Europe: A History (76 page)
MURANO
M
URANO
is an island in the Venetian lagoon. It is the site of a Romanesque church, Santa Maria e Donato, dating from 999, and the glassworks of the former Venetian Republic.
Glass-making has been practised in Europe since ancient times, but Greek and Roman glass was coarse in texture and opaque in colour. It was only at Murano, near the turn of the thirteenth century, that the glass-masters created a product that was both tough and transparent. For several decades the formula remained secret; but then it leaked to Nuremberg, whence it spread to all corners of the continent.
Transparent glass made possible the science of optics, and was crucial in the development of precision instruments. The principles of the lens and the refraction of light were known by the time, c.1260, that Roger Bacon was credited with designing the first pair of spectacles. (There is a portrait of the Emperor Henry VII (d. 1313) wearing spectacles in one of the stained glass windows of Strasbourg cathedral.) Glass windows gradually came into fashion between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, first in churches and palaces and later in more humble dwellings. Glass flasks, retorts, and tubes facilitated the experiments of alchemy, later of chemistry. Glassclochesand greenhouses transformed market-gardening. The microscope (1590), telescope (1608), barometer (1644), and thermometer (1593), all glass-based, revolutionized our views of the world. The silvered mirror, first manufactured at Murano, revolutionized the way we see ourselves.
The social consequences of glass were far-reaching. The use of spectacles extended the reading span of monks and scholars, and accelerated the spread of learning. Windows increased the hours and efficiency of indoor work, especially in northern Europe. Workplaces could be better lit and better heated. Greenhouses vastly improved the cultivation of flowers, fruit, and vegetables, bringing a healthier and more abundant diet, previously known only in the Mediterranean. Storm-proof lanterns, enclosed coaches, and watch-glasses all appeared, whilst precision instruments encouraged a wide range of scientific disciplines, from astronomy to medicine.
The mirror had important psychological consequences. People who could see a sharp image of their own faces developed a new consciousness. They became more aware of their appearances, and hence of clothes, hairstyles, and cosmetics. They were also led to ponder the link between external features and the inner life, in short, to study personality and individuality. They developed interests in portraiture, biography, and fashion. The very unmedieval habits of introspection were strongly reflected in Rembrandt’s, paintings, for example, and ultimately in the novel. The
Galerie des Glaces
(Hall of Mirrors) at the palace of Versailles was opened
on 15 November 1684. It was a wonder of the age. Spanning the full façade of the central pavilion and overlooking the park, its colossal mirrors reflected the light of seventeen huge windows and seventeen colossal chandeliers. It was the secular counterpart to the medieval stained glass of Chartres.
The ancients had seen through glass darkly. The moderns saw through it clearly, in a shocking, shining cascade of light that reached into their innermost lives.
1
Other historians would go still further. Compared to previous conditions, the growth of cities was spectacular; and their activities have been seen as evidence for the ‘take-off’ of a European economy.
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This is perhaps an exaggeration. The huge annual fairs which were held from 1180 onwards on the plains of Champagne, at Lagny, Provins, Troyes, or Bar-sur-Aube, were indeed a major development. They were located midway between the urban centres in Lombardy, in the Rhineland, in the Low Countries, and in northern France; and they provided the meeting-point for merchants and financiers with international connections. One can say that they were the focus of a Europe-wide, if not an all-European, economic system.
Urban wealth underlay many of the political problems. City corporations were acquiring the means to challenge the authority of the local bishop or count, just as the guilds and merchant associations could press the city fathers. (The first recorded strike was organized by the weavers of Douai in 1245.
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) The feudal order was weakening from within. In Germany, the sturdy independence of cities such as Cologne or Nuremberg helps to explain why neither the Church nor the barons could reimpose the authority of the Hohenstaufen. In Italy, the colossal resources of Milan, Genoa, Venice, and Florence explain why the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines were so intractable, why neither Pope nor Emperor would desist. In Flanders, urban overpopulation supplied an important element in the migrations to the East. There were marked contrasts between Eastern and Western Europe— which none the less, and as always, betrayed strong indications of interdependence. Europe was on the move.
