Europe in the High Middle Ages

created further problems in international politics. In this chapter we consider the political situation of France; in chapter 5 that of central Europe.

Francia, the kingdom of France, was more an abstract concept than a reality of governance in the early eleventh century. Not even its geographical extent is easy to describe, because the Crown claimed suzerain authority over territories at a great distance from its heartland, which was in and around the Parisian basin. Indeed, the legacy of France’s late Carolingian history – devolution of authority, erosion of military power, economic regression – had turned the realm into a congeries of self-governing principalities, some well managed, others poorly, but almost always in bitter rivalry. It was the lands directly under the king’s fiscal exploitation, the royal demesne, rather than the kingdom as a whole, that really defined the sphere of his governance.

Despite their best efforts, however, scholars know very little about the quality and extent of governance of royal demesne lands in this period or even about the governors themselves. The three early Capetian kings of France, Hugh Capet (987–96), from whose nickname eighteenth-century writers coined the name of the dynasty, Robert the Pious (996–1031) and Henry I (1031–60), displaced (according to their supporters) or usurped (according to their detractors) the claim of the Carolingian dynasty to the throne. They were successful in part because they survived at all, let alone for such a long time, and managed to pass on the kingship to their eldest sons.

They achieved this, in part, by stressing the honour of the Crown. Kingship mattered in that an elaborate ideology justified its existence. The king of the Franks, to use the formal title of the French ruler, was lionized by ecclesiastical supporters as a new David and a new Solomon and as the Lord’s anointed. The kingly office, bestowed at his coronation, no doubt bore many of the trappings of imperial authority. We do not know as much as we might like to know about the coronation ceremonies, however. We can argue back from twelfth- and thirteenth-century records and imagine the new king inoiled at the magnificent cathedral of Reims with chrism said to have been sent from heaven in the mouth of a dove for the baptism of Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks, in the fifth century. We can envision the new David girded with Charlemagne’s sword as a sign of his military prowess and carrying a baton topped by an ivory sculpture of a hand (the main de justice) to represent his Solomonic and Christ-like persona as the Just Judge. And we can picture the new king as a miracle worker after the coronation, healing the repellent skin disease, scrofula, by the mere touch of his fleshly hand and the making of the sign of the cross on the victim.

Unfortunately, many of these ceremonies are almost certainly not early eleventh-century rites. Touching for scrofula was not practised either as an immediate post-coronation rite or regularly at other times until more than a century after the accession of Hugh Capet, although the publicists of Robert the Pious believed he had used the miraculous power, and there is some indication that some ritual of miraculous touching, however infrequently it occurred, was already regarded as a custom in the reign of King Philip I (1060–1108). As to other matters, the record is equally spotty and inconclusive about eleventh-century practice. Reims cathedral was not fixed as the coronation site until 1129. The first mention of the miraculous chrism does not occur until 1131; it is scarcely credible that this oil would have gone unremarked if it had been used in eleventh-century coronations.

The point is that an eleventh-century core of religious ceremonies, including coronation, acclamation and related rites of kingship, needed repeatedly to be ‘enhanced’ as part of an ongoing and self-serving celebration of Capetian kingship. It was not until the thirteenth century that the Capetian rites of kingship surpassed those of other Catholic dynasties in brilliance and, to a large extent, in the bold claims they embodied.

While their ecclesiastical supporters were enriching the coronation ceremony, they were also of necessity stressing the Capetians’ personal virtue, as opposed to their birthright, as justification for rule, for it proved impossible in the short run to suppress the accusation that the new rulers were usurpers. Robert the Pious’s reign was crucial here. Despite irregularities in his personal life, especially his liaison with a cousin, a union regarded technically as incestuous and therefore condemned by the pope, Robert managed to inspire a strong cadre of supporters. (His eventual submission to papal discipline by his renunciation of his cousin certainly helped.) His devotional practices gave him a monkish reputation, as did his support of the Cluniac reformers, of the Peace of God, and of the faith against the alleged perfidies of Jews and heretics, some of the latter of whom he caused to be executed by fire. Thus, it is no accident that Robert was the first Capetian alleged to have had thaumaturgic powers.

