December 18th, 2023
The book starts off interesting, though you can tell it will be a bit slow. I think the author wants us to view Europe at the end of the Early Middle Ages as a small island of Roman Catholicism, hemmed in from all sides. Before this, it was invaded by all sides: Norse from the north, Arabs from the south, and pagans, or Magyars, specifically from the east. The Europe in discussion is a joining of post-Roman regions and culture with Germanic regions and culture. The first chapter discusses the spread of Papal authority by viewing the timeline of the founding of bishoprics in different regions. In Rome’s old borders, some hundreds could go back to the Constantine era and were found in many well known cities. In the new regions, like England, there were not really cities. The bishoprics adapted to the tribal borders for the time being. Bit by bit they spread past the Elbe, up Denmark and into Scandinavia, and battle the Greek Orthodox in the east. The Germanic system was able to spread Catholicism to Bohemia and Poland, creating a cultural dividing line in Slavic cultures still visible. Down in the Mediterranean, it was a battle not for savage souls but sophisticated souls. Sicily was a melting pot of faiths, for example.
December 19th, 2023
There’s more about bishoprics in Europe. Spain obviously expanded the Christian realm during the Reconquista. Most notorious are the Crusades, where the First Crusade got a foothold in the Middle East, only to lose it later. They did get more permanent footholds in islands like Cyprus and Crete. In some of these places they displaced the Greek Orthodox. When the Venetians and crusaders sacked Constantinople in one of the later crusades, they established their own Latin sees and even tried to make a Venetian heritage requirement. Less famous crusades were against the last stronghold of Pagans in the Baltic. After much violence and coercion, they converted these peoples. The Lithuanians may have been first, converting in order to gain the Polish crown. The author says this is a spread of Latin Christianity and a Catholic world, but is careful to say that adherence to the religion was not sufficient for people at the time. The Irish had been Catholic long before the English or Germans, yet they were still viewed as “others” for not adhering to the exact rites or general feudal culture. This opened them up for conquest by the Anglo-Normans, as the Irish were “Christian in name only”. So “Europe” was not only adherence to a religion but aspects of a culture.
December 20th, 2023
The second chapter is about the spread of aristocratic families. To be honest, it’s pretty dull so far. It kind of drones on about specific families that I cannot remember, but I guess it makes its point. One example was a family from Champagne who, down the centuries, ended up crusading with Saint Louis in Egypt, gaining a foothold in Acre, and marrying into a lordship in Ireland. This is a common French example of spreading through war and marriage. I guess the French are hemmed in on all sides, so they need drastic measures to expand their holdings. Germans, on the other hand, have all that eastern frontier to expand into. It’s not as dramatic on a map, but this gradual eastward expansion was much more permanent and had longer lasting effects.
December 21st, 2023
The part about families goes on for a while and is still fairly boring. The interesting part is when the author discusses new kingdoms being formed in the Latin expansion. For example, kingdoms were created in Portugal, Spain, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, Greece. Some of these were not long lasting, like Greece (formed after sacking Constantinople) and Jerusalem. What is interesting is that a great majority of these kings came from Frankish regions of Europe. The crusader kings in Iberia and the Mediterranean were Franks. Old kingdoms like England and Scotland soon had Frankish kings. Only the Northern Europeans, Poland, and Hungary had local monarchs. Compare this to the Germanic expansion east, where no new kingdoms were formed. They may have found wealth, land, and power, but no crowns.
December 22nd, 2023
The next part of the second chapter discusses potential reasons for why this aristocratic diaspora happened. The first point to make is that it mostly happened to minor families. Major families with large holdings could house their children comfortably. Minor families could not divide their land amongst all their sons because then none of them would have anything worth anything. Of course, this is a generalization. Some families may have one male heir or no heir and go extinct. Regardless, the sons with nothing to get had to go elsewhere. These knights depended on their lords to give them land and it became a sort of self-perpetuating cycle. A lord needed knights, he would give them land, he would gain more power and attract more knights and thus have to seek more land. It was expand or die. At the same time, possibly a cause or possibly a coincidence in time, laws in some countries were passed so that only the senior son would posses all the inheritance. Before this, it was common to share or split: just look at Charlemagne’s grandsons splitting the empire. This created a more permanent land-holding system and the concept of the “house” or family. This feeds into the cycle of needing knights, needing to land them, etc.
