, efforts to impose restraints on the prince in the name of the community became more widespread. Precocious efforts to subordinate royal government to the scrutiny of the magnates in Parliament, and even to require general assent to the appointment of officers of state, occurred in England between 1258 and 1265 and continued with some formal success in the 14th and 15th centuries. It was a successful struggle in the 14th century to require parliamentary consent to all extraordinary taxation that ensured the regular summons of such gatherings and made possible their use as an occasional forum of political discontent or even revolution, as in the reign of Richard II.
The Estates-General in France made similar efforts at political control of the kingship in the crises associated with the capture of King John II the Good, between 1356 and 1358 and again in 1413. The Cortes of Spain secured an even larger measure of success; in 1287 the magnates extracted from Alfonso III of Aragon the Privilegio de la Unión, which conferred upon the Cortes even the power to depose an unjust king; here, too, assent to taxation was a prerogative of the assembly, though grants were made only by the burgesses. The weaknesses of these estates were very like those of the 15th-century councils of the church in their conflicts with the pope. Essentially they were occasions, rather than permanent bodies, which either were summoned by the king or—if gathered by any other means—were unrepresentative. Their control over the monarchy lasted only so long as they were in session, and exhaustion or particularism frustrated their long continuance. The kings could normally exploit either the localism or the diverging class interests of their estates to prevent any continuous supervision. In Catalonia in the 15th century, the Cortes possessed a General Council (Diputaçio del General), a standing committee to watch over the government, which not only granted but collected and spent any extraordinary taxation; but the forms of taxation divided the burgesses from the knights and nobles. In England there was less division of class interest but no effective or continuous supervision. In all cases, the resistance of the magnates was a precondition of large claims on behalf of the estates; yet a prolonged and successful magnate resistance destroyed that fusion of local and class interests upon which the estates depended for their vitality.
The need for general legislation arose largely from the great expansion of judicial business done by the king and his courts. The right and duty to do justice was so fundamental an element in early conceptions of government that almost every aspect of political authority was exercised in judicial form. The local organs of taxation and military recruitment were the courts of count, prince, or petty baron, to which freemen came to settle their differences; the English Exchequer was, in form and in practice, both a court and a counting house; the meetings of the estates as Parliament, Reichstag, or Cortes were courts before they were representative assemblies. Similarly, a centralized judicial system involved a centralized government and also a wealthy one.
Where custom was both decisive and localized, central courts had little attraction; where the modes of proof were intended to invoke divine rather than human judgment, there was little room for a theory of appeal; where travel was slow and literacy rare, centralized justice was extremely difficult to enforce. Therefore, the first technique available to the king who sought to enforce his law lay in the dispatch of trusted agents from his court to preside at local assemblies and to reduce the autonomy of counts or royal bailiffs. Under the Carolingians, special missi, often churchmen of high rank, performed this duty; in England, the itinerant justices formed the model for the earliest French baillis in the 12th century. Under the French king Louis IX, in the 13th century, friars were often employed as enquêteurs to scrutinize local government and amend the faults of local officers; under Louis's successors, the scrutiny was rather of their devotion to the king's interest.
As early as the 12th century, such devices were already giving a new importance to the king's central court, for matters of difficulty were often referred by the traveling judges to the king's own hearing; the existence of a body of such judges provided a volume of general legal experience at the centre and a certain degree of consistency of procedure in the provinces that pointed the way toward a single royal law and enhanced the value of a central judgment. At the same time, the king's court as the unique tribunal for disputes between his great tenants and as the last resort of injured litigants was attracting a greater volume of business. Although the ordeals and judicial combat never vanished entirely as methods of proof, they lost ground rapidly in western Europe in the 13th century to the procedures of written evidence and judicial inquiry; this made the theory of appeal easier to accept, and the practice was accelerated by two fundamental characteristics of medieval litigation. The first was the remarkable tenacity of litigants. The second was that judgments, to be effective, had to be accepted by both parties; the object of the court was to secure agreement and the voluntary submission of the unsuccessful litigant. In a society largely devoid of specific offices of enforcement, where those who appeared before the courts were often neighbours, this insistence upon the acceptability of judgments was essential. It made all the more valuable the judgment of a tribunal whose authority could not be refused. Hence, there emerged in all the larger states a variety of central courts.
In France the regular gatherings at the king's court produced the distinctive institution of the Parlement, essentially an omnicompetent supreme court that began in the 13th century as a committee of the king's councillors with some expert legal assessors. By the mid-14th century this had become a fully organized and almost wholly professional body with three principal organs—the Grand Chamber, in which the decisions were pronounced; a Chamber of Petitions, which scrutinized appeals and distributed them to the appropriate tribunals; and a Chamber of Inquiry, which carried out the judicial inquiries upon which the final judgment rested. From its position as supreme court, the Parlement came to exercise a wide supervisory power even over the Chamber of Accounts; in this it continued to resemble the English Parliament as it had in its origins. Unlike the English institution, however, its nonprofessional element tended to diminish, and it achieved a substantial measure of independence in the appointment of its officers. But, having no control over financial supply and no representative or political basis, it was rarely capable of serious resistance to royal autocracy. With the collapse of English and Burgundian power in France in the late 15th century, a number of local parlements were created to serve the reunited territories, the earliest being that of Toulouse; in these, however, the crown's right of nomination prevented any serious threat to the legal unity of the realm.
In England the two courts of Common Pleas and King's Bench came to operate as supreme courts, especially for civil cases, while the royal monopoly over serious offenses was chiefly exercised by the itinerant justices of assize; over all these stood the high court of Parliament, which the litigant could petition for redress. The judicial authority of the king and the king's council offered the litigant a further source of appeal.
In Germany, political fragmentation prevented the evolution of a law unified by administrative practice, so that the need for a common code was reflected in the formal Reception of Roman Civil Law in 1495, a measure without immediate or widespread practical consequences.
Throughout the medieval period, central courts tended to attract an ever-larger proportion of litigation from the local courts. As a court of appeal, the French Parlement slowly eroded the importance of the local Grands Jours (the solemn sessions of the courts of the earlier great lordships), except in those cases in which these were themselves transformed into parlements at the end of the period. In England, police jurisdiction passed into the hands of justices of the peace, unpaid officials appointed by the crown from among the local landowners. All important civil litigation was conducted in London, leaving the old shire courts, once omnicompetent, only a shadowy existence. The letters of the Paston family show a group of minor Norfolk gentry engaged in a long series of lawsuits that kept the head of the family almost constantly in London as well as employing a considerable number of the professional lawyers who were so characteristic a product of the 14th and 15th centuries, both in France and England. These lawyers were among the earliest literate laity, the first trained secular administrators, and the chief agents of the unification of postmedieval states.
The whole fabric of the centralized state depended on the mobilization of great resources for the crown. Even the earliest rulers had needed a hoard from which to reward their followers and to draw the gifts upon which relations with neighbouring chieftains depended. Such hoards were accumulated by successful plundering and the tribute of subject peoples; they were themselves the great prize of war, as when Charlemagne's forces sacked the Avars' Ring (chief fortress) in 795/796, and the treasure was carried across Europe by the cartload. The rich furniture buried with the ship of a petty king in East Anglia at Sutton Hoo in the 7th century shows how magnificent and how diverse these hoards must have been. With the stabilization of settlement between the 9th and 12th centuries, the pursuit of plunder and tribute became a more marginal enterprise, still actively pursued by the Vikings and the Magyars (and later, in the 9th and 10th centuries, by the German settlers along the eastern frontier) but rarely available to most princes of post-Carolingian Europe. By this time, the fragmentary system of Roman taxation had also broken down, so that the central or royal revenues that existed were mostly those open to any great landowner. For many rulers, these resources were still largely in food rents, which the owners traveled about their estates to consume where they were produced. Throughout the medieval period, these revenues from the king's own estates were an essential element of his power; the extent and distribution of the royal domain were touchstones of his authority.
Beyond the revenue in kind produced on the king's estates or collected by his bailiffs, supplemented by a proportion of the trappings of his dead followers and any quasi-judicial fines that could be seized to his use, the king's revenue lay in services, such as his right to summon the army or to secure labour for his fortresses, cartage for his crops, or suitors for his courts. All these services and many of his food rents needed constant vigilance to enforce or secure. No prolonged expansion of central authority could rest on this anarchic foundation.
Such primitive sources of supply were the consequence of the almost complete collapse of a system of money exchanges across Europe, which was itself a consequence both of economic regression and perhaps a shortage of bullion; until the opening up of the central European silver mines on a large scale in the later Middle Ages, Europe had few supplies of ore for coinage. The monetary chaos of the 7th and 8th centuries was in part relieved by Charlemagne's introduction of the first medieval European silver coinage of commercial use, his pound of 240 pennies (deniers), coins of excellent quality and weight. Yet the multiplication of local mints and unstable values made even the abundant silver coinage of the 14th century awkward to use and offered innumerable opportunities for malpractice—from coining on a small scale by petty forgers to large but undisclosed devaluations by princes.
For all its inconveniences, however, the use of money to replace food rents or services rapidly became widespread as soon as the circulation of coinage and the evolution of a market made it possible. In the 10th century, the great domains of Italy were already being leased out; and, by the end of the 14th century, rent rather than labour was the characteristic peasant due everywhere in Latin Europe except in parts of Germany and central Europe. Similarly, it became increasingly common to commute the obligations of free tenants and feudal vassals to money payments; the very term aid (Latin auxilium), originally meaning simply the help a man owed his lord, had by 1200 come to mean a tax. The king could in theory impose what dues he liked, as could any other lord; these arbitrary tallages were of considerable importance in areas where, as in Capetian France, there were large towns on the domain to contribute to it. The exploitation of the forests also contributed in fines and licenses; market tolls and even a primitive form of sales tax went to swell the domain revenue. Though these profits could all be commuted and so more readily applied to the common needs of the kingdom, they still formed an extraordinarily complex and miscellaneous collection of rights of fluctuating value, which was far beyond the capacity of any central accounting system to assess or collect in detail—hence the importance of the local revenue collectors, stewards of the royal domain, sheriffs, provosts, vicars, and so forth. In general, the practice was to allow these officers to collect the normal profits of lordship for themselves in return for a fixed payment, accounting in detail only for such extraordinary revenue as heavy judicial fines or tallages. Fixed incomes of this kind suffered through a marked inflation over much of 13th-century Europe.
Rising costs of government in the 12th and 13th centuries required new and more comprehensive taxes little connected with either the ownership of land or the exploitation of vassals. The church, with its tithes, had long collected a form of income tax; under Innocent III the so-called charitable subsidy was imposed on the whole church by the papacy. Lay princes first employed a similar principle to finance the Crusades of the later 12th century by imposing a tax on the movable goods of their subjects. By the end of the 13th century, such taxes were frequent. In many respects they were the first manifestation of an act of sovereign government in Europe for centuries, being applicable to all subjects upon a uniform principle—although in practice the collectors often struck bargains with whole communities rather than pursue the complexities of universal assessment. The fifteenth and thirtieth granted by the English Parliament at regular intervals from the reign of Edward I were also employed occasionally in France, where a combination of a hearth tax and a variety of forms of sales tax (such as the notorious gabelle, a salt tax) became the most characteristic and permanent forms of national taxation. Customs dues, particularly on comparatively valuable and portable goods such as wool, wine, and cloth, also became widespread in the 13th century; it was at this time that elements of a genuine commercial policy first appeared in the conduct of princes, so that merchants began to secure legal and political rights as a class (as opposed to local privileges).
These merchants owed their political influence largely to the possession of large sums of cash or increasingly trustworthy systems of credit. Kings, and lesser rulers too, constantly found that their need for money was urgent but that their means of realizing it were slow. It took several years for a grant of a subsidy by subjects to be assessed and collected, but no army or even household could go without wages so long. Until the late 12th century, the sources of available credit were chiefly the Jews, exempt from the prohibitions of the church against usury, and goldsmiths. The Jews, generally prevented by law from holding land, were widely found in the towns, living sometimes under the protection of the church and often under that of the king, who exacted heavy sums in return for his protection and sometimes assumed the rights of a Jewish creditor himself. The life of the Jewish community was extremely precarious, for the Jews were constantly subject to the civil disabilities imposed by the church and were the most frequent victims of a wanton crusading zeal and sporadic violence; they found in kings harsh and inconsistent protectors who not infrequently expelled them from their lands as a measure of extortion or political appeasement.
The communities of the early Middle Ages lived on intimate terms with a largely hostile environment. Storms on sea and land, floods, pestilences, and famine were constant hazards. Even in the more densely settled parts of Europe, impenetrable forest and trackless fen covered large areas. These areas were often believed to be the haunts of demons and, in fact, provided refuge for brigands and outlaws as well as wolves and wild beasts. The uncultivated moorlands and mountain passes were safely crossed only in haste and with company.
The religious beliefs of the Germanic tribes gave way rapidly before the missionary fervour of Arian and Roman missionaries, but many pagan elements passed into the superficial Christianity of the first converts. Devotion to local saints was often (even deliberately) based upon earlier pagan cults, while churches were built on the sites of temples or sacred groves. The mere possession of such wonder-working relics as the Holy Lance of the empire was supposed to confer a title to the crown and a formidable military authority to its holder. There was a brisk traffic in such objects among princes, while the sacred groves and wells of the earlier religion rapidly took on the name of some local saint for the peasant population. Augury, the sacrifice of cattle, and a host of other pagan rites continued throughout the period, though the ecclesiastical police system was more and more successful in sharpening the distinction between acceptable devotion and witchcraft.
Christian life at the parish level necessarily reflected such conditions. In an illiterate society it was the ceremonial performance of the sacraments that was of paramount importance; indeed, preaching was a late and occasional addition to the duties of the parish clergy. The blessing of harvests and houses and the averting of plague, fire, and invasion by regular formal intercession were the essential functions of the parish clergy. Correspondingly, communal disaster and outbreaks of anticlericalism were closely connected. For the salvation of the individual, the church required annual confession and very occasional taking of the sacrament. Private confession and private penance became the rule by 1100, but penance might be done by extensive traveling. By the 12th century, pilgrimages were made to the great international shrines of Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, or even St. Thomas of Canterbury, as well as to a host of lesser local shrines, insuring against the future or expiating past crimes. The Crusades, in part intended to restore the pilgrim road to Jerusalem, were themselves a means of securing full remission of sins for the participants. Their frequent failure or diversion to trivial or political ends made them a dying force after 1300, but the need for such concrete means of salvation continued. Papal jubilees and the organization of a system of indulgences secured by generous alms met this need, though at the same time they offered many opportunities for abuse.
Until the 12th century, when Manichaeism spread through Italy and southern France, the orthodox church in the West was notably free of the doctrinal divisions that rent the Eastern church. Eradicated by prolonged and bloody war, this heretical view had little later influence, but the source of the success of Manichaeism—dissatisfaction with the wealth and pastoral inertia of the secular church—was to produce a multitude of dissident movements that laid stress either upon the defects of the propertied clergy or upon the possibility of direct illumination of the individual, notably by the reading of the Scriptures; already in the 12th century the Waldenses had adopted such views. In the late 14th century, John Wycliffe in England preached individual salvation and criticized the whole fabric of the church, sacramental and hierarchic. Wycliffe's doctrines met with little response in England but provided the starting point for the Hussite movement in Bohemia, where economic, political, and doctrinal revolution united to threaten the whole social and ecclesiastical order of eastern Europe.
In part this multiplication of dissent drew on the anticlericalism of the more educated laity and on wider knowledge of the Scriptures in vernacular versions, but it also coincided with the end of the period of monastic reform and development. While the fervour of St. Francis produced a new order to perform a vital function within the church, the devotional tendencies of the 14th and 15th centuries associated with the names of Meister Eckehart or Thomas à Kempis were largely devoid of institutional consequences. At the opposite extreme of this interior devotion was the proliferation of extravagant sects such as the recurring appearance of the flagellants in the years after the Black Death and its successors ravaged Europe. The prophetic form of much of the Scriptures, the frequency of disasters that appeared, at least locally, to portend the collapse of human society, and the general belief that the centuries after Christ's coming represented the last age of mankind produced a steady trickle of sects believing in the imminence of judgment or the new Jerusalem, encouraged by an easy distortion of the view of such academic prophets as Joachim of Fiore.
Against the hostility of their world, seen or unseen, medieval societies also fell back upon a wide variety of communities vowed to mutual support. The minimal privacy of the characteristic medieval household gave all houses a communal quality. It was common for several generations to live, eat, and sleep under one roof, which often enough also covered the livestock. The earliest forms of Germanic settlement and organization rested upon the kin group, the early codes all supposing that the kin had absolute responsibility for its members. In the unstable society of the early Middle Ages, the bonds of commendation by which men bound themselves to a protector provided a substitute for the security and social cohesiveness of the earlier kin group. The medieval impulse toward the formation of communities bound together by oaths also may be seen in the trading guilds of the communes, in the councils of kings and princes, and even in the societies of rebels or robber bands.
The tightly knit character of most medieval communities was a result of the relative immobility of the population. While the church and warfare were international occupations in which a man might serve from one end of Europe to the other and though merchants traveled with their wares across a multitude of frontiers, the bulk of the agricultural population rarely journeyed more than a few miles from their village, and many townspeople were equally confined. News traveled slowly and inaccurately, borne by pilgrims, peddlers, bailiffs, and beggars; marriage outside the village was unusual; and local dialects sharply contrasted. On the edge of this society, however, some adventurous travelers were covering huge distances. The Vikings sailed south to the Mediterranean, east and south to the Black Sea, and west to Iceland, Greenland, and the coast of North America. In the 13th century, the Venetian traveler Marco Polo crossed the breadth of Asia to China, where several Franciscan missionaries were to follow. In the 15th century, Portuguese seamen groped their way south along the African coast in pursuit of gold and a sea route to the Indies, rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. In 1492 a Genoese seaman, in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, crossed the Atlantic and returned; remarkable though Columbus' voyage was, the rapidity with which its significance was assessed and exploited provided proof of how much the European view of the world was changing.
Primitive though the vessels and instruments of these navigators were, they showed a marked advance over the equipment of their predecessors, an advance that was widespread and accelerating in the 14th and 15th centuries. From the 9th century on, waterpower was extensively harnessed to mill flour, replacing the infinitely laborious querns of past millennia; it was also at work driving the hammers of the ironworkers and the first fulling mills, which revolutionized the social patterns of cloth working. In the 12th century, windmills also began to be used widely, while, at about the same time, changes in the forms of harness allowed horses to take over some of the plowing and carting formerly performed by oxen. In the 13th century, mining techniques for the first time allowed the driving of deep but drained shafts beneath the surface to the richer iron, copper, tin, and lead of Bohemia, Sweden, or Cornwall. By 1500 the demand for charcoal for smelting and timber for shipbuilding was already pressing hard upon the once inexhaustible forest of an older Europe.