The new dynasty also practised a politically stabilizing form of anticipatory succession which they maintained until the late twelfth century. Lords in some other principalities, such as Normandy, practised very similar forms of succession. In the case of the Capetians, the eldest son was associated with his father, was crowned in his father’s lifetime, and at least formally ruled as co-king until his father’s death, after which he was crowned a second time. Robert the Pious, indeed, was associated with his father, Hugh, from the very beginning of Hugh’s reign. This method of inheritance was not only a preventative against disputed successions, but also, depending on the characters of the senior and junior kings, helped the younger men get considerable experience of ruling.

Despite their best efforts to represent themselves as chosen by God to rule, the Capetian kings found political rivals everywhere in the fertile landscape of northern France. Much of the time and effort of the eleventh- and indeed twelfth-century kings was spent on the nasty work of bringing these rivals – barons and men of lesser status who controlled strongly fortified castles in the Parisian basin itself – into submission. They found their justification for doing so in part from the royal claim, repeated in every coronation oath, to protect the Church, which translated in practice into coming to the defence of the scores of individual churches and monasteries which were among the principal objects of depredation by local lords.

The vineyards, grain fields, sheep flocks and array of dairy and orchard farms that dotted the lush countryside and were held in dependence by monastic, episcopal and lay lords in the Ile de France were tempting targets to plunderers and brigands. And it must be said that except for the spring floods that turned the many rivers of the region into formidable barriers to raiders and to more serious invaders as well, the villages and agricultural lands of northern France, nestled as they were in a gentle landscape, enjoyed little natural protection. When peace prevailed, this meant that the countryside was open to easy communication and economic penetration across political boundaries. The same rivers that, swollen and choked with debris, endangered farmland and villages provided in normal weather and tranquil times extensive and effective means of transportation of goods. The Ile de France was almost inevitably a hub of trade and mercantile activity, and great cities – none greater than Paris – were growing up despite the recurrent political disorder.

Elsewhere the disorder was both more and less crippling. In Brittany political authority was in shambles from internecine strife and from continual pressure from the counts of Anjou and from the dukes of Normandy, both of whom sought, more or less successfully, to dominate the Breton regions bordering their principalities. This two-fold pressure from Anjou on the east and Normandy on the north-east of the province meant that only the western Celtic-speaking regions of Brittany were spared ‘foreign’ invasion. Not surprisingly, these were by far the poorest regions of the province, although there were numerous relatively prosperous fishing villages hard by the sea, and many Bretons made tolerable livings from trade and piracy.

Of the two principalities putting most pressure on Breton political autonomy, namely, Anjou and Normandy, Anjou displayed the more aggressive character. Watered by delightful rivers and blessed with a lovely climate and rich soil, its bounty provided the counts with the surplus revenue they needed for military action against their enemies and rivals. Throughout the first half of the eleventh century the counts annexed major adjacent territories. Annexation by marriage may have been the preferred strategy; it cost less (there were limits to the counts’ wealth) and was usually less risky in the short run, but the appetites of the counts, two of whom, Fulk Nerra and Geoffrey Martel, are legendary for their expansionist desires, could not be fully whetted except by outright conquest. Besides the borderlands of Brittany as far as Nantes, over which they exercised and maintained control from the tenth century onwards, the counts expanded their domains southward into Poitou and Touraine, incorporating the capital of the latter, Tours, into the Angevin patrimony by the mid-century. These enormous territorial gains were secured by the construction of a large number of stone castles, which were staging points both for disciplinary action against rebellious subjects and for strikes at foreign invaders.

