In the 960s the German emperor Otto I sent a Lombard bishop, Liudprand of Cremona, as his ambassador to Constantinople to obtain a Byzantine princess for his son. The embassy was not successful, but Liudprand left an account of his experiences that offers an illuminating insight into the relations between the still new European civilization and the old and wealthy culture of the Mediterranean world. The Greeks regarded the Germans as impoverished barbarian upstarts, and Liudprand was conscious of the fact that there was nothing in the West that even distantly resembled the wealth and luxury of Constantinople. He had to compensate for his sense of inferiority by depicting the Greeks as effeminate and corrupt and living off the glories of a vanished age. His hero, Otto, was bold and honest, the Byzantine emperor cowardly and devious. Liudprand’s report of his embassy to Constantinople reflects the encounter of the old and the new, the meeting of a civilization just beginning to develop its characteristic form and one that had reached its ultimate limits. Compared to Byzantium and the other Mediterranean civilization, Islam, western Europe was indeed impoverished and backward in the middle of the tenth century. A hundred years later Byzantium had begun to enter its long eclipse—the Arab world had reached the limits of its cultural, political, and economic growth—while medieval Europe was at the beginning of its greatest period of creativity and improvement, and the Latin peoples had begun their economic and political penetration of the Mediterranean world. This fundamental change in the relative situations of Byzantium, Islam, and the West marks the conclusion of the early Middle Ages.
In the middle of the tenth century Byzantium entered its last golden age under the wise and aggressive Macedonian dynasty, particularly during the reign of Basil II (963–1025). The government, economy, and cultural life of the east Roman Empire exhibited its greatest vigor since the reign of Justinian in the sixth century. The Macedonians finally brought the divisive iconoclastic controversy that had intermittently raged since the first half of the eighth century to an end by subscribing to the orthodox view on images. They protected the peasant class against the depredations of the wealthy landlords, who aimed to achieve a decentralization of political authority similar to that which had ruined the Carolingian empire. Basil II destroyed the power of the Asiatic Bulgars, who had pressed on the Balkan frontier of Byzantium, and he undertook a counterattack against the Islamic power in the Middle East, bringing back Antioch, Cyprus, and Crete under Greek rule. The emperor benefited from his control over the commerce of Constantinople, which in the tenth century was probably the wealthiest city in the world. These political and economic achievements were paralleled by a cultural efflorescence that art historians, at least, have called the Macedonian Renaissance. The magnificent illuminated manuscripts that were produced in the Byzantine court and monasteries during Basil’s reign are marked by a greater degree of classical naturalism in their depiction of the human figure.
But the Macedonian age turned out to be the last achievement of Byzantium before the long twilight of Byzantine civilization set in. The rise of lordship after the first quarter of the eleventh century weakened the power of the Byzantine state from within, and in the middle of the eleventh century a new Asiatic invader of the Mediterranean world, the Moslem Seljuk Turks, again forced the Greeks to engage in a bitter struggle for survival. By the beginning of the 1070s the conquests of Basil II had once more been lost to the Moslems, and the desperate emperor was forced to appeal to the pope for aid in preventing the fall of Constantinople.
The history of Byzantium is a study in disappointment. The empire centering on Constantinople had begun with all the advantages obtained from its inheritance of the political, economic, and intellectual life of the fourth-century Roman Empire. Except in the realm of art, in which the Greeks excelled, Byzantium added scarcely anything to this superb foundation. The east Roman Empire of the Middle Ages made no important contributions to philosophy, theology, science, or literature. Its political institutions remained fundamentally unchanged from those that existed in the reign of Theodosius the Great at the end of the fourth century; while the Byzantines continued to enjoy an active urban and commercial life, they made no substantial advance in the technology of industry and trade developed by the cities of the ancient world. Modern historians of the medieval eastern Roman Empire have strongly criticized the tendency of nineteenth-century scholars to write off Byzantium as the example of an atrophied civilization. Yet it is hard to find, outside the field of art, any contributions by way of either original ideas or institutions that the medieval Greek-speaking peoples made to civilization. Perhaps the unprogressive nature of medieval Byzantium was precisely the consequence of the vast legacy of the Roman world that the Greeks received inviolate. The Byzantine world apparently had already answered for it all problems of government, economy, and higher thought, and therefore the task to which the Byzantines dedicated themselves was merely one of preserving the satisfactory and comfortable existence they had inherited. The limitations of Byzantine civilization must also be attributed, of course, to the tremendous pressures that were exerted almost incessantly on the frontiers of the empire from the sixth century onward. The Byzantines had to apply all the resources at their command to hold back the Arabs and their other enemies, and in so doing they dissipated their best energies and allowed their culture to become more and more rigid.
