The Age of Chivalry (39 page)

R
IGHT
Peasants and masons build a new city in the 14th century, from a French manuscript version of the prose romