The Early Middle Ages


The disintegrating Roman Empire began re-emerging even as it was falling apart. In what we think of as Western Europe--Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, France, Germany, Austria, Italy--the formerly Roman world was in the hands of barbarians, but they were barbarians who had real respect for Rome. Many were Christians, though not necessarily Roman Catholic Christians.

In the East--Greece, Asia Minor and the general Eastern Mediterranean world--the Roman Empire did not fall at all, and had long been transformed into a Greek speaking Roman Empire centered at Constantinople. We call it the Byzantine Empire; they simply called it the Roman Empire. We will discuss them further at a later time, but they preserved much of the literature, law, and ceremony of Ancient Greece and Rome. There was not a clear break between Eastern and Western Christianity until perhaps the 1200s--1n 1204 Catholic Crusaders would attack and sack Constantinople which did not make them any friendlier, but there were theological and political issues, not to mention issues of world view. In the West, the pope came to be a political power in his own right. He controlled land in central Italy, could depose emperors, princes and kings--but c ouldn't always make it stick--He had his own base of power separate from the political rulers of the age.

In the East, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church tended to be a creature of the Emperor, lacked any independent power base, and supported imperial policy. The Patriarch of Constantinople was the Patriarch as long as the Byzantine Empire held the world together, but as their world began to fall apart, other patriarchates emerged identified with specific nationalities--Greece, and Russia became the most important, surpassing older patriarchates in Jerusalem and Antioch.

The other world was also identified by religion--the world of Islam which too emerged from the Roman-Greek world of religion and culture, of Aristotle and Jesus. It was also unique, for Arabia was a far away world to the west, and Mohammed's interpretation of God while it rested on a Judeo-Christian, Hellenistic base, was quite remarkable.

The West The cities were in decline, especially in the West. Cities depend on trade, on transportation and economic complexity to assert their importance. But in the 400s, they simply became magnets for invading armies to attack and sack. With the city populations declining, there was much less profitability in the large estates of the late Roman world. Owners of these large latifundia tended to settle their slaves on small family farms so they could pay rent--usually in kind, money was becoming less important in the economy than simply being able to eat.

The free farmers who had once made up the Roman Legions were much less important in their military roles. The success of mounted troops against foot soldiers meant that armies of the middle ages would be dominated by horse soldiers who could afford the expense of going to war. The small, independent farmers, able to exploit technological innovations in agriculture were no longer expected to take months off to fight. He was, however, increasingly expected to pay for his protection, again in the form of produce. There was a clear distinction between independent peasant farmers and serfs--people tied to the land--but one wonders if the distinction were not in the psyche and not in the actual work performed. It is not clear how many people were serfs and how many were free peasants--peasants seem to have outnumbered serfs.

When the empire as a political unit fell, nothing immediately emerged to take its place. The Kingdoms of Franks and other kingdoms were much more informal political units than we might imagine. A king was whoever could act like one and be recognized by his fellows as one, and Germanic tribes tended to elect their kings and to bind them to respect the ancient customs of the tribe. Thus the basic political and economic unit was the most local. For much of Northern Europe and England, it was the Manor, made up of 50 to 250 people, a thousand acres or only a few hundred.

Whereas ancient Europe had been a world of commerce and interdependence--producing grain in Sicily and Egypt, wine and olives in Italy and Greece, the world of the manor, beginning about 500 AD was a world of self-sufficiency. The manor would include forests and fields where the lord would hunt boar and deer, and where the peasants and serfs would range their livestock. It would have commons--open fields where cattle could be grazed--numbers regulated by custom and tradition to prevent overgrazing. In addition, each peasant or serf--and it is difficult to draw a line sometimes--would have several strips of land in various parts of the manor. These might be passed on to children, or they might be exchanged on occasion. The manor would have a mill and a wine press and craftspeople to weave and mend and do all the things a rural economy needs, which is not a great deal.

The Lord of the manor and his family would live perhaps in a rude building in the middle of a wood and earthen stockade called a donjon. He provided justice for the members of the community, hearing cases about stolen pigs and who got whom pregnant out of wedlock, punishing wrongdoers and, at least in the ideal, defending with his sword the peace of the community.

