The investiture controversy had shattered the early-medieval equilibrium and ended the interpenetration of ecclesia and mundus. Medieval kingship, which had been largely the creation of ecclesiastical ideals and personnel, was forced to develop new institutions and sanctions. The result, during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, was the first instance of a secular bureaucratic state whose essential components appeared in the Anglo-Norman monarchy. The intellectual expansion of Europe in the twelfth century, which was largely the work of churchmen, was in some ways more beneficial to the growth of secular power than to ecclesiastical leadership. The improvements in education, law, and even the increase in piety all came to serve the aims of monarchy. The rise of the universities produced a new kind of administrative personnel for royal government. The great increase in legal knowledge gave kings a way of implementing their control over society. It also gave them a juristic ideology to replace the early-medieval tradition of theocratic kingship, which had been divested of its effectiveness by the attacks of the Gregorian reformers. The explosive effects of the new piety also contributed to the entrenchment of secular power. The widespread criticism of the clergy made it easier for royal government to assert its own leadership in society. The many problems arising from the new piety also distracted the hierarchy from paying close attention to what was happening in political life and gave kings greater freedom to pursue their own interests without ecclesiastical interference.
The twelfth-century Roman curia had only one firm policy with regard to the kings of western Europe: The northern rulers were not to threaten the independence of the papacy by invading Italy. Otherwise the popes took a flexible and pragmatic attitude toward the European kings, trying to win from them limited concessions, such as recognition of the papal curia as the central appellate court of the church. The calm in church-state relations allowed the monarchy to make use of the new learning to improve its administrative techniques, bureaucratic personnel, and ideology and to entrench its leadership in society. Especially in England and Capetian France, by 1200 all classes and groups were becoming accustomed to the regular exercise of royal power in law and taxation. The central importance of the royal government in the lives of nobles, bourgeois, and the higher clergy was becoming routinized. Given a dramatic and strong personality on the throne, the engine of royal power would become an extremely formidable one that would be difficult for the papacy to control. Two such charismatic royal figures appeared in the second half of the twelfth century, namely, Henry II of England and Frẹderick Barbarossa of Germany. By the last decade of the century the advance of royal power was a matter of deep concern to the Roman curia. On all sides the success of monarchy was being demonstrated, and the papacy was now faced with the problem of learning to deal with the kings who, in one way or another, had established vast reserves of wealth and military strength and in some cases inspired an emotional loyalty in their subjects.
The strength of the medieval state was determined by three essentials: the personal qualities of the ruler; the ideology of kingship; and the effectiveness of the administrative, legal, and financial institutions. In the earliest stage of medieval monarchy the king’s power had depended almost exclusively on his own personality. If he was a formidable warrior, he commanded loyalty, at least within his immediate circle, and if he did not exhibit the characteristics that the warrior class admired, royal property and power were usurped with impunity by local lords, and the king was neglected and insulted. From the eighth until the end of the eleventh century the church buttressed the inadequate foundations of monarchy with moral and religious sanctions, and the kings of the period had come to depend heavily on ideology to sustain the loyalty of lay and ecclesiastical lords, with various degrees of success. They also made painful experiments in the development of effective administrative institutions, and after the Gregorian papacy had delivered a mortal blow to the old doctrine of sacred kingship, the institutional basis of royal power was accentuated, while the kings also sought to find new moral and theoretical sanctions for their power. The twelfth-century monarchies made use of administrative institutions and ideology in varying degrees, but the personal qualities of the king could still contribute strongly to the growth of royal power. Where a self-perpetuating and self-conscious bureaucracy existed, governments could now sometimes get by with little or no decrease in authority for a considerable period, even if the throne’s occupant did not make an impressive and attractive figure. But the effectiveness of even the most skilled bureaucracy would be weakened by the long reign of a king who was inept in war and government. The personality of the king still counted for much in the affairs of states. And if the king was a charismatic figure, great in the arts of war and peace, an admired leader in the eyes of the landed classes, then royal power would enjoy an immediate growth. A king of charismatic qualities, even without the assistance of centralized administrative traditions, could make a profound impression upon society.
For four decades after 1150 political life was dominated by two charismatic figures, Henry II of England and Frederick Barbarossa of Germany. Both kings exhibited a rare combination of qualities that made them appear almost superhuman figures to contemporaries: longevity, boundless ambition, extraordinary organizing skill, and greatness on the battlefield. They both came to the throne in the prime of manhood; they were handsome and proficient in courtly gestures, which some members of the nobility now found attractive, without being in any way softened by courtly ideals. They were both benefited at critical points in their careers by outstanding strokes of good luck. Henry and Frederick were men of active, not scholarly, disposition. But they keenly appreciated the potential uses of the new learning, especially in the field of law, to royal government. They were adept at selecting educated men who served them with intense loyalty. Henry and Frederick were formally devout, but they were not greatly moved by the piety of the twelfth century. They were ruthless in pursuit of their aims, and they were not charitable toward their enemies. They believed mostly in themselves and never questioned the identity of the amelioration of society with the advancement of their own power.
