By 900 it was certain that the ideal of the political unity of the new Latin Christian civilization could not be realized. The European peoples would have to be satisfied with more limited political structures. During the tenth century these states began to take shape; the political decentralization and social chaos of the late ninth century was reversed, and two successful examples of political leadership appeared in northwestern France and in Germany. The feudal duchy of Normandy and the Ottonian German empire were, to a considerable degree, founded upon strongly contrasting kinds of institutions. But they had in common a fundamental quality of new European civilization: Ecclesiastical and secular political ideas, leadership, and resources were inextricably joined together in the creation and progress of these states. The same interpenetration of ecclesia and mundus, the church and the world, can be seen at work all over tenth-century Europe, even in the disappointing later Anglo-Saxon monarchy with its ineffective central government and in the even weaker Capetian monarchy.
This equilibrium between the church and the world was the outcome of the long struggle to achieve the Christianization of European society. Gregory the Great and St. Boniface had been the founders of this movement, which in the later eighth and ninth centuries had been greatly advanced by the Carolingian kings and higher clergy. The failure of the Merovingian monarchy had demonstrated Germanic kingship’s great need of the moral and religious sanctions and other assistance that the church could provide. The efforts made by the leaders of the Carolingian world to create a world order in which church and kingship worked together had resulted in a bitter and painful failure. The same interpenetration and identification of the church and the world was used, however, by the Norman dukes and German emperors to create more limited political structures, but ones that exhibited outstanding qualities of strength and endurance and that gave European civilization its first examples of successful political leadership.
The power of both the German emperors and the Norman dukes of the tenth and eleventh centuries was founded, to a substantial degree, on the control they were able to exercise over the church in their territories, especially the Benedictine monasteries, and by the aid and support the church gave them in the form of revenues, knights, administrative personnel, and the fostering of popular veneration for the pious ruler who affected to be a friend of the church. On its side the church gained its patron’s protection against the unruly lay nobility, the endowment of monasteries and bishoprics with great estates and magnificent Romanesque religious houses and cathedrals, the raising of the higher clergy to the front rank of the nobility, and frequent opportunities for the leading ecclesiastics to attend the courts and councils of the ruler and thereby to influence his policy.
This kind of relationship between ecclesiastical and secular leaders was supported by the learned doctrine of the identification of the ecclesia and mundus that was popular precisely at the period when the early medieval equilibrium came to fruition. Since the ninth century there had been a growing tendency for ecclesiastical writers to describe the church, regarded as the mystical Body of Christ, as embracing the whole world. In this view there were not separate spheres for the ecclesia and the mundus; rather, the church was one, indivisible, universal Body of Christ encompassing the whole world. By the eleventh century this theory had become commonplace among the leading thinkers and even less prominent writers of the Latin church. “The church” and “the world” were treated as identical and synonymous terms, and hence empires and kingdoms had to be regarded as entities not outside the church, but within its universal bounds. This theory of the absorption of the secular into the spiritual realm was inspired by the actual prevailing relationship between church and kingship in western Europe in the tenth and first half of the eleventh centuries.
In 987 the Carolingian line finally lost the royal title west of the Rhine. The descendants of Charlemagne had exercised no effective control over the great feudal princes for a hundred years, and the monarchy had no resources of its own. But the persistence of the Germanic and Christian traditions of kingship made the French crown still a prized possession, and the most powerful lord in the Ile-de-France, Hugh Capet, pushing aside the Carolingians, took pains to secure his elevation to the French throne by the formal Germanic process of election. The church legitimated his rule by anointment, and the abbot of the royal monastery of St. Denis was as devoted to Hugh as he had been toward the Carolingians. With clerical support Hugh Capet was able to pass the royal title on to his son, and, in fact, the Capetian family was to hold the French throne by direct line of hereditary succession until the fourteenth century. As far as the tenth and eleventh centuries are concerned, nothing important had happened; one weak dynasty had merely been supplanted by another. Before the twelfth century the Capetian kings were famous for only two things: extreme piety and sexual promiscuity. This somewhat paradoxical combination of qualities may be due to the fact that all we know about the earlier Capetians comes from the description of monastic chroniclers whose judgment of character was based on severely limited criteria. But it is significant that the tenth- and eleventh-century Capetians attracted notice only by their devout exercises and adulterous scandals. These are purely personal enterprises; the Capetians had no effect on the government and society of France. The great feudal princes who were nominally their vassals acted independently and gave them no support. In fact, these kings were not even secure in their own domain of the Ile-de-France, which was infested with the castles of robber barons. It is true that the Capetians did have the royal title and, with the aid of the abbot of St. Denis and the archbishop of Rheims, they cultivated the traditions of sacred kingship. Although these traditions would eventually be useful to the later Capetians, they availed the kings of France in the tenth and eleventh centuries very little. Theocratic monarchy could be an extremely powerful moral force, but only when combined with power derived from effective institutions, and of these the earlier Capetians had not a shred.