The penetration of the Mediterranean world by the Seljuk Turks was by no means a boon to eleventh-century Islamic civilization. The level of Turkish culture was much more primitive than that which prevailed among the sophisticated Arabic-speaking peoples of the eastern Mediterranean. The Turks’ attempt to seize political power in the Middle East deeply divided the Moslem world for more than a century. At the western end of the Mediterranean a similar incursion took place in the eleventh century by nomadic Berber tribesmen from the North African desert, who crossed the straits of Gibraltar and gained control of Moslem Spain. At both ends of the Mediterranean Moslem world by the middle of the eleventh century, political authority was passing to unsophisticated, fanatical puritans who cared nothing for the great achievements of Arabic thought and who were willing to listen to the hysterical strictures of the orthodox against philosophy and science. After the tenth century the weakness of the Arabic political tradition became more and more evident. The political institutions of Islam were strictly those of oriental despotism, and the later political history of medieval Islam is marked by the irresponsibility of the rulers toward the welfare of the people and the recurrent palace revolutions that are endemic to this kind of political system. The political instability that began to distinguish the Islamic world in the first half of the eleventh century caused the increasing neglect of the Mediterranean irrigation system, which had been in existence in some cases for three millennia and upon which the prosperity of the Arabic countries was ultimately based. The Islamic world had not yet entered its deep decline in 1050. Some of its greatest military and intellectual achievements were yet to come, and the Moslem merchant was still a dominant figure in Mediterranean life in the eleventh century, but by and large the greatest days of Islam had ended, and the strength of Islamic civilization was leveling off from its pinnacle of creativity. These limitations of Islamic civilization account for the inability of the Arabs to prevent the political and economic penetration of the Mediterranean by the European peoples in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
Compared with the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, tenth-century western Europe was still an underdeveloped area, impoverished, intensely ruralized, and thinly populated. But whereas the Greeks and Arabs had reached the ultimate extent of their economic development, western Europe was just beginning a demographic and technological revolution that was to bring the Latin world, within two centuries, to a commercial and industrial level surpassing the economic achievements of any area and period of the early Middle Ages and probably also of the ancient world.
The new European political and social order, the improved degree of peace and good government, the Christianization of Europe, and the increase in literacy and social intelligence created an environment that encouraged optimism, enterprise, improved communications, and technological innovation. There was still a great deal of violence in European life, but there was sufficient peace and order in many areas to allow men to use their energies for something beyond the war of all against all—improvement in their material condition.
In the tenth century the European people adopted improvements in technology that had been available in the Mediterranean world for centuries. The importation of the horse collar and stirrup gave them a much greater use of available horsepower. Some historians have said that the stirrup made possible the emergence of the knight who was able to stand up in the stirrups and tilt a lance against his adversary, but this advanced form of military horsemanship did not actually appear until the twelfth century. Until then, as contemporary illustrations demonstrate, the medieval knights threw their metal-tipped wooden lances in the manner of nineteenth-century Comanche warriors. The innovations in the control of horsepower were mainly useful in improving transportation in tenth-century Europe. Europeans also began to make use of waterpower in the tenth century on land and wind power, to a greater degree than before, on the sea. The introduction of watermills greatly facilitated the grinding of grain and contributed to an increase in the food supply. Waterpower was also used to operate sawmills, which contributed to an increase in the amount of good lumber available for construction. The development of the lateen sail made it possible for ships in the Atlantic and Baltic coastal trade to tack against the wind, which the old square sails did not permit. For naval warfare and long-distance commerce in the Mediterranean, where the winds were unreliable and inadequate, the Italians employed a Byzantine-type galley that was the descendant of the oared ships of antiquity.
These social and technological changes go a long way toward explaining the steady growth in the population of Europe from the middle of the tenth century. There was no alteration in the extremely primitive conditions of European medicine and no apparent improvement in the pitifully short average life expectancy, but the increased food supply must have resulted in a marked decrease in infant mortality. For all classes in society there was a greater hope of controlling the physical environment and greater expectations of a better life. Greater confidence in the future, joined with the impress of Christian teachings on all classes, increased respect for the value of human life and created a favorable milieu for raising larger families.