When Henry II (1154–1189), the first of the Angevin line, became king of England, he was already duke of Normandy, count of Anjou, and the most powerful prince in northern France. The condition of England in 1154 was favorable for the achievement of Henry’s ambitions. The feudal lords had just experienced two decades of exhausting civil war, and they wanted the restoration of the peace and good government of the Anglo-Norman kings. This Henry gave them. He completed the work of his grandfather, Henry I, making the shire court into a royal court presided over by an itinerant justice who carried the king’s commission. He effectively destroyed the jurisdiction of the private feudal courts and brought the civil cases involving land disputes, which had previously been tried in the feudal courts, before his own justices. He greatly expanded the use of the sworn inquest, or jury, in civil suits, and he introduced the indicting grand jury in criminal cases. The reign of Henry II constitutes the most important era in the creation of the institutions of the common law. It was therefore fashionable among Victorian writers to hail Henry II as the founder of liberal English institutions and constitutional monarchy. Nothing could have been further from his mind. His aims were no different from those of contemporary rulers, such as Frederick Barbarossa of Germany and Philip Augustus of France: He wanted as much power for himself as possible. Henry and his judges did not make much use of Roman law, and he did not formulate a theory of juristic absolutism on the basis of the Justinian code. But he did not do so because English legal institutions had already gone in a different direction from those on the Continent, and Henry found it cheaper and more convenient to preserve the prevailing system, systematizing and improving it. In accordance with political traditions that he found in existence in England. Henry recognized that he had to rule, at least formally, with the advice and consent of the lay and ecclesiastical magnates. He introduced his improvements in the English common law not by royal decree but by “assizes” (establishments), that is, improvements in the prevailing law with the consent of the magnates, in accordance with the Germanic ideal of legislation that still prevailed in England. Some of Henry’s courtiers addressed him in terms of Roman absolutism and even those of the archaic traditions of theocratic monarchy, but he made no attempt to formulate an ideology of royal absolutism in England. He was satisfied with the exercise of an effective control over society through royal, legal, and financial institutions and through his position as feudal liege lord; his was a practical absolutism.
Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine brought him a principality that, when joined to his other possessions, made him the ruler of most of the western half of France. He was an extremely energetic man who spent a great deal of time attending to the affairs of his continental principalities. In England he was content to achieve order, wealth, and power; he did not concern himself deeply with the ideological foundations of his rule. The tone and efficiency of Henry’s government can be seen in The Dialogue on the Course of the Exchequer, the first great administrative treatise written in the Middle Ages. It was the work of Richard FitzNeal, the head of Henry’s exchequer, and, as a reward for his services, bishop of London. Richard’s treatise is an admirably organized and informative work written in the dialogue form so popular in the twelfth century. The philosophy of administration set forth in its preface is highly significant. FitzNeal tells the novice in the exchequer, for whom his treatise was especially intended, that it is the function of the exchequer officials to exercise royal policy, not to decide on its merit. Here is already, full blown, the secular bureaucratic attitude that knows no sanction beyond the king’s will.
The advance of royal power in England in Henry II’s reign was facilitated by the absence of any organized opposition. The lesser members of the feudal class, who were called knights in England, benefited from the increase in royal power because they were more likely to get justice in the king’s court than in the private feudal courts of their lords. The great nobles were loath to quarrel with a king who commanded such vast resources and who could simply destroy them with the twin engines of law and taxation. Henry was popular with the English bishops, who had, for the most part, begun their careers as royal clerks and were personally grateful to the king. The attention of the papacy was completely distracted from English affairs by its struggle with the German emperor. The only opposition that Henry ever experienced came from an unexpected source: his own appointee as archbishop of Canterbury, the former royal chancellor Thomas Becket. The archbishop’s motives in trying to limit the king’s authority over the English church and his willingness to engage in a bitter quarrel with his former patron and friend were the cause of much speculation by contemporary writers, as well as by modern historians and dramatists. Clearly, Becket was a psychologically disturbed person, but his neurotic tendencies do not detract from the significance of his struggle against the advance of secular power and his position as the first martyr to the Leviathan state.
Becket was the son of a poor knight who had gone into trade in London. He was therefore a bourgeois who rose to a high position in ecclesiastical and royal government, which was as yet unheard of in his day north of the Alps. His father had great ambitions for his precocious son and sent him to be educated in the new French schools. On his return to England Becket became the principal secretary of the archbishop of Canterbury; then royal chancellor; and finally, on the archbishop’s death, he was made the primate of the English church by Henry II. He proceeded to struggle against royal power in as vehement a manner as he had previously served it, much to Henry’s surprise and chagrin. As a bourgeois who had risen high in circles that were as yet open only to the landed classes, Becket had a strong feeling of insecurity and inferiority, for which he compensated by the most zealous fulfillment of his duties. He determined to become as great a servant of the church as he had been of the monarchy. But this determination led him to take a stand that ran contrary to the long tradition of royal control over the English church. He began to propound doctrines that had not been heard in Europe since the time of Gregory VII and that were regarded as archaic even in Rome. His colleagues in the English episcopate were as annoyed as the king by the archbishop’s stand. The bishop of London, an excellent scholar and administrator, made cruel allusions to Becket’s bourgeois background, and the bishops generally regarded the archbishop as either a fool or a madman. The issue upon which Henry II and Becket quarreled most bitterly was whether clergymen who were accused of crimes should be tried in royal or ecclesiastical courts; Becket saw this as part of the larger issue of whether the English church should be subjected to the legal supremacy that the royal government was imposing on the whole realm. He refused to surrender on this issue and, receiving no support from his ecclesiastical colleagues, fled to exile in France and appealed to Rome for help. Becket’s conduct greatly embarrassed the pope. It was hard to deny the theoretical validity of the archbishop’s argument, but the papacy had no inclination to arouse the ire of one of the two strongest kings in Europe, especially while it was engaged in a struggle against the other.