Schiedam, County of Holland, 5 December 1262
. Hendrik, Bishop of Utrecht, on the Eve of St Nicholas granted a licence to a church built and endowed ‘on the new land’ at Schiedam by the Countess Aleida van Henegouwen, Regent of Holland and Zeeland:
Henricus Dei Gratia Traiectensis episcopus universis presentes literas inspecturis salutem in Domino sempiternam. Cum illustris domina, dilecta nostra consanguínea domina Aleidis, uxor quondam domini lohannis de Avennis, Hollandie et Selandie tutrix, in nova
terra apud Schiedam in divini honorem nominis de novo ecclesiam construí fecerit et dotaverit eandem, nos ipsius in hac parte piis supplicationibus inclinati ad huiusmodi structuram ecclesiae licentiam concedimus…
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PLOVUM
T
HE
heavy, iron, three-piece plough or
plovum
was a far more sophisticated implement than its predecessor, the simple wooden ‘scratch-plough’ or
aratrum
. Equipped with a vertical sod-cutter or coulter, a horizontal ploughshare, a tilted mouldboard, and usually with wheels, it could turn the heaviest soils. Yet it demanded the sort of tractive power that was rarely available in the ancient world. A thousand years passed between its earliest sighting by Pliny in the Po valley and its general adoption in northern Europe in the eleventh to twelfth centuries. For all that time, the main problem was how to pull it. In the early Middle Ages ox teams were the norm. Land was measured in ox-hides and ox-gangs, i.e. in units of ploughland that could be served by one ox-team. But the ox was painfully slow; and a full team of eight oxen was expensive both to buy and to feed. Horses were only bred in the fast but smaller and less powerful breeds.
Five developments were required before the iron plough could come into its own. First was the breeding of heavy farm-horses—an offshoot of the Carolingian charger. Second was the horse-collar, not noted before
AD
800, which enabled the draught animal to haul maximum loads without being throttled. Third was the horseshoe, adopted c.900. Fourth was the cultivation of oats, the workhorse’s staple food. Most important of all was the introduction of the three-field system of crop rotation. The change from the two-field to the three-field plan greatly improved crop yields whilst increasing the peasant family’s productivity by at least 50 per cent. It permitted the growing of all four cereals, and effectively distributed the peasant’s toil between spring and autumn sowing. But it demanded a marked rise in ploughing capacity. (See Plate 29.)
By the twelfth century at the latest, all the elements of the northern agricultural revolution were in place from France to Poland. Historians may have modified some of the simpler equations of the subject, such as Meltzen’s ‘Scratch-plough + cross-ploughing = square fields’ or Marc Bloch’s famous ‘Three-piece plough + wheels = strips = open fields = communal agriculture’. But the main lines are now generally accepted. Square-shaped upland fields, which required cross-ploughing, were often abandoned, whilst long open-strip fields made their appearance in the heavy but fertile lands of the valley bottoms. Europe’s landscape was altered once and for all. The fields were adorned with the familiar pattern of ridge-and-furrow. Time saved from ploughing could be used to extend the arable. Forests were felled, marshes drained, polders reclaimed from the sea. Larger villages clustered in the valleys, and the working of the strips was regulated by new forms of communal management. The village council and the manorial economy both went into action. From it all, Europeans gained a growing supply of ever more nutritious food that was to sustain a correspondingly greater population until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
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Two years later, the Countess Aleida ordered a dam and sluice to be built across the stream of the Schie at the point where it flowed into the tidal waters of the Rhine delta. Its purpose was to regulate the channel which linked the nearby town of Delft with its tiny river-port of Delfshaven. It was to be built in conjunction with another dike and dam across a still smaller rivulet, the Rotte, two miles upstream. Three years after that, on 11 August 1270, the young Count Floris V granted privileges to the burghers of Rotterdam.