Nothing demonstrates more dramatically the impact of social and technological change in western Europe than the eagerness of the more numerous younger sons of lords, knights, peasants, and other people who were dissatisfied with their too meager lot to move around in search of a better life. The scions of aristocratic families could establish large domains of their own in areas where central authority was weakest inside Europe, or they could move to the frontier regions or even overseas and try to carve out fiefs for themselves. The young knights competed with each other to become the vassals of some established great lord, and, failing this, they could follow enterprising nobility in their freebooting new ventures. The opportunity for the younger and poorer peasants was similarly promising and probably greater in the tenth century than either before or after, at least for another four hundred years. The tenth century was the great age of the internal colonization of Europe, turning some of the immense stretches of forest and swamp into agricultural regions. The peasants learned how to clear wooded land, reclaim marshes, and make greater use of field rotation, leaving one of the two or three open fields of the village fallow each year to restore its fertility and thereby increase the yield. In Germany the more robust sons of the peasants had a special kind of opportunity for improving their condition; some became royal ministeriales and ended up as the captains of royal castles.
In many parts of Europe in the tenth century some of the poorer knights and more intelligent peasants followed an unprecedented avenue of economic advancement. They took up residence in towns and became merchants and craftsmen. The process of the rise of urban life in tenth-century Europe has been somewhat obscured by the categorical thesis that Henri Pirenne presented in his brilliant essay, Medieval Cities. Pirenne, in this and other well-written and highly plausible works, insisted that the origin of the tenth-century cities lay exclusively in international trade. He contended that the merchants who engaged in this large-scale enterprise gathered for protection under the walls of a “burgh,” a fortress belonging to some lay or ecclesiastical prince, and such “burghers” proceeded to make their town into a center for international trade. Eventually, as the bourgeois grew in number, they built a wall around themselves. As the suburbs developed, a new wall became necessary fifty or a hundred years later. Thus Pirenne, measuring the surviving walls of his native Belgian cities, was able to demonstrate their growth in concentric circles, which served as indices of ever-expanding commercial activity. This neat pattern of medieval urban growth existed in Flanders and the Rhineland, but there were cities in other parts of Europe whose beginnings and nature were different. Most of the cities of Italy had been there since Roman times, but they had been neglected and underpopulated for centuries. In the tenth century people from the surrounding countryside moved into the cities to engage in commerce and industry, making them again into centers of urban life instead of mainly centers for ecclesiastical and political administration. Many towns in England and northern France began as burghs and ended as centers of only local trade. And all over Europe there had appeared, by 1050, towns that were merely overgrown villages, places in which a few wealthy and enterprising peasants set up a market for the immediate neighborhood. There are many small towns in England whose main street is still called the Corn Market.
An English churchman of the late tenth century distinguished three classes in society: those who fought, those who prayed, and those who worked. He did not mention the bourgeois, for whom there was no place in the traditional social structure. The burgher did not even have a wergeld in Germanic law. Was he a freeman or unfree? Was he subject to the bishop or lord whose fortress or cathedral he nestled against for protection? In northern Europe there was no clear answer to these questions, and it was to take three centuries before many cities would gain the right to administer their internal affairs and the bourgeois would achieve the full status of freemen in royal and ducal law courts. These rights were usually obtained by purchase, at exorbitant prices, of a charter of urban liberties from king, lord, or bishop.
The dominant class in society looked with suspicion upon a group of men whose provenance was frequently humble and obscure and who made their living in ways that hitherto had been associated with social outcasts and aliens, such as Jews and Arabs. The landed class enjoyed the benefits of commercial exchange and industrial production that the burghers provided. But kings, dukes, bishops, and lords did not regard even the wealthiest burghers as their social equals, and they refused to give the city people their freedom. The burghers of the tenth and eleventh centuries were ruthlessly harassed, blackmailed, subjected to oppressive taxes, and humiliated. This drove the bourgeois back upon their own resources, and it accounts for the intensely corporate and excessively organized character of medieval cities. The city people living in their dark little houses in their crooked and dirty streets, surrounded by an indifferent and frequently hostile world, began in the tenth century to regulate every aspect of urban life with a compulsive efficiency.