Becket finally returned to England and pursued his quarrel in a reckless manner that could end only in disaster for himself. He proceeded to excommunicate some of his opponents among the English bishops, and finally the exasperated king remarked to his court that he wished someone would rid him of this nuisance. Four knights who overheard this careless statement, wishing to court Henry’s favor, took him at his word and rode off to Canterbury to slay the archbishop. Becket appears to have expected this end, and he certainly welcomed his martyrdom, which would be an unusual achievement for a bourgeois and would fulfill his desire to be an ideal churchman. He waited calmly for his executioners at the high altar of Canterbury cathedral, objecting only that one of his assassins happened to be his vassal and was therefore violating his oath of homage in killing his lord.
Becket was far more useful to the church dead than alive. The querulous archbishop immediately became the Canterbury martyr, whose shrine attracted thousands of pilgrims over the next three centuries. The papacy, which had largely ignored Becket when he was alive, found his martyrdom to be useful as a lever for winning concessions from the dismayed English king. To gain absolution for his part in Becket’s death, Henry had to surrender on the issue of criminous clerks. The result was the peculiar institution of “benefit of clergy,” which lasted until the Reformation. If a man, indicted in a royal court, could prove that he was a member of the clergy, the case was transferred to the jurisdiction of an ecclesiastical court; in practice, however, the royal judges frequently proceeded to try the case before the defendant could prove his clerical status. The most important concession that Henry made to Rome was to recognize that all English churchmen could have freedom of appeal to the papal court in ecclesiastical disputes, including cases of disputed elections of bishops and abbots. This was the first instance of the penetration of some form of effective papal jurisdiction over the English higher clergy. The fact that it took the assassination of the archbishop of Canterbury to achieve it indicates the degree of royal control over the English church since the time of William the Conqueror. Henry’s concession was the entering wedge of papal influence in English ecclesiastical affairs, but by and large, royal power suffered little from reactions to Becket’s death. During the next three decades the king continued to appoint bishops and abbots as before, to receive the homage of these spiritual lords, and to tax the English church heavily. The loyalty of the English higher clergy to the crown was unaffected by the Becket interlude.
Henry II’s power was based on the combination of a charismatic personality with administrative skill. His two sons who followed him on the English throne, Richard I the Lionhearted (1189–1199) and John (1199–1216), exhibited only one or the other of their father’s qualities, and even then only to a limited degree. Richard had the reputation as the greatest chivalric warrior in Christendom, which made him personally popular with the nobility, but he was inept in government and law. It is probably fortunate for English royal power that he spent nearly all his reign in overseas ventures and left the government in the capable hands of his father’s bureaucrats. John, on the other hand, was something of an administrative genius and made some important contributions to the technique of royal administration. He was, however, a paranoiac who suspected treachery everywhere and flagrantly abused the processes of the common law to vent his hatred against certain noble families whom he suspected of treason. Eventually these families were driven to become rebels as the only way of saving themselves from ruin. He was furthermore susceptible to manic-depressive tendencies, at times exhibiting frenetic energy and then, particularly at crucial moments when his presence was required on the battlefield, becoming totally incapable of action. The third weakness of John’s personality, his lecherous proclivities, inaugurated the chain of events that brought about his crushing defeat by the Capetian monarchy. He took as his queen the daughter of a minor French count, whose father had already betrothed her to another obscure feudatory. The enraged lord, whose intended had been stolen from him in violation of contemporary custom by the English king, appealed to the king of France. Since John was technically the vassal of the king of France for Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine, Philip Augustus was the mutual overlord of both parties to the dispute. John was in one of his deep funks, and he refused to answer the summons to the French court. He was declared a contumacious vassal by Philip Augustus’s court and held to have forfeited Normandy and Anjou to the French crown. Had John quickly put his army into the field, he would likely have prevented Philip from seizing Normandy and Anjou. But John did nothing—did not even give instructions to his captains in Normandy. Thus the original homeland of the English kings fell to the Capetian monarch with scarcely a blow being struck.
The loss of Normandy was a disaster not only for the Angevin family, but for many of the English nobility who had held fiefs across the channel. They henceforth had to confine their interests to England, and they necessarily became more and more concerned with John’s use of royal, legal, and financial institutions. Any medieval king who was defeated on the battlefield was bound to lose the respect of his people and find his authority challenged at home. John was simply employing in a more relentless and severe manner the institutions of royal power that had developed in his father’s day. But his lack of an attractive and imposing personality removed from the English political situation the factor that had previously compensated for the stringency of Angevin institutions.
The charismatic personal qualities of the king, which contributed to the growth of royal power in England during the reign of Henry II, was the chief resource of monarchy during the same period in Germany. The reign of Frederick I Barbarossa (1152–1190) was a magnificent performance, a fantastic juggling act in which the king tried to overcome the enormous obstacles to the revival of imperial authority. Frederick’s formidable enemies defeated him on almost every side, yet in the end, by what appeared to be an incredible stroke of good luck but was partly the consequence of his unceasing efforts, he emerged triumphant. When Frederick came to the throne, the prospects for the revival of German imperial power were extremely thin. During the previous half century, the great German princes had steadily increased their territorial sovereignty, and the king was left with only his family domains and the vestige of control over some bishoprics and abbeys. For a quarter century before Frederick’s accession the holders of the German throne had done nothing to reverse the disastrous consequences of the investiture controversy. They were too involved in the great feud that had broken out between the descendants of the Salians; the Hohenstaufen dukes of Swabia; and the Welfs, first dukes of Bavaria and then, as a result of a marriage alliance, also dukes of Saxony. When the Salian line died out with Henry V in 1125, the princes refused to give the crown to his nephew, the duke of Swabia, fearing that he would try to regain the power that the German monarch had lost during the investiture controversy. Their choice, Lothair, the duke of Saxony (1125–1137), found himself embroiled in a bitter feud with the Hohenstaufens, and for protection he allied himself by marriage with the Welfs. On Lothair’s death, one of the Hohenstaufen princes gained the throne as Conrad III (1137–1152), but the struggle between the two great dynasties continued unabated.