As a consequence of these changes, the use of iron became common, even in the implements and houses of the poor. Metal cooking pots, glass bottles, and glazed wheel-turned pottery came into widespread use. Houses of stone or even brick often now had the chimneys and glass windows formerly found only in palaces. Domestic furniture of these centuries survives to show that it was no longer confined to crude benches, tables, and chests but was more carefully fitted and elaborately decorated. In the 15th century, the former cloth-working town of Arras expanded its manufacture of the tapestry hangings for which it would be long famous, while silk, linen, and cotton came into wider use. Sumptuary laws showed how much wider a range of society was able to dress in the materials and fashions that had once been the hallmark of the highest rank.
The earliest surviving medieval architecture is ecclesiastical; outside the area of continuing Byzantine occupation, these are small churches sometimes built out of the fragments of former Roman buildings and always derivative in style. Some of the greater Carolingian churches, however, were more ambitious in scale and conception, and the surviving 11th- and 12th-century Romanesque churches show the emergence of a wholly distinctive architectural convention in enormous and complex buildings. Gothic emerged in early 12th-century France and became the dominant style of the Latin West. In Italy the success of this style came late and was short-lived, for it was overtaken by the revived classical models before it had long taken root; but over much of northern Europe the Gothic survived into the 20th century.
The earliest surviving medieval domestic architecture is found in a few stone houses of the towns and in the modifications of fortresses to serve more domestic purposes. By the 13th century, the stone palaces of princes were constructed with the skills first practiced in churches. Such planned towns as Aigues-Mortes foreshadowed the elaborate fortifications of many towns of the 15th century, within which numerous multistoried houses of wealthier merchants survive to the present. The single chamber of the lord's hall or the peasant's hut was increasingly giving way to the house divided into rooms, though in much of rural Europe there was little to distinguish the cabins of the poor of 1500 from those of a millennium earlier.
The recreations of most ranks of society are poorly attested before the later Middle Ages. Among great men and warriors, the life of the hall and forest was preeminent. In the hall the long eating and heavy drinking of the lord's followers were favourite motifs of the heroic poetry once sung by household or itinerant poets, and feasts were an essential focus of social life. Coronations, weddings, and funerals were all celebrated with banquets. Pagan customs of punctuating the year with such events were either contested or taken over by the church; the gathering of the harvest and the celebration of Christmas were regular occasions of the kind, and from time to time the enthronement of a bishop produced a banquet of extraordinary splendour. The earliest texts stress the quantity (rather than the quality) of food and drink, but the more detailed later medieval records show that scarce or exotic foods and an extreme elaboration in their preparation were becoming the marks of ceremonial extravagance, the highest achievement of the pastrycook being such “subtleties” as the Holy Trinity surrounded by choirs of angels. Eating, drinking, and singing were supplemented by various forms of gambling, to which the Germanic peoples were so addicted that men were known to stake their own liberty on the fall of the dice and so condemn their descendants to slavery. Backgammon, chess, and (late in the period) card games were played by those with leisure and means.
The principal recreations of the nobility in the countryside were hunting and fighting, both of which were originally conducted in an extremely dangerous way. The main beasts chased were the deer, boar, wolf, and bear, with rabbits, hares, and foxes serving as a lesser challenge; all were usually pursued on horses with packs of hounds, the variety and qualities of which were discussed in numerous later medieval treatises. The support of the chase was an important economic and legal institution. The raising of the lord's dogs and other services for his hunting were conditions of some tenures, and the preservation of hunting rights was a source of revenue and a cause of oppression. Another honourable sport was falconry, first recorded in the 5th century. There was an appropriate bird for each rank of society, and in this sport women might participate more often than in the hunt.
The holding of sham battles for enjoyment and exercise became general in the 12th century, when the ransom of prisoners was an accepted means of support for skilled but landless knights. By the end of the century, the practice was so widespread as to attract the condemnation of the church and to represent, it was supposed, a threat to the stability of the state, since gatherings of armed men could readily become rebellions. In later centuries, this generalized melee gave way increasingly to highly formalized jousting between individual knights wearing armour especially adapted for a variety of possible rules of combat. In the 14th century, this was still a possible means of capture, ransom, or death; by the end of the 15th, it was almost entirely a sport.
For the less wealthy, the available entertainments were rarer and less elaborate but perhaps not much safer. Football (soccer), wrestling, or fighting with staves, regulated by few conventions, produced a heavy casualty rate, as did brawling in innumerable unregulated alehouses. Brewing was a cottage industry frequently engaged in by women, who sold their product subject to a seignorial right to examine the quality of the drink. In a society in which sugar was expensive even for kings and in which honey was prized but scarce, the thick beer and mead of the north was not only a focus of recreation but also an essential element of diet, as was the wine of the south.
Among the earliest of recorded arts was that of song, and a substantial body of medieval music has survived. The best-known is the ecclesiastical plainsong, whose traditional origins lie in the liturgical reforms of Pope Gregory I and which was elaborated into the complex polyphony of the 14th and 15th centuries, when for the first time the names of individual composers are recorded. The songs of troubadours and minnesingers of the 11th and 12th centuries show the rise of a sophisticated secular music that was increasingly accompanied by a variety of musical instruments. Well before 1500 the playing of music as an autonomous and often purely secular art was already established.
The decorative arts of painting and sculpture had undergone a similar progress. The rise of the professional painter of pictures to be considered as a creator in his own right is largely matched by the decline of the illumination of manuscripts, which reached a peak of elaboration in the mid-15th century just as the earliest printed books were heralding the end of the role of the hand-copied manuscript. Printing on wooden blocks spread rapidly in the second half of the 15th century, and, by 1500, presses were at work in every major country in Europe. Though the earliest printed books were extremely expensive and their purpose frequently liturgical, their potential importance was great because they could cater to the new market of the educated laity. These now included far more than the circle of great men who commissioned the splendid psalters and books of hours of the 14th and 15th centuries, which had overthrown a monastic monopoly of lavish manuscripts that had prevailed since the time of Cassiodorus and his copyists at Vivarium in the 6th century.
The institutions and the subject matter of education had already proceeded according to a similar rhythm. The only schools of Europe in the 8th century, except perhaps in parts of northern Italy, were those attached often to monasteries and more rarely to bishoprics. Independent thought, even in theology, was extremely rare; theology remained under the long shadow of St. Augustine of Hippo, and the Greek learning and originality of John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century was little pursued. The rise of the new skills in dialectic in the 11th and 12th centuries produced two phenomena: first, a confidence in rational thought as a means of solving problems, especially those raised by the conflict of authorities, and, second, a number of teachers whose exceptional talents attracted scholars from the farthest ends of Europe. The self-confidence and European reputation of Peter Abelard reveal this movement at its most distinctive. Around such teachers grew up either religious communities such as that of Saint-Victor of Paris or the earliest universities. In the 12th century, the lawyers of Bologna, the doctors of Salerno, and, above all, the theologians of Paris were becoming organized bodies governed by a chancellor; by the 13th century, the universities possessed their own statutes regulating the arduous courses of study toward recognized degrees. The crown of studies was the pursuit of the highest knowledge, theology. The forms of 13th-century university study gave rise to the characteristic theological achievements of the period, the summae of the Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan St. Bonaventure. The founding of universities received a new impetus at the end of the 14th and 15th centuries, when they spread into Scandinavia, Scotland, and eastern Europe. It was in these years that most secured a large independence from external ecclesiastical government, and in the Councils of Constance and Basel the universities claimed a position of the highest authority.
Much of the earlier confidence in the capacity of intellectual endeavour according to the established forms of inquiry drained away in the 15th century. Logicians in the tradition of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham asserted the essential disparity of faith and reason; the canon law proved incapable of resolving the most pressing problems of ecclesiastical authority or of securing effective reforms; and the only literary forms that offered novelty and room for growth were the vernacular literature of the court and the classical poetry of the humanists. Whatever changes occurred in education were generated not in the universities but in the schools of such Italians as Vittorino da Feltre near Mantua or of the Brethren of the Common Life in the Netherlands. These first insisted upon the effects of education on the whole personality, where the numerous grammar, guild, and charitable schools had provided only a grounding in the mechanics of literacy. The retreat of the monopoly of the church in education stands beside the work of the explorers and the rise of the absolute monarchies as an important mark of the ending of medieval society.
Few historians are comfortable with the triumphalist and western Europe-centred image of the Renaissance as the irresistible march of modernity and progress. A sharp break with medieval values and institutions, a new awareness of the individual, an awakened interest in the material world and nature, and a recovery of the cultural heritage of ancient Greece and Rome—these were once understood to be the major achievements of the Renaissance. Today, every particular of this formula is under suspicion if not altogether repudiated. Nevertheless, the term Renaissance remains a widely recognized label for the multifaceted period between the heyday of medieval universalism, as embodied in the Papacy and Holy Roman Empire, and the convulsions and sweeping transformations of the 17th century.
In this period some important innovations of the Middle Ages came into their own, including the revival of urban life, commercial enterprise based on private capital, banking, the formation of states, systematic investigation of the physical world, classical scholarship, and vernacular literatures. In religious life the Renaissance was a time of the broadening and institutionalizing of earlier initiatives in lay piety and lay-sponsored clerical reforms, rather than of the abandonment of traditional beliefs. In government, city-states and regional and national principalities supplanted the fading hegemony of the empire and the Papacy and obliterated many of the local feudal jurisdictions that had covered Europe, although within states power continued to be monopolized by elites drawing their strength from both landed and mercantile wealth. If there was a Renaissance “rediscovery of the world and of man,” as the 19th-century historians Jules Michelet (in the seventh volume of his History of France) and Jacob Burckhardt (in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860]) asserted, it can be found mainly in literature and art, influenced by the latest and most successful of a long series of medieval classical revivals. For all but exceptional individuals and a few marginal groups, the standards of behaviour continued to arise from traditional social and moral codes. Identity derived from class, family, occupation, and community, although each of these social forms was itself undergoing significant modification. Thus, for example, while there is no substance to Burckhardt's notion that in Italy women enjoyed perfect equality with men, the economic and structural features of Renaissance patrician families may have enhanced the scope of activity and influence of women of that class. Finally, the older view of the Renaissance centred too exclusively on Italy, and within Italy on a few cities—Florence, Venice, and Rome. By discarding false dichotomies—Renaissance versus Middle Ages, classical versus Gothic, modern versus feudal—one is able to grasp more fully the interrelatedness of Italy with the rest of Europe and to investigate the extent to which the great centres of Renaissance learning and art were nourished and influenced by less exalted towns and by changes in the pattern of rural life.
Additional treatment of Renaissance thought and intellectual activity can be found in humanism and classical scholarship.
Although town revival was a general feature of 10th- and 11th-century Europe (associated with an upsurge in population that is not completely understood), in Italy the urban imprint of Roman times had never been erased. By the 11th century, the towers of new towns, and, more commonly, of old towns newly revived, began to dot the spiny Italian landscape—eye-catching creations of a burgeoning population literally brimming with new energy due to improved diets. As in Roman times, the medieval Italian town lived in close relation to its surrounding rural area, or contado; Italian city folk seldom relinquished their ties to the land from which they and their families had sprung. Rare was the successful tradesman or banker who did not invest some of his profits in the family farm or a rural noble who did not spend part of the year in his house inside city walls. In Italian towns, knights, merchants, rentiers, and skilled craftsmen lived and worked side by side, fought in the same militia, and married into each other's families. Social hierarchy there was, but it was a tangled system with no simple division between noble and commoner, between landed and commercial wealth. That landed magnates took part in civic affairs helps explain the early militancy of the townsfolk in resisting the local bishop, who was usually the principal claimant to lordship in the community. Political action against a common enemy tended to infuse townspeople with a sense of community and civic loyalty. By the end of the 11th century, civic patriotism began to express itself in literature; city chronicles combined fact and legend to stress a city's Roman origins and, in some cases, its inheritance of Rome's special mission to rule. Such motifs reflect the cities' achievement of autonomy from their respective episcopal or secular feudal overlords and, probably, the growth of rivalries between neighbouring communities.
Rivalry between towns was part of the expansion into the neighbouring countryside, with the smaller and weaker towns submitting to the domination of the larger and stronger. As the activity of the towns became more complex, sporadic collective action was replaced by permanent civic institutions. Typically, the first of these was an executive magistracy, named the consulate (to stress the continuity with republican Rome). In the late 11th and early 12th centuries, this process—consisting of the establishment of juridical autonomy, the emergence of a permanent officialdom, and the spread of power beyond the walls of the city to the contado and neighbouring towns—was well under way in about a dozen Italian centres and evident in dozens more; the loose urban community was becoming a corporate entity, or commune; the city was becoming a city-state.
The typical 13th-century city-state was a republic administering a territory of dependent towns; whether it was a democracy is a question of definition. The idea of popular sovereignty existed in political thought and was reflected in the practice of calling a parlamento, or mass meeting, of the populace in times of emergency; but in none of the republics were the people as a whole admitted to regular participation in government. On the other hand, the 13th century saw the establishment, after considerable struggle, of assemblies in which some portion of the male citizenry, restricted by property and other qualifications, took part in debate, legislation, and the selection of officials. Most offices were filled by men serving on a rotating, short-term basis. If the almost universal obligation of service in the civic militia is also considered, it becomes clear that participation in the public life of the commune was shared by a considerable part of the male population, although the degree of participation varied from one commune to another and tended to decline. Most of the city republics were small enough (in 1300 Florence, one of the largest, had perhaps 100,000 people; Padua, nearer the average, had about 15,000) so that public business was conducted by and for citizens who knew each other, and civic issues were a matter of widespread and intense personal concern.
The darker side of this intense community life was conflict. It became a cliché of contemporary observers that when townsmen were not fighting their neighbours they were fighting each other. Machiavelli explained this as the result of the natural enmity between nobles and “the people—the former desiring to command, the latter unwilling to obey.” This contains an essential truth: a basic problem was the unequal distribution of power and privilege, but the class division was further complicated by factional rivalry within the ruling groups and by ideological differences—Guelfism, or loyalty to the pope, versus Ghibellinism, or vassalage to the German emperors. The continuing leadership of the old knightly class, with its violent feudal ways and the persistence of a winner-take-all conception of politics, guaranteed bloody and devastating conflict. Losers could expect to be condemned to exile, with their houses burned and their property confiscated. Winners had to be forever vigilant against the unending conspiracies of exiles yearning to return to their homes and families.
During the 14th century a number of cities, despairing of finding a solution to the problem of civic strife, were turning from republicanism to signoria, the rule of one man. The signore, or lord, was usually a member of a local feudal family that was also a power in the commune; thus, lordship did not appear to be an abnormal development, particularly if the signore chose, as most did, to rule through existing republican institutions. Sometimes a signoria was established as the result of one noble faction's victory over another, while in a few cases a feudal noble who had been hired by the republic as its condottiere, or military captain, became its master. Whatever the process, hereditary lordship had become the common condition and free republicanism the exception by the late 14th century. Contrary to what Burckhardt believed, Italy in the 14th century had not shaken off feudalism. In the south, feudalism was entrenched in the loosely centralized Kingdom of Naples, successor state to the Hohenstaufen and Norman kingdoms. In central and northern Italy, feudal lordship and knightly values merged with medieval communal institutions to produce the typical state of the Renaissance. Where the nobles were excluded by law from political participation in the commune, as in the Tuscan cities of Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, parliamentary republicanism had a longer life; but even these bastions of liberty had intervals of disguised or open lordship. The great maritime republic of Venice reversed the usual process by increasing the powers of its councils at the expense of the doge (from Latin dux, “leader”). However, Venice never had a feudal nobility, only a merchant aristocracy that called itself noble and jealously guarded its hereditary sovereignty against incursions from below.
There were new as well as traditional elements in the Renaissance city-state. Changes in the political and economic situation affected the evolution of government, while the growth of the humanist movement influenced developing conceptions of citizenship, patriotism, and civic history. The decline in the ability of both the empire and the Papacy to dominate Italian affairs as they had done in the past left each state free to pursue its own goals within the limits of its resources. These goals were, invariably, the security and power of each state vis-à-vis its neighbours. Diplomacy became a skilled game of experts; rivalries were deadly, and warfare was endemic. Because the costs of war were all-consuming, particularly as mercenary troops replaced citizen militias, the states had to find new sources of revenue and develop methods of securing public credit. Governments borrowed from moneylenders (stimulating the development of banking), imposed customs duties, and levied fines; but, as their costs continued to exceed revenues, they came up with new solutions such as the forced loan, funded debt, and taxes on property and income. New officials with special skills were required to take property censuses (the catasto), calculate assessments, and manage budgets, as well as to provision troops, take minutes of council meetings, administer justice, write to other governments, and send instructions to envoys and other agents. All this required public space—council, judicial, and secretarial rooms, storage space for bulging archives, and both closed and open-air ceremonial settings where officials interacted with the citizenry and received foreign visitors. As secular needs joined and blended with religious ones, towns took their place alongside the church and the monasteries as patrons of builders, painters, and sculptors (often the same persons). In the late 13th century, great programs of public building and decoration were begun that were intended to symbolize and portray images of civic power and beneficence and to communicate the values of “the common good.” Thus the expansion of the functions of the city-state was accompanied by the development of a public ideology and a civic rhetoric intended to make people conscious of their blessings and responsibilities as citizens.
The city-state tended to subsume many of the protective and associative functions and loyalties connected with clan, family, guild, and party. Whether it fostered individualism by replacing traditional forms of association—as Burckhardt, Alfred von Martin, and other historians have claimed—is problematic. The Renaissance “discovery of the individual” is a nebulous concept, lending itself to many different meanings. It could be argued, for example, that the development of communal law, with its strong Roman influence, enhanced individual property rights or that participatory government promoted a consciousness of individual value. It could also be argued, however, that the city-state was a more effective controller of the loyalty and property of its members than were feudal jurisdictions and voluntary associations. In some respects the great merchants and bankers of the Renaissance, operating in international markets, had more freedom than local tradespeople, who were subject to guild restrictions, communal price and quality controls, and usury laws; but the economic ideal of Renaissance states was mercantilism, not free private enterprise.
Amid the confusion of medieval Italian politics, a new pattern of relations emerged by the 14th century. No longer revolving in the papal or in the imperial orbit, the stronger states were free to assert their hegemony over the weaker, and a system of regional power centres evolved. From time to time the more ambitious states, especially those that had brought domestic conflict under control, made a bid for a wider hegemony in the peninsula, such as Milan attempted under the lordship of the Visconti family. In the 1380s and '90s Gian Galeazzo Visconti pushed Milanese power eastward as far as Padua, at the very doorstep of Venice, and southward to the Tuscan cities of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena and even to Perugia in papal territory. Some believed that Gian Galeazzo meant to be king of Italy; whether or not this is true, he would probably have overrun Florence, the last outpost of resistance in central Italy, had he not died suddenly in 1402, leaving a divided inheritance and much confusion. In the 1420s, under Filippo Maria, Milan began to expand again; but by then Venice, with territorial ambitions of its own, had joined with Florence to block Milan's advance, while the other Italian states took sides or remained neutral according to their own interests. The mid-15th century saw the Italian peninsula embroiled in a turmoil of intrigues, plots, revolts, wars, and shifting alliances, of which the most sensational was the reversal that brought the two old enemies, Florence and Milan, together against Venetian expansion. This “diplomatic revolution,” supported by Cosimo de' Medici, the unofficial head of the Florentine republic, is the most significant illustration of the emergence of balance-of-power diplomacy in Renaissance Italy.