Fulk’s countship (987–1040) was marked by brutality. Monkish chronicle sources may exaggerate just how brutal he was, but his three pilgrimages to Jerusalem testify not merely to his piety but also to his recognition that his behaviour on and off the battlefield failed to live up to the moral standards of Christian rulership then being articulated and could only be redeemed by the penitential act of pilgrimage. His son and successor, Geoffrey Martel (1040–60), was probably less brutal, but brutal enough. In any case he was equally effective in keeping the vast array of Angevin territories in submission. He never let the castellans achieve anything like political independence, and at every opportunity he carefully reinforced what were sometimes local lords’ rather vague notions of the nature of their dependence on him as overlord. Under Geoffrey, the Angevin principality probably became the most powerful in western France.

Equally martial in its political culture, though still remarkably stable in the first two decades of the eleventh century, was Normandy under Duke Richard II (996–1026). Inheriting a province whose Scandinavian conquerors had settled down as free farmers to exploit the rich land increasingly famous for its dairy products, fruit and grains, he ruled with benign self-confidence. He was not only a competent ruler but also a major player, more so than the Angevin counts, in international politics. Some sort of commercial tie with England was almost inevitable.

Duke Richard was also responsible for bringing a zealous Lombard aristocrat and churchman, one Guilermo of Volpiano and usually known in English-language books as William of Volpiano, to Normandy. Guilermo came from a successful career in Dijon in the duchy of Burgundy, where as a Cluniac monk and abbot of Saint-Bénigne of Dijon, he was known as a great reformer of the moral and material fabric of the church. Besides the renewal of the spiritual life of Saint-Bénigne, to Guilermo of Volpiano is attributed the inspiration for the rotunda of the majestic abbey church there, which was built on the model of that of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Guilermo of Volpiano did his job in Normandy extremely well, reestablishing the once important abbey of Fécamp, which had been destroyed by the duke’s pagan Viking ancestors, and instituting reformed monastic chapters on the Cluniac model in other monasteries in the territories most closely tied to Richard. Most of the new foundations, more than twenty-five in the next two or three decades, were owed directly to the duke’s or his near kin’s patronage. This close relationship between the dukes and the churches helped undergird the duchy’s political cohesion, which in turn benefited ideologically from the celebratory mythology that passed for history among the writers who recorded the settlement and achievements of the Normans. The fact that the highest levels of the aristocracy were kindred of the ducal family and recognized that the security of their property depended on his good will further strengthened the unity of the province. Consequently, in Normandy, neither encastellation nor unrestrained feud or private war rose to levels visible elsewhere, such as in Brittany. By and large, the castles that were constructed in Normandy, like those in Anjou, were defensive centres and staging points for the duke’s retainers.

Grave problems arose when one of Richard’s successors, Robert I (1028–35), designated an illegitimate infant son as his heir. Soon afterwards Robert died while on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, itself evidence, like the pilgrimages of the Angevin counts, of the increasing centrality in northern Europe of the holy city of Jerusalem to the devotional life of the age. Only seven years old at the time of his accession, the child whom Robert left behind was for many years in no position to rule, but in 1047, as an adolescent, he dared to assert his authority and by doing so provoked a rebellion from those subjects who had become accustomed to the looser rule of the prince’s minority. Thanks to the opposition of King Henry I of France, the rebellion faltered, and the young man, William by name, survived and came effectively into personal rule. Almost immediately he retaliated against his enemies, expanding his influence militarily into the west of the duchy, where opposition to him had been strongest, and into the neighbouring provinces of Maine and Brittany as well, from which some of his opponents had launched raids or sought support.

Duke William’s relations with Flanders, his northern neighbour, were more irenic. Under Counts Baldwin IV (989–1035) and Baldwin V (1035–67), whose daughter William married, Flanders entered upon that phase of its history that would make it one of the wealthiest regions in northern Europe. Benefiting from its navigable rivers – the Meuse, the Scheldt and the lower Rhine – and from its coastal harbours, economic life in Flanders was almost intimately connected to trade. But land reclamation on an immense scale, largely brought about by dyking, also made possible increased grain and animal production to support the burgeoning populations of big trading towns like Ghent, Ypres and Bruges.