December 28th, 2023
The second chapter goes on about aristocrats. It talks about various types of “colonizations”. There’s the type that’s standard, like the English in Ireland, where major landholders held their land at a distance. There were also English who went to Ireland and intermarried. This second type also happened in Frankish and Norman holdings. Some smaller land holders gave up their old estates in the homeland, as it was inconvenient to travel, and thus became purely local. Generations down they’d be no different than natives. In real foreign territories, like Crusader states, they’d drop their old identities and become John of Acre or something.The third chapter is about warfare. What we think of stereotypical warfare is pretty much true. War was dominated by knights and castles, with crossbowmen to boot. The knights, or heavy cavalry, ruled the battlefield. They were fully armored, with heavy armored horses, additional horses, and several types of arms. They wore more iron than a smith could produce in a week, at a higher cost than iron is today. They were initially just mounted warriors, like at the time of the Conquest, but over time this became a hereditary class and thus enters the realm of Arthuric romance. Bowmen came in three types: short, long, and cross. The short bows were not used all that often, but Scandinavians used them quite a bit, especially in the Conquest era. Longbowmen developed in Wales and were deadly, but became a dominant English weapon later. The Crossbowmen were hated by even the Pope for their violence, but they were incredibly valuable. Especially from a castle, they could kill many a knight, baron, or king. It’s how the Lionheart met his end. They ended being like a caste almost; necessary but disgusting to others. It’s interesting.
December 29th, 2023
Castles are a pretty well known concept. They started out as wooden structures on hills, or on man-man mounds. They replaced the huge earthwork mounds of the old days, which would dozens of times larger. The old earthwork systems were for community protection, where the castle was meant for protection of a specific individual and his property. The benefit of the wooden castle was that they could be raised quickly (a week or two) and were used to protect a massive area; they were often only 10 miles apart from each other. The stone castles were much more expensive and took decades to build. The most important aspect of them was the tower. With the rise of castles came a new class of siege weapons to destroy them. All these military changes seemed to have started in Frankish territory and spread. It either spread by conquest, like England, or as a means to defend against these attackers. A third was was the diffusion of ideas through both conquest and defense, the Germanic strongholds in Livonia leading to Baltic natives gaining the technology.
January 2nd, 2024
It continued to talk about warfare and the diffusion of technology. The main point was a topic of invitation as opposed to invasion. In the 1100s, the Scots invited many Normans with promise of land holdings to fight for them. This, of course, led to tension with locals, but brought the Scots lots of technology. At the same time, the Anglo-Normans were building castles in Northumbria. Instead of the old-time raids, there was now a reason to take land and hold it. The other benefit of invitation is that the newcomers are dependent on the king and must stay loyal, or else they may lose out to the locals. It creates a mercenary caste, essentially.
January 3rd, 2024
The fourth chapter looks like it is about the image of the warrior or conqueror. It’s mostly about the intentional savagery of the Franks to instill fear in the Italians, Greeks, or Muslims. They also were notorious for their reasons behind fighting. The Franks did not have a goal, they just wanted more. They came for wealth and land, and they would only leave to acquire more of it. They would write charters making deals and giving away land which they didn’t even own yet, or may not ever. The time of conquest also became the beginning of a new era and kind of a foundational myth. People dated things “since the taking of Jerusalem” or whatever, and landholdings and descendants that can be traced to the time of conquest were given a special kind of privilege. They did not hold land by the gift of a king; they took it for themselves, alongside other conquerors and the ancestor of the king.
January 5th, 2024
I forget most of what was left of chapter 4. The main thing I remember is the usage of the term “Frank”. The peoples of the east came to use Frank as general term for westerner, with all the negative connotations that come with that. In west and central Europe, this was not the case at first. Eventually, Frank could be used as a catch-all term in Europe. Obviously this had to be in only the broadest meanings; an Italian would not call a Dutchman a Frank. The term could be used to describe Latin Christendom, probably with exceptions of the Celtic lands being invaded. It could also be used as a general term when people of different ethnic groups were fighting together, such as in the crusades in the Middle East or Spain. Chapter 5 starts talking about demographics. There are no censuses or really any baptismal records, so it is all guesswork. The author uses the Domesday Book to get a rough min-max in England around 1100 (1086?) and then a later work for around 1370, which would have been after the main plague devastation. The point is that it was a million or so and then up to a few million people. Another part talks about migration and uses Flanders as an example. The Flemish ended up going everywhere, which could be told by surnames or place names as many places from England to Hungary. Don’t remember much else. Flemish possibly became a synonym for foreigner in some places.