When Frederick Barbarossa succeeded his uncle in 1152, there seemed to be excellent prospects for ending the feud, since Frederick was a Welf on his mother’s side. But the Welf duke of Saxony, Henry the Lion, could not be appeased; he remained the implacable enemy of the Hohenstaufen monarchy. Barbarossa had the force of his own personality, the duchies of Swabia and Franconia, and very little else to begin with. The German crown still enjoyed some vestiges of its former control over the German bishoprics and abbeys, but this control could not provide the additional resources that Frederick needed to crush the Welfs and the other great princes. He tried for a time to make additions to his family holdings and to build up a royal domain in the Rhineland, but he quickly realized that it would be a long task and would not in the end give him the resources he needed. His only hope lay in asserting his effective control over northern Italy and taxing the Italian communes heavily. Only then would he have the wealth to defeat the great princes. It was a risky plan, since the Italian cities were bound to put up stiff resistance to real, instead of merely nominal, imperial control, and such a plan might arouse the pope’s fears. But Frederick could find no alternative if he wished to regain royal power in Germany. The prospect of asserting imperial domination in Italy also appealed to Frederick’s personal inclinations. He had a high sense of the dignity and potential powers of his office, as set down in Roman law, and he tended to envision himself as a successor to the Roman emperors. He was strongly under the influence of the new juristic absolutism, and he could not bear to see the perpetuation of the discrepancy between the prevailing weakness and the potential glory and autocracy implicit in his office.
Frederick made his first expedition to Italy in 1154–55. He wanted to make a show of strength, to assert German hegemony personally, and to get himself crowned emperor by the pope. He accomplished all these aims, partly because the pope was having trouble with the communal movement in Rome led by a fiery disciple of Abelard, Arnold of Brescia, who combined intellectual and social radicalism. Arnold and the commune proclaimed the independence of the city and appealed for support to the German king. But Frederick had no sympathy with the Italian urban leaders and their ideal of the city-state; the latter was contrary to the achievement of his ultimate aim to rule northern Italy. Frederick captured Arnold of Brescia, had him burned, and had his ashes scattered into the Tiber.
There were three parties in the northern Italian situation: the emperor, the communes, and the papacy. On his visit to Rome Frederick had been disturbed by the pope’s insistence that he officially perform the office of papal groom in accordance with the Donation of Constantine. But Barbarossa’s first expedition to Italy indicated to him that he and the pope were natural allies against the city-states and their principles of self-government. He returned to Germany to prepare for a great expedition that would bring the riches of northern Italy under his control. Meanwhile, a great debate was waged in papal circles as to whether the papacy ought to ally itself with Frederick against the communal movement or to join ranks with the city-states and revert to the traditional papal policy of trying to keep the emperor out of Italy. It was a hard decision to make. The northern Italian burghers were notorious for their frequent quarrels with bishops and for their anticlerical and even antisacerdotal views. The pope certainly did not want a commune in Rome. Should the papacy throw in its lot with the scurvy bourgeois? It was a difficult choice to make, and there was a division among the cardinals. Those who opposed Frederick tried to foment a split between emperor and pope by means of provocative tactics. A papal legate addressing Frederick’s court in 1157 claimed that the emperors received their power from the pope, which he knew would greatly anger the young and ambitious ruler. Adrian IV, the only English pope, slowly moved toward an alliance with the communes against the German ambassador, and when the cardinal who had intentionally aroused the emperor’s wrath was elected to the throne of Peter as Alexander III in 1159, it became evident that the die was cast and that another great imperial-papal struggle was inevitable.
During the next two decades Frederick made three great expeditions against the northern Italian cities. He won some initial victories, including the defeat and humiliation of the obstreperous burghers of Milan. The professors of the law school in Bologna proclaimed at a diet, or assembly, on the Roncaglian plain in 1158 that the emperor’s claims to appoint the chief officials of each city and to impose taxes were in accordance with Roman law. Frederick was helped at first by the fact that there were deep divisions among the oligarchs who ruled the Italian cities. Some, called the Ghibellines, after the Italianized form of Waiblingen, one of the Hohenstaufen possessions, were willing to surrender to Frederick’s demands and the juristic arguments of the civil lawyers, but the majority, who came to be called the Guelphs, after the Hohenstaufen enemy in Germany, determined to devote all their resources to a struggle to retain their independence. For a few years the emperor managed to subject some of the Italian cities to his absolute authority, but after two decades it became apparent that the alliance of the papacy and the commune was too much for him. The pope contributed organizing ability and leadership and managed to unite most of the cities, which had always fought each other with delicious hatred, into the Lombard League (1167). In 1174 the armies of the Lombard League inflicted a complete defeat on the imperial forces at the battle of Legnano, and Frederick decided to cut his losses and sue for peace. Alexander III, having achieved his aim of keeping the emperor out of Italy, could afford to be generous; he forgave the emperor for setting up an antipope in accordance with the traditional technique of imperial-papal struggles. The peace of Constance of 1183 allowed Barbarossa to save face, but nothing more. His loose suzerainty over northern Italy was recognized, but he was denied the right to appoint the city officials and to collect taxes. In other words, after two decades of war Frederick had failed to gain control over northern Italy, which he felt was the first great step toward the restoration of imperial authority over the German princes.
