Medieval Christendom

Medieval political authority was fragmented by design and by accident. Kings ruled through networks of personal obligation rather than bureaucracies, holding land in return for service and swearing oaths that bound both parties. Historians label the arrangement feudalism, a term coined afterwards and now used with great caution, since practice varied enormously and the tidy pyramid of the textbooks never existed anywhere.

The defining structural fact was the rivalry between two universal authorities. The Investiture Controversy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, over whether emperors or popes appointed bishops, produced the spectacle of Henry IV waiting barefoot at Canossa for papal absolution, and, more importantly, established that spiritual and temporal power were separate jurisdictions.

That separation shaped everything after. Nowhere else in the Archives did religious and political authority split so sharply into competing institutions with independent legal systems, and much of later European constitutional development happened in the space between them.

Law developed on several tracks at once: canon law systematised by the church, Roman law rediscovered at Bologna in the eleventh century and taught across Europe, and customary and common law in the kingdoms. Magna Carta in 1215 was a baronial settlement with a rebellious king rather than a charter of liberties, and its assertion that the ruler is subject to law, whatever its original scope, became one of the most consequential documents ever written.

The mounted armoured knight dominated European warfare for centuries, and the reason is partly technology, in the stirrup, the couched lance and the heavy warhorse, and largely social. A knight represented years of training and enormous expense, which meant the fighting class and the landholding class were the same class, and military organisation and social structure were one subject.

Chivalry developed as the ideology of that class, a code of conduct emphasising loyalty, courage, protection of the weak and courtly love. The church and literature promoted it heavily, and it was honoured in practice about as consistently as such codes usually are.

The Crusades ran for two centuries from 1095, and their main significance lay off the battlefield. The First Crusade took Jerusalem and established Latin states in the Levant that lasted two hundred years. The later expeditions largely failed, and the Fourth Crusade sacked Christian Constantinople instead, permanently crippling the Byzantine empire and poisoning relations between the churches. In Europe the crusades produced contact, commerce and a lasting ideological framework for holy war.

The knight’s dominance ended in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: to the longbow at Crécy and Agincourt, to Swiss pikes, and finally to gunpowder artillery that made the castle obsolete. The Hundred Years War is the long demonstration of it.

The medieval economy grew substantially and for unglamorous reasons: the heavy plough that could work northern European clay soils, the three-field rotation, the horse collar, the watermill and windmill. Between roughly 1000 and 1300 population, cultivated area and town size all rose sharply.

Towns were the transformative development, and their legal character mattered more than their size. A chartered town was a corporate body with its own courts, customs and privileges, standing outside the seigneurial order. That is the origin of the principle that town air makes free, and of the merchant and craft guilds that regulated production within them.

Long-distance commerce revived on two axes: the Italian maritime cities trading into the Mediterranean and Levant, and the Hanseatic League working the Baltic and North Sea. Between them the Champagne fairs became the clearing house of Europe, and the commercial techniques developed to serve this trade, including bills of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, insurance and the partnership contract, are the foundation of modern finance.

Then the fourteenth century broke it. Famine from 1315, and the Black Death from 1347 which killed perhaps a third to a half of Europe’s population within a few years, reversed three centuries of growth. The consequence for survivors was a labour shortage that raised wages, weakened serfdom, and provoked legislation to hold wages down, and, when that failed, revolts.

Medieval society was described by its own theorists as three orders, those who pray, those who fight and those who work. The idealised scheme flattered the first two and covered over an enormously varied reality of free peasants, serfs, townspeople, merchants, artisans and clergy of every rank.

Most people farmed, in village communities working open fields in strips with collective decisions about rotation and grazing. Serfdom bound peasants to the land with obligations of labour and render, and its extent, terms and enforcement varied by region and declined markedly in western Europe after the Black Death.

Women’s position was constrained by law and more varied in practice than the law suggests. Aristocratic women managed estates in their husbands’ absence and occasionally ruled, townswomen worked in trades and sometimes ran them as widows, and peasant women worked the fields. The convent offered the one institutional route to literacy, authority and a life outside marriage, and produced figures like Hildegard of Bingen, who wrote on theology, medicine and music and corresponded with popes and emperors.

Jewish communities lived under a deteriorating settlement. Initially tolerated and often royally protected as a taxable resource, they were subjected from 1096 onwards to massacre during crusade preaching, ritual murder accusations, compulsory badges, and finally expulsion, from England in 1290, from France repeatedly, and from Spain in 1492. This was part of how medieval Christendom defined itself, not incidental to it.