The notion that ancient wisdom and eloquence lay slumbering in the Dark Ages until awakened in the Renaissance was the creation of the Renaissance itself. The idea of the revival of classical antiquity is one of those great myths, comparable to the idea of the universal civilizing mission of imperial Rome or to the idea of progress in a modern industrial society, by which an era defines itself in history. Like all such myths, it is a blend of fact and invention. Classical thought and style permeated medieval culture in ways past counting. Most of the authors known to the Renaissance were known to the Middle Ages as well, while the classical texts “discovered” by the humanists were often not originals but medieval copies preserved in monastic or cathedral libraries. Moreover, the Middle Ages had produced at least two earlier revivals of classical antiquity. The so-called Carolingian Renaissance of the late 8th and 9th centuries saved many ancient works from destruction or oblivion, passing them down to posterity in its beautiful minuscule script (which influenced the humanist scripts of the Renaissance). A 12th-century Renaissance saw the revival of Roman law, Latin poetry, and Greek science, including almost the whole corpus of Aristotelian writings known today.
Nevertheless, the classical revival of the Italian Renaissance was so different from these earlier movements in spirit and substance that the humanists might justifiably claim that it was original and unique. During most of the Middle Ages, classical studies and virtually all intellectual activities were carried on by churchmen, usually members of the monastic orders. In the Italian cities, this monopoly was partially breached by the growth of a literate laity with some taste and need for literary culture. New professions reflected the growth of both literary and specialized lay education—the dictatores, or teachers of practical rhetoric, lawyers, and the ever-present notary (a combination of solicitor and public recorder). These, and not Burckhardt's wandering scholar-clerics, were the true predecessors of the humanists.
In Padua a kind of early humanism emerged, flourished, and declined between the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Paduan classicism was a product of the vigorous republican life of the commune, and its decline coincided with the loss of the city's liberty. A group of Paduan jurists, lawyers, and notaries—all trained as dictatores—developed a taste for classical literature that probably stemmed from their professional interest in Roman law and their affinity for the history of the Roman Republic. The most famous of these Paduan classicists was Albertino Mussato, a poet, historian, and playwright, as well as lawyer and politician, whose play Ecerinis, modeled on Seneca, has been called the first Renaissance tragedy. By reviving several types of ancient literary forms and by promoting the use of classical models for poetry and rhetoric, the Paduan humanists helped make the 14th-century Italians more conscious of their classical heritage; in other respects, however, they remained close to their medieval antecedents, showing little comprehension of the vast cultural and historical gulf that separated them from the ancients.
It was Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, who first understood fully that antiquity was a civilization apart and, understanding it, outlined a program of classically oriented studies that would lay bare its spirit. The focus of Petrarch's insight was language: if classical antiquity was to be understood in its own terms, it would be through the speech with which the ancients had communicated their thoughts. This meant that the languages of antiquity had to be studied as the ancients had used them and not as vehicles for carrying modern thoughts. Thus, grammar, which included the reading and careful imitation of ancient authors from a linguistic point of view, was the basis of Petrarch's entire program.
From the mastery of language, one moved on to the attainment of eloquence. For Petrarch, as for Cicero, eloquence was not merely the possession of an elegant style, nor yet the power of persuasion, but the union of elegance and power together with virtue. One who studied language and rhetoric in the tradition of the great orators of antiquity did so for a moral purpose—to persuade men and women to the good life—for, said Petrarch in a dictum that could stand as the slogan of Renaissance humanism, “it is better to will the good than to know the truth.”
To will the good, one must first know it, and so there could be no true eloquence without wisdom. According to Leonardo Bruni, a leading humanist of the next generation, Petrarch “opened the way for us to show in what manner we might acquire learning.” Petrarch's union of rhetoric and philosophy, modeled on the classical ideal of eloquence, provided the humanists with an intellectual dignity and a moral ethos lacking to the medieval dictatores and classicists. It also pointed the way toward a program of studies—the studia humanitatis—by which the ideal might be achieved. As elaborated by Bruni, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and others, the notion of the humanities was based on classical models—the tradition of a liberal arts curriculum conceived by the Greeks and elaborated by Cicero and Quintilian. Medieval scholars had been fascinated by the notion that there were seven liberal arts, no more and no less, although they did not always agree as to which they were. The humanists had their own favourites, which invariably included grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy, and history, with a nod or two toward music and mathematics. They also had their own ideas about methods of teaching and study. They insisted upon the mastery of Classical Latin and, where possible, Greek, which began to be studied again in the West in 1397, when the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to lecture in Florence. They also insisted upon the study of classical authors at first hand, banishing the medieval textbooks and compendiums from their schools. This greatly increased the demand for classical texts, which was first met by copying manuscript books in the newly developed humanistic scripts and then, after the mid-15th century, by the method of printing with movable type, first developed in Germany and rapidly adopted in Italy and elsewhere. Thus, while it is true that most of the ancient authors were already known in the Middle Ages, there was an all-important difference between circulating a book in many copies to a reading public and jealously guarding a single exemplar as a prized possession in some remote monastery library.
The term humanist (Italian umanista, Latin humanista) first occurs in 15th-century documents to refer to a teacher of the humanities. Humanists taught in a variety of ways. Some founded their own schools—as Vittorino da Feltre did in Mantua in 1423 and Guarino Veronese in Ferrara in 1429—where students could study the new curriculum at both elementary and advanced levels. Some humanists taught in universities, which, while remaining strongholds of specialization in law, medicine, and theology, had begun to make a place for the new disciplines by the late 14th century. Still others were employed in private households, as was the poet and scholar Politian (Angelo Poliziano), who was tutor to the Medici children as well as a university professor.
Formal education was only one of several ways in which the humanists shaped the minds of their age. Many were themselves fine literary artists who exemplified the eloquence they were trying to foster in their students. Renaissance Latin poetry, for example, nowadays dismissed—usually unread—as imitative and formalistic, contains much graceful and lyrical expression by such humanists as Politian, Giovanni Pontano, and Jacopo Sannazzaro. In drama, Politian, Pontano, and Pietro Bembo were important innovators, and the humanists were in their element in the composition of elegant letters, dialogues, and discourses. By the late 15th century, humanists were beginning to apply their ideas about language and literature to composition in Italian as well as in Latin, demonstrating that the “vulgar” tongue could be as supple and as elegant in poetry and prose as was Classical Latin.
Not every humanist was a poet, but most were classical scholars. Classical scholarship consisted of a set of related, specialized techniques by which the cultural heritage of antiquity was made available for convenient use. Essentially, in addition to searching out and authenticating ancient authors and works, this meant editing—comparing variant manuscripts of a work, correcting faulty or doubtful passages, and commenting in notes or in separate treatises on the style, meaning, and context of an author's thought. Obviously, this demanded not only superb mastery of the languages involved and a command of classical literature but also a knowledge of the culture that formed the ancient author's mind and influenced his writing. Consequently, the humanists created a vast scholarly literature devoted to these matters and instructive in the critical techniques of classical philology, the study of ancient texts.
Classicism and the literary impulse went hand in hand. From Lovato Lovati and Albertino Mussato to Politian and Pontano, humanists wrote Latin poetry and drama with considerable grace and power (Politian wrote in Greek as well), while others composed epistles, essays, dialogues, treatises, and histories on classical models. In fact, it is fair to say that the development of elegant prose was the major literary achievement of humanism and that the epistle was its typical form. Petrarch's practice of collecting, reordering, and even rewriting his letters—of treating them as works of art—was widely imitated.
For lengthier discussions, the humanist was likely to compose a formal treatise or a dialogue—a classical form that provided the opportunity to combine literary imagination with the discussion of weighty matters. The most famous example of this type is The Courtier, published by Baldassare Castiglione in 1528; a graceful discussion of love, courtly manners, and the ideal education for a perfect gentleman, it had enormous influence throughout Europe. Castiglione had a humanist education, but he wrote The Courtier in Italian, the language Bembo chose for his dialogue on love, Gli Asolani (1505), and Ludovico Ariosto chose for his delightful epic, Orlando furioso, completed in 1516. The vernacular was coming of age as a literary medium.
According to some, a life-and-death struggle between Latin and Italian began in the 14th century, while the mortal enemies of Italian were the humanists, who impeded the natural growth of the vernacular after its brilliant beginning with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In this view, the choice of Italian by such great 16th-century writers as Castiglione, Ariosto, and Machiavelli represents the final “triumph” of the vernacular and the restoration of contact between Renaissance culture and its native roots. The reality is somewhat less dramatic and more complicated. Most Italian writers regarded Latin as being as much a part of their culture as the vernacular, and most of them wrote in both languages. It should also be remembered that Italy was a land of powerful regional dialect traditions; until the late 13th century, Latin was the only language common to all Italians. By the end of that century, however, Tuscan was emerging as the primary vernacular, and Dante's choice of it for his The Divine Comedy ensured its preeminence. Of lyric poets writing in Tuscan (hereafter called Italian), the greatest was Petrarch. His canzoni, or songs, and sonnets in praise of Laura are revealing studies of the effect of love upon the lover; his Italia mia is a plea for peace that evokes the beauties of his native land; his religious songs reveal his deep spiritual feeling.
Petrarch's friend and admirer Giovanni Boccaccio is best known for his Decameron; but he pioneered in adapting classical forms to Italian usage, including the hunting poem, romance, idyll, and pastoral, whereas some of his themes, most notably the story of Troilus and Cressida, were borrowed by other poets, including Geoffrey Chaucer and Torquato Tasso.
The scarcity of first-rate Italian poetry throughout most of the 15th century has caused a number of historians to regret the passing of il buon secolo, the great age of the language, which supposedly came to an end with the ascendancy of humanist classicism. For every humanist who disdained the vernacular, however, there was a Leonardo Bruni to maintain its excellence or a Poggio Bracciolini to prove it in his own Italian writings. Indeed, there was an absence of first-rate Latin poets until the late 15th century, which suggests a general lack of poetic creativity in this period and not of Italian poetry alone. It may be that both Italian and Latin poets needed time to absorb and assimilate the various new tendencies of the preceding period. Tuscan was as much a new language for many as was Classical Latin, and there was a variety of literary forms to be mastered.
With Lorenzo de' Medici the period of tutelage came to an end. The Magnificent Lorenzo, virtual ruler of Florence in the late 15th century, was one of the fine poets of his time. His sonnets show Petrarch's influence, but transformed with his own genius. His poetry epitomizes the Renaissance ideal of l'uomo universale, the many-sided man. Love of nature, love of women, love of life are the principal themes. The woodland settings and hunting scenes of Lorenzo's poems suggest how he found relief from a busy public life; his love songs to his mistresses and his bawdy carnival ballads show the other face of a devoted father and affectionate husband. The celebration of youth in his most famous poem was etched with the sad realization of the brevity of life. His own ended at the age of 43.
Oh, how fair is youth, and yet how fleeting! Let yourself be joyous if you feel it: Of tomorrow there is no certainty—
Florence was only one centre of the flowering of the vernacular. Ferrara saw literature and art flourish under the patronage of the ruling Este family and before the end of the 15th century counted at least one major poet, Matteo Boiardo, author of the Orlando innamorato, an epic of Roland. A blending of the Arthurian and Carolingian epic traditions, Boiardo's Orlando inspired Ludovico Ariosto to take up the same themes. The result was the finest of all Italian epics, Orlando furioso. The ability of the medieval epic and folk traditions to inspire the poets of such sophisticated centres as Florence and Ferrara suggests that, humanist disdain for the Dark Ages notwithstanding, Renaissance Italians did not allow classicism to cut them off from their medieval roots.
While the humanists were not primarily philosophers and belonged to no single school of formal thought, they had a great deal of influence upon philosophy. They searched out and copied the works of ancient authors, developed critical tools for establishing accurate texts from variant manuscripts, made translations from Latin and Greek, and wrote commentaries that reflected their broad learning and their new standards and points of view. Aristotle's authority remained preeminent, especially in logic and physics, but humanists were instrumental in the revival of other Greek scientists and other ancient philosophies, including stoicism, skepticism, and various forms of Platonism, as, for example, the eclectic Neoplatonist and Gnostic doctrines of the Alexandrian schools known as Hermetic philosophy. All of these were to have far-reaching effects on the subsequent development of European thought. While humanists had a variety of intellectual and scholarly aims, it is fair to say that, like the ancient Romans, they preferred moral philosophy to metaphysics. Their faith in the moral benefits of poetry and rhetoric inspired generations of scholars and educators. Their emphasis upon eloquence, worldly achievement, and fame brought them readers and patrons among merchants and princes and employment in government chancelleries and embassies.
Humanists were secularists in the sense that language, literature, politics, and history, rather than “sacred subjects,” were their central interests. They defended themselves against charges from conservatives that their preference for classical authors was ruining Christian morals and faith, arguing that a solid grounding in the classics was the best preparation for the Christian life. This was already a perennial debate, almost as old as Christianity itself, with neither side able to prove its case. There seems to have been little atheism or dechristianization among the humanists or their pupils, although there were efforts to redefine the relationship between religious and secular culture. Petrarch struggled with the problem in his book Secretum meum (1342–43, revised 1353–58), in which he imagines himself chastized by St. Augustine for his pursuit of worldly fame. Even the most celebrated of Renaissance themes, the “dignity of man,” best known in the Oration (1486) of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, was derived in part from the Church Fathers. Created in the image and likeness of God, people were free to shape their destiny, but human destiny was defined within a Christian, Neoplatonic context of contemplative thought.
You will have the power to sink to the lower forms of life, which are brutish. You will have the power, through your own judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.
Perhaps because Italian politics were so intense and innovative, the tension between traditional Christian teachings and actual behaviour was more frankly acknowledged in political thought than in most other fields. The leading spokesman of the new approach to politics was Niccolò Machiavelli. Best known as the author of The Prince (1513), a short treatise on how to acquire power, create a state, and keep it, Machiavelli dared to argue that success in politics had its own rules. This so shocked his readers that they coined his name into synonyms for the Devil (“Old Nick”) and for crafty, unscrupulous tactics (Machiavellian). No other name, except perhaps that of the Borgias, so readily evokes the image of the wicked Renaissance, and, indeed, Cesare Borgia was one of Machiavelli's chief models for The Prince.
Machiavelli began with the not unchristian axiom that people are immoderate in their ambitions and desires and likely to oppress each other whenever free to do so. To get them to limit their selfishness and act for the common good should be the lofty, almost holy, purpose of governments. How to establish and maintain governments that do this was the central problem of politics, made acute for Machiavelli by the twin disasters of his time, the decline of free government in the city-states and the overrunning of Italy by French, German, and Spanish armies. In The Prince he advocated his emergency solution: Italy needed a new leader, who would unify the people, drive out “the barbarians,” and reestablish civic virtue. But in the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1517), a more detached and extended discussion, he analyzed the foundations and practice of republican government, still trying to explain how stubborn and defective human material was transformed into political community.
Machiavelli was influenced by humanist culture in many ways, including his reverence for classical antiquity, his concern with politics, and his effort to evaluate the impact of fortune as against free choice in human life. The “new path” in politics that he announced in The Prince was an effort to provide a guide for political action based on the lessons of history and his own experience as a foreign secretary in Florence. In his passionate republicanism he showed himself to be the heir of the great humanists of a century earlier who had expounded the ideals of free citizenship and explored the uses of classicism for the public life.
At the beginning of the 15th century, when the Visconti rulers of Milan were threatening to overrun Florence, the humanist chancellor Coluccio Salutati had rallied the Florentines by reminding them that their city was “the daughter of Rome” and the legatee of Roman justice and liberty. Salutati's pupil, Leonardo Bruni, who also served as chancellor, took up this line in his panegyrics of Florence and in his Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII (“Twelve Books of Histories of the Florentine People”). Even before the rise of Rome, according to Bruni, the Etruscans had founded free cities in Tuscany, so the roots of Florentine liberty went very deep. There equality was recognized in justice and opportunity for all citizens, and the claims of individual excellence were rewarded in public offices and public honours. This close relation between freedom and achievement, argued Bruni, explained Florence's superiority in culture as well as in politics. Florence was the home of Italy's greatest poets, the pioneer in both vernacular and Latin literature, and the seat of the Greek revival and of eloquence. In short, Florence was the centre of the studia humanitatis.
As political rhetoric, Bruni's version of Florentine superiority was magnificent and no doubt effective. It inspired the Florentines to hold out against Milanese aggression and to reshape their identity as the seat of “the rebirth of letters” and the champions of freedom; but, as a theory of political culture, this “civic humanism,” as Hans Baron has called it, represented the ideal rather than the reality of 15th-century communal history. Even in Florence, where after 1434 the Medici family held a grip on the city's republican government, opportunities for the active life began to fade. The emphasis in thought began to shift from civic humanism to Neoplatonist idealism and to the kind of utopian mysticism represented by Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man. At the end of the century, Florentines briefly put themselves into the hands of the millennialist Dominican preacher Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who envisioned the city as the “New Jerusalem” rather than as a reincarnation of ancient Rome. Still, even Savonarola borrowed from the civic tradition of the humanists for his political reforms (and for his idea of Florentine superiority) and in so doing created a bridge between the republican past and the crisis years of the early 16th century. Machiavelli got his first job in the Florentine chancellery in 1498, the year of Savonarola's fall from power. Dismissing the friar as one of history's “unarmed prophets” who are bound to fail, Machiavelli was convinced that the precepts of Christianity had helped make the Italian states sluggish and weak. He regarded religion as an indispensable component of human life, but statecraft as a discipline based on its own rules and no more to be subordinated to Christianity than were jurisprudence or medicine. The simplest example of the difference between Christian and political morality is provided by warfare, where the use of deception, so detestable in every other kind of action, is necessary, praiseworthy, even glorious. In the Discourses, Machiavelli commented upon a Roman defeat:
This is worth noting by every citizen who is called upon to give counsel to his country, for when the very safety of the country is at stake there should be no question of justice or injustice, of mercy or cruelty, of honour or disgrace, but putting every other consideration aside, that course should be followed which will save her life and liberty.
Machiavelli's own country was Florence; when he wrote that he loved his country more than he loved his soul, he was consciously forsaking Christian ethics for the morality of civic virtue. His friend and countryman Francesco Guicciardini shared his political morality and his concern for politics but lacked his faith that a knowledge of ancient political wisdom would redeem the liberty of Italy. Guicciardini was an upper-class Florentine who chose a career in public administration and devoted his leisure to writing history and reflecting on politics. He was steeped in the humanist traditions of Florence and was a dedicated republican, notwithstanding the fact—or perhaps because of it—that he spent his entire career in the service of the Medici and rose to high positions under them. But Guicciardini, more skeptical and aristocratic than Machiavelli, was also half a generation younger, and he was schooled in an age that was already witnessing the decline of Italian autonomy.