In the late tenth century there were already guilds of merchants and craftsmen in Italy and even along the Rhine that carefully regulated commerce and industry. The merchant guilds were corporations of entrepreneurs who engaged in international commerce. The craft guilds were dominated by the master craftsmen who regulated the standard of industrial products, fixed prices, and strictly controlled the journeymen and apprenticés who worked in their shops. In the first half of the eleventh century the Italian cities took up the institution of the commune—a sworn association of men banded together for some purpose—which had existed in rural areas, and used it as the legal basis for turning their cities into self-governing corporations. By 1050 another common characteristic of medieval life had appeared in the commercial centers of Flanders and northern Italy: The real power among the bourgeois was in the hands of a small oligarchy of great entrepreneurs who controlled the merchant guilds in each city and dominated the town government. In the old episcopal center of Milan there was a bitter feud not only between the bishop and the bourgeois, but between the wealthier people and those of more modest means, “the rag-pickers.” The class struggle in Milan already indicated what would be a common characteristic of the medieval townsmen: They hated each other even more than they hated everybody else.
The economic growth that Europe was experiencing between 900 and 1050 involved the processing of some natural resources for export. It was the Flemish cities that discovered the first staple of medieval European international trade. Having drained the marshes of Flanders, the late tenth-century peasants found the recovered land unsuitable for agriculture and used it for raising sheep. They obtained enough wool to make cloth for export, and it was on the basis of this commerce that the Flemish weaving towns of Ghent and Ypres prospered in the eleventh century. By 1050 the first internal trade routes had come into existence, stretching from Flanders across the heart of Europe to northern Italy, whose merchants were willing to exchange Mediterranean luxuries for Flemish textiles. The meeting ground for the Flemish and Italian merchants was the county of Champagne, whose ruler in the twelfth century was to sponsor an annual international fair in his territory.
The north Italian cities had initially become wealthy as interlopers in Byzantine and Moslem trade. The Venetians, who were technically part of the Byzantine empire in the tenth century, were given special trading privileges at Constantinople that allowed them to become the intermediaries between Byzantium and Europe. Not satisfied with this enormously profitable commerce, the ruthless Venetians established relations with all the important Moslem commercial centers of the Mediterranean world. In the later decades of the tenth century Genoa and Pisa, on the west coast of Italy, also sought a share of Moslem wealth, which they attained by a subtle mixture of commerce and piracy. It was the Genoese and Pisan merchants who brought the Rhone valley back into the Mediterranean orbit and who inaugurated the use of the Alpine passes for trade with northern Europe.
The revival of western Europe’s participation in Mediterranean economic life was followed, during the first two decades of the eleventh century, by political and military penetration. The more enterprising or land-hungry French knights followed the lead of the Italian merchants in trying to gain a share of the fabulous wealth of the Moslem lands. Norman freebooters appeared in Sicily in the second decade of the eleventh century and began a long struggle to carve out domains for themselves in southern Italy, a country wealthy beyond the dreams of feudal avarice. Similarly, Norman and other French adventurers joined the struggle against the Moslems in northern Spain. This advance of the western European nobility was to culminate, at the end of the eleventh century, in the first crusade of 1095.
Bourgeois, nobles, and peasants were not the only people who were seeking new opportunities in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. The churchmen, who in any case had always had a much more international outlook, also exhibited a greater degree of mobility. A Frenchman and several Germans went to Italy to become the bishops of Rome, and a Norman Frenchman was for a time archbishop of Canterbury in the 1050s. The leaders of the Cluniac order moved around Europe, founding monasteries and advising rulers. What was unprecedented in the early medieval church was the emergence of a new kind of itinerant scholar, who traveled great distances to find a suitable intellectual milieu and to study under renowned teachers. The great monastic schools of Normandy drew a steady stream of outstanding Italian scholars. Others, however, were making their way to cathedral cities in northern France and Lorraine to study theology and canon law. A few intrepid souls had even dared to cross over into Moslem territory to study mathematics and science at Cordoba. These usually obscure and impecunious scholars were preparing the ground for a tremendous upheaval in European intellectual life.
In the year 1050, in every country in western Europe, there were groups of people engrossed in some kind of novel enterprise. Europe no longer lagged far behind Byzantium and Islam in any way, and in some respects it had surpassed the greatest achievements of the two civilizations with which the Latin-speaking peoples now competed for hegemony in the Mediterranean. In all areas of human activity new aims were being pursued and new methods tested in the western Europe of 1050. The civilization formed out of the union of the Latin Christian and Germanic cultures was entering an era of unprecedented creativity and achievement. The question that remained to be answered was whether the social order of the early medieval equilibrium, which had provided the background for political, economic, and cultural success, could prevail in the changed world that was at the dawn of its existence.