Among the leaders of feudal France of the tenth century the count of Flanders and the duke of Aquitaine stand out for their effective control over the vassals of their principalities. The counts of Champagne, Toulouse, and Anjou were also figures of prominence in the new feudal society, but it was the dukes of Normandy who stand preeminent among the vassals of the king of France. In the late tenth century and first half of the eleventh they made of the hitherto backward frontier, Neustria, in northwestern France, a country renowned for its great monasteries and schools, and they manipulated feudal institutions in an unprecedented manner to create the strongest state in Europe west of the Rhine.
Normandy came into existence as a feudal duchy in 911 when a certain Rollo, the savage leader of a group of Viking war bands, wrested from the terrified Carolingian king the area contiguous with the ecclesiastical province of Rouen. Rollo became the vassal of the French king and received the title of duke, but he proceeded to act in an entirely independent manner and to expand the original size of his fief. The size of the Scandinavian settlement was small, and the Northmen rapidly intermarried with the native population and adopted the French language. Rollo and his companions allowed themselves to be received into the church by the archbishop of Rouen, but their conversion no more altered their way of life than it had that of Clovis and his companions. For seven decades Normandy was the scene of interminable wars and blood feuds among the Norman lords, and the power of the early dukes was simply dependent on their ability as warriors. There is nothing in the history of Normandy before 980 to account for the subsequent development of Norman institutions. How, then, did the Norman dukes create the most powerful feudal duchy in western Europe between 980 and 1050?
Three stages can be distinguished in the creation of the power of the Norman dukes. In the 980s the dukes helped place Hugh Capet on the French throne, and as a consequence the Capetians did not attempt to interfere in the affairs of the duchy during the crucial period of Norman state building. By the time the Capetian king finally realized the significance of the rise of a new kind of feudal state in the duchy contiguous to the Ile-de-France in the 1030s, it was too late to remove this danger. The second and most decisive stage in the emergence of Normandy involved the relationship between the Norman dukes and the church in their territory. The dukes of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries were much more sophisticated men than were their predecessors. They were aware of Normandy’s cultural backwardness, and they brought into the duchy from the Rhineland and northern Italy outstanding monastic scholars to inaugurate the improvement of the Norman church. The dukes built and endowed monasteries, supported the monastic schools, and allowed these able scholars to establish some of the most thriving centers of learning in western Europe. Their relationship with the church was not, however, confined to this worthy patronage; they proceeded to use the ecclesiastical resources and personnel to advance their effective power in their territory. It is probable that the leaders of Norman monasticism gave them valuable advice and encouragement in this connection. For these churchmen had come to Normandy in most cases from areas that lay within the confines of the German empire, whose rulers were using the German church for a similar purpose. Certainly the higher clergy in Normandy did not question the kind of church-state relations that the dukes proceeded to establish before 1035, but rather consciously accepted it.
The dukes’ plan was to impose heavy feudal obligations on the higher clergy and to use the knights who were enfeoffed on ecclesiastical lands as the nucleus of an army that could overcome the unruly lay nobility. By the middle of the eleventh century the Norman duke could, in fact, obtain the military service of more than three hundred knights from his ecclesiastical vassals, which was more than sufficient to destroy the power of the lay nobility. Certain advantages accrued to the duke from his inauguration of the feudalization of Normandy by imposing vassalage on the clergy and only then turning to the lay nobility. The clergy could not legally marry; though many had children, these children were bastards who could not inherit fiefs under feudal law. Hence no bishop or abbot could pursue a dynastic interest with regard to his fiefs. The fiefs, in any case, were attached to the ecclesiastical office and were not the personal possession of the bishop or abbot. Furthermore, the duke had control over the election of the higher clergy. He was the venerated patron of the Norman church, whose opinion would be sought before the monks or cathedral clergy proceeded with the election of an abbot or bishop. The duke had in addition a veto power over the selection of the higher clergy because unless he was willing to receive the bishop or abbot-elect as his vassal, the latter could not take possession of the lands associated with his office.
The final stage in the rise of ducal power began in the 1020s with the imposition of vassalage and feudal obligations on the lay nobility. This work was made easier by land hunger and overpopulation among the knightly class in Normandy. A few of the restless Norman lords had already departed for southern Italy in the second decade of the eleventh century to carve out domains for themselves in that wealthy land. The landless knights who remained at home could obtain fiefs from the duke only if they were prepared to undertake onerous feudal obligations. The greater lords in Normandy, who already were substantial landowners, found themselves driven to the wall by the dukes’ military power and forced into vassalage. This successful final stage in the building of the Norman feudal state suddenly stopped when one of the dukes, in a fit of piety, departed on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and died en route, leaving as his heir a child whose legitimacy was clouded by the fact that he had been born before his parents’ marriage. The early part of the reign of William II, the Bastard (1035–1087), was marked by a desperate attempt by the enemies of ducal power—namely, the Capetian king and the lay nobility—to undo the work of the previous half century. The alliance between the ducal family and the Norman churchmen remained firm, however, and the union of the strength of the ecclesiastical vassals with William’s precocious military ability resulted in the complete victory of the duke over his enemies by the end of the 1040s.