January 8th, 2024
The book discussed how the expanded Europe was populated. There was a large amount of land being claimed but not enough people to turn it into farms, and thus rent money. The marshes and forests needed a lot of labor to convert to tillable land. The lords then made it worth the peasants while. What could convince someone to leave their family and life for an unknown land, possibly a completely different climate? One was freedom from rent and other dues for several years. Another was the promise of the land being inheritable. Another was a sort of judicial freedom. Certain settlements were allowed to have their own judge, or to go directly to the duke for judgment. And of course, land itself was a good promise. In England, holdings could be 25 acres. In Picardy, half an acre. These would shrink more as population grew. In new lands, individuals were getting 40 to 80 acres. Pretty enticing.
January 12th, 2024
I read a bit but haven’t written because it’s kind of dull. The sixth chapter was more of the same, new settlements and how to get people there. There were often guys named locators who would attract people there. As mentioned, there were benefits given to attract people. The seventh chapter is about towns. The author breaks it down into two types, the economic town and the legal town. A town is a relative concept based on the population and surroundings. A town could be a town in theory and not in name if it is an economic hub, and a town could be a town in name but little more than a farmstead. The economic benefits a town brings was, in this era, crucial to the development of a ruler’s territory. In order to develop towns, the ruler would give the inhabitants, or “burgers”, benefits that could not be found elsewhere. Later in history, these benefits would be the source of tension between a ruler and his subjects. But now, the independence of the town was a sacrifice that brought enough benefits.
January 16th, 2024
The book talks about the spread of laws. As towns sprout up, they inherit the law structure from their mother city. There was an interesting bit about the spread of Italian merchants. Over the centuries Italians, especially Venetians and Genoese, established critical trading routes in the Mediterranean and practically formed colonies in their locations. This ranged from Spain and Morocco to Egypt, Israel, Constantinople, and even the far end of the Black Sea. The Venetians and Genoese fought each other for primacy. Germans had some big trade routes up north and had similar colonial structure, with Riga on the Baltic as an example. Then the 8th chapter talks about race. I didn’t get very far into it, but the general idea is that race was viewed differently than the way we view it genetically today. It was essentially what we would call culture: language, customs, and laws. Language is the big one, even today people are more sympathetic and tolerant to those who know their language.
February 5th, 2024
Been a couple week since I touched this one. I think I read a bit on the 17th and forgot to write about it, but I don’t remember the topic other than the main heading. There were some bits about the importance of language and how someone who could act as a translator and interpreter was highly valued. I don’t remember much about culture and customs, but it is plain to see that over time the colonizer culture was to supplant the native culture. In some instances this was welcomed by the natives, but that may be more regarding laws. There was a lot written about laws, with different codes existing side-by-side. Initially there were courts for Slavic law and German law, or Muslim law and Spanish law, and a person would use their appropriate system. The colonizer generally had favorable terms legally, the worst case being not in a land of crusading but in Ireland. In Ireland, an Irishman could not bring an Englishman to court, period. Over time, the colonizer would change the system piecemeal to unify the legal system, but racial law was widespread in this era.
February 6th, 2024
The next chapter is a continuation on racial concerns. Where the previous chapter was more about friendlier interactions and changes, this one is about power and control. The first section is on the most powerful organization in Medieval Europe: the Church. The struggle comes down to the fact that the locals want bishops and whatnot who are of their race and language. They want to confess in their native tongue and don’t want to go through an interpreter. Early and often this was not a problem; there would be bilingual priests or two priests or two parishes in a single location. But diversity brings complexity, and at the end of the day, a church seat is a position of power. The colonizers would lobby for their own men and once in power would see that many of the colleagues were of their race, especially in the more oppressive locations like Ireland.
February 9th, 2024
I finished the 9th chapter on race and whatnot but can’t really remember the rest of it. I think the first part was the interesting part. The 10th chapter is on the church again, which I usually find dull. This is no exception. The point seems to be to discuss how the Latin church went from its Early Middle Age state of diversity to its High Middle Age uniformity. Pope Gregory VII appears to responsible for a lot of reforming and unifying, in a tyrant sort of way. Christendom started to mean physical land instead of an idea, and the Christian became a people. The border situation became severe when Latin meant Greek. In the earlier era, a gradient was accepted and a mixture of rites was normal. Once uniformity was demanded and tolerance was diminished, the Latin-Greek frontier became a strict border, each side wanting additional land and souls.