In 1527 Florence revolted against the Medici a second time and established a republic. As a confidant of the Medici, Guicciardini was passed over for public office and retired to his estate. One of the fruits of this enforced leisure was the so-called Cose fiorentine (Florentine Affairs), an unfinished manuscript on Florentine history. While it generally follows the classic form of humanist civic history, the fragment contains some significant departures from this tradition. No longer is the history of the city treated in isolation; Guicciardini was becoming aware that the political fortunes of Florence were interwoven with those of Italy as a whole and that the French invasion of Italy in 1494 was a turning point in Italian history. He returned to public life with the restoration of the Medici in 1530 and was involved in the events leading to the tightening of the imperial grip upon Italy, the humbling of the Papacy, and the final transformation of the republic of Florence into a hereditary Medici dukedom. Frustrated in his efforts to influence the rulers of Florence, he again retired to his villa to write; but, instead of taking up the unfinished manuscript on Florentine history, he chose a subject commensurate with his changed perspective on Italian affairs. The result was his History of Italy. Though still in the humanist form and style, it was in substance a fulfillment of the new tendencies already evident in the earlier work—criticism of sources, great attention to detail, avoidance of moral generalizations, shrewd analysis of character and motive.
The History of Italy has rightly been called a tragedy by the American historian Felix Gilbert, for it demonstrates how, out of stupidity and weakness, people make mistakes that gradually narrow the range of their freedom to choose alternative courses and thus to influence events until, finally, they are trapped in the web of fortune. This view of history was already far from the world of Machiavelli, not to mention that of the civic humanists. Where Machiavelli believed that virtù—bold and intelligent initiative—could shape, if not totally control, fortuna—the play of external forces—Guicciardini was skeptical about men's ability to learn from the past and pessimistic about the individual's power to shape the course of events. All that was left, he believed, was to understand. Guicciardini wrote his histories of Florence and of Italy to show what people were like and to explain how they had reached their present circumstances. Human dignity, then, consisted not in the exercise of will to shape destiny but in the use of reason to contemplate and perhaps to tolerate fate. In taking a new, hard look at the human condition, Guicciardini represents the decline of humanist optimism.
In 1494 King Charles VIII of France led an army southward over the Alps, seeking the Neapolitan crown and glory. Many believed that this barely literate gnome of a man, hunched over his horse, was the Second Charlemagne, whose coming had been long predicted by French and Italian prophets. Apparently, Charles himself believed this; it is recorded that, when he was chastised by Savonarola for delaying his divine mission of reform and crusade in Florence, the king burst into tears and soon went on his way. He found the Kingdom of Naples easy to take and impossible to hold; frightened by local uprisings, by a new Italian coalition, and by the massing of Spanish troops in Sicily, he left Naples in the spring of 1495, bound not for the Holy Land, as the prophecies had predicted, but for home, never to return to Italy. In 1498 Savonarola was tortured, hanged, and burned as a false prophet for predicting that Charles would complete his mission. Conceived amid dreams of chivalric glory and crusade, the Italian expedition of Charles VIII was the venture of a medieval king—romantic, poorly planned, and totally irrelevant to the real needs of his subjects.
The French invasion of Italy marked the beginning of a new phase of European politics, during which the Valois kings of France and the Habsburgs of Germany fought each other, with the Italian states as their reluctant pawns. For the next 60 years the dream of Italian conquest was pursued by every French king, none of them having learned anything from Charles VIII's misadventure except that the road southward was open and paved with easy victories. For even longer Italy would be the keystone of the arch that the Habsburgs tried to erect across Europe from the Danube to the Strait of Gibraltar in order to link the Spanish and German inheritance of the emperor Charles V. In destroying the autonomy of Italian politics, the invasions also ended the Italian state system, which was absorbed into the larger European system that now took shape. Its members adopted the balance-of-power diplomacy first evolved by the Italians as well as the Italian practice of using resident ambassadors who combined diplomacy with the gathering of intelligence by fair means or foul. In the art of war, also, the Italians were innovators in the use of mercenary troops, cannonry, bastioned fortresses, and field fortification. French artillery was already the best in Europe by 1494, whereas the Spaniards developed the tercio, an infantry unit that combined the most effective field fortifications and weaponry of the Italians and Swiss.
Thus, old and new ways were fused in the bloody crucible of the Italian Wars. Rulers who lived by medieval codes of chivalry adopted Renaissance techniques of diplomacy and warfare to satisfy their lust for glory and dynastic power. Even the lure of Italy was an old obsession; but the size and vigour of the 16th-century expeditions were new. Rulers were now able to command vast quantities of men and resources because they were becoming masters of their own domains. The nature and degree of this mastery varied according to local circumstances; but throughout Europe the New Monarchs, as they are called, were reasserting kingship as the dominant form of political leadership after a long period of floundering and uncertainty.
By the end of the 15th century, the Valois kings of France had expelled the English from all their soil except the port of Calais, concluding the Hundred Years' War (1453), had incorporated the fertile lands of the duchy of Burgundy to the east and of Brittany to the north, and had extended the French kingdom from the Atlantic and the English Channel to the Pyrenees and the Rhine. To rule this vast territory, they created a professional machinery of state, converting wartime taxing privileges into permanent prerogative, freeing their royal council from supervision by the Estates-General, appointing a host of officials who crisscrossed the kingdom in the service of the crown, and establishing their right to appoint and tax the French clergy. They did not achieve anything like complete centralization; but in 1576 Jean Bodin was able to write, in his Six Books of the Commonweal, that the king of France had absolute sovereignty because he alone in the kingdom had the power to give law unto all of his subjects in general and to every one of them in particular.
Bodin might also have made his case by citing the example of another impressive autocrat of his time, Philip II of Spain. Though descended from warrior kings, Philip spent his days at his writing desk poring over dispatches from his governors in the Low Countries, Sicily, Naples, Milan, Peru, Mexico, and the Philippines and drafting his orders to them in letters signed “I the King.” The founding of this mighty empire went back more than a century to 1469, when Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile brought two great Hispanic kingdoms together under a single dynasty. Castile, an arid land of sheepherders, great landowning churchmen, and crusading knights, and Aragon, with its Catalan miners and its strong ties to Mediterranean Europe, made uneasy partners; but a series of rapid and energetic actions forced the process of national consolidation and catapulted the new nation into a position of world prominence for which it was poorly prepared. Within the last decade of the 15th century, the Spaniards took the kingdom of Navarre in the north; stormed the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, the kingdom of Granada; and launched a campaign of religious unification by pressing tens of thousands of Muslims and Jews to choose between baptism and expulsion, at the same time establishing a new Inquisition under royal control. They also sent Columbus on voyages of discovery to the Western Hemisphere, thereby opening a new frontier just as the domestic frontier of reconquest was closing. Finally, the crown linked its destinies with the Habsburgs by a double marriage, thus projecting Spain into the heart of European politics. In the following decades, Castilian hidalgos (lower nobles), whose fathers had crusaded against the Moors in Spain, streamed across the Atlantic to make their fortunes out of the land and sweat of the American Indians, while others marched in the armies and sailed in the ships of their king, Charles I, who, as Charles V, was elected Holy Roman emperor in 1519 at the age of 19. In this youth, the vast dual inheritance of the Spanish and Habsburg empires came together. The grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella on his mother's side and of the emperor Maximilian I on his father's, Charles was duke of Burgundy, head of five Austrian dukedoms (which he ceded to his brother), king of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and claimant to the duchy of Milan as well as king of Aragon and Castile and German king and emperor. To administer this enormous legacy, he presided over an ever-increasing bureaucracy of viceroys, governors, judges, military captains, and an army of clerks. The New World lands were governed by a separate Council of the Indies after 1524, which, like Charles' other royal councils, combined judicial, legislative, military, and fiscal functions.
The yield in American treasure was enormous, especially after the opening of the silver mines of Mexico and what is now Bolivia halfway through the 16th century. The crown skimmed off a lion's share—usually a fifth—which it paid out immediately to its creditors because everything Charles could raise by taxing or borrowing was sucked up by his wars against the French in Italy and Burgundy, the Protestant princes in Germany, the Turks on the Austrian border, and the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean. By 1555 both Charles and his credit were exhausted, and he began to relinquish his titles—Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip, Germany and the imperial title to his brother Ferdinand I. American silver did little for Spain except to pay the wages of soldiers and sailors; the goods and services that kept the Spanish armies in the field and the ships afloat were largely supplied by foreigners, who reaped the profits. Yet, for the rest of the century, Spain continued to dazzle the world, and few could see the chinks in the armour; this was an age of kings, in which bold deeds, not balance sheets, made history.
The growth of centralized monarchy claiming absolute sovereignty over its subjects may be observed in other places, from the England of Henry VIII on the extreme west of Europe to the Muscovite tsardom of Ivan III the Great on its eastern edge, for the New Monarchy was one aspect of a more general phenomenon—a great recovery that surged through Europe in the 15th century. No single cause can be adduced to explain it. Some historians believe it was simply the upturn in the natural cycle of growth: the great medieval population boom had overextended Europe's productive capacities; the depression of the 14th and early 15th centuries had corrected this condition through famines and epidemics, leading to depopulation; now the cycle of growth was beginning again.
Once more, growing numbers of people, burgeoning cities, and ambitious governments were demanding food, goods, and services—a demand that was met by both old and new methods of production. In agriculture, the shift toward commercial crops such as wool and grains, the investment of capital, and the emancipation of servile labour completed the transformation of the manorial system already in decline. (In eastern Europe, however, the formerly free peasantry was now forced into serfdom by an alliance between the monarchy and the landed gentry, as huge agrarian estates were formed to raise grain for an expanding Western market.) Manufacturing boomed, especially of those goods used in the outfitting of armies and fleets—cloth, armour, weapons, and ships. New mining and metalworking technology made possible the profitable exploitation of the rich iron, copper, gold, and silver deposits of central Germany, Hungary, and Austria, affording the opportunity for large-scale investment of capital.
One index of Europe's recovery is the spectacular growth of certain cities. Antwerp, for example, more than doubled its population in the second half of the 15th century and doubled it again by 1560. Under Habsburg patronage, Antwerp became the chief European entrepôt for English cloth, the hub of an international banking network, and the principal Western market for German copper and silver, Portuguese spices, and Italian alum. By 1500 the Antwerp Bourse was the central money market for much of Europe. Other cities profited from their special circumstances, too: Lisbon as the home port for the Portuguese maritime empire; Sevilla (Seville), the Spaniards' gateway to the New World; London, the capital of the Tudors and gathering point for England's cloth-making and banking activity; Lyon, favoured by the French kings as a market centre and capital of the silk industry; and Augsburg, the principal north-south trade route in Germany and the home city of the Fugger merchant-bankers. (For further discussion, see below The emergence of modern Europe: Economy and society.)
Cities were also markets for culture. The resumption of urban growth in the second half of the 15th century coincided with the diffusion of Renaissance ideas and educational values. Humanism offered linguistic and rhetorical skills that were becoming indispensable for nobles and commoners seeking careers in diplomacy and government administration, while the Renaissance ideal of the perfect gentleman was a cultural style that had great appeal in this age of growing courtly refinement. At first many who wanted a humanist education went to Italy, and many foreign names appear on the rosters of the Italian universities. By the end of the century, however, such northern cities as London, Paris, Antwerp, and Augsburg were becoming centres of humanist activity rivaling Italy's. The development of printing, by making books cheaper and more plentiful, also quickened the diffusion of humanism.
A textbook convention, heavily armoured against truth by constant reiteration, states that northern humanism—i.e., humanism outside Italy—was essentially Christian in spirit and purpose, in contrast to the essentially secular nature of Italian humanism. In fact, however, the program of Christian humanism had been laid out by Italian humanists of the stamp of Lorenzo Valla, one of the founders of classical philology, who showed how the critical methods used to study the classics ought to be applied to problems of biblical exegesis and translation as well as church history. That this program only began to be carried out in the 16th century, particularly in the countries of northern Europe (and Spain), is a matter of chronology rather than of geography. In the 15th century, the necessary skills, particularly the knowledge of Greek, were possessed by a few scholars; a century later, Greek was a regular part of the humanist curriculum, and Hebrew was becoming much better known, particularly after Johannes Reuchlin published his Hebrew grammar in 1506. Here, too, printing was a crucial factor, for it made available a host of lexicographical and grammatical handbooks and allowed the establishment of normative biblical texts and the comparison of different versions of the Bible.
Christian humanism was more than a program of scholarship, however; it was fundamentally a conception of the Christian life that was grounded in the rhetorical, historical, and ethical orientation of humanism itself. That it came to the fore in the early 16th century was the result of a variety of factors, including the spiritual stresses of rapid social change and the inability of the ecclesiastical establishment to cope with the religious needs of an increasingly literate and self-confident laity. By restoring the gospel to the centre of Christian piety, the humanists believed they were better serving the needs of ordinary people. They attacked scholastic theology as an arid intellectualization of simple faith, and they deplored the tendency of religion to become a ritual practiced vicariously through a priest. They also despised the whole late-medieval apparatus of relic mongering, hagiology, indulgences, and image worship, and they ridiculed it in their writings, sometimes with devastating effect. According to the Christian humanists, the fundamental law of Christianity was the law of love as revealed by Jesus Christ in the Gospel. Love, peace, and simplicity should be the aims of the good Christian, and the life of Christ his perfect model. The chief spokesman for this point of view was Desiderius Erasmus, the most influential humanist of his day. Erasmus and his colleagues were uninterested in dogmatic differences and were early champions of religious toleration. In this they were not in tune with the changing times, for the outbreak of the Reformation polarized European society along confessional lines, with the paradoxical result that the Christian humanists, who had done so much to lay the groundwork for religious reform, ended by being suspect on both sides—by the Roman Catholics as subversives who (as it was said of Erasmus) had “laid the egg that Luther hatched” and by the Protestants as hypocrites who had abandoned the cause of reformation out of cowardice or ambition. Toleration belonged to the future, after the killing in the name of Christ sickened and passions had cooled.
The quickening of the religious impulse that gave rise to Christian humanism was also manifested in a variety of forms of religious devotion among the laity, including mysticism. In the 14th century a wave of mystical ardour seemed to course down the valley of the Rhine, enveloping men and women in the rapture of intense, direct experience of the divine Spirit. It centred in the houses of the Dominican order, where friars and nuns practiced the mystical way of their great teacher, Meister Eckhart. This wave of Rhenish mysticism radiated beyond convent walls to the marketplaces and hearths of the laity. Eckhart had the gift of making his abstruse doctrines understandable to a wider public than was usual for mystics; moreover, he was fortunate in having some disciples of a genius almost equal to his own—the great preacher of practical piety, Johann Tauler, and Heinrich Suso, whose devotional books, such as The Little Book of Truth and The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, reached eager lay readers hungry for spiritual consolation and religious excitement. Some found it by joining the Dominicans; others, remaining in the everyday world, joined with like-spirited brothers and sisters in groups known collectively as the Friends of God, where they practiced methodical contemplation, or, as it was widely known, mental prayer. Probably few reached, or even hoped to reach, the ecstasy of mystical union, which was limited to those with the appropriate psychological or spiritual gifts. Out of these circles came the anonymous German Theology, from which, Luther was to say, he had learned more about man and God than from any book except the Bible and the writings of St. Augustine.
In the Netherlands the mystical impulse awakened chiefly under the stimulus of another great teacher, Gerhard Groote. Not a monk nor even a priest, Groote gave the mystical movement a different direction by teaching that true spiritual communion must be combined with moral action, for this was the whole lesson of the Gospel. At his death a group of followers formed the Brethren of the Common Life. These were laymen and laywomen, married and single, earning their livings in the world but united by a simple rule that required them to pool their earnings and devote themselves to spiritual works, teaching, and charity. Houses of Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life spread through the cities and towns of the Netherlands and Germany, and a monastic counterpart was founded in the order of Canons Regular of St. Augustine, known as the Windesheim Congregation, which in the second half of the 15th century numbered some 82 priories. The Brethren were particularly successful as schoolmasters, combining some of the new linguistic methods of the humanists with a strong emphasis upon Bible study. Among the generations of children who absorbed the new piety (devotio moderna) in their schools were Erasmus and, briefly, Luther. In the ambience of the devotio moderna appeared one of the most influential books of piety ever written, The Imitation of Christ, attributed to Thomas à Kempis, a monk of the Windesheim Congregation.
One man whose life was changed by The Imitation was the 16th-century Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola. After reading it, Loyola founded the Society of Jesus and wrote his own book of methodical prayer, Spiritual Exercises. Thus, Spanish piety was in some ways connected with that of the Netherlands; but the extraordinary outburst of mystical and contemplative activity in 16th-century Spain was mainly an expression of the intense religious exaltation of the Spanish people themselves as they confronted the tasks of reform, Counter-Reformation, and world leadership. Spanish mysticism belies the usual picture of the mystic as a withdrawn contemplative, with his or her head in the clouds. Not only Loyola but also St. Teresa of Avila and her disciple, St. John of the Cross, were tough, activist Reformers who regarded their mystical experiences as means of fortifying themselves for their practical tasks. They were also prolific writers who could communicate their experiences and analyze them for the benefit of others. This is especially true of St. John of the Cross, whose mystical poetry is one of the glories of Spanish literature.
In literature, medieval forms continued to dominate the artistic imagination throughout the 15th century. Besides the vast devotional literature of the period—the ars moriendi, or books on the art of dying well, the saints' lives, and manuals of methodical prayer and spiritual consolation—the most popular reading of noble and burgher alike was a 13th-century love allegory, the Roman de le rose. Despite a promising start in the late Middle Ages, literary creativity suffered from the domination of Latin as the language of “serious” expression, with the result that, if the vernacular attracted writers, they tended to overload it with Latinisms and artificially applied rhetorical forms. This was the case with the so-called grande rhetoriqueurs of Burgundy and France. One exception is 14th-century England, where a national literature made a brilliant showing in the works of William Langland, John Gower, and, above all, Geoffrey Chaucer. The troubled 15th century, however, produced only feeble imitations. Another exception is the vigorous tradition of chronicle writing in French, distinguished by such eminently readable works as the chronicle of Jean Froissart and the memoirs of Philippe de Commynes. In France, too, about the middle of the 15th century there lived the vagabond François Villon, a great poet about whom next to nothing is known. In Germany The Ship of Fools, by Sebastian Brant, was a lone masterpiece.
The 16th century saw a true renaissance of national literatures. In Protestant countries, the Reformation had an enormous impact upon the quantity and quality of literary output. If Luther's rebellion destroyed the chances of unifying the nation politically—because religious division exacerbated political division and made Lutherans intolerant of the Catholic Habsburgs—his translation of the Bible into German created a national language. Biblical translations, vernacular liturgies, hymns, and sacred drama had analogous effects elsewhere. For Roman Catholics, especially in Spain, the Reformation was a time of deep religious emotion expressed in art and literature. On all sides of the religious controversy, chroniclers and historians writing in the vernacular were recording their versions for posterity.