William then set about continuing his predecessors’ policy, establishing the strongest feudal power in Europe by the end of the 1050s. He not only imposed vassalage on all the lay nobility, but was able to demand from them military service of a particularly well-defined and onerous kind. He overcame the debilitating effects of subinfeudation by making himself the liege lord of every vassal in the duchy. In Normandy the amount of feudal service that the tenants-in-chief owed their lord was specifically set down, proceeding in multiples of five knights to as large a feudal contingent as 120 chevaliers, according roughly to the amount and value of land that the vassals held of the duke. By 1060 the Norman duke could command an army of one thousand knights, which was by far the largest available to any ruler west of the Rhine. William prohibited the building of castles without his license on pain of forfeiture, and he was strict in demanding suit at court from his vassals. His local official, the viscount, was effectively employed to draw the jurisdiction of law and taxation away from the feudal lords and into the ducal authority.
The moral sanction for this effective military and administrative power was provided by the support that William received from the church. Like his predecessors, William was a great patron and endower of monasteries, and the Norman schools continued to attract some of the finest minds in Europe. Among them was Lanfranc, a former teacher of law at Pavia in northern Italy, who became a monk in Normandy and won renown as one of the foremost theologians of the mid-eleventh century. Lanfranc became one of William’s strongest admirers. The Norman duke gained the plaudits of churchmen all over Europe for taking seriously the Peace of God movement. William saw in it a way to give religious sanction to centralized ducal authority and to limit still further the traditional indiscriminate warfare of feudal society, which had no place in his conception of a feudal state. He made himself the president of the Peace of God movement in Normandy and forced its vows upon his vassals. By 1060 a Norman lord who thought of revolting against the duke faced the prospect of ignominious defeat and forfeiture, as well as ecclesiastical condemnation.
The completion of the structure of ducal power gave William the freedom to look for new fields of conquest and triumph. He had behind him a magnificent army and an aggressive nobility who sought a satisfactory outlet for both their love of fighting and hunger for land. Consequently, in the 1050s William began to turn his attention to events across the channel and to scheme for the eventual gaining of the English throne. The situation in England offered a dramatic contrast to that which existed in Normandy. The power of the later Anglo-Saxon monarchy was in the course of being drained by the rise of lordship in a manner that paralleled that of the ninth-century Carolingian monarchy. The great earls had gained for themselves not only enormous estates, but control over royal legal, administrative, and financial institutions in their regions. Compared to England, Normandy was a small, thinly populated, and poor country. But the Norman dukes had succeeded in bringing all the resources of their land under their own control, whereas in England public power was rapidly passing into private hands and the authority of the king was on the verge of extinction. Compared to the Anglo-Saxon king, who was an offspring of the house of Wessex, which had ruled part or all of England for five centuries, the Norman duke was an upstart. Nor could the Norman duke make use of the doctrine of theocratic kingship that had been popular in England since the middle of the tenth century. He had, however, what the Anglo-Saxons, like the later Carolingians, lacked: effective institutions, a strong personality, and military ability. This combination marked a new departure in the development of medieval monarchy.
East of the Rhine, as compared with France, feudal institutions were not the basis of social organization. The political and social structure of the east Carolingian kingdom was still dominated by pristine Germanic traditions. Each of the various tribes, or “stems,” as they were called—the Franks, Saxons, Swabians, Bavarians, Lotharingians, and Thuringians—recognized the leadership of a great warrior chieftain who in the Carolingian period had acquired the administrative title of duke and had made it into a sign of his superiority. Below the stem dukes on the social scale there was a small group of great nobles and a large mass of free peasants. In the south and west both manorialism and feudal lordship were making their appearance, but in a degree too limited and embryonic to have any effect on political authority. The leaders of Germanic society were the stem dukes, the great nobles, and the bishops and abbots of the German church. The latter were influential because they controlled all the literacy and a considerable part of the landed wealth of the country. In a sense the German church had existed before there was any effective royal leadership in Germany because the great abbeys that Boniface and his disciples had established in the river valleys of what is today western Germany had been the vanguard of Carolingian expansion. Only after the monks had converted the people, established centers of learning and civilization, and created the German church did the Frankish kings begin to exercise effective rule east of the Rhine.