If the trading centres of Flanders were growing in power, they did not yet offer any significant challenge to the count’s rule. That came from other lords, particularly the German emperor, Henry II, against whom Baldwin IV had to defend himself and his lands by force shortly after the turn of the millennium. The eventual outcome of their struggle was recognition on the count’s part that he held some of his territories directly from the emperor. This collection of lands, known as imperial Flanders, needs to be differentiated from those lands held of the French king, French Flanders, in order to understand the complexities of international relations involving the county in the centuries to come.

This political division only very imperfectly replicated the linguistic division of French (Walloon) and Germanic (Flemish) in the count’s territories, but that linguistic division was also the basis of a rivalry among the count’s subjects that had deleterious consequences for the effectiveness of his and his successors’ rule. It did not help matters of governance that Baldwin’s son chafed under his father’s dominion and rebelled in 1028, or that the son was ineffective himself as a warrior after he came into the countship in his own right in 1035. Only by skilful negotiation, including an alliance with the dukes of Normandy, did he preserve and extend his patrimony and thus safeguard the opportunity to improve modes of governance in Flanders during his thirty-year countship.

The power of the French king was certainly inferior to that of the duke of Normandy and potentially to that of the count of Flanders during most of the eleventh century, but the princes who seemed to the Crown potentially even more ominous rivals were the rulers of another collection of lands, usually called Blois-Champagne. It was Count Eudes II (d. 1037) who amassed the lands of this great agglomeration of fiefs. His possession of Blois was uncontested from the beginning of the eleventh century, but the legality of his claim to the inheritance of Champagne was less clear. At Eudes’s request, Bishop Fulbert of Chartres, one of the greatest scholars of the age, put together a compelling dossier in the count’s favour, arguing for the legitimacy of Eudes’s inheritance of extensive territories in Champagne in 1021 through his grandmother.

At the core of Fulbert’s argument, besides the legalities, was the avowal he made of Eudes’s unshakable fidelity as a royal vassal, a valuable pledge in a world where personal loyalty counted so much in being able to confront one’s enemies effectively. On this subject the bishop could wax eloquent. ‘He who swears fealty to his lord,’ he writes,

Outside the narrow political context of princely rivalries there is another context that helps explain the frenzied struggle for power among the great lords of Francia. It has already been pointed out that northern France was richly endowed in resources. Trading centres of notable importance were growing up in the towns of Champagne, as well as in Paris, Rouen, and in the Loire valley towns of the counts of Anjou. Jewish traders and merchants were moving into these centres, itself testimony of the towns’ economic vitality. Grain was grown in abundance throughout most of the rural regions, and the wines produced from the grapes were coveted in France and elsewhere. It was also in the north that there emerged a very concerted effort to harness water power to the daily tasks of life, especially the grinding of grain at water mills. Village after village exploited the streams and rivers with a mill and mill pond, the latter providing fish also for local populations.

Besides grain, fruit and wine, northern France soon became known for the raising of flocks and therefore the production of wool and for the raising of industrial crops like flax for linen cloth and woad for dyestuffs. With its extensive, though heavily exploited woodlands, still another resource in the form of pasturage for pigs, lumber for building, wood for fuel, and charcoal for making steel added to the wealth of the rulers and their subjects. War itself had a productive aspect in that it stimulated certain forms of artisanship, like the production of metal weapons and armour, that could be reoriented in peacetime to the manufacture of ploughshares, hoes, harrows and axes. The woodlands in turn yielded – or began to yield – to further efforts at clearance.

Thus, according to one calculus, it may be argued that rival princes in northern France were attempting to expand their lands not merely because it gave them masculine prestige, but also because it made economic sense to do so. It was an ironically depressing truth, however, that their very attempts – by interrupting rural workers’ production, by making villagers homeless through savage acts of arson, and by destroying productive resources like mills and forges – put brakes on what might have been a yet more spectacular economic take-off, one even more beneficial to them.