While the Reformation was providing a subject matter, the Italian Renaissance was providing literary methods and models. The Petrarchan sonnet inspired French, English, and Spanish poets, while the Renaissance neoclassical drama finally began to end the reign of the medieval mystery play. Ultimately, of course, the works of real genius were the result of a crossing of native traditions and new forms. The Frenchman François Rabelais assimilated all the themes of his day—and mocked them all—in his story of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes, in Don Quixote, drew a composite portrait of his countrymen, which caught their exact mixture of idealism and realism. In England, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare used Renaissance drama to probe the deeper levels of their countrymen's character and experiences.
According to medieval scientists, matter was composed of four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—whose combinations and permutations made up the world of visible objects. The cosmos was a series of concentric spheres in motion, the farther ones carrying the stars around in their daily courses. At the centre was the globe of Earth, heavy and static. Motion was either perfectly circular, as in the heavens, or irregular and naturally downward, as on Earth. The Earth had three landmasses—Europe, Asia, and Africa—and was unknown and uninhabitable in its southern zones. Human beings, the object of all creation, were composed of four humours—black and yellow bile, blood, and phlegm—and the body's health was determined by the relative proportions of each. The cosmos was alive with a universal consciousness with which people could interact in various ways, and the heavenly bodies were generally believed to influence human character and events, although theologians worried about free will.
These views were an amalgam of classical and Christian thought and, from what can be inferred from written sources, shaped the way educated people experienced and interpreted phenomena. What people who did not read or write books understood about nature is more difficult to tell, except that belief in magic, good and evil spirits, witchcraft, and forecasting the future was universal. The church might prefer that Christians seek their well-being through faith, the sacraments, and the intercession of Mary and the saints, but distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable belief in hidden powers were difficult to make or to maintain. Most clergy shared the common beliefs in occult forces and lent their authority to them. The collaboration of formal doctrine and popular belief had some of its most terrible consequences during the Renaissance, such as pogroms against Jews and witch-hunts, in which the church provided the doctrines of Satanic conspiracy and the inquisitorial agents and popular prejudice supplied the victims, predominantly women and marginal people.
Among the formally educated, if not among the general population, traditional science was transformed by the new heliocentric, mechanistic, and mathematical conceptions of Copernicus, Harvey, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Historians of science are increasingly reluctant to describe these changes as a revolution, since this implies too sudden and complete an overthrow of the earlier model. Aristotle's authority gave way very slowly, and only the first of the great scientists mentioned above did his work in the period under consideration. Still, the Renaissance made some important contributions toward the process of paradigm shift, as the 20th-century historian of science Thomas Kuhn called major innovations in science. Humanist scholarship provided both originals and translations of ancient Greek scientific works—which enormously increased the fund of knowledge in physics, astronomy, medicine, botany, and other disciplines—and presented as well alternative theories to those of Ptolemy and Aristotle. Thus, the revival of ancient science brought heliocentric astronomy to the fore again after almost two millennia. Renaissance philosophers, most notably Jacopo Zabarella, analyzed and formulated the rules of the deductive and inductive methods by which scientists worked, while certain ancient philosophies enriched the ways in which scientists conceived of phenomena. Pythagoreanism, for example, conveyed a vision of a harmonious geometric universe that helped form the mind of Copernicus.
In mathematics the Renaissance made its greatest contribution to the rise of modern science. Humanists included arithmetic and geometry in the liberal arts curriculum; artists furthered the geometrization of space in their work on perspective; Leonardo da Vinci perceived, however faintly, that the world was ruled by “number.” The interest in algebra in the Renaissance universities, according to the 20th-century historian of science George Sarton, “was creating a kind of fever.” It produced some mathematical theorists of the first rank, including Niccolò Tartaglia and Girolamo Cardano. If they had done nothing else, Renaissance scholars would have made a great contribution to mathematics by translating and publishing, in 1544, some previously unknown works of Archimedes, perhaps the most important of the ancients in this field.
If the Renaissance role in the rise of modern science was more that of midwife than of parent, in the realm of technology the proper image is the Renaissance magus, manipulator of the hidden forces of nature. Working with medieval perceptions of natural processes, engineers and technicians of the 15th and 16th centuries achieved remarkable results and pushed the traditional cosmology to the limit of its explanatory powers. This may have had more to do with changing social needs than with changes in scientific theory. Warfare was one catalyst of practical change that stimulated new theoretical questions. With the spread of the use of artillery, for example, questions about the motion of bodies in space became more insistent, and mathematical calculation more critical. The manufacture of guns also stimulated metallurgy and fortification; town planning and reforms in the standards of measurement were related to problems of geometry. The Renaissance preoccupation with alchemy, the parent of chemistry, was certainly stimulated by the shortage of precious metals, made more acute by the expansion of government and expenditures on war.
The most important technological advance of all, because it underlay progress in so many other fields, strictly speaking, had little to do with nature. This was the development of printing, with movable metal type, about the mid-15th century in Germany. Johannes Gutenberg is usually called its inventor, but in fact many people and many steps were involved. Block printing on wood came to the West from China between 1250 and 1350, papermaking came from China by way of the Arabs to 12th-century Spain, whereas the Flemish technique of oil painting was the origin of the new printers' ink. Three men of Mainz—Gutenberg and his contemporaries Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer—seem to have taken the final steps, casting metal type and locking it into a wooden press. The invention spread like the wind, reaching Italy by 1467, Hungary and Poland in the 1470s, and Scandinavia by 1483. By 1500 the presses of Europe had produced some six million books. Without the printing press it is impossible to conceive that the Reformation would have ever been more than a monkish quarrel or that the rise of a new science, which was a cooperative effort of an international community, would have occurred at all. In short, the development of printing amounted to a communications revolution of the order of the invention of writing; and, like that prehistoric discovery, it transformed the conditions of life. The communications revolution immeasurably enhanced human opportunities for enlightenment and pleasure on one hand and created previously undreamed-of possibilities for manipulation and control on the other. The consideration of such contradictory effects may guard us against a ready acceptance of triumphalist conceptions of the Renaissance or of historical change in general.
The 16th century was a period of vigorous economic expansion. This expansion in turn played a major role in the many other transformations—social, political, and cultural—of the early modern age.
By 1500 the population in most areas of Europe was increasing after two centuries of decline or stagnation. The bonds of commerce within Europe tightened, and the “wheels of commerce” (in the phrase of the 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel) spun ever faster. The great geographic discoveries then in process were integrating Europe into a world economic system. New commodities, many of them imported from recently discovered lands, enriched material life. Not only trade but also the production of goods increased as a result of new ways of organizing production. Merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers accumulated and manipulated capital in unprecedented volume. Most historians locate in the 16th century the beginning, or at least the maturing, of Western capitalism. Capital assumed a major role not only in economic organization but also in political life and international relations. Culturally, new values—many of them associated with the Renaissance and Reformation—diffused through Europe and changed the ways in which people acted and the perspectives by which they viewed themselves and the world.
This world of early capitalism, however, can hardly be regarded as stable or uniformly prosperous. Financial crashes were common; the Spanish crown, the heaviest borrower in Europe, suffered repeated bankruptcies (in 1557, 1575–77, 1596, 1607, 1627, and 1647). The poor and destitute in society became, if not more numerous, at least more visible. Even as capitalism advanced in the West, the once-free peasants of central and eastern Europe slipped into serfdom. The apparent prosperity of the 16th century gave way in the middle and late periods of the 17th century to a “general crisis” in many European regions. Politically, the new centralized states insisted on new levels of cultural conformity on the part of their subjects. Several states expelled Jews, and almost all of them refused to tolerate religious dissenters. Culturally, in spite of the revival of ancient learning and the reform of the churches, a hysterical fear of witches grasped large segments of the population, including the learned. Understandably, historians have had difficulty defining the exact place of this complex century in the course of European development.
The century's economic expansion owed much to powerful changes that were already under way by 1500. At that time, Europe comprised only between one-third and one-half the population it had possessed about 1300. The infamous Black Death of 1347–50 principally accounts for the huge losses, but plagues were recurrent, famines frequent, wars incessant, and social tensions high as the Middle Ages ended. The late medieval disasters radically transformed the structures of European society—the ways by which it produced food and goods, distributed income, organized its society and state, and looked at the world.
The huge human losses altered the old balances among the classical “factors of production”—labour, land, and capital. The fall in population forced up wages in the towns and depressed rents in the countryside, as the fewer workers remaining could command a higher “scarcity value.” In contrast, the costs of land and capital fell; both grew relatively more abundant and cheaper as human numbers shrank. Expensive labour and cheap land and capital encouraged “factor substitution,” the replacement of the costly factor (labour) by the cheaper ones (land and capital). This substitution of land and capital for labour can be seen, for example, in the widespread conversions of arable land to pastures; a few shepherds, supplied with capital (sheep) and extensive pastures, could generate a higher return than plowland, intensively farmed by many well-paid labourers.
Capital could also support the technology required to develop new tools, enabling labourers to work more productively. The late Middle Ages was accordingly a period of significant technological advances linked with high capital investment in labour-saving devices. The development of printing by movable metal type substituted an expensive machine, the press, for many human copyists. Gunpowder and firearms gave smaller armies greater fighting power. Changes in shipbuilding and in the development of navigational aids allowed bigger ships to sail with smaller crews over longer distances. By 1500 Europe achieved what it had never possessed before: a technological edge over all other civilizations. Europe was thus equipped for worldwide expansion.
Social changes also were pervasive. With a falling population, the cost of basic foodstuffs (notably wheat) declined. With cheaper food, people in both countryside and city could use their higher earnings to diversify and improve their diets—to consume more meat, dairy products, and beverages. They also could afford more manufactured products from the towns, to the benefit of the urban economies. The 14th century is rightly regarded as the golden age of working people.
Economic historians have traditionally envisioned the falling costs of the basic foodstuffs (cereals) and the continuing firm price of manufactures as two blades of a pair of open scissors. These price scissors diverted income from countryside to town. The late medieval price movements thus favoured urban artisans over peasants and merchants over landlords. Towns achieved a new weight in society; the number of towns counting more than 10,000 inhabitants increased from 125 in about 1300 to 154 in 1500, even as the total population was dropping. These changes undermined the leadership of the landholding nobility and enhanced the power and influence of the great merchants and bankers of the cities. The 16th would be a “bourgeois century.”
Culturally, the disasters of the late Middle Ages had the effect of altering attitudes and in particular of undermining the medieval faith that speculative reason could master the secrets of the universe. In an age of ferocious and unpredictable epidemics, the accidental and the unexpected, chance or fate, rather than immutable laws, seemed to dominate the course of human affairs. In an uncertain world, the surest, safest philosophical stance was empiricism. In formal philosophy, this new priority given to the concrete and the observable over and against the abstract and the speculative was known as nominalism. In social life, there was evident a novel emphasis on close observation, on the need to study each changing situation to arrive at a basis for action.
The 16th century thus owed much to trends originating in the late Middle Ages. It would, however, be wrong to view its history simply as a playing out of earlier movements. New developments proper to the century also shaped its achievements. Those developments affected population; money and prices; agriculture, trade, manufacturing, and banking; social and political institutions; and cultural attitudes. Historians differ widely in the manner in which they structure and relate these various developments; they argue over what should be regarded as causes and what as effects. But they are reasonably agreed concerning the general nature of these trends.
For the continent as a whole, the population growth under way by 1500 continued over the “long” 16th century until the second or third decade of the 17th century. A recent estimate by the American historian Jan De Vries set Europe's population (excluding Russia and the Ottoman Empire) at 61.6 million in 1500, 70.2 million in 1550, and 78.0 million in 1600; it then lapsed back to 74.6 million in 1650. The distribution of population across the continent was also shifting. Northwestern Europe (especially the Low Countries and the British Isles) witnessed the most vigorous expansion; England's population more than doubled between 1500, when it stood at an estimated 2.6 million, and 1650, when it probably attained 5.6 million. Northwestern Europe also largely escaped the demographic downturn of the mid-17th century, which was especially pronounced in Germany, Italy, and Spain. In Germany, the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) may have cost the country, according to different estimates, between 25 and 40 percent of its population.
Cities also grew, though slowly at first. The proportion of Europeans living in cities with 10,000 or more residents increased from 5.6 percent of the total population in 1500 to only 6.3 percent in 1550. The towns of England continued to suffer a kind of depression, now often called “urban decay,” in the first half of the century. The process of urbanization then accelerated, placing 7.6 percent of the population in cities by 1600, and even continued during the 17th-century crisis. The proportion of population in cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants reached 8.3 percent in 1650.
More remarkable than the slow growth in the number of urban residents was the formation of cities of a size never achieved in the medieval period. These large cities were of two principal types. Capitals and administrative centres—such as Naples, Rome, Madrid, Paris, Vienna, and Moscow—give testimony to the new powers of the state and its ability to mobilize society's resources in support of courts and bureaucracies. Naples, one of Europe's largest cities in 1550, was also one of its poorest. The demographic historian J.C. Russell theorized that Naples' swollen size was indicative of the community's “loss of control” over its numbers. Already in the 16th century, Naples was a prototype of the big, slum-ridden, semiparasitic cities to be found in many poorer regions of the world in the late 20th century.
Commercial ports, which might also have been capitals, formed a second set of large cities: examples include Venice, Livorno, Sevilla (Seville), Lisbon, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Bremen, and Hamburg. About 1550, Antwerp was the chief port of the north. In 1510, the Portuguese moved their trading station from Brugge to Antwerp, making it the chief northern market for the spices they were importing from India. The Antwerp bourse, or exchange, simultaneously became the leading money market of the north. At its heyday in mid-century, the city counted 90,000 inhabitants. The revolt of the Low Countries against Spanish rule (from 1568) ruined Antwerp's prosperity. Amsterdam, which replaced it as the greatest northern port, grew from 30,000 in 1550 to 65,000 in 1600 and 175,000 in 1650. The mid-17th century—a period of recession in many European regions—was Holland's golden age. Late in the century, Amsterdam faced the growing challenge of another northern port, which was also the capital of a powerful national state—London. With 400,000 residents by 1650 and growing rapidly, London then ranked below only Paris (440,000) as Europe's largest city. Urban concentrations of such magnitude were unprecedented; in the Middle Ages, the largest size attained was roughly 220,000, reached by a single city, Paris, about 1328.
Another novelty of the 16th century was the appearance of urban systems, or hierarchies of cities linked together by their political or commercial functions. Most European cities had been founded in medieval or even in ancient times, but they long remained intensely competitive, duplicated each other's functions, and never coalesced during the Middle Ages into tight urban systems. The more intensive, more far-flung commerce of the early modern age required a clearer distribution of functions and cooperation as much as competition. The centralization of governments in the 16th century also demanded clearly defined lines of authority and firm divisions of functions between national and regional capitals.
The new importance of northwestern Europe in terms of overall population and concentration of large cities reflects in part the “Atlantic revolution,” the redirection of trade routes brought about by the great geographic discoveries. The Atlantic revolution, however, did not so much replace the old lines of medieval commerce as build upon them. In the Middle Ages, Italian ports—Venice and Genoa in particular—dominated trade with the Middle East and supplied Europe with Eastern wares and spices. In the north, German cities, organized into a loose federation known as the Hanseatic League, similarly dominated Baltic trade. When the Portuguese in 1498 opened direct maritime links with India, Venice faced the competition of the Atlantic ports, first Lisbon and Antwerp. Nonetheless, Venice effectively responded to the new competition and attained in the 16th century its apogee of commercial importance; in most of its surviving monuments, this beautiful city still reflects its 16th-century prosperity. Genoa was not well placed to take advantage of the Atlantic discoveries, but Genoese bankers played a central role in the finances of Spain's overseas empire and in its military ventures in Europe. Italians did not quickly relinquish the prominence as merchants and bankers that had distinguished them in the Middle Ages.
In the north, the Hanseatic towns faced intensified competition from the Dutch, who from about 1580 introduced a new ship design (the fluitschip, a sturdy, cheaply built cargo vessel) and new techniques of shipbuilding, including wind-powered saws. Freight charges dropped and the size of the Dutch merchant marine soared; by the mid-17th century, it probably exceeded in number of vessels all the other mercantile fleets of Europe combined. The English competed for a share in the Baltic trade, though they long remained well behind the Dutch.
In absolute terms, Baltic trade was booming. In 1497 the ships passing through the Sound separating Denmark from Sweden numbered 795; 100 years later the number registered by the toll collectors reached 6,673. The percentage represented by Hanseatic ships rose over the same century from roughly 20 to 23–25 percent; the Germans were not yet routed from these eastern waters.
In terms of maritime trade, the Atlantic revolution may well have stimulated rather than injured the older exchanges. At the same time, new competition from the western ports left both Hanseatics and Italians vulnerable to the economic downturn of the 17th century. For both the Hanseatic and Italian cities, the 17th—and not the 16th—century was the age of decline. At Lübeck in 1628, at the last meeting of the Hanseatic towns, only 11 cities were represented, and later attempts to call a general meeting ended in failure.
In historical accounts, the glamour of the overseas discoveries tends to overshadow the intensification of exchanges within the continent. Intensified exchanges led to the formation of large integrated markets for at least some commodities. Differences in the price of wheat in the various European regions leveled out as the century progressed, and prices everywhere tended to fluctuate in the same direction. The similar price movements over large areas mark the emergence of a single integrated market in cereals. Certain regions came to specialize in wheat production and to sell their harvests to distant consumers. In particular, the lands of the Vistula basin, southern Poland, and Ruthenia (western Ukraine) became regular suppliers of grain to Flanders, Holland, western Germany, and, in years of poor harvests, even England and Spain. In times of famine, Italian states also imported cereals from the far-off Baltic breadbasket. From about 1520, Hungary emerged as a principal supplier of livestock to Austria, southern Germany, and northern Italy.
Changes in price levels in the 16th century profoundly affected every economic sector, but in ways that are disputed. The period witnessed a general inflation, known traditionally as the “price revolution.” It was rooted in part in frequent monetary debasements; the French kings, for example, debased or altered their chief coinage, the livre tournois, in 1519, 1532, 1549, 1561, 1571–75 (four mutations), and 1577. Probably more significant (though even this is questioned) was the infusion of new stocks of precious metal, especially silver, into the money supply. The medieval economy had suffered from a chronic shortage of precious metals. From the late 15th century, however, silver output, especially from German mines, increased and remained high through the 1530s. New techniques of sinking and draining shafts, extracting ore, and refining silver made mining a booming industry. From 1550 “American treasure,” chiefly from the great silver mine at Potosí in Peru (now in Bolivia), arrived in huge volumes in Spain, and from Spain it flowed to the many European regions where Spain had significant military or political engagements. Experts estimate (albeit on shaky grounds) that the stock of monetized silver increased by three or three and a half times during the 16th century.
At the same time, the growing numbers of people who had to be fed, clothed, and housed assured that coins would circulate rapidly. In monetary theory, the level of prices varies directly with the volume of money and the velocity of its circulation. New sources of silver and new numbers of people thus launched (or at least reinforced) pervasive inflation. According to one calculation, prices rose during the century in nominal terms by a factor of six and in real terms by a factor of three. The rate is low by modern standards, but it struck a society accustomed to stability. As early as 1568 the French political theorist Jean Bodin perceptively attributed the inflation to the growing volume of circulating coin, but many others, especially those victimized by inflation, chose to blame it on the greed of monopolists. Inflation contributed no small part to the period's social tensions.