By the end of the ninth century the Carolingian kings had become nonentities and could offer no leadership to the tribes in their struggles to hold back invaders along their borders. To the west the Scandinavians offered a threat. To the east the incursions of Magyars (Hungarians)—another invader of Europe from Central Asia—and Slavs were dangerous to the survival of the German duchies. In 911 the last of the Carolingians died, and the stem dukes, asserting the German electoral principle, chose Conrad I, duke of Franconia, as king. This choice cannot be said to have marked an important change in the history of the German monarchy. Conrad was unable to exercise any authority over the other stem dukes, who remained independent. At Conrad’s death in 918 the dukes elected as king his chief tormentor, Henry I, the Fowler, the duke of Saxony. Henry’s family, which later came to be known as the Ottonians, was to rule in Germany for more than a century, and consequently the beginning of his reign has frequently been said to mark the real beginning of the German monarchy. But he was not much more successful than his predecessor, and at the accession of his son Otto I in 936, the German monarchy had found neither the institutions nor the ideology to give it any control over the great dukes. In fact, the duke of Bavaria was attempting to join his duchy with Lombardy, which would have made him more powerful than the Saxon dukes and would have demolished whatever unity the German realm possessed.
The creation of the German monarchy was the work of Otto I the Great (936–973), who consciously symbolized the policy he intended to follow by the manner of his coronation. By insisting on being anointed and crowned by the archbishop of Mainz, the primate of the German church, at Charlemagne’s old capital of Aachen, he thereby signified that he regarded himself as the successor of the great emperor and that he intended to associate himself with the powerful German church and to make use of the ideology of theocratic monarchy. His father had feared the powerful bishops and abbots and had refused even to be crowned by an ecclesiastic. Otto determined to dominate the church and to use its resources and personnel in the interests of establishing the institutional basis of royal power in Germany. There was no other way by which the German monarchy could obtain the wealth, military support, and the administrators it needed to overcome the entrenched power of the stem dukes. The German clergy were willing to cooperate with the king, who offered them protection against the nobility, rich endowments for ecclesiastical establishments, and the opportunity to serve in his chancery and act as royal ministers.
A threefold institutional basis for the Ottonian control over the German church can be distinguished. Most important was the institution that came to be called “lay investiture” by its critics in the late eleventh century, but until then was simply referred to as the royal investiture of churches. The king asserted the right to invest bishops and abbots with the symbols of their office, finding theoretical support for this claim in his sacred quality as an anointed king. Without royal investiture, the bishop and abbot-elect could not assume office; the effect was to give the king control over the election of the higher clergy. To make the king’s control of ecclesiastical appointments even more, secure, ecclesiastical homage was joined to lay investiture, so the bishop or abbot could take possession of the property belonging to his office only after he became the king’s vassal. Under these conditions clerical election became a mere formality in the Ottonian empire, and the king filled up the ranks of the episcopate with his own relatives and with his loyal chancery clerks, who were also appointed to head the great German monasteries.
The Ottonian domination over the church was aided by the persistence of the Germanic legal ideas of property that form the background to the institution of proprietary churches (Eigenkirchen). This institution was by no means exclusively confined to Germany; it existed all over Europe and still exists in the Anglican church in the form of the advowson. But it was in the German empire of the tenth and eleventh centuries that the proprietary church system assumed its greatest importance, for it became one of the foundations of royal power. German law held that any structure, including a church, that was erected on a proprietor’s land legally belonged to the proprietor. Thus, whoever owned the lands on which churches and monasteries were built could act as the lord over them and appoint the ecclesiastical officials. This was not important if the church was a parish church, but it was significant if a monastery with great estates was involved. The Ottonian house, partly because of its benefactions to the church and partly by more violent means, gained proprietary rights over many of the German bishoprics and abbeys, thereby acquiring the right to appoint important members of the higher clergy and the control of the ecclesiastical revenue.
The third institutional basis of the Ottonian control over the German church was the system of “advocacy.” The advocate was a secular manager of the estates belonging to a cathedral or monastery who thereby gained a large share of the revenues and lordship over the people on the ecclesiastical estates. The Ottonian family was adept at gathering the majority of advocacies in Germany into their hands.
By the middle of the tenth century the wealth and military power of the German monarchy was steadily on the increase as a result of these ways of establishing close control over the church. It is known that almost half the army that Otto II used in Italy in 981 came from monastic lands. The higher clergy were also used extensively as royal administrators, not only in the royal chancery; the abbots were granted the power of counts in many cases and given onerous tasks of local administration on behalf of the monarch. With the political, military, and economic support of the church, Otto did not find it difficult to beat the stem duchies, including Lorraine, into submission. By 955 he had begun to meddle in the chaotic affairs of northern Italy through his marriage to Adelaide, an Italian “queen,” and his claim to the Lombard crown.
That year marked the turning point in Otto’s reign. He inflicted a crushing defeat on the Magyars at the Battle of the Lechfeld and became the hero of western Europe. To the German nobility he appeared to have fulfilled the claim he made at his coronation to be the successor of Charlemagne. On the field of his victory over the Magyars the great lords raised him on their shields in the Germanic manner and proclaimed him emperor. A few years later, in 962, Otto went to Rome and had himself crowned emperor by the pope.