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About the same time, construction of a dam began on the River Amstel, 35 miles to the north. Step by step, the Rhine delta was being tamed.
Though not the earliest man-made constructions in the area, the dams were specifically designed to aid commercial navigation in the perilous wastes which stretched in a huge arc over some 25,000 km
2
(10,000 sq. miles) between the Scheldt and the Ems (see Map 13, opposite). In retrospect, they may be seen as crucial steps in the evolution of Europe’s most densely populated country, of the world’s largest port, and of one of Europe’s most distinctive nations. It could not have seemed so at the time.
The country of Holland was one of the more remote and underdeveloped districts of the Holy Roman Empire. Its name, meaning
Holt-land
or ‘Marshland’, underlined the fact that it was entirely dominated by the watery wastes. It was the lowest of all the low countries, the
Nederlanden
. Between the ring of sand islands on the seaward side and the inland terra firma, at least two-thirds of its surface area lay below sea-level. It consisted for the most part of mud-flats, salt-marsh, flood-banks, brackish lakes, and treacherous
wadden
or shallows. Travel was usually by boat, except in the winter when the shallow waters froze solid to form roads across the ice.
The Rhine delta was the most recent and most mobile of Europe’s landforms. Created in the few thousand years since the last Ice Age, it had been shaped by the contending forces of three north-flowing rivers—the Scheldt (Escaut), the Maas (Meuse), and the Rijn (Rhine)—and of the westerly winds and tides of the sea. As a result, it was visibly subject to change and movement. The seaborne sand had formed a massive barrier of dunes up to 70 m high and 4 or 5 km wide. Behind this, the river-borne sediment piled up in ever-shifting configurations, whilst the freshwater flow gushed and probed against the points of least resistance in the unceasing battle to force new outlets to the sea. In Roman times, a number of coastal forts had stood on the sand barrier beyond a great inland lagoon, the Fleo Lacus. The main waters of the ‘Old Rhine’ reached the sea through a channel which still exists in modern Leiden, whilst the ‘Old Maas’ wound its separate way some twenty miles further south.
But the intervening millennium had wrought several dramatic alterations. In 839 a great flood had diverted the principal Rhine flow into the Maas, creating the
interlinked channels of Lek, Waal, and ‘New Maas’. The freshwater lagoon to the north, starved of water, partly silted up. Then, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a warmer climatic phase caused a gradual rise in the sea-level. The dune barrier was breached repeatedly, the estuary of the Scheldt was split into several channels, opening Antwerp to sea traffic; and islands proliferated. The salt water rushed in to turn the northern lagoon into a broad sea bay, the Zuider Zee, which cut Frisia in two. High tides were overrunning the tributaries of the main
channels, threatening the livelihood of the towns on their banks. This was the problem that inspired the construction of the dams.
Map 13. The Low Countries, 1265
Prior to the mid-thirteenth century, human habitation in the delta region had been limited to three types of location. There was a string of ancient towns on the edge of the mainland. Arnhem (Arenacum or ‘Sandtown’), nearby Nijmegen (Noviomagum or ‘New Market’), and Utrecht (Trajectum ad Rhenam or ‘Rhine Ford’) were all Roman foundations. Antwerp (Aen de Werpen or ‘Anchorage’) had grown up round the seventh-century church of St Amand on the banks of the Scheldt. There were a few isolated settlements on the sand-dunes, such as the abbey of Middleburg on Walcheren dating from 1120, or the hunting-lodge recently built at s’Gravenhaage or ‘Count’s Hedge’ in 1242. A number of fishing villages had found a precarious foothold in the lee of the dunes. Several of these had reached the status of a formal chartered city—Dordrecht (1220), Haarlem (1245), Delft (1246), and Alkmaar (1254). But none of them contained a fraction of the teeming population of the great textile cities of neighbouring Flanders. For centuries, the bishop of Utrecht exercised the main religious and secular authority. The delta ports had long served as staging posts on the costal trade.