Inflation always redistributes wealth; it penalizes creditors and those who live on fixed rents or revenues; it rewards debtors and entrepreneurs who can take immediate advantage of rising prices. Moreover, prices tend to rise faster than wages. For the employer, costs (chiefly wages) lag behind receipts (set by prices), and this forms what is classically known as “profit inflation.” This profit inflation has attracted the interest of economists as well as historians; especially notable among the former is the great British economic theorist John Maynard Keynes. In a treatise on money published in 1930, he attributed to the 16th-century price revolution and profit inflation a crucial role in the primitive accumulation of capital and in the birth of capitalism itself. His analysis has attracted much criticism. Wages lagged not so much behind the prices of manufactured goods as of agricultural commodities, and inflation may not have increased profits at all. Then, too, inflation in Spain (particularly pronounced in the 1520s), or later in France, did not lead to a burst of enterprise. There is no mechanical connection between price structures and behaviour.
On the other hand, the price revolution certainly stimulated the economy. It clearly penalized the inactive. Those who wished to do no more than maintain their traditional standard of living had, nonetheless, to assume an active economic stance. The increased supply of money seems further to have lowered interest rates—another advantage for the entrepreneur. The price revolution by itself did not assure capital accumulation and the birth of capitalism, but it did bring about increased outlays of entrepreneurial energy.
The growing population in the 16th century and the larger concentrations of urban dwellers required abundant supplies of food. In the course of the century, wheat prices steadily rose; the blades of late medieval price scissors once more converged. Money again flowed into the countryside to pay for food, especially wheat. But the social repercussions of the rising price of wheat varied in the different European regions.
In eastern Germany (with the exception of electoral Saxony), Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Lithuania, and even eventually Russia, the crucial change was the formation of a new type of great property, called traditionally in the German literature the Gutsherrschaft (ownership of an estate). The estate was divided into two principal parts: the landlord's demesne, from which he took all the harvest; and the farms of the peasants, who supplied the labour needed to work the demesne. The peasants (and their children after them) were legally serfs, bound to the soil. These bipartite, serf-run estates superficially resemble the classical manors of the early Middle Ages but differ from them in that the new estates were producing primarily for commercial markets. The binding of the peasants of eastern Europe to the soil and the imposition of heavy labour services constitute, in another traditional term, the “second serfdom.”
In the contemporary west (and in the east before the 16th century), the characteristic form of great property was the Grundherrschaft (“ownership of land”). This was an aggregation of rent-paying properties. The lord might also be a cultivator, but he worked his land through hired labourers.
What explains the formation of the Gutsherrschaft in early modern eastern Europe? Historians distinguish two phases in its appearance. The nobility and gentry, even without planning to do so, accumulated large tracts of abandoned land during the late medieval population collapse. However, depopulation also meant that landlords could not easily find the labour to work their extensive holdings. Population, as previously mentioned, was growing again by 1500, and prices (especially the price of cereals) steadily advanced. Inflation threatened the standard of living of the landlords; to counter its effects, they needed to raise their incomes. They accordingly sought to win larger harvests from their lands, but the lingering shortage of labourers was a major obstacle. As competition for their labour remained high, peasants were prone to move from one estate to another, in search of better terms. Moreover, the landlords had little capital to hire salaried hands and, in the largely rural east, there were few sources of capital. They had, however, one recourse. They dominated the weak governments of the region, and even a comparatively strong ruler, like the Russian tsar, wished to accommodate the demands of the gentry. In 1497 the Polish gentry won the right to export their grain without paying duty. Further legislation bound the peasants to the soil and obligated them to work the lord's demesne. The second serfdom gradually spread over eastern Europe; it was established in Poland as early as 1520; in Russia it was legally imposed in the Ulozhenie (Law Code) of 1649. At least in Poland, the western market for cereals was a principal factor in reviving serfdom, in bringing back a seemingly primitive form of labour organization.
No second serfdom developed in western Europe, even though the stimulus of high wheat prices was equally powerful. Harassed landlords, pressed to raise their revenues, had more options than their eastern counterparts. They might look to a profession or even a trade or, more commonly, seek at court an appointment paying a salary or a pension. The western princes did not want local magnates to dominate their communities, as this would erode their own authority. They consequently defended the peasants against the encroachments of the gentry. Finally, landlords in the west could readily find capital. They could use the money either to hire workers or to improve their leased properties, in expectation of gaining higher rents. The availability of capital in the west and its scarcity in the east were probably the chief reasons why the agrarian institutions of eastern and western Europe diverged so dramatically in the 16th century.
In the west, in areas of plow agriculture, the small property remained the most common productive unit. However, the terms under which it was held and worked differed widely from one European region to another. In the Middle Ages, peasants were typically subject to a great variety of charges laid upon both their persons and the land. They had to pay special marriage and inheritance taxes; they were further required to provide tithes to the parish churches. These charges were often small—sometimes only recognitive—and were fixed by custom. They are often regarded as “feudal” as distinct from “capitalist” rents, in that they were customary and not negotiated; the lord, moreover, provided nothing—no help or capital improvements—in return for the payments.
The 16th century witnessed a conversion—widespread though never complete—from systems of feudal to capitalist rents. The late medieval population collapse increased the mobility of the peasant population; a peasant who settled for one year and one day in a “free village” or town received perpetual immunity from personal charges. Personal dues thus eroded rapidly; dues weighing upon the land persisted longer but could not be raised. It was therefore in the landlord's interest to convert feudal tenures into leaseholds, and this required capital.
In England upon the former manors, farmers (the original meaning of the term was leaseholder or rent payer), who held land under long-term leases, gradually replaced copyholders, or tenants subject only to feudal dues. These farmers constituted the free English yeomanry, and their appearance marks the demise of the last vestiges of medieval serfdom. In the Low Countries, urban investors bought up the valuable lands near towns and converted them into leaseholds, which were leased for high rents over long terms. The heavy infusions of urban capital into Low Country agriculture helped make it technically the most advanced in Europe, a model for improving landlords elsewhere. In central and southern France and in central Italy, urban investment in the land was closely linked to a special type of sharecropping lease, called the métayage in France and the mezzadria in Italy. The landlord (typically a wealthy townsman) purchased plots, consolidated them into a farm, built a house upon it, and rented it. Often, he also provided the implements needed to work the land, livestock, and fertilizer. The tenant gave as rent half of the harvest. The spread of this type of sharecropping in the vicinity of towns had begun in the late Middle Ages and was carried vigorously forward in the 16th century. Nonetheless, the older forms of feudal tenure, and even some personal charges, also persisted, especially in Europe's remote and poorer regions. The early modern countryside presents an infinitely complex mixture of old and new ways of holding and working the land.
Two further changes in the countryside are worth noting. In adopting Protestantism, the North German states, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, and England confiscated and sold, in whole or in part, ecclesiastical properties. Sweden, for example, did so in 1526–27, England in 1534–36. It is difficult to assess the exact economic repercussions of these secularizations, but the placing of numerous properties upon the land market almost surely encouraged the infusion of capital into (and the spread of capitalist forms of agrarian organization in) the countryside.
Second, the high price of wheat did not everywhere make cereal cultivation the most remunerative use of the land. The price of wool continued to be buoyant, and this, linked with the availability of cheap wheat from the east, sustained the conversion of plowland into pastures that also had begun in the late Middle Ages. In England this movement is called “enclosure.” In the typical medieval village, peasants held the cultivated soil in unfenced strips, and they also enjoyed the right of grazing a set number of animals upon the village commons. Enclosure meant both the consolidating of the strips into fenced fields and the division of the commons among the individual villagers. As poorer villagers often received plots too small to work, they often had little choice but to sell their share to their richer neighbours and leave the village. In 16th-century England, enclosure almost always meant the conversion of plowland and commons into fenced meadows or pastures. To many outspoken observers, clergy and humanists in particular, enclosures were destroying villages, uprooting the rural population, and multiplying beggars on the road and paupers in the towns. Sheep were devouring the people—“Where there have been many householders and inhabitants,” the English bishop Hugh Latimer lamented, “there is now but a shepherd and his dog.” In light of recent research, these 16th-century enclosures were far less extensive than such strictures imply. Nonetheless, enclosures are an example of the power of capital to transform the rhythms of everyday life; at the least, they were an omen of things to come.
In Spain, sheep and people also entered into destructive competition. Since the 13th century, sheepherding had fallen under the control of a guild known as the Mesta; the guild was in turn dominated by a few grandees. The Mesta practiced transhumance (alternation of winter and spring pastures); the flocks themselves moved seasonally along great trailways called cañadas. The government, which collected a tax on exported wool, was anxious to raise output and favoured the Mesta with many privileges. Cultivators along the cañadas were forbidden to fence their fields, lest the barriers impede the migrating sheep. Moreover, the government imposed ceiling prices on wheat in 1539. Damage from the flocks and the low price of wheat eventually crippled cereal cultivation, provoked widespread desertion of the countryside and overall population decline, and was a significant factor in Spain's 17th-century decline. High cereal prices primarily benefited not the peasants but the landlords. The landlords in turn spent their increased revenues on the amenities and luxuries supplied by towns. In spite of high food costs, town economies fared well.
Historians favour the term “protoindustrialization” to describe the form of industrial organization that emerged in the 16th century. The word was initially applied to cottage industries in the countryside. In spite of the opposition of urban guilds, rural residents were performing many industrial tasks. Agricultural labour did not occupy the peasants during the entire year, and they devoted their free hours to such activities as spinning wool or weaving and washing cloth. Peasants usually worked for lower remuneration than urban artisans. Protoindustrialization gave rural residents supplementary income, which conferred a certain immunity from harvest failures; it enabled them to marry younger and rear larger families; it prepared them, socially and psychologically, for eventual industrialization. The efforts of urban guilds to limit rural work enjoyed only limited success; in England, for example, the restrictions seem rarely to have been enforced. Cottage industries certainly existed in the Middle Ages, but the economic expansion of the 16th century diffused them over much larger areas of the European countryside, perhaps most visibly in England and western Germany.
More recently, historians have stressed the role of towns in this early form of industrial organization. Towns remained the centres from which the raw materials were distributed in the countryside. Moreover, urban entrepreneurs coordinated the efforts of the rural workers and marketed their finished products. Certain processes—usually the most highly skilled and the most remunerative—remained centred in cities. Not only the extension of industry into rural areas but also the greater integration of city and countryside in regional economies was the principal achievement of 16th-century industry.
This manner of organizing manufactures is known as the “putting-out system,” an awkward translation of the German Verlagssystem. The key to its operation was the entrepreneur, who purchased the raw materials, distributed them among the working families, passed the semifinished products from one artisan to another, and marketed the finished products. He was typically a great merchant resident in the town. As trade routes grew longer, the small artisan was placed at ever-greater distances from sources of supply and from markets. Typically, the small artisan would not have the knowledge of distant markets or of the preferences of distant purchasers and rarely had the money to purchase needed raw materials. The size of the trading networks and the volume of merchandise moving within them made the services of the entrepreneur indispensable and subordinated the workers to his authority.
The production of fabric remained everywhere the chief European industry, but two developments, both of them continuations of medieval changes, are noteworthy. In southern Europe the making of silk cloth, stimulated by the luxurious tastes of the age, gained unprecedented prominence. Lucca, Bologna, and Venice in Italy and Sevilla and Granada in Spain gained flourishing industries. Even more spectacular in its rise as a centre of silk manufacture was the city and region of Lyon in central France. Lyon was also a principal fair town, where goods of northern and southern Europe were exchanged. It was ideally placed to obtain silk cocoons or thread from the south and to market the finished cloth to northern purchasers. The silk industry is also notable in that most of the workers it employed were women.
Northern industry continued to concentrate on woolens but partially turned its efforts to producing a new type of cloth, worsteds. Unlike woolens, worsteds were woven from yarn spun from long-haired wool; moreover, the cloth is not fulled (that is, washed, mixed with fuller's earth, and pounded in order to mat the weave). Worsteds were lighter and cheaper to make than woolens and did not require the services of a mill, which might have to be located near running water. Under the name of “new draperies,” worsteds had come to dominate the Flemish wool industry in the late Middle Ages. In the 16th century, several factors—the growth of population and of markets, the revolt of the Low Countries against Spain, and religious persecutions, which led many skilled Protestant workers to seek refuge among their coreligionists—stimulated the worsted industry in England. England had developed a vigorous woolens industry in the late Middle Ages, and the spread of worsted manufacture made it a European leader in fabric production.
Another major innovation in 16th-century industrial history was the growing use of coal as fuel. England, with rich coal mines located close to the sea, could take particular advantage of this cheap mineral fuel. The port of Newcastle in Northumbria emerged in the 16th century as a principal supplier of coal to London consumers. As yet, coal could not be used for the direct smelting of iron, but it found wide application in glassmaking, brick baking, brewing, and the heating of homes. The use of coal eased the demand on England's rapidly diminishing forests and contributed to the growth of a coal technology that would make a crucial contribution to the later Industrial Revolution.
In industry, the 16th century was not so much an age of dramatic technological departures; rather, it witnessed the steady improvement of older technological traditions—in shipbuilding, mining and metallurgy, glassmaking, silk production, clock and instrument making, firearms, and others. Europe slowly widened its technological edge over non-European civilizations. Most economic historians further believe that protoindustrialization, and the commerce that supplied and sustained it, best explains the early accumulations of capital and the birth of a capitalist economy.
Perhaps the most spectacular changes in the 16th-century economy were in the fields of international banking and finance. To be sure, medieval bankers such as the Florentine Bardi and Peruzzi in the 14th century and the Medici in the 15th had operated on an international scale, but the full development of an international money market with supporting institutions awaited the 16th century. Its earliest architects were South German banking houses, from Augsburg and Nürnberg in particular, who were well situated to serve as financial intermediaries between such southern capitals as Rome (or commercial centres such as Venice) and the northern financial centre at Antwerp. Through letters of exchange drawn on the various bourses that were growing throughout Europe, these bankers were able to mobilize capital in fabulous amounts. In 1519 Jakob II Fugger the Rich of Augsburg amassed nearly two million florins for the Habsburg king of Spain, Charles I, who used the money to bribe the imperial electors (he was successfully elected Holy Roman emperor as Charles V). Money was shaping the politics of Europe.
The subsequent bankruptcies of the Spanish crown injured the German bankers; from 1580 or even earlier, the Genoese became the chief financiers of the Spanish government and empire. Through the central fair at Lyon and through letters of exchange and a complex variant known as the asiento, the Genoese transferred great sums from Spain to the Low Countries to pay the soldiers of the Spanish armies. In the mid-16th century, dissatisfied with Lyon, the Genoese set up a fictional fair, known as Bisenzone (Besançon), as a centre of their fiscal operations. Changing sites several times, “Bisenzone” from 1579 settled at Piacenza in Italy.
The centralized state of the early modern age exerted a decisive influence on the development of financial institutions and in other economic sectors as well. To maintain its power both within its borders and within the international system, the state supported a large royal or princely court, a bureaucracy, and an army. It was the major purchaser of weapons and war matériel. Its authority affected class balances. Over the century's course, the prince expanded his authority to make appointments and grant pensions. His control of resources softened the divisions among classes and facilitated social mobility. Several great merchants and bankers, the Fuggers among them, eventually were ennobled. Yet, in spending huge sums on war, the early modern state may also have injured the economy. The floating debt of the French crown came close to 10 million ecus (the ecu was worth slightly less than a gold florin), that of the Spanish, 20 million. These sums probably equaled the worth of the circulating coin in the two kingdoms. Only in England did the public debt remain at relatively modest proportions, about 200,000 gold ducats. Governments, with the exception of the English, were absorbing a huge part of the national wealth. The Spanish bankruptcies were also sure proof that Spain had insufficient resources to realize its ambitious imperial goals.
The effort to control the economy in the interest of enhancing state power is the essence of the political philosophy known as mercantilism. Many of the policies of 16th-century states affecting trade, manufactures, or money can be regarded as mercantilistic, but as yet they did not represent a coherent economic theory. The true age of mercantilism postdates 1650.
Cultural changes also worked to legitimate, even to inspire, the early modern spirit of enterprise. In a famous thesis, the German sociologist Max Weber and, later, the English historian Richard Henry Tawney posited a direct link between the Protestant ethic, specifically in its Calvinist form, and the capitalist motivation. Medieval ethics had supposedly condemned the profit motive, and teachings about usury and the just price had shackled the growth of capitalist practices. Calvinism made the successful merchant God's elect. Today, this thesis appears too simple. Many movements contributed to a reassessment of the mercantile or business life, and the rival religious confessions influenced one another. Calvinism did not really view commercial success as a sign of God's favour until the 17th century, but 16th-century Roman Catholic scholastics (as the humanists before them) had come to regard the operations of the marketplace as natural; it was good for the merchant to participate in them. Martin Luther, in emphasizing that every Christian had received a calling (Berufung) from God, gave new dignity to all secular employments. Roman Catholics developed their own theory of the “vocation” to both secular and religious callings in what was a close imitation of the Lutheran Berufung.
To examine the psychology of merchants is to stay within a narrow social elite. Historians, in what is sometimes called “the new social history,” have paid close attention to the common people of Europe and to hitherto neglected social groups—women, the nonconformists, and minorities.
Two fundamental changes affected the status of early modern women. Women under protoindustrialization were valued domestic workers, but they also had little economic independence; the male head of the household, the father or husband, gained the chief fruits of their labour. A second change, perhaps related to the first, was the advancing age of first marriage for women. Medieval girls were very young at first marriage, barely past puberty; these young girls were given to mature grooms who were in their middle or late 20s. By the late 16th century, parish marriage registers show that brides were nearly the same age as their grooms and both were mature persons, usually in their middle 20s. This is, in effect, what demographers call the modern, western European marriage pattern. Comparatively late ages at first marriage also indicate that significant numbers of both men and women would not marry at all. Though the origins of this pattern remain obscure, it may be that families, recognizing the economic value of daughters, were anxious to retain their services as long as possible. European marriages were overwhelmingly patrilocal—that is, the bride almost always joined her husband's household. Thus, the contribution that daughters made to the household economy exerted an upward pressure on their ages of marriage. Whatever the explanation for the new marriage pattern, the near equality of ages between the marriage partners at least opened the possibility that the two would become true friends as well as spouses; this was harder to achieve when brides were young girls and their husbands mature and experienced.
In investigating what might be called the cultural underground of the early modern age, historians now take full advantage of a distinctive type of source. The established religions of Europe, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, zealously sought to assure uniformity of belief in the regions they dominated. The courts inspired by them actively pursued not only the heterodox but also witches, the insane, and anyone who maintained an unusual style of life. The special papal court known as the Inquisition operated in many (though not all) Catholic states. Its judges carefully interrogated witnesses and kept good records. These records permit rare views into the depths of early modern society. They show how widespread was the belief in magic and the practice of witchcraft and how far popular culture diverged from the officially sanctioned ideologies. The variety and strange nature of popular beliefs have convinced some historians that Christianity had never really won the minds of rural people during the Middle Ages. Only the aggressive and reformed churches of the 16th century succeeded in converting the peasants to formal Christianity. This thesis may be doubted, but it cannot be doubted that the European countryside sheltered deep wells of popular culture which the documentation of the age leaves largely in darkness.