Otto wanted to bring remnants of the old middle kingdom under his control, particularly Lorraine and northern Italy, and he needed the imperial title to provide the legal basis for such claims. He was especially concerned with northern Italy, whose political condition was chaotic, and he wished to preclude further attempts by the south German dukes to conquer Lombardy. Another motive for Otto’s imperial coronation was his need to emulate Charlemagne as much as possible to strengthen the legal foundation for his control over the German church. A third reason for Otto’s taking the imperial crown was the potential danger of the renovation of the imperial title outside Germany by the French king or a French duke. Another thesis, strongly favored by German historians in the 1930s, is that Otto wanted the imperial title to be the moral leader of a German drive into the Slavic lands beyond the Elbe. All or most of these motives were involved in Otto’s imperial coronation, but whatever special reasons Otto had for reviving the imperial title, it was the natural consequence of his position as the most outstanding ruler in Europe. He commanded the greatest military power since Charlemagne, he was a theocratic monarch who dominated the church in his territory, and he was the warrior-hero of Germanic society. These qualities made Otto appear, both to himself and to contemporaries, as the worthy successor of Charlemagne, and if the great Frankish king was an emperor, then Otto had to be also. His imperial title was simply the apotheosis of his rule over Germany and northern Italy.
There was nothing Roman in Otto’s conception of the imperial title. The nineteenth-century Kleindeutsch historians blamed the Saxon king for getting the German monarchy involved with the fatal and debilitating charms of Italy, which they believed to have been the source of all the later troubles of the medieval German monarchy. But Otto hardly spent any time there and did not even make any effective contribution to rescuing the papacy from its subversion by the Roman nobility. Otto the Great was a hard, tough soldier and administrator; he was intelligent enough to make use of ideology, but he was not the kind of man who was actually inspired by ideas. He did, however, fall prey to the proclivity of the arriviste to obtain social recognition for his heir. And the only recognition that seemed suitable for the son of the German emperor was marriage to a Byzantine princess. The Greeks initially dismissed Otto as a barbarian upstart, but after a change in dynasty, the new Byzantine emperor finally allowed the Ottonians to have one of his distant relatives. Otto II’s marriage inaugurated a kind of political antiquarianism that had marked the Carolingian empire after Charlemagne. Under His Greek wife’s influence he directed his attention to establishing effective authority south of the Alps. Otto II allowed the Slavs to destroy the German settlements east of the Elbe, while he used his army to undertake an expedition into southern Italy, where he was killed fighting the Moslems in 983.
During the reign of Otto II’s son, Otto III (983–1002), the association of the German empire with Rome became predominant, and the policy of Otto I was abandoned in a fundamental way. It is a tribute to the strength of the institutions that Otto the Great had created that the German monarchy did not completely collapse during his grandson’s reign. Otto III succeeded to the throne as a child, and until 995 the empire was ruled first by his Byzantine mother Theophano, and then by his grandmother Adelaide. During the seven years of his own rule Otto was rarely in Germany, but devoted himself to the achievement of a far-flung imperial plan centered on Rome. This program was a consequence of the influence exerted on the youthful Otto III by his teacher, the French churchman Gerbert of Aurillac, who had studied in Moslem Spain and who had become the greatest western scholar of his age. Gerbert and other churchmen who predominated at the court of Otto III talked about a “renewal of the Roman Empire.” Gerbert easily won over the young and impressionable Otto to his plans for a new empire, with Rome once again the center of the western world. Accordingly Otto took up residence in Rome and set Gerbert on the papal throne as Sylvester II. It was intended that this would be the most important moment in the history of the Roman Empire since the time of Constantine. The coins, illuminated manuscripts, and poems coming from Otto’s court proclaimed an involved and sophisticated imperial ideology going far beyond the political antiquarianism of the later Carolingian empire.
To the Ottonian court theorists the city of Rome symbolized both the political unity of the world and the unity of the church. One of Otto’s documents begins, “Otto, slave of the Apostles and according to the will of the Lord Savior, august emperor of the Romans. We proclaim Rome capital of the world. We recognize that the Latin church is the mother of all churches.” These ideas are depicted in the extremely well-executed Ottonian illuminations. One picture shows Otto seated on his throne and flanked by the Apostles Peter and Paul. Another shows the countries of Europe bringing him gifts of homage.