The church was the one institution present everywhere, from the papal curia to the village priest, and it structured time itself: the day by bells, the week by Sunday, the year by a calendar of feasts and fasts, and the life course by baptism, marriage and last rites.

Monasticism was its engine. Benedictine houses preserved literacy through the early medieval centuries, cleared and farmed land, kept libraries and copied texts. The Cistercians reformed toward austerity and became formidable agricultural enterprises. And the thirteenth-century friars, Franciscan and Dominican, took religion into the towns as preachers rather than withdrawing from them.

Popular religion had its own texture, centred on saints, relics and pilgrimage. A relic made a place holy and a destination, and pilgrimage moved enormous numbers of ordinary people across Europe to Compostela, Rome and Canterbury, along an infrastructure of hostels, roads and shrines that is also, incidentally, the origin of a good deal of European tourism.

The institution’s response to dissent hardened over time. The Cathars of Languedoc were destroyed by crusade and inquisition, Waldensians, Lollards and Hussites were persecuted, and the machinery of investigation grew up to do it. The Avignon papacy and the Great Schism, with two and then three rival popes, damaged papal authority in ways the Reformation would exploit.

The Gothic cathedral is the period’s greatest building and a real technical breakthrough. The pointed arch, the ribbed vault and the flying buttress together moved the load off the walls, which meant the walls could be replaced with glass, and the interior filled with coloured light in a way that was explicitly theological, following the Neoplatonic idea of light as the medium of the divine.

The scale is difficult to convey. Chartres, Amiens, Cologne and their peers were built over generations by towns whose entire population was a fraction of the workforce a modern equivalent would need, financed by donation and pilgrimage, and pushed to the structural limits of what stone could do, as Beauvais demonstrated by collapsing.

Manuscript illumination was the art of the book: the Book of Kells, the Très Riches Heures, gospel books in gold and lapis. Every one was made by hand on prepared animal skin, which is why books were treasure and why libraries were counted in dozens or hundreds of volumes.

Medieval art is often described as a decline from classical naturalism, which mistakes intention for capacity. The aim was to signify rather than to record appearance, through hierarchical scale, gold grounds, and standardised gestures and attributes that formed a visual language a largely non-literate population could read fluently.

The university is a medieval invention with no ancient precedent. Bologna, Paris, Oxford and their successors were corporations of masters and students holding charters, granting degrees, governing themselves, and claiming jurisdiction over their own members. The form has proved one of the most durable institutions ever devised.

What they taught was substantially recovered rather than inherited. The twelfth-century translation movement in Toledo and Sicily brought Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen and the works of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd into Latin, mostly from Arabic, so the Latin West received a great deal of Greek learning through Islamic intermediaries, along with Arabic mathematics and medicine.

Scholasticism was the method built to handle it. Pose a question, marshal authorities on both sides, and resolve the contradiction by drawing a distinction. It is easy to caricature and it was a rigorous training in argument, and Aquinas’s project of reconciling Aristotle with Christian doctrine is one of the most ambitious intellectual undertakings anywhere in the Archives.

The scientific work is better than its reputation. Oxford’s Merton calculators worked on the mathematics of motion, Grosseteste and Roger Bacon wrote on optics and experimental method, and Buridan and Oresme developed impetus theory and anticipated arguments about the earth’s rotation. The technologies changed daily life: the mechanical clock, spectacles, the blast furnace, the water-powered mill in its hundreds of applications, and from the 1450s movable type, which changed the terms of everything that followed.

Medieval Europe is documented in enormous quantity and with a heavy institutional bias. Charters, cartularies, court rolls, wills, papal registers, monastic chronicles and manorial accounts survive in vast numbers. Churches, courts and landowners produced them, so the record is strongest exactly where property and privilege are concerned.

Ordinary people appear mostly when they enter those records: as parties to a land transfer, as defendants, as tenants in a survey, as names in a tax list. Coroners’ rolls and manorial court records are among the best sources for everyday life because they document mishap and dispute.

The narrative sources need careful handling. Monastic chroniclers wrote with institutional interests and providential assumptions, saints’ lives follow generic conventions that shape what they report, and crusade accounts were written to justify. Reading them means asking what genre a text belongs to before asking what it says.

The historiographical burden here is the period label itself. ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Dark Ages’ were coined to describe a gap between antiquity and its revival, and carried an assumption of stagnation that took a century of scholarship to dislodge. It has not fully gone. Popular accounts still routinely credit the period with beliefs it did not hold, including the flat earth, which no educated medieval person believed and which is a nineteenth-century invention.