Witchcraft presents special problems. Witches were hunted in the 16th century with a relentlessness never seen before. Were they becoming more numerous, their services more in demand? It may be that the two reformations, Protestant and Catholic, purged Europe of the magical aura that the medieval church had hung over it. It may be that the abiding thirst for enchantment could be slaked only in the cultural underground, only through popular magic. But it may also be that the new determination and efficiency of the reformed religions and the early modern states simply exposed persons long a fixture in village life: the woman healer, who knew the ancient, time-honoured cures; the old wife, who through charms or potions could induce conception or sterility, love or hate. It is hard even to reconstruct the character of early modern witchcraft. Terrorized witnesses tended to respond in ways they thought would please their interrogators; thus they reinforced stereotypes rather than revealing what they truly believed or did. Court records of this kind are not flawless sources, but they remain a rich vein of cultural history. Ironically, the court officials saved for history the thoughts and values they had hoped to extirpate.
The 16th century also witnessed a continuing deterioration in the status of western Jews. They had been expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1306 (the first of several expulsions and readmissions). Riots and killings accompanying the Black Death (the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells) had pushed the centres of German Jewry (the Ashkenazim) to the east, into Poland, Lithuania, and, eventually, the Russian Empire. In 1492 the Jews of Spain (the Sephardim), who had formed the largest and most culturally accomplished western community, were given the choice of conversion or expulsion. Many chose to leave for Portugal (whence they would also be subsequently expelled), the Low Countries, Italy, or the Ottoman Empire. Those who remained and ostensibly converted were called “New Christians,” or Marranos, and many of these later chose to emigrate to more hospitable lands. Many Marranos continued to live as Jews while professing Christianity; accusations against them were commonly heard by the Inquisition in both Spain and Italy. Their position was especially distressing. Often, both Jews and Christians rejected them, the former for their ostensible conversion, the latter for secretly practicing Judaism.
The communities of exiles had different experiences. Jews in Holland made a major contribution to the country's great prosperity. The Italian states, papal Rome included, accepted the exiles, hoping to profit from their commercial and financial expertise. Yet the Jews were also subject to increasingly severe restrictions. The Jewish community at Venice, which absorbed large numbers of Iberian Jews and Marranos, formed the first ghetto (the word itself is Venetian, first used in 1516). The practice of confining Jews into walled quarters, locked at night, became the common social practice of early modern states, at least in the central and eastern parts of the continent. The Sephardim, who continued to speak a form of Spanish known as Ladino, established large and prosperous colonies in Ottoman cities—Salonika, Istanbul, and Cairo among them. On balance, however, the early modern period in Europe was socially and culturally a dark age for Jewry.
Is there a single factor that can explain the social history of Europe's 16th century? Many have been proposed: population growth, overseas discoveries, the emergence of a world economic system, American treasure, profit inflation, capital accumulation, protoindustrialization, the Renaissance or Reformation. Perhaps the most decisive change was progress toward more integrated systems of social organization and action and toward wider and tighter social networks. The western monarchies overcame much of the political localism of the medieval world and set a model that even divided Italy and Germany would eventually emulate. Economic integration advanced even more rapidly; markets in foodstuffs, spices, luxuries, and money extended throughout the continent: The skilled banker could marshal funds from all the continent's money markets; silks from Lucca were sold in Poland. Cities formed into hierarchies, still on a regional basis but surpassing in their effectiveness the loose associations of medieval urban places. To be sure, competition among the centralized states often led to destructive wars and terrible waste of resources; and the quest for unity brought shameful persecution upon those who could not or would not conform to the dominant culture.
In the 15th century, changes in the structure of European polity, accompanied by a new intellectual temper, suggested to such observers as the philosopher and clerical statesman Nicholas of Cusa that the “Middle Age” had attained its conclusion and a new era had begun. The Papacy, the symbol of the spiritual unity of Christendom, lost much of its prestige in the Great Western Schism and the conciliar movement and became infected with the lay ideals prevailing in the Italian peninsula. In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation reacted against the worldliness and corruption of the Holy See, and the Roman Catholic church responded in its turn by a revival of piety known as the Counter-Reformation. While the forces that were to erupt in the Protestant movement were gathering strength, the narrow horizons of the Old World were widened by the expansion of Europe to America and the East. (This section treats the political, diplomatic, and military history of Europe from the Reformation to the Peace of Westphalia. For a discussion of the religious history of this period, see Christianity, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism. The expansion of European culture to new lands is covered in colonialism.)
In western Europe, nation-states emerged under the aegis of strong monarchical governments, breaking down local immunities and destroying the unity of the European respublica Christiana. Centralized bureaucracy came to replace medieval government. Underlying economic changes affected social stability. Secular values prevailed in politics, and the concept of a balance of power came to dominate international relations. Diplomacy and warfare were conducted by new methods. Permanent embassies were accredited between sovereigns, and on the battlefield standing armies of professional and mercenary soldiers took the place of the feudal array that had reflected the social structure of the past. At the same time, scientific discoveries cast doubt on the traditional cosmology. The systems of Aristotle and Ptolemy, which had long been sanctified by clerical approval, were undermined by Copernicus, Mercator, Galileo, and Kepler.
In the Iberian Peninsula the impetus of the counteroffensive against the Moors carried the Portuguese to probe the West African coastline and the Spanish to attempt the expulsion of Islam from the western Mediterranean. In the last years of the 15th century, Portuguese navigators established the sea route to India and within a decade had secured control of the trade routes in the Indian Ocean and its approaches. Mercantile interests, crusading and missionary zeal, and scientific curiosity were intermingled as the motives for this epic achievement. Similar hopes inspired Spanish exploitation of the discovery by Christopher Columbus of the Caribbean outposts of the American continent in 1492. The Treaties of Tordesillas and Saragossa in 1494 and 1529 defined the limits of westward Spanish exploration and the eastern ventures of Portugal. The two states acting as the vanguard of the expansion of Europe had thus divided the newly discovered sea lanes of the world between them.
By the time of the Treaty of Saragossa, when Portugal secured the exclusion of Spain from the East Indies, Spain had begun the conquest of Central and South America. In 1519, the year in which Ferdinand Magellan embarked on the westward circumnavigation of the globe, Hernán Cortés launched his expedition against Mexico. The seizure of Peru by Francisco Pizarro and the enforcement of Portuguese claims to Brazil completed the major steps in the Iberian occupation of the continent. By the middle of the century, the age of the conquistadores was replaced by an era of colonization, based both on the procurement of precious metal by Indian labour and on pastoral and plantation economies using imported African slaves. The influx of bullion into Europe became significant in the late 1520s, and from about 1550 it began to produce a profound effect upon the economy of the Old World.
The organization of expansion overseas reflected in economic terms the political nationalism of the European states. This political development took place through processes of internal unification and the abolition of local privileges by the centralizing force of dynastic monarchies. In Spain the union of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia under John II of Aragon was extended to association with Castile through the marriage of his son Ferdinand with the Castilian heiress Isabella. The alliance grew toward union after the accession of the two sovereigns to their thrones in 1479 and 1474, respectively, and with joint action against the Moors of Granada, the French in Italy, and the independent kingdom of Navarre. Yet, at the same time, provincial institutions long survived the dynastic union, and the representative assembly (Cortes) of Aragon continued to cling to its privileges when its Castilian counterpart had ceased to play any effective part. Castilian interest in the New World and Aragonese ties in Italy, moreover, resulted in the ambivalent nature of Spanish 16th-century policy, with its uneasy alternation between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The monarchy increased the central power by the absorption of military orders and the adaptation of the Hermandad, or police organization, and the Inquisition for political purposes. During the reign of Charles I (the emperor Charles V) centralization was quickened by the importation of Burgundian conciliar methods of government, and in the reign of his son Philip II Spain was in practice an autocracy.
Other European monarchies imitated the system devised by Roman-law jurists and administrators in the Burgundian dominions along the eastern borders of France. In England and France the Hundred Years' War (conventionally 1337–1453) had reduced the strength of the aristocracies, the principal opponents of monarchical authority. The pursuit of strong, efficient government by the Tudors in England, following the example of their Yorkist predecessors, found a parallel in France under Louis XI and Francis I. In both countries revision of the administrative and judicial system proceeded through conciliar institutions, although in neither case did it result in the unification of different systems of law. A rising class of professional administrators came to fulfill the role of the king's executive. The creation of a central treasury under Francis I brought an order into French finances already achieved in England through Henry VII's adaptation of the machinery of the royal household. Henry VIII's minister, Thomas Cromwell, introduced an aspect of modernity into English fiscal administration by the creation of courts of revenue on bureaucratic lines. In both countries, the monarchy extended its influence over the government of the church. The unrestricted ability to make law was established by the English crown in partnership with Parliament. In France the representative Estates-General lost its authority, and sovereignty reposed in the king in council. Supreme courts (parlements) possessing the right to register royal edicts imposed a slight and ineffective limitation on the absolutism of the Valois kings. The most able exponent of the reform of the judicial machinery of the French monarch was Charles IX's chancellor, Michel de L'Hôpital, but his reforms in the 1560s were frustrated by the anarchy of the religious wars. In France the middle class aspired to ennoblement in the royal administration and mortgaged their future to the monarchy by investment in office and the royal finances. In England, on the other hand, a greater flexibility in social relations was preserved, and the middle class engaged in bolder commercial and industrial ventures.
Territorial unity under the French crown was attained through the recovery of feudal appanages (alienated to cadet branches of the royal dynasty) and, as in Spain, through marriage alliances. Brittany was regained in this way, although the first of the three Valois marriages with Breton heiresses also set in train the dynastic rivalry of Valois and Habsburg. When Charles VIII of France married Anne of Brittany, he stole the bride of the Austrian archduke and future emperor Maximilian I and also broke his own engagement to Margaret of Austria, Maximilian's daughter by Mary of Burgundy. Margaret's brother Philip, however, married Joan, heiress of Castile and Aragon, so that their son eventually inherited not only Habsburg Germany and the Burgundian Netherlands but also Spain, Spanish Italy, and America. The dominions of Charles V thus encircled France and incorporated the wealth of Spain overseas. Even after the division of this vast inheritance between his son, Philip II of Spain, and his brother, the emperor Ferdinand I, the conflict between the Habsburgs and the French crown dominated the diplomacy of Europe for more than a century.
The principal dynastic conflict of the age was less unequal than it seemed, for the greater resources of Charles V were offset by their cumbrous disunity and by local independence. In the Low Countries he was able to complete the Seventeen Provinces by new acquisitions, but, although the coordinating machinery of the Burgundian dukes remained in formal existence, Charles's regents were obliged to respect local privileges and to act through constitutional forms. In Germany, where his grandfather Maximilian I had unsuccessfully tried to reform the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V could do little to overcome the independence of the lay and ecclesiastical princes, the imperial knights, and the free cities. The revolts of the knights (1522) and the peasantry (1525), together with the political disaggregation imposed by the Reformation, rendered the empire a source of weakness. Even in Spain, where the rebellion of the comuneros took place in 1520–21, his authority was sometimes flouted. His allies, England and the papacy, at times supported France to procure their own profit. France, for its part, possessed the advantages of internal lines of communication and a relatively compact territory, while its alliance with the Ottoman Empire maintained pressure on the Habsburg defenses in southeast Europe and the Mediterranean. Francis I, however, like his predecessors Charles VIII and Louis XII, made the strategic error of wasting his strength in Italy, where the major campaigns were fought in the first half of the century. Only under Henry II was it appreciated that the most suitable area for French expansion lay toward the Rhine.
A contemporary who rivaled the power and prestige of Francis I and Charles V was the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, the sultan Süleyman I the Magnificent (1520–66). With their infantry corps d'élite (the Janissaries), their artillery, and their cavalry, or sipahis, the Ottomans were the foremost military power in Europe, and it was fortunate for their Christian adversaries that Eastern preoccupations prevented them from taking full advantage of Western disunity. A counterpoise was provided by the rise of the powerful military order of the Safavids in Persia—hostile to the orthodox Ottomans through their acceptance of the heretical Islamic cult of the Shi'ites. Ottoman strength was further dissipated by the need to enforce the allegiance of Turkmen begs in Anatolia and of the chieftains of the Caucasus and Kurdistan and to maintain the conquest of the sultanate of Syria and Egypt by Süleyman's predecessor, Selim I. Süleyman himself overran Iraq and even challenged Portuguese dominion of the Indian Ocean from his bases in Suez and Basra. The Crimean Tatars acknowledged his suzerainty, as did the corsair powers of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. His armies conquered Hungary in 1526 and threatened Vienna in 1529. With the expansion of his authority along the North African coast and the Adriatic littoral, it seemed for a time as if the Mediterranean, like the Black Sea and the Aegean, might become an Ottoman lake.
Though it observed the forms of an Islamic legal code, Turkish rule was an unlimited despotism, suffering from none of the financial and constitutional weaknesses of Western states. With its disciplined standing army and its tributary populations, the Ottoman Empire feared no internal threat except during the periods of disputed succession, which continued to occur despite a law empowering the reigning sultan to put to death collateral heirs. It was not unusual for the sultan to content himself with the overlordship of frontier provinces. Moldavia and Walachia were for a time held in this fashion, and in Transylvania the vaivode John Zápolya gladly accepted Süleyman as his master in return for support against Ferdinand of Austria.
Despite the expeditions of Charles V against Algiers and Tunis, and the inspired resistance of Venice and Genoa in the war of 1537–40, the Ottomans retained the initiative in the Mediterranean until several years after the death of Süleyman. The Knights of St. John were driven from Rhodes and Tripoli and barely succeeded in retaining Malta. Even after Spain, the papacy, Venice, and Genoa had crushed the Turkish armament in 1571 in the Battle of Lepanto, the Ottomans took Cyprus and recovered Tunis from the garrison installed by the allied commander, Don John of Austria. North Africa remained an outpost of Islam and its corsairs continued to harry Christian shipping, but the Ottoman Empire did not again threaten Europe by land and sea until late in the 17th century.
Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia, and Hungary were all loosely associated at the close of the 15th century under rulers of the Jagiellon dynasty. In 1569, three years before the death of the last Jagiellon king of Lithuania-Poland, these two countries merged their separate institutions by the Union of Lublin. Thereafter the Polish nobility and the Roman Catholic faith dominated the Orthodox lands of Lithuania and held the frontiers against Muscovy, the Cossacks, and the Tatars. Bohemia and the vestiges of independent Hungary were regained by the Habsburgs as a result of dynastic marriages, which the emperor Maximilian I planned as successfully in the east as he did in the west. When Louis II of Hungary died fighting the Ottomans at Mohács in 1526, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria obtained both crowns and endeavoured to affirm the hereditary authority of his dynasty against aristocratic insistence on the principle of election. In 1619, Habsburg claims in Bohemia became the ostensible cause of the Thirty Years' War, when the Diet of Prague momentarily succeeded in deposing Ferdinand II.
In the 16th century, eastern Europe displayed the opposite tendency to the advance of princely absolutism in the West. West of the Carpathians and in the lands drained by the Vistula and the Dnestr, the landowning class achieved a political independence that weakened the power of monarchy. The towns entered a period of decline, and the propertied class, though divided by rivalry between the magnates and the lesser gentry, everywhere reduced their peasantry to servitude. In Poland and Bohemia the peasants were reduced to serfdom in 1493 and 1497, respectively, and in free Hungary the last peasant rights were suppressed after the rising of 1514. The gentry, or szlachta, controlled Polish policy in the Sejm (parliament), and, when the first Vasa king, Sigismund III, tried to reassert the authority of the crown after his election in 1587, the opportunity had passed. Yet, despite the anarchic quality of Polish politics, the aristocracy maintained and even extended the boundaries of the state. In 1525 they compelled the submission of the secularized Teutonic Order in East Prussia, resisted the pressure of Muscovy, and pressed to the southeast, where communications with the Black Sea had been closed by the Ottomans and their tributaries.
Farther to the east the grand principality of Moscow emerged as a new and powerful despotism. Muscovy, and not Poland, became the heir to Kiev during the reign of Ivan III the Great in the second half of the 15th century. By his marriage with the Byzantine princess Sofia (Zoë) Palaeologus, Ivan also laid claim to the traditions of Constantinople. His capture of Novgorod and repudiation of Tatar overlordship began a movement of Muscovite expansion, which was continued by the seizure of Smolensk by his son Vasily (Basil) III and by the campaigns of his grandson Ivan IV the Terrible (1533–84). The latter destroyed the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan and reached the Baltic by his conquest of Livonia from Poland and the Knights of the Sword. He was the first to use the title of tsar, and his arbitrary exercise of power was more ruthless and less predictable than that of the Ottoman sultan. After his death Muscovy was engulfed in the Time of Troubles, when Polish, Swedish, and Cossack armies devastated the land. The accession of the Romanov dynasty in 1613 heralded a period of gradual recovery. Except for occasional embassies, the importation of a few Western artisans, and the reception of Tudor trading missions, Muscovy remained isolated from the West. Despite its relationship with Greek civilization, it knew nothing of the Renaissance. Though it experienced a schism within its own Orthodox faith, it was equally untouched by Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the consequences of which convulsed western Europe in the late 16th century.
In a sense, the Reformation was a protest against the secular values of the Renaissance. No Italian despots better represented the profligacy, the materialism, and the intellectual hedonism that accompanied these values than did the three Renaissance popes, Alexander VI, Julius II, and Leo X. Among those precursors of the reformers who were conscious of the betrayal of Christian ideals were figures so diverse as the Ferraran monk Savonarola, the Spanish statesman Cardinal Jiménez, and the humanist scholar Erasmus.
The corruption of the religious orders and the cynical abuse of the fiscal machinery of the church provoked a movement that at first demanded reform from within and ultimately chose the path of separation. When the Augustinian monk Martin Luther protested against the sale of indulgences in 1517, he found himself obliged to extend his doctrinal arguments until his stand led him to deny the authority of the pope. In the past, as in the controversies between pope and emperor, such challenges had resulted in mere temporary disunity. In the age of nation-states, the political implications of the dispute resulted in the irreparable fragmentation of clerical authority.