Gerbert’s plans were confined not only to ideology, art, and court ceremonial; Rome as the head of the world and as the head of the church implied some specific policies that, if they could have been executed, would have had a profound impact on the development of Europe. The first policy involved the creation of a great federal empire embracing east central Europe to obviate a renewal of the struggle between Germans and Slavs. Otto, in fact, made a trip to Poland to grant the Christian duke of Poland an honorary title and to receive him within the renovated Roman Empire. A similar kind of federal arrangement was made with the king of Hungary. The second policy that Gerbert induced Otto to support was in the area of papal-imperial relations. For almost a century the papacy had played no part in European life because of its subjection to the Roman nobility, and as Pope Sylvester II Gerbert was conscious of the conflicts that might arise between the German emperor and a revived papacy. In his view the papacy ought not to assert temporal claims, but should become a purely spiritual institution. Gerbert did not believe that the Donation of Constantine was genuine, and he persuaded the emperor to condemn it as “lies forged by certain popes and attributed to the name of the great Constantine.”
Otto III died in 1002 and Sylvester II one year later, and their ambitious program expired with them. Already in the last years of Otto’s reign the Saxon nobles were beginning to rebel against him on the grounds that Otto’s imperial ideology neglected Germany and went against their interests. Otto’s successor, his cousin Henry II (1002–1024), abandoned Otto’s plans and confined himself to maintaining the royal power in Germany. This was certainly a more realistic approach to the problems of the German monarchy than those adopted by Otto II and Otto III, and it is doubtful if the institutions created by Otto the Great could have sustained another reign like his son’s and grandson’s. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that Gerbert had foreseen two of the bitterest conflicts that marked later medieval German history: the struggle of the Germans against the Slavs and the conflict between empire and papacy. Many aspects of the renewal of the “Roman Empire” appear as useless and as empty of real significance as the political antiquarianism of the later Carolingians. But in these two respects Gerbert and his disciple Otto had exhibited a keen perception of two fundamental problems that were in their incipient stage.
The Ottonian empire has sometimes been interpreted as merely a continuation of Carolingian kingship. It has been pointed out that the Ottonian kings relied for their power on their association with the church, that they made use of the doctrine of theocratic monarchy, that they cultivated the imperial ideology; all these ideas and institutions can be found in the age of Charlemagne and his successors. It is true that the Ottonians were not great innovators, as were the Norman dukes. It is true that the essentials of Ottonian government were already delineated by the Carolingian monarchy. But the Ottonians used these precedents to establish a successful and long-lived monarchy, whereas the Carolingian efforts resulted in bitter disappointment. The Ottonians did not have to deal with such a large area, nor were they as troubled by the decentralizing effects of lordship. In addition to these initial advantages, the success of the Ottonian empire must be attributed to the firm hold over the resources of the church that Otto the Great established and that served as the foundation of effective royal power even when the presence of a strong royal personality was wanting in Germany during the two successive reigns. The Salian rulers of the second and third quarters of the eleventh century were able to build on the achievements of their Ottonian kinsmen, to go beyond Carolingian precedents, and to strengthen the institutional foundations of the German empire.
The Ottonian period, which inaugurated German history, sets the tone and in some ways acts as a microcosm of all the later vicissitudes of German civilization. In the Ottonian empire we see that peculiar combination of aggressive, ruthless efficiency and the expression of a childlike, lyrical idealism or, as the German writers call it, that union of Macht and Geist that so often distinguishes the later history of the lands between the Rhine and the Elbe.
The interpenetration of ecclesia and mundus that characterized the institutional foundations of both the Ottonian empire and the Norman duchy depended heavily on the resources and activities of the Benedictine order. The relations between church and kingship in the tenth and eleventh centuries and the contemporary theory of the identification of ecclesia and mundus were, in effect, founded upon the ubiquitous Benedictine cooperation with the leaders of the lay society. The monastic order was the keystone of the early medieval equilibrium.
This equilibrium, as it came to be firmly established in the late tenth and first half of the eleventh centuries, was particularly identified with the ideals and activities of the Burgundian monastery of Cluny and her dependencies and affiliates. As the ideal of the acknowledged leader of western monasticism in the first half of the eleventh century, the Cluniac program became the intellectual expression of the prevailing world order. The abbot of Cluny was the elder statesman of mid-eleventh-century Europe. Cluniac monks were closely involved with the government of the German Salian dynasty, which succeeded to the German throne in 1024, and they played an important role in the creation of the Norman church. The monastery of Cluny itself was the largest, best endowed, and most prestigious in Europe. It held the admiration of churchmen and the devotion of laymen, and the kind of religious life it inculcated was at the heart of early eleventh-century piety.
The monastic life as envisaged by Cluny was, on the whole, not original; it was a perpetuation and intensification of the Benedictine form as it had come to exist by the ninth century. Carolingian monasticism had been given official form in the monastic constitutions of 817, which had been drawn up by St. Benedict of Aniane, who had been placed at the head of all the Carolingian monasteries by Louis the Pious. The aim of the second Benedict was to supplement the rule of the first Benedict and to acknowledge the changes that had taken place in western monasticism over the previous three centuries as the communities of the black monks had come to undertake their indispensable social duties. Benedict of Aniane recognized that the monks no longer supported themselves with their physical labor; instead, they acted as official intercessors for lay society with the deity through liturgical prayer and performed educational, political, and economic functions. This was the kind of monastic life that came to be identified with Cluny during the tenth and eleventh centuries.