In hindsight scholars can tell that the slow process that would bring most petty lords under control and would give the Crown superior access to the resources just described started around the mid-eleventh century in the reign of King Henry I (1031–60) and continued in the even longer reign of his son Philip I (1060–1108). The remarkable length of the individual Capetian reigns contributed to the stability that was required to pursue a consistent policy. And the desire to magnify the stature of the dynasty was manifested not simply in the evolving coronation rituals, but also in opportune marriages. Philip I was called Philip, a Greek name, not because the apostle Philip’s name was a common choice in the West (it was not), but because it was so in the East, and that is where his mother, Anne, came from.

A Russian princess, the daughter of the ruler of the great principality of Kiev, Anne had been a very desirable match in that the family of which she was a part was recognized as one of the most important in Europe. Her father, Prince Iaroslav the Wise (1019–54), ruled an immense congeries of territories in eastern Europe and seemed single-handedly to be holding back the steppe barbarians. He may even have flirted with aligning the young Russian church with the Roman rather than the Orthodox obedience, for he was no slavish sycophant of Constantinople. But he failed in his attempt to take Constantinople by military force late in his reign and thereafter remained at peace with the Eastern Empire. Despite this setback he continued to command respect and fear until the day he died.

Evidence of the family’s prestige, as suggested above, abounds in the marriage alliances. Iaroslav himself wed a Swedish princess, while one sister made a match with the king of Poland and the other with a high-ranking member of the Byzantine nobility. Iaroslav’s six children, three boys and three girls, all married high European nobility: the three girls the kings of France (Anne), Hungary and Norway respectively. The allegiances – marital and implicitly political – testify to the increasing ‘europeanization’ of Christian elites in the eleventh century, a hallmark of aristocratic life for centuries to come.

King Henry I, with young Philip, his son by Anne, as nominal co-ruler the last two years of his reign, kept up the pressure on the petty lords within the Ile de France, but increasingly fell foul of the Norman duke, William, whose reign he had earlier helped secure. Henry twice, unsuccessfully, invaded Normandy. The important point was not the failure perhaps, so much as the pattern. The Crown was beginning to take a more active role against the really great princes in the kingdom.

Unfortunately, when Henry died Philip was still very young, only seven or eight. His father had foreseen the likely precariousness of the situation for his son and had arranged for the count of Flanders to act as regent of the kingdom, a brilliant move in that it put Philip under the protection of a powerful man who was also the father-in-law of the Norman duke. It thus placed a moral obstacle in the way of Duke William avenging the attacks that Henry I had launched against Normandy a few years before.

Philip I continued his father’s policies when he reached adulthood. For much of his reign he did so successfully, and to Philip are often attributed innovations like the institution of provosts: officers, more or less territorially based, often in a town, who were to oversee the collection of royal revenues and carry out other administrative duties. Increasingly, too, one finds evidence of more systematic organization of the central administration, with a few officials emerging as the principal administrators of genuine departments of government. Again, it is not far-fetched to see Philip’s hand at work in this development.

Like his counterparts elsewhere in Europe, however, Philip did not fully understand or ultimately endorse all the currents of change that were convulsing the Church towards the end of the eleventh century (see chapter 6), and his confusion, alternating as it did with hostility to any change that might limit his authority, led to disputes with ecclesiastics. No dispute was as bitter or put as much of a break on the aggrandizing policies of the Crown vis-à-vis the territorial lords as Philip’s renunciation of his wife, Bertha, and his remarriage, or bigamous marriage, as censorious ecclesiastics would have it, to Bertrade de Montfort in 1092: excommunication, then absolution, then another excommunication for backsliding, another absolution, and on and on for a dozen years, while the king himself seems to have become more and more morose, lethargic about governing, and generally unfit for rule.

The dignity of the Crown was saved through the luck of Capetian associative kingship; Philip’s son Louis began to take up the slack, in what by then seemed a traditional manner, and pressed on with the work of territorial consolidation (suppressing lordlings’ petty acts of violence) and expansion, if not by conquest, then by purchase, as with the viscounty of Bourges in 1101. Most importantly, the son was not irredeemably tainted in churchmen’s eyes by his father’s sins. The eleventh century, on balance, therefore, must be counted as a success for the Capetians and for those who saw in the Capetian monarchy the best hope of creating a lasting internal peace for France.