When Frederick returned to Germany after his defeat in northern Italy, he was a bitter and exhausted man. The princes, far from being subordinated to royal control, were intensifying their hold on wealth and power in Germany and entrenching their positions as the leaders of society by their direction of the great eastward movement of the German people. In the 1130s the Germans again, for the first time since Otto II’s reign, began to press against the Slavic world to the east. They crossed the Elbe and in the twelfth century created a “new Germany” stretching eastward to the Oder and even beyond. They opened up the Baltic sea-coast and founded great commercial centers, such as Lübeck. The “old Germany” west of the Elbe was the creation of the church and the Germany monarchy, but the new Germany was largely settled and civilized at the direction of great princes who had understood the significance of the colonization movement and had rushed to put themselves at the head of it. Dukes and margraves who already had great fiefs in the old Germany now carved out vast domains in the east, thereby completely upsetting the balance of power in Germany and making the existing Hohenstaufen power relatively less significant. The dukes’ direction of the Drang nach Osten involved no consideration for the Slavs, who were massacred or subjugated, but it was clever and efficient. The princes attracted peasants from the Low Countries and western Germany, especially those experienced in the new techniques of colonization, by offering favorable terms of settlement. The immigrants of the eastern frontier were promised freedom from the old manorial dues and services and large blocks of land instead of the meager manorial strips. These attractive offers, when combined with the fertility of the soil and the protection the peasants received from the princes, induced a steady eastward movement in the twelfth century, resulting in the creation of the new Germany. Frederick Barbarossa played no part in this development. He allowed it to go on without making any attempt to intervene, and the princes greatly increased their domains and power by default. Modern writers have criticized Frederick for his blindness in getting involved in the morass of Italian politics while ignoring the opening up of eastern Germany, where the Hohenstaufens would have been able to create the royal domain they needed if they had early assumed the direction of the movement. In retrospect this was a grave miscalculation that, in the long run, greatly conditioned the future history of the German monarchy. But it is hard to be severe with Frederick for making this fatal error. At the beginning of his reign the eastward movement was still a modest development; Frederick believed that he needed an immediate increase in his resources, and Italy appeared to be the only place he could obtain it; the creation of new, wealthy domains in the east seemed a far-off prospect. Frederick’s gamble failed, and by the end of the 1170s he was in some ways worse off than when he started, but under the circumstances he had made the most plausible choice of the alternatives open to him.
When the aging and disappointed king returned to Germany, he vented his anger on his old Guelph enemy, Henry the Lion. One slim hope of victory seemed open to Frederick: the use of the feudal resources of the crown in the manner that the Norman and Angevin rulers of England had done for more than a century and that the Capetian kings were to follow just a quarter of a century later. German feudalism was by no means English feudalism. The feudal pyramid in the empire was truncated, and although the great dukes were the emperor’s vassals, their subvassals did not recognize the king as their liege lord. But Henry the Lion, as Frederick’s vassal, could still be impleaded in his lord’s court and, if found guilty by his peers, declared in forfeit of his feudal duchies of Saxony and Bavaria. On this legal basis Frederick inaugurated his great feudal trial against his Guelph enemy, charging him with failure to render his lord military service in the Italian campaigns and with other felonies. The princes were not reluctant to see the great duke of Saxony brought low, and when Henry refused to appear in Frederick’s court to answer the indictment brought against him, they declared his fiefs forfeit. Frederick was able to drive Henry out of Saxony and Bavaria and leave him only his eastern principalities, which were not fiefs of the crown, but the princes would not let the emperor absorb the forfeited duchies into his own domain; he had to infeudate the Guelph principalities to other princes. The trial of Henry the Lion was the decisive moment in German feudalism; Frederick’s failure to gain the lands of his Guelph enemies meant that the emperor could not use feudal law to increase his power, which had been the case in England for more than a century and was also soon to be attempted successfully in France.
In the last years of his life the aging emperor finally had to abandon the prodigious efforts and great wars of his younger days. He took the cross and died en route to the Holy Land in 1190. But the great emperor was able to die with the comforting knowledge that his son would have the resources to achieve the triumph of imperial power that he had lacked. By an incredible combination of circumstances Frederick’s son, who had already been crowned Henry VI before Barbarossa’s departure on the third crusade, found himself the ruler of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, one of the wealthiest countries in the Mediterranean world. Four years previously Barbarossa had married his son to the Norman Sicilian princess Constance, but this union did not appear significant because Constance’s chances of inheriting the throne were slim; if her chances had been good, the pope would never have allowed the marriage. The year before Barbarossa’s death Constance, because of unexpected deaths in her family, inherited the Norman Sicilian crown, and her husband came into possession of the kind of domain that Barbarossa had striven unsuccessfully for three decades to obtain. Yet the decisions of fortune had been prepared by the indomitable will of the emperor. He had tried one method after another to achieve his grand design, and all had failed. His last effort, a dynastic union with the Norman house in the hope that someday one of his successors might gain the throne, had an almost immediate result in the ascendancy of the Hohenstaufens.
