Everywhere in northern Europe in the eleventh century violence was characteristic of political life. This is not to suggest that violence was constant or that every outbreak was intensely destructive to human life or property. Much of the violence practised by elites against other elites is now regarded as being of a ritual character. At the knightly level and upwards, people of roughly the same economic and social standing faced off in confrontations meant as much to demonstrate power and courage as to reinforce boundaries in both a territorial and a conceptual sense. Men – and here we are talking principally about men – needed to know their place, where they could exercise authority, and whom they could exploit and to what degree.
The limits were occasionally being redefined, as by the emergence of movements like the Peace and Truce of God, and thus, in a curious way, force or the ritual show of force was required to confirm the new limits. Yet, one thing is certain. However much new tendencies within Christian society like the Peace Movement stimulated the reconfiguration of political forces, there was as yet in the eleventh century little reduction in the absolute number of actors who claimed rights to the legitimate use of force.
This fact helps explain why in France and Germany, although there were long traditions of centralizing, if never fully centralized, royal authority, centrifugal forces always seemed poised to destroy every semblance of unity. In each case, there was a constant struggle to hold the polity together, and in each case the struggle was only partly successful. Nonetheless, containment of the forces of disunity was more successful in Germany than in France even though new polities on the German borderlands, the Hungarian and Polish kingdoms, complicated the situation which the German emperor confronted. The uncertain conversion of the people of these new kingdoms to Catholic Christianity