The actual beginnings of the monastery in 910 were extremely modest. The monastery was founded in an obscure corner of Burgundy by a duke of Aquitaine on the site of his hunting lodge, and for a while the duke even neglected to remove his hunting dogs to make room for the monks. Yet within a century Cluny had become the leading monastery in Europe and had formed a loose kind of special order of its own. Several monasteries were directly subject to the abbot of Cluny, particularly daughter houses founded by Cluny itself, and other Benedictine communities, many of which were much older than Cluny, were loosely affiliated with it and recognized the leadership of its abbot. Cluny exercised a strong influence over the great monastery of Gorze in Lorraine, the Cluniacs reformed and then dominated the important French royal monastery of Fleury on the Loire, there was a strong Cluniac influence at work in the revitalization of English monasticism undertaken by St. Dunstan in the late tenth century, and it was a Cluniac abbot from Dijon whom the duke of Normandy brought to his duchy in the early eleventh century to inaugurate the expansion of the Norman church.
Cluny’s success must be partly attributed to the fact that it had obtained immunity from both lay and episcopal interference and was directly subject to the pope, and since the papacy was in a condition of complete decrepitude until the middle of the eleventh century, the monks of Cluny were free to work out the destiny of their community. They chose a succession of extremely able abbots, usually men with the highest aristocratic, or even princely, backgrounds, who led the Burgundian religious house to its position of eminence in the affairs of Europe. This was particularly true of the two abbots who between them ruled Cluny for most of the eleventh century: Odilo (died 1049) and Hugh the Great (died 1109). Cluny demanded of its own brothers and of dependent and affiliated monasteries the full observance of the Benedictine Rule as amended by Benedict of Aniane. The monks at Cluny became famous for the extent and beauty of their liturgical devotions. Kings and nobles all over Europe who had come to take seriously the teachings of the church and who were concerned for the salvation of their own souls and those of their relatives were eager to give Cluny rich endowments to be named in Cluniac prayers. But neither its enforcement of monastic discipline nor its association with popular piety accounts for Cluny’s leadership in the world order of the early eleventh century. While Cluny was free of any lay control, its abbots did not make this a requirement for Cluny’s daughter houses or affiliates. On the contrary, the Cluniac monks, who worked all over western Europe, exhibited the greatest eagerness to accept kings and dukes as the patron lords of their establishments. The abbot of Cluny looked with respect, gratitude, and admiration on the friends of the church who ruled in Germany, the Ile-de-France, Normandy, England, and other states in western Europe. The Cluniac monks were eager to offer their services to royal chanceries and were not loath to receive the usual rewards for this work—appointments to bishoprics. The Cluniacs readily accepted, and certain of them even encouraged, the entrenchment of the doctrine of theocratic kingship in Germany, and they took the lead in spreading the veneration of the ruler as the patron and friend of the church even in Normandy, where such traditions had hitherto been lacking.
The Cluniac movement entered Germany from Burgundy and Lorraine at the beginning of the eleventh century, and the attitude of the German rulers was from the first sympathetic to the spread of this movement. The first ruler of the Salian dynasty, Conrad II (1024–1039), was a harsh soldier and administrator who exploited the German clergy severely, but he favored the spread of the Cluniac movement in his realm. But the great advance of Cluniac influence in Germany came during the reign of Conrad’s son, Henry III (1039–1056), who acted as the patron and protector of the order in his realm. Henry had married the daughter of the duke of Acquitaine, whose house had founded Cluny in the early tenth century, but Henry’s affinity for the Cluniac order was based on much deeper motives than his wife’s special association with the leading monastery in western Europe. In the character and ideals of Henry III can be seen what appears also in the outlook and conduct of the rulers of France, England, and Normandy in the middle of the eleventh century—the completion of the Christianization of Europe.
The leaders of western society, nearly all the rulers of the period, and many of the ordinary nobility themselves had come to take seriously the teachings of the church and to allow these teachings to govern their lives. Contemporaries sensed that Henry III of Germany was a monk in worldly garb, and Edward the Confessor of England, as his appellation implies, later was canonized as a saint. All over Europe in the middle of the eleventh century kings, dukes, and nobles were building churches and endowing monasteries. The regular clergy in particular had come to receive fanatical devotion and respect from the leaders of the lay society. Monastic intercession was deemed to be almost indispensable for achieving heavenly grace, and nobles, when they felt mortality creeping on, got themselves off to the nearest monastery to die clothed in the monastic habit. Gifts were made to monasteries not only to secure the salvation of certain named relatives, but, in more general terms, for the welfare of all believers living or dead. It is during the eleventh century that the holy day of All Souls was fixed in the church calendar.