February 12th, 2024
The rest of the church chapter talks about monks and knights. Monasteries evolved over the centuries to become more complex and bureaucratic structures. The Benedictines in the 10th century started living in monasteries, but there was no link between them. Later, Cluny started the model of a mother house, and its daughter houses reported directly to Cluny. This did not expand far beyond France. The Cistercians then started the chain of command. Each daughter house that sprang from another house reported to the house it sprang from. These expanded rapidly all over Europe. The Franciscans were similar, except they did not tie a monk to an abbey. The Franciscans were allowed to travel and be moved between houses. Or maybe that was the Dominicans. They all sound the same. The next bit was about military religious orders. The Templars were first and were formed as a result of knights vowing to protect pilgrims in Jerusalem after the Crusade. Then there were Hospitalers and Teutonic Knights and others, all the same thing. The success of the First Crusade changed the whole thought process of Europe. Everything became a crusade and crusading became a family tradition. God knows how many crusades were in the Middle East, but the crusades into the pagan east were just as big and bloody. Then you have Spain, and later against heretic Europeans themselves. Kill for Christ.
February 14th, 2024
The 11th chapter is about the Europeanization of Europe. How did Europe become homogenized after the fall of Rome? It first discusses names and saints. Names are very malleable and a sign of cultural change. Prior to the 11th century, names tended to be very localized. Duncan was a Scot, Edward was English, William was French. After 1066 and a generation or two, the English names were old-hat and there were plenty of Williams and Roberts. People wanted the names of the upper class, and this was also seen in the east, where Slavs were taking German names. The choice of saints also became contentious. Saints were also localized, so the Normans had no respect for English saints and often replaced them. On the other hand, some saints were so loved that culture did not matter. Norman king Henry III named his son an English name, Edward, after Edward the Confessor. But key at this time was the increase in worship of “universal” saints: Peter, Paul, Virgin Mary, etc. This is the time when dozens of “Notre Dames” sprang up. It also made it easier for Crusaders to found churches after saints everyone knew. A new popularity for these saints meant that more people were given their names. You had Peters and Johns from Spain to Poland, further reflecting a unified Christian culture.
February 15th, 2024
Another indicator of Europanization was the spread of silver pennies and charters. Silver coins can be seen to have a initial minting in the Carolingian empire in the 10th century and spread outward from there. English and Germanic lands, followed by Slavic, created their own mints. Celtic lands did not really create mints and were dependent on the English, though Scotland did set up its own. Scotland, of course, had also imported Normans en masse. Charters showed a path of land grant by papal bull or similar, then creation of bishoprics, then secular creation of ecclesiastical lands, then secular chanceries period. This spread quickly and can be seen in Bohemia and Slavic lands that over two centuries or so went from illiterate to writing native charters. One last section is on universities, which France and Italy had a strong grip on. Outside of these areas and somewhere like Oxford, there was nothing for centuries. This caused people on the peripheries to travel to these lands to become educated and thus came to be part of a shared culture despite diverse origins. They returned home and brought their Latinized education with them.
February 17th, 2024
I finished the last chapter in non-working hours. It’s nice to start a new book on a Monday. The last chapter is about the “Political Sociology” after the expansion of Europe. I guess it’s kind of a summary of previous topics. In general, things were different. Former frontiers, where Christians were victims of pagan or Muslim raiding and pirating, were now safely in the heartland of Christian Europe. Unlike later colonization, this had very little to do with the King and government. The church, merchants, and crusaders (volunteers, if you will) paved the way for this expansion. Often during this times, the heads of states were busy expanding their personal holdings at the expense of their fellow European. Knights conquered the Wends, Italians forced a foothold in far foreign markets, and monasteries spread like wildfire. Not everything was equal everywhere. In Celtic lands, colonization came directly at the expense of the locals, and they became second class citizens. In Muslim lands, they also became second class but held on to their right to religion. Muslims were not pagans; they had a complex culture with a deep and written religious scripture. Muslims were there to stay or they were moving out, and they had the benefit in the Levant of being surrounded by fellow Muslims. The pagans of the Baltic region did not have such a network or culture, so conversion was not a big deal. It often came with benefits. Some, like the Lithuanians, held on to their beliefs and became a massively powerful pagan kingdom with new imported German technology. That’s pretty much it. Not bad, a bit dull.