Unlike the owner of a Roman estate, his power was far from absolute and he had to earn his status even if he inherited the estate. The serfs on the land could not be expropriated. He could not expel a serf from the land without serious cause.

The ideal of this manoral age was cooperation. Law was what those in power said it was--but such has always been the case--and custom had greater power than law. Custom limited the power of a Lord. It limited the amount of rent he could demand from his serfs and peasants; it limited the days and kinds of service his lord could demand of him. Individualism and individual rights were a luxury this age--if any age--could not afford.

We are tempted to think of Medieval Europe as a violent world, and it certainly had its moments of violence and victimization. One only needs to read Beowulf, a tenth century story that looks back to the era on the border of Christendom and pagan Europe. The hero is the one who slays the monster, but the king, the one who really gets respect, is the one who gives presents and thereby lays obligations on the recipient. Hrothgar the Ringgiver can expect those who accept his gifts to follow him into battle tomorrow or whenever he calls. These obligations would become formalized after about 800, but these, obligations, formal or informal, were powerfully binding.

For that matter, what binds you to your obligations? What binds a soldier to go to war today? What binds a church member to tithe? Why do people give to the United Way or to National Public Radio? When you graduate from here you will get mail from the Alumni Association, and many of you will give to support your alma mater. The ideal of community, of loyalty to something more important than you, whether blood or soil or honor, or adventure, gets people to do remarkable things. Sometimes these things are remarkably mindless and stupid, occasionally evil, but sometimes also of great worth. There is a reason people still read Shakespeare, as hard as his language is at times. He understands, and leads us to understand, the deepest motivations of our hearts.

Shakespeare puts these words in the mouth of Henry V. A small English force of longbowmen faces overwhelming numbers of French knights at a field called Agincourt. His cousin Warwick wishes they had reinforcements from England. Henry responds:

If we are marked to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will, I pray thee wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It ernes me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God's peace, I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O do not wish one more.
Rather proclaim it presently through my host
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart. His passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse.
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the Feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours
And say, "Tomorrow is Saint Crispian."
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars
And say, "These wounds I had on Crispin's day."
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words--
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester--
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son,
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by
From this day to the ending of the world
But we in it shall be remembered,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

In our day this rings hollow does it not? Are we not more inclined to the other, far more modern prince, the one from Denmark who kept his options open, and whined about fate and dared not take a public stand that might prove him wrong, the one who whimpered:

To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune... or to sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there's the rub...

The people we encounter in the early middle ages were motivated, I think, at a different basic level than we are: Shakespeare understood this, for Henry was not to him a modern figure. Hamlet was, and still is.

Beowulf and Henry were motivated by a desire for glory and spoils. They wanted the women to sing about their exploits. They wanted to be famous for their generosity and for their courage.

And there were other sorts of motivation too.

Before the reign of Constantine, every Christian lived with the threat--some saw it as the hope--of martyrdom. Suddenly in the 5th through the 8th centuries Christians were no longer threatened with martyrdom, and thousands of people poured into the church, some of them believing, but many of them still more pagan than christian. It became easy to be a christian, which suited most folks, but many looked fondly to the days of martyrdom. Some of them went to the desert--Anthony is the most famous of the Egyptian desert fathers who went to the desert in the 300s. Over the next few centuries others would follow, first as Hermits, seeking to seal themselves off from the temptations of the city and face alone the terrors of the wilderness. One, Simon Stylitus, sat on a pole for decades. His food would be sent up to him, vermin would fall off his body and be caught by the people below who came out to share in his holiness.

Some of these desert fathers and mothers were probably insane--or became so--but they were seeking God and knew that encountering God would not come without struggle.

To regulate the movement, and to protect it from excess, a hermit named Pachomius organized his disciples into a regulated community built around regular prayer and meditation, communal labor, and the triple discipline of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

This organized monasticism met a profound spiritual need among a lot of Europeans, and took on a number of forms throughout Europe. Most monasteries would be located in the most remote regions--especially the coast of Ireland. Benedict of Nursia, Italy (d 543) established a formal set of rules for the monks in his monastery at Monte Casino which became the norm.