The spread of lay piety did not, however, imply the willingness of kings and dukes to subject themselves to ecclesiastical authority. On the contrary, it provided a further intellectual basis for royal control over the church, for it made kings feel as spiritual as churchmen. In no case was this situation more marked than in that of the great German emperor Henry III, who was not only a great patron of the Cluniac order in Germany, but was inclined to adopt monastic attitudes. His greatest delight was participating in the translation of relics to a new shrine. He was fond of making speeches in which he declared that he forgave all his enemies. At the same time, however, he believed that he had received a sacramental office at his coronation and that he had full spiritual authority to bestow the symbols of ecclesiastical office on bishops or abbots and to order the affairs of the church. He believed that Christ was working through his royal power just as He did through a priest at the celebration of the mass. As the representative of Christ on Earth Henry felt compelled not only to govern the German church but to order the affairs of the papacy, which had been in a scandalous condition for more than a century. In 1045 there were no fewer than three rival popes in Rome, corrupt scions of the gangster Roman nobility. The synod of Sutri of 1045, which Henry called and presided over, marked the first step in the reform of the eleventh-century papacy. In two years Henry appointed three German bishops to the throne of Peter, and the pontificate of the last of these, Leo IX (1049–1054), who was the emperor’s kinsman, became the turning point in the development of the eleventh-century papacy.
Henry’s piety and ecclesiastical interests by no means precluded his continuing the work of the Ottonians and adding to the institutional foundations of royal power in Germany. As a strong personality, able warrior, theocratic monarch, and great administrator, Henry III represents the apotheosis of early medieval kingship in that he brought together all the qualities that made for successful medieval monarchy. Henry realized that the German monarchy was still short of strong and permanent institutions and that it still relied too exclusively on the personnel, resources, and doctrine of the church. He discovered a new kind of royal soldier and administrator in the institution of the ministerialis. The latter was a serf-knight, a soldier who was given the best training and equipment of the day but did not have the legal status of a freeman. The ministerialis did not voluntarily enter into vassalage, but was entirely dependent on his lord. Serf-knights were by no means exclusively a German institution, but they never played any important role in feudal societies outside the Salian empire. It appears that German churchmen were the first to recruit serfs from their estates and to train them as knights, but it was Henry III who made the ministerialis into an important royal institution. He used ministeriales to garrison the castles that he was building all over northern Germany. It was his plan to join Saxony to Franconia, the homeland of the Salian dynasty, and to make these duchies into the permanent crown lands of the German monarchy. Thus Henry had discovered a new kind of personnel for his army and local government, and in his concern to build up the German crown lands he had laid the foundations for a policy similar to that which the Capetian kings were to pursue with enormous success in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He set up his capital at the great fortress of Goslar in Saxony, which was situated close to the silver mines discovered in Otto Is reign, and he proceeded to use his ecclesiastical knights and the new ministeriales to bring the recalcitrant Saxon nobility and free peasantry under the full authority of the Salian dynasty.
In 1050 it appeared that the political destiny of Germany, as much as that of the feudal duchy of Normandy, would be marked by the ever increasing power of the central government. The world in which Cluny was the leading spiritual force was marked not only by the final stage in the Christianization of Europe, but also, in Normandy and the German empire, by the achievement of a degree of political and social order that western Europe had not known since the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Early eleventh-century ideals of church and kingship were given monumental form in the style of architecture that modern art historians have chosen to call Romanesque. In the river valleys of western Germany, France, and northern Spain, many stone churches had been built to serve the needs of the monarchical, feudal, and ecclesiastical elite by the middle of the eleventh century. The churches that have been designated as Romanesque in style exhibit strong regional and local differences in their structures. They have, however, certain things in common. First, these ecclesiastical structures tend to be small compared with the grandiose churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Romanesque churches were chapels for the lay and sacerdotal hierarchies, whereas the later Gothic churches were designed to bring in the masses for public worship. Second, the Romanesque churches were ecclesiastical fortresses; they were built by the same architects and artisans who erected the feudal fortresses of the eleventh century. The Romanesque church was God’s fortress, and it reflects a view of Jesus as head of the feudal hierarchy and the prototype of theocratic kings. Third, the Romanesque churches tend to be dark inside; the walls have few windows to let in the light. The absence of windows is a consequence not only of technological limitations in architectural engineering, but of the elitist and private character of this kind of house of worship. Finally, the Romanesque style is marked by a richness in ornamentation and sculpture, often individual in character and much less universal in style than the Gothic of the thirteenth century. This quality again reflects the elitist and private character of Romanesque art, but it also reveals the increasing self-consciousness and confidence that prevailed in the Cluniac world of the mid-eleventh century. Considered as feats of structural engineering, the Romanesque stone churches mark a tremendous advance upon Carolingian churches. In the Rhine valley, southern France, and northern Spain, many of these imposing buildings still stand as monuments to the increasing rationality, piety, wealth, and public power that marked the age of Henry III and the leadership of Cluny in European culture.