It was Frederick’s enormous reputation as one of the greatest men in Christendom that induced the Norman Sicilian king, the traditional ally of the papacy against the German emperor, to agree to an alliance of the northern and southern ruling dynasties. Barbarossa’s long struggle with the pope did not in any way lessen the intense popular admiration that he evoked. The sort of enthusiasm with which he had been greeted by his uncle, Bishop Otto of Freising, in the early part of his reign, continued all through his life and long afterward. He became a folk hero, a kind of messianic figure who, it was said, would return some day and lead the Germans to new glories. This emotional response transcended the severe institutional limitations of the German monarchy and gave the Hohenstaufens the aura of majesty and virtue that, it seemed in 1190, had brought them to the threshold of the power they had sought for so long.
But Henry VI’s temperament and character differed even more strongly from Barbarossa’s than Richard’s and John’s did from Henry II’s. Barbarossa appeared to contemporaries to be a man with greatness of soul; Henry IV was singularly lacking in this quality. He was pompous, calculating, and ruthless, a schemer and a bully. It took him until 1194 to enter fully into possession of southern Italy. Almost immediately he began an attack on the cities of northern Italy and scored initial successes. Henry could not refrain from making extravagant announcements of how the Hohenstaufen family would achieve western and, in fact, world supremacy. He terrified the German princes; the northern Italian cities; and, above all, the papacy, which found itself on the verge of being surrounded by the Hohenstaufen power it had fought twenty years to keep out of Italy. Henry VI’s only miscalculation was not to take into account the effects of the unsalubrious Italian climate, which had carried off some of his wife’s family in their prime and had made him king of Sicily. Henry died suddenly in 1197, leaving a three-year-old child as his heir and the affairs of Germany and Italy in turmoil. This act of God favored the enemies of the Hohenstaufens even more than a similar stroke of fortune, eight years previously, had given Barbarossa most of what he had wanted. It is difficult for a modern German historian to write a book on the twelfth or thirteenth centuries without expatiating on the misfortune of Henry VI’s early death and attributing to this one event the subsequent troubles and final collapse of the medieval German empire. Yet, the fact that Henry VI’s death was such a great calamity demonstrates the almost exclusive reliance that the German monarchy had to place on the person of the king because of its lack of administrative institutions. Nothing in medieval history illustrates more graphically both the value and the limitations of charisma than does the history of the German empire in the second half of the twelfth century.
The seizure of Normandy and Anjou in 1204 and their incorporation into the royal domain of the French monarchy was a great turning point in the history not only of France but generally of Europe. The kingdom of France, which was ruled by the Capetians in a direct line of succession until 1328 and then by the cadet branches of the family, the Valois and the Bourbons, until the nineteenth century, was to be the most important European state at least until 1700 and, in the opinion of some historians, until 1870. If the lands lying between Flanders and the Pyrenees and between the Atlantic and the Rhine could be brought under an effective central government, the result was bound to have a profound impact on European civilization, for this government would then have at its command a larger population and more intellectual, economic, and military resources than any other state in Europe. The conquest of Normandy signaled the emergence of such a state, but a century before there was no France; it was merely a geographic expression. It was a large, diverse land with neither topographical, political, economic, linguistic, nor cultural unity.
The people of the north and the south spoke different Romance dialects. Northern France was the classic land of feudalism and was largely a rural area; its dominant figure was the feudal baron. The culture, society, and language of southern France had much more in common with Christian Spain and Italy than with northern France. Languedoc, the region of the southern dialect, had a vibrant urban civilization and a literate bourgeois class. Its aristocracy was also becoming urbanized; like the northern Italian nobility they had town houses, and they enjoyed the intellectual benefits of town life. The third area of what later became France, the Rhineland region, tended to look eastward toward the German empire, to which many of its bishoprics, principalities, and cities technically belonged, and many of the people in this area spoke German rather than one of the French dialects. In central France there was a mountainous region that served as a hangout for robber barons and made travel between the north and the south difficult. Thus, in 1100 France was not naturally or even potentially one country. It was the Capetian monarchy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that created France, which need not have existed; there was no national destiny of France before the rise of the French monarchy. But if the country could ultimately be subjected to royal power, then the kings would have at their disposal wealthy cities, a large feudal warrior class, and universities and their graduates—a formidable combination.
The history of the Capetians before the twelfth century gave no promise of the later success of the dynasty. The Capetians gained the French crown in 987, but until 1108 the French kings were nonentities who had no control over the great dukes and counts who were their nominal vassals. They did not even have unchallenged power in their own domain of the Ile-de-France. Paris was surrounded by the castles of robber barons, and the French king was sometimes afraid to go outside the walls of the city. The first Capetian monarch to contribute to the institutional foundation of royal power was Louis VI the Fat, or the Wideawake (1108–1137). Because of the information provided by Louis’ biography, written by his chief minister Abbot Suger of St. Denis, he is much more of a real person to us than any of his predecessors, who are faceless men, renowned only for piety or personal scandal. One of the mistakes of the early Capetians was their involvement in grandiose attempts to expand their authority when they were not even strong in the Ile-de-France. Under the wise and patient guidance of Suger, Louis VI generally pursued a policy that was both much more limited and more effective. He was not free from his predecessors’ delusions of grandeur; he made a stab at conquering Flanders, which ended in humiliation when his army was routed by the Flemish burghers. But usually he stayed close to home and succeeded in destroying the power of the petty lords and robber barons in the Ile-de-France, thereby providing a secure base of operations for his successors.