Luther had chosen to attack a lucrative source of papal revenue, and his intractable spirit obliged Leo X to excommunicate him. The problem became of as much concern to the emperor as it was to the pope, for Luther's eloquent writings evoked a wave of enthusiasm throughout Germany. The reformer was by instinct a social conservative and supported existing secular authority against the upthrust of the lower orders. Although the Diet of Worms accepted the excommunication in 1521, Luther found protection among the princes. In 1529 the rulers of electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, Hessen, Lüneberg, and Anhalt signed the “protest” against an attempt to enforce obedience. By this time, Charles V had resolved to suppress Protestantism and to abandon conciliation. In 1527 his mutinous troops had sacked Rome and secured the person of Pope Clement VII, who had deserted the imperial cause in favour of Francis I after the latter's defeat at the Battle of Pavia. The sack of Rome proved a turning point both for the emperor and the humanist movement that he had patronized. The humanist scholars were dispersed, and the initiative for reform then lay in the hands of the more violent and uncompromising party. Charles V himself experienced a revulsion of conscience that placed him at the head of the Roman Catholic reaction. The empire he ruled in name was now divided into hostile camps. The Catholic princes of Germany had discussed measures for joint action at Regensburg in 1524; in 1530 the Protestants formed a defensive league at Schmalkalden. Reconciliation was attempted in 1541 and 1548, but the German rift could no longer be healed.
Lutheranism laid its emphasis doctrinally on justification by faith and politically on the God-given powers of the secular ruler. Other Protestants reached different conclusions and diverged widely from one another in their interpretation of the sacraments. In Geneva, Calvinism enforced a stern moral code and preached the mystery of grace with predestinarian conviction. It proclaimed the separation of church and state, but in practice its organization tended to produce a type of theocracy. Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger in Zürich taught a theology not unlike Calvin's but preferred to see government in terms of the godly magistrate. On the left wing of these movements were the Anabaptists, whose pacifism and mystic detachment were paradoxically associated with violent upheavals.
Lutheranism established itself in northern Germany and Scandinavia and for a time exercised a wide influence both in eastern Europe and in the west. Where it was not officially adopted by the ruling prince, however, the more militant Calvinist faith tended to take its place. Calvinism spread northward from the upper Rhine and established itself firmly in Scotland and in southern and western France. Friction between Rome and nationalist tendencies within the Catholic church facilitated the spread of Protestantism. In France the Gallican church was traditionally nationalist and antipapal in outlook, while in England the Reformation in its early stages took the form of the preservation of Catholic doctrine and the denial of papal jurisdiction. After periods of Calvinist and then of Roman Catholic reaction, the Church of England achieved a measure of stability with the Elizabethan religious settlement.
In the years between the papal confirmation of the Jesuit order in 1540 and the formal dissolution of the Council of Trent in 1563, the Roman Catholic church responded to the Protestant challenge by purging itself of the abuses and ambiguities that had opened the way to revolt. Thus prepared, the Counter-Reformation embarked upon recovery of the schismatic branches of Western Christianity. Foremost in this crusade were the Jesuits, established as a well-educated and disciplined arm of the papacy by Ignatius Loyola. Their work was made easier by the Council of Trent, which did not, like earlier councils, result in the diminution of papal authority. The council condemned such abuses as pluralism, affirmed the traditional practice in questions of clerical marriage and the use of the Bible, and clarified doctrine on issues such as the nature of the Eucharist, divine grace, and justification by faith. The church thus made it clear that it was not prepared to compromise; and, with the aid of the Inquisition and the material resources of the Habsburgs, it set out to reestablish its universal authority. It was of vital importance to this task that the popes of the Counter-Reformation were men of sincere conviction and initiative who skillfully employed diplomacy, persuasion, and force against heresy. In Italy, Spain, Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, Poland, and the southern Netherlands (the future Belgium), Protestant influence was destroyed.
This was a golden era for diplomats and international lawyers. To the network of alliances that became established throughout Europe during the Renaissance, the Reformation added confessional pacts. Unfortunately, however, the two systems were not always compatible. The traditional amity between Castile and England, for example, was fatally undermined when the Tudor dynasty embraced Protestantism after 1532; and the “auld alliance” between Scotland and France was likewise wrecked by the progress of the Reformation in Scotland after 1560. Moreover, in many countries, the confessional divisions of Christendom after Luther created powerful religious minorities who were prepared to look abroad for guarantees of protection and solidarity: for example, the English Catholics to Spain and the French, German, and Dutch Calvinists to England.
These developments created a situation of chronic political instability. On the one hand, the leaders of countries which themselves avoided religious fragmentation (such as Spain) were often unsure whether to frame their foreign policy according to confessional or political advantage. On the other hand, the foreign policy of religiously divided states, such as France, England, and the Dutch Republic, oscillated often and markedly because there was no consensus among the political elite concerning the correct principles upon which foreign policy should be based.
The complexity of the diplomatic scene called for unusual skills among the rulers of post-Reformation Europe. Seldom has the importance of personality in shaping events been so great. The quixotic temperaments and mercurial designs of even minor potentates exerted a disproportionate influence on the course of events. Nevertheless, behind the complicated interplay of individuals and events, two constants may be detected. First, statesmen and churchmen alike consistently identified politics and religion as two sides of the same coin. Supporters of the Bohemian rebellion of 1618, for example, frequently stated that “religion and liberty stand or fall together”: that is, a failure to defend and maintain religious liberty would necessarily lead to the loss of political freedom. The position of Emperor Ferdinand II (1619–37) was exactly the same. “God's blessing cannot be received,” he informed his subjects, “by a land in which prince and vassals do not both fervently uphold the one true Catholic faith.”
These two views, precisely because they were identical, were totally incompatible. That their inevitable collision should have so often produced prolonged wars, however, was due to the second “constant”: the desire of political leaders everywhere, even on the periphery of Europe, to secure a balance of power on the continent favourable to their interests. It is scarcely surprising that, when any struggle became deadlocked, the local rulers should look about for foreign support; it is more noteworthy that their neighbours were normally ready and eager to provide it. Queen Elizabeth I of England (1558–1603) offered substantial support after 1585 to the Dutch rebels against Philip II and after 1589 to the Protestant Henry IV of France against his more powerful Catholic subjects; Philip II of Spain (1556–98), for his part, sent troops and treasure to the French Catholics, while his son Philip III (1598–1621) did the same for the German Catholics.
This willingness to assist arose because every court in Europe believed in a sort of domino theory, which argued that, if one side won a local war, the rest of Europe would inevitably be affected. The Spanish version of the theory was expressed in a letter from Archduchess Isabella, regent of the Spanish Netherlands, to her master Philip IV in 1623: “It would not be in the interests of Your Majesty to allow the Emperor or the Catholic cause to go down, because of the harm it would do to the possessions of Your Majesty in the Netherlands and Italy.” Thus the religious tensions released by the Reformation eventually pitted two incompatible ideologies against each other; this in turn initiated civil wars that lasted 30 years (in the case of France and Germany) and even 80 years (in the Netherlands), largely because all the courts of Europe saw that the outcome of each confrontation would affect the balance of power for a decade, a generation, perhaps forever.
Germany, France, and the Netherlands each achieved a settlement of the religious problem by means of war, and in each case the solution contained original aspects. In Germany the territorial formula of cuius regio, eius religio applied—that is, in each petty state the population had to conform to the religion of the ruler. In France, the Edict of Nantes in 1598 embraced the provisions of previous treaties and accorded the Protestant Huguenots toleration within the state, together with the political and military means of defending the privileges that they had exacted. The southern Netherlands remained Catholic and Spanish, but the Dutch provinces formed an independent Protestant federation in which republican and dynastic influences were nicely balanced. Nowhere was toleration accepted as a positive moral principle, and seldom was it granted except through political necessity.
There were occasions when the Wars of Religion assumed the guise of a supranational conflict between Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Spanish, Savoyard, and papal troops supported the Catholic cause in France against Huguenots aided by Protestant princes in England and Germany. In the Low Countries, English, French, and German armies intervened; and at sea Dutch, Huguenot, and English corsairs fought the Battle of the Atlantic against the Spanish champion of the Counter-Reformation. In 1588 the destruction of the Spanish Armada against England was intimately connected with the progress of the struggles in France and the Netherlands.
Behind this ideological grouping of the powers, national, dynastic, and mercenary interests generally prevailed. The Lutheran duke Maurice of Saxony assisted Charles V in the first Schmalkaldic War in 1547 in order to win the Saxon electoral dignity from his Protestant cousin, John Frederick; while the Catholic king Henry II of France supported the Lutheran cause in the second Schmalkaldic War in 1552 to secure French bases in Lorraine. John Casimir of the Palatinate, the Calvinist champion of Protestantism in France and the Low Countries, maintained an understanding with the neighbouring princes of Lorraine, who led the ultra-Catholic Holy League in France. In the French conflicts, Lutheran German princes served against the Huguenots, and mercenary armies on either side often fought against the defenders of their own religion. On the one hand, deep divisions separated Calvinist from Lutheran; and, on the other hand, political considerations persuaded the moderate Catholic faction, the Politiques, to oppose the Holy League. The national and religious aspects of the foreign policy of Philip II of Spain were not always in accord. Mutual distrust existed between him and his French allies, the family of Guise, because of their ambitions for their niece Mary Stuart. His desire to perpetuate French weakness through civil war led him at one point to negotiate with the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre (afterward Henry IV of France). His policy of religious uniformity in the Netherlands alienated the most wealthy and prosperous part of his dominions. Finally, his ambition to make England and France the satellites of Spain weakened his ability to suppress Protestantism in both countries.
In 1562, seven years after the Peace of Augsburg had established a truce in Germany on the basis of territorialism, France became the centre of religious wars which endured, with brief intermissions, for 36 years. The political interests of the aristocracy and the vacillating policy of balance pursued by Henry II's widow, Catherine de Médicis, prolonged these conflicts. After a period of warfare and massacre, in which the atrocities of St. Bartholomew's Day (1572) were symptomatic of the fanaticism of the age, Huguenot resistance to the crown was replaced by Catholic opposition to the monarchy's policy of conciliation to Protestants at home and anti-Spanish alliances abroad. The revolt of the Holy League against the prospect of a Protestant king in the person of Henry of Navarre released new forces among the Catholic lower classes, which the aristocratic leadership was unable to control. Eventually Henry won his way to the throne after the extinction of the Valois line, overcame separatist tendencies in the provinces, and secured peace by accepting Catholicism. The policy of the Bourbon dynasty resumed the tradition of Francis I, and under the later guidance of Cardinal Richelieu the potential authority of the monarchy was realized.
In the Netherlands the wise Burgundian policies of Charles V were largely abandoned by Philip II and his lieutenants. Taxation, the Inquisition, and the suppression of privileges for a time provoked the combined resistance of Catholic and Protestant. The house of Orange, represented by William I the Silent and Louis of Nassau, acted as the focus of the revolt; and, in the undogmatic and flexible personality of William, the rebels found leadership in many ways similar to that of Henry of Navarre. The sack of the city of Antwerp by mutinous Spanish soldiery in 1576 (three years after the dismissal of Philip II's autocratic and capable governor, the Duke de Alba) completed the commercial decline of Spain's greatest economic asset. In 1579 Alessandro Farnese, Duke di Parma, succeeded in recovering the allegiance of the Catholic provinces, while the Protestant north declared its independence. French and English intervention failed to secure the defeat of Spain, but the dispersal of the Armada and the diversion of Parma's resources to aid the Holy League in France enabled the United Provinces of the Netherlands to survive. A 12-year truce was negotiated in 1609, and when the campaign began again it merged into the general conflict of the Thirty Years' War, which, like the other wars of religion of this period, was fought mainly for confessional security and political gain.
The war originated with dual crises at the continent's centre: one in the Rhineland and the other in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire.
“The dear old Holy Roman Empire, How does it stay together?”
The Thirty Years' War.
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asked the tavern drinkers in Goethe's Faust—and the answer is no easier to find today than in the late 18th, or early 17th, century. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was a land of many polities. In the empire there were some 1,000 separate, semiautonomous political units, many of them very small—such as the Imperial Knights, direct vassals of the emperor and particularly numerous in the southwest, who might each own only part of one village—and others comparable in size with smaller independent states elsewhere, such as Scotland or the Dutch Republic. At the top came the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs, covering the elective kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary, as well as Austria, the Tyrol, and Alsace, with about 8,000,000 inhabitants; next came electoral Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bavaria, with more than 1,000,000 subjects each; and then the Palatinate, Hesse, Trier, and Württemberg, with about 500,000 each.
These were large polities, indeed, but they were weakened by three factors. First, they did not accept primogeniture: Hesse had been divided into four portions at the death of Landgrave Philip the Magnanimous, Luther's patron, in 1567; the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs were partitioned in 1564 and again in 1576. Second, many of the states were geographically fragmented: thus the Palatinate was divided into an Upper County, adjoining the borders of both Bohemia and Bavaria, and a Lower County, on the middle Rhine. These factors had, in the course of time, created in Germany a balance of power between the states. The territorial strength of the Habsburgs may have brought them a monopoly of the imperial title from 1438 onward, but they could do no more: the other princes, when threatened, were able to form alliances whose military strength was equal to that of the emperor himself. However, the third weakness—the religious upheaval of the 16th century—changed all that: princes who had formerly stood together were now divided by religion. Swabia, for example, more or less equal in area to modern Switzerland, included 68 secular and 40 spiritual princes and also 32 imperial free cities. By 1618 more than half of these rulers and almost exactly half of the population were Catholic; the rest were Protestant. Neither bloc was prepared to let the other mobilize an army. Similar paralysis was to be found in most other regions: the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had separated Germany into hostile but evenly balanced confessional camps.
The Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had put an end to 30 years of sporadic confessional warfare in Germany between Catholics and Lutherans by creating a layered structure of legal securities for the people of the empire. At the top was the right (known as cuius regio, eius religio) of every secular ruler, from the seven electors down to the imperial knights, to dictate whether their subjects' religion was to be Lutheran or Catholic (the only officially permitted creeds). The only exceptions to this rule were the imperial free cities, where both Lutherans and Catholics were to enjoy freedom of worship, and the Catholic ecclesiastical states, where bishops and abbots who wished to become Lutherans were obliged to resign first. The latter provision, known as the reservatum ecclesiasticum, gave rise to a war in 1583–88 when the archbishop of Cologne declared himself a Protestant but refused to resign: in the end a coalition of Catholic princes, led by the duke of Bavaria, forced him out.
This “War of Cologne” was a turning point in the religious history of Germany. Until then, the Catholics had been on the defensive, losing ground steadily to the Protestants. Even the decrees of the Council of Trent, which animated Catholics elsewhere, failed to strengthen the position of the Roman church in Germany. After the successful struggle to retain Cologne, however, Catholic princes began to enforce the cuius regio principle with rigour. In Bavaria, as well as in Würzburg, Bamberg, and other ecclesiastical states, Protestants were given the choice of either conversion or exile. Most of those affected were adherents of the Lutheran church, already weakened by defections to Calvinism, a new creed that had scarcely a German adherent at the time of the Religious Peace of Augsburg. The rulers of the Palatinate (1560), Nassau (1578), Hesse-Kassel (1603), and Brandenburg (1613) all abandoned Lutheranism for the new confession, as did many lesser rulers and several towns. Small wonder that the Lutherans came to detest the Calvinists even more than they loathed the Catholics.
These religious divisions created a complex confessional pattern in Germany. By the first decade of the 17th century, the Catholics were firmly entrenched south of the Danube and the Lutherans northeast of the Elbe; but the areas in between were a patchwork quilt of Calvinist, Lutheran, and Catholic, and in some places one could find all three. One such was Donauwörth, an independent city just across the Danube from Bavaria, obliged (by the Peace of Augsburg) to tolerate both Catholics and Protestants. But for years the Catholic minority had not been permitted full rights of public worship. When in 1606 the priests tried to hold a procession through the streets, they were beaten and their relics and banners were desecrated. Shortly afterward, an Italian Capuchin, Fray Lorenzo da Brindisi, later canonized, arrived in the city and was himself mobbed by a Lutheran crowd chanting “Capuchin, Capuchin, scum, scum.” He heard from the local clergy of their plight and promised to find redress. Within a year, Fray Lorenzo had secured promises of aid from Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and Emperor Rudolf II. When the Lutheran magistrates of Donauwörth flatly refused to permit their Catholic subjects freedom of worship, the Bavarians marched into the city and restored Catholic worship by force (December 1607). Maximilian's men also banned Protestant worship and set up an occupation government that eventually transferred the city to direct Bavarian rule.
These dramatic events thoroughly alarmed Protestants elsewhere in Germany. Was this, they wondered, the first step in a new Catholic offensive against heresy? Elector Frederick IV of the Palatinate took the lead. On May 14, 1608, he formed the Evangelical, or Protestant, Union, an association to last for 10 years, for self-defense. At first, membership remained restricted to Germany, although the elector's leading adviser, Christian of Anhalt, wished to extend it, but before long a new crisis rocked the empire and turned the German union into a Protestant International.
The new crisis began with the death of John William, the childless duke of Cleves-Jülich, in March 1609. His duchies, occupying a strategic position in the Lower Rhineland, had both Protestant and Catholic subjects, but both of the main claimants to the inheritance were Protestants; under the cuius regio principle, their succession would lead to the expulsion of the Catholics. The emperor therefore refused to recognize the Protestant princes' claim. Since both were members of the Union, they solicited, and received, promises of military aid from their colleagues; they also received, via Christian of Anhalt, similar promises from the kings of France and England. This sudden accretion in Protestant strength caused the German Catholics to take countermeasures: a Catholic League was formed between Duke Maximilian of Bavaria and his neighbours on July 10, 1609, soon to be joined by the ecclesiastical rulers of the Rhineland and receiving support from Spain and the Papacy. Again, reinforcement for one side provoked countermeasures. The Union leaders signed a defensive treaty with England in 1612 (cemented by the marriage of the Union's director, the young Frederick V of the Palatine, to the king of England's daughter) and with the Dutch Republic in 1613.
At first sight, this resembles the pyramid of alliances, patiently constructed by the statesmen of Europe 300 years later, which plunged the continent into World War I. But whereas the motive of diplomats before 1914 was fear of political domination, before 1618 it was fear of religious extirpation. The Union members were convinced of the existence of a Catholic conspiracy aimed at rooting out all traces of Protestantism from the empire. This view was shared by the Union's foreign supporters. At the time of the Cleves-Jülich succession crisis, Sir Ralph Winwood, an English diplomat at the heart of affairs, wrote to his masters that, although “the issue of this whole business, if slightly considered, may seem trivial and ordinary,” in reality its outcome would “uphold or cast down the greatness of the house of Austria and the church of Rome in these quarters.” Such fears were probably unjustified at this time. In 1609 the unity of purpose between pope and emperor was in fact far from perfect, and the last thing Maximilian of Bavaria wished to see was Habsburg participation in the League: rather than suffer it, in 1614 he formed a separate association of his own and in 1616 he resigned from the League altogether. This reduction in the Catholic threat was enough to produce reciprocal moves among the Protestants. Although there was renewed fighting in 1614 over Cleves-Jülich, the members of the Protestant Union had abandoned their militant stance by 1618, when the treaty of alliance came up for renewal. They declared that they would no longer become involved in the territorial wrangles of individual members, and they resolved to prolong their association for only three years more.
Although, to some extent, war came to Germany after 1618 because of the existence of these militant confessional alliances, the continuity must not be exaggerated. Both Union and League were the products of fear; but the grounds for fear seemed to be receding. The English ambassador in Turin, Isaac Wake, was sanguine: “The gates of Janus have been shut,” he exulted in late 1617, promising &#