Monasteries were about the only refuge for the intellectually inclined. In fact monks were about the only people who could read and write. They sustained libraries, and copied ancient manuscripts of all sorts, some of them yet undiscovered. They provided education for their members--and later for the younger children of the nobility.

They provided a place where the nobility could send their daughters and younger sons. A king could endow a monastery in a far off corner of his kingdom and know that the monks would civilize it.

Monasticism, for a time, gave dignity to labor, something the ancients had forgotten. They sought, now always successfully, to discourage violence.

Often the monastery gave a former serf or peasant a way up. Usually the only way up, and occasionally a former peasant became pope.

Monasteries almost inevitably became wealthy--people left them wealth which was invested, and monasteries had their own serfs after a time. The lands made it possible for the monks to live better, but they also endowed schools, hospitals and cultural institutions. In a sense, the monasteries were isolated bits of classical culture, expressed in religious terms, and often enough subverted, but real enough.

Charlemagne

Clovis, 481-511 succeeded in building a united Frankish Kingdom in modern day France and the Low Countries. His grandfather was named Merovech, and his family line were the Merovingians. He and his Merovingian successors were still Germanic tribal leaders rather than kings in any modern, or ancient sense. They treated the kingdom of the Franks according to Germanic custom, which is to say that, upon his death, Clovis divided the land up among his sons. Clovis was energetic enough, but his descendents were remarkably inept and little concerned with defending or administering a kingdom. They left the actual running of affairs to a senior official called the mayor of the palace. These mayors of the palace administered the royal estates, and distributed land to the vassels of the king--those who served the king in exchange for the land. In the 600s someone started attaching a stirrup to the saddle, so a warrior could stand in the saddle, carry a heavier sword, lance , or whatever. It transformed warfare again, making it far more expensive. The only way a king could be sure of an army was to provide his knights, chevaliers, or ritters, with an estate that could be enfeudated to them in exchange for military service. The larger the estate, the greater the expected service. The medieval feudal system was essentially a military-political system based on the same sense of obligation that motivated Beowulf.

In 687 Pepin became mayor of the palace for a particularly enept Merovingian king and assiduously began distributing royal lands, making sure the beneficiaries knew whom to thank. His son, Charles Martel, a successful warrior who, using stirrups and heavy cavalry turned back a Muslim advance at Poitiers, something earlier Merovingian kings had been unable to do. His son, Pepin the Short, in 751 was proclaimed legitimate sovereign of the Franks; the Merovingians were deposed. This was confirmed by the Pope a few years later. Thus Pepin's legitimacy rested on both Germanic custom--proclamation by an assembly of warriors--and Roman custom--coronation by the pontifex maximus, Patriarch of Rome, the Pope.

Pepin's son, Charlemagne (768-814) took the consolidated Frankish kingdom and expanded it to include most of Central Europe from the Pyranees to west of Italy, and into Italy as far as Rome.

Frankish conquest and conversion to Roman Christianity went hand in hand for Charlemagne. Invaded Italy four times at the request of the pope to suppress the Lombards. Conquered and converted the pagan Bavarians and Saxons, in 800, on Christmas day, crowned Emperor by the Pope

(But wait, there is already an emperor in Constantinople! More on that later!

So how was he to control so vast an empire? He traveled widely, sent out inspectors with full power to represent his interests, called yearly assemblies of his nobles where he issued decrees, heard complaints, and got advice. He also standardized money, weights and measures throughout his kingdom.

His son, Louis the Pious did little before he died with three sons who all wanted to be king. It was still a Germanic world. They partitioned the empire in 843 and saw it fall apart. The west became Germany where Charlemagne is called Karl Der Grosse, the east France. Charlemagne had been emperor of both.

After 843, the brief unity under Charlemagne disintegrated, and the expansion of Christianity seemed to evaporate under intense external pressure from the Spanish Moors as well as others.

The Saracens, also Muslim, occupied the North coast of Africa, from whence they threatened Italy. The Magyars, another barbarian, pagan people from the steppes of Russia invaded the Danube basin in 895. They settled in Southeastern Europe and were converted to Christianity about the year 1000. The greatest challenge, however, came from the Vikings. Christendom might have continued to shrink had it not been for a number of remarkable, and quite ambiguous events