The long reign of his son Louis VII (1137–1180) was the turning point in the development of Capetian institutions and the beginning of the exercise of some royal jurisdiction over the great feudal princes. Louis VII was a devout, hard-working, and colorless figure who suffered the terrible humiliation and great loss attendant upon his divorce from Eleanor of Aquitaine. Some historians have said that Louis VI made such an impression by his work of building royal power in the Ile-de-France that the extremely wealthy duke of Aquitaine deigned to marry his daughter to the heir of the French throne. This is a possibility, but it may have been simply the result of whimsy by the troubadour duke of Aquitaine. In any case, Louis VII lost the vast accretion in the territory of the royal domain that Eleanor had brought with her, and this duchy passed under the rule of Henry II, Eleanor’s second husband. As a consequence, Louis faced the grim fact that his nominal vassal ruled the western half of France and, even without England, was immensely more powerful than Louis himself. Yet, by the end of Louis’s reign the Capetian king was beginning to exercise some leadership among the great princes who were his nominal vassals.
The court of the French king, as the overlord of the great feudatories, was technically the high court of the realm. But before the reign of Louis VII it was merely a theoretical possibility. The dukes and counts ignored the king’s court in their dealings with each other, and the king had no power to compel his vassals to give him suit at court in accordance with feudal law. In the latter half of Louis’s reign the great vassals began to bring cases in the royal court for the first time. They did so partly because by the middle of the twelfth century there was a balance of power among the great feudatories and therefore little possibility of settling their disputes by the old method of feudal warfare. They knew that they would receive a fair judgment in the court of the peaceful and pious Capetian king. The French feudal princes also turned toward Paris for the first time because of their fear of the overwhelming power of Henry II. By his vast holdings the Angevin ruler had made himself the most obvious threat to the future independence and security of the other dukes and counts, and as a reaction they looked with greater favor on the Capetian king as a counterbalance to Henry II. In the long run Louis VII benefited greatly from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage to Henry II. For the first time the value of the Capetian monarchy in the affairs of France became evident to the great feudatories.
The French royal demesne had been traditionally administered by prévôts, local lords who paid the king a lump sum for the privilege of farming the demesne in his area. This primitive system was indicative of the general ineptitude of the early Capetians. The prévôts cheated the king, ruthlessly abused the populace, and tried to turn their jurisdictions into hereditary patrimonies. Furthermore, by delegating his local authority in this way, the king lost the opportunity to impress the local areas with the tradition of royal leadership. Louis VI by and large continued this ruinous system of local administration, but in the latter part of his reign there are indications that he was experimenting with sending officials directly from the royal court to supervise the local administration of the royal demesne.
Louis VII’s son Philip II Augustus (1180–1223) turned these experiments into the creation of a distinctive local administrative system, whose essentials were perpetuated to the end of the ancien régime. The third of the great rulers of the later twelfth century, alongside Henry II and Frederick Barbarossa, Philip was singularly lacking in their glamorous and attractive qualities. He was a miserable, crafty hunchback totally without scruples. His high-sounding appellation was probably intended to mean “the augmentor” rather than to associate him with the Roman emperors. Yet Philip’s devious qualities were the only ones that could have led to a great increase in the French royal demesne. By the late twelfth century the political borders of Europe had been drawn, and in France the division of the country among the feudatories had a long tradition behind it. The rearrangement of the political map of France could not be accomplished without craft and guile, qualities in which Philip excelled. But Philip was also an extremely industrious and ingenious administrator who prepared for the expansion of the royal demesne by creating the bailli, the local financial, legal, administrative, and military representative of the French monarchy. In England the local officials of the royal government were the sheriff, who acted as the general administrative officer and was in charge of tax collection in the shire, and the itinerant justices who presided over the county courts. The bailli combined both these offices, carrying out all the administrative, judicial, and financial services on behalf of the king. The English sheriff and his assistants were wealthy members of the local landed classes with strong interests in the shire where they worked, which meant that in the long run the monarchy had to preserve the goodwill of the county families who were its agents or suffer the paralysis of local government. This problem was not so evident in the reign of Henry II because of his overwhelming popularity and power, but after 1200 it became more and more apparent in England that royal government could be effectively carried on only with the assent and cooperation of the leading families of the county. The social and political characteristics of the bailli were different. He was a paid official sent out by the royal government, and he had no roots in his area of jurisdiction. He was a true bureaucrat whose whole income and social status depended on his position as a royal servant. He was therefore fanatically loyal to the king and was concerned only with the full exercise of royal power.
Unlike the English county families from whose ranks were drawn the sheriffs and other local officials, the bailli never took it into his head to question the merit of the royal policy. The difference between the French bailli and the English sheriff was not so much the result of the prescient wisdom of the French monarchy; rather it was determined by geographic and social circumstances. The territory that Philip Augustus initially had to administer was only the size of one of the larger English counties. He did not need many officials to govern this small area, and he could afford to dispatch reliable and experienced men directly from his court. In fact, the institutional term designating the French local official was simply that of bailiff, a generic word used all over Europe to mean a personal agent or steward. In the beginning the bailli only differed in degree from the bailiff who managed the estate of a great manorial lord. But by the end of the twelfth century the bailli had become more of a public than a private institution of the monarchy. It would have been difficult for the Capetian kings to perpetuate this institution and to apply it to the new areas they conquered if it had not been for the educational revolution of the twelfth century. It was the universities that provided them with the clerks and lawyers who filled the office of bailli, and these were the ideal personnel to serve as local bureaucrats. They were intelligent, industrious, and well educated, and few of them had any prospects in life other than what they could gain in the royal service.
During the reign of Philip Augustus several of the baillis were already magistri, university graduates who were sent to administer the new areas that were absorbed into the French royal domain and to incorporate them fully into the royal jurisdiction. The same institution was extended in the thirteenth century to Languedoc when the southern principalities came under French rule. In southern France the bailli was called the seneschal, another old generic term for the agent of a feudal lord that was now given a new meaning as the local paid representative of the French monarchy. By the middle of the thirteenth century the baillis and seneschals had become a self-sustaining corporate group and in some ways were more fanatical supporters of the extension of royal power than was the king himself. It was they who subordinated local customs and institutions and brought the disparate regions of France under a common government. It is no exaggeration to say that France was the creation of a bureaucracy that began to assume its characteristic form at the beginning of the reign of Philip Augustus, perhaps even a little earlier.
The advance of royal power in France was conditioned by the king’s relations with the bourgeois and the church. It is a nineteenth-century myth that the king of France realized the importance of the new urban development and that he allied himself with the new class against the feudal nobility. Even if this were true, it would not have secured his triumph because the towns of northern France were too few and, aside from Paris, too small in size and wealth to affect profoundly the power structure. In reality Louis VII and Philip Augustus were not much more sympathetic to the ambitions of the burghers than were the lay and ecclesiastical princes. The towns on the royal domain received only meager communal privileges, and even then only after a long struggle and heavy payments to the royal treasury. But the townsmen generally favored the advance of royal power as a counterbalance to the feudal lords and because they were able to win more concessions of urban self-government from the king than from the local magnates, even though they had to pay dearly for them.
The relation between the Capetian monarchy and the church played a much more important part in the eventual Capetian triumph. The backwardness and insignificance of the eleventh-century Capetian monarchy is demonstrated by the fact that the French king held on to some of the accoutrements of theocratic monarchy long after the papacy had forced the abandonment of such traditions in the much more powerful monarchies of Germany and England. From the late eleventh century the papacy generally looked on the French monarchy as its ally and supporter, if for no other reason than that the pope had to have some support among the kings of Europe. The pope was intermittently embroiled with the German emperor and feared the consequences of his claims over northern Italy. In view of the power of the English monarch, his hold over the church in his territory, and the distance of England from Rome, the papacy could not ally itself with the Norman and Angevin kings. The French king remained the only possible candidate, and he appeared so weak and innocuous that it seemed impossible that he would ever threaten the authority of the papacy. The Capetian kings, furthermore, had a great reputation for piety; even in the twelfth century they were known as the “very Christian” kings. Therefore Gregory VII was unusually moderate in his relations with the Capetian monarch. During the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, France became a common place of refuge for the popes driven from Rome by the German emperor. Urban II went to France to get away from the armies of Henry IV and to preach the first crusade, and Alexander III sought the protection of Louis VII in the 1160s when Frederick Barbarossa held Rome for a short time. The sympathetic attitude of the papacy allowed the French kings to perpetuate some of the archaic traditions and rituals of early-medieval kingship. There was a close association between the Capetian dynasty and the royal abbey of St. Denis. The regalia of the French crown were kept there, and much later than monastic statesmen played a leading role in other European governments, abbot Suger of St. Denis, in the reigns of Louis VI and VII, continued to be the chief minister of the royal administration. Whereas the ceremony of anointment was becoming a mere formality in Germany and in England, the religious and emotional qualities of this ceremony were still accentuated in France.
The association of the church with the French monarchy was particularly emphasized during the long reign of Louis VII. Louis, who was personally devout, exhibited great friendship for both the pope and the higher clergy all over France. He received Alexander III with the greatest deference, and he took the side of bishops and abbots in their struggles with local lords. In so doing, he was, of course, helping to advance royal power as well as satisfying his own devout inclinations. Louis’s attempts to aid the higher clergy were part of his general effort to expand the jurisdiction of the royal court. The Capetian king’s reputation as the friend and ally of the papacy could not but help contribute to his prestige in France and might eventually prove useful in his relations with the great feudatories and the other kings of western Europe.
The moral and religious traditions of the very Christian Capetian monarchy were valuable to Philip Augustus. They provided the necessary façade behind which he could undertake his depredations and pursue his crooked schemes. He gained the northern county of Artois by his marriage and then turned upon the vast domains of the Angevin ruler in northern France. He fomented the rebellion of Henry II’s sons against their father and made the great king’s last years miserable. He was continually plotting against Richard and John, and by 1204 he had achieved his great triumph. He had incorporated all northwestern France into the royal domain, leaving the English king with only Gascony and part of Poitou, the most distant of the former French possessions of the Angevin house. In the first two decades of his reign Philip clearly demonstrated for his successors how the territory of the French crown might be expanded: by dynastic marriage, by political and diplomatic chicanery, by feudal forfeiture, and by outright conquest. The old innocuous royal ally of the church had suddenly become a great power in northern Europe, and not the least of the problems facing the thirteenth-century papacy was the kind of adjustment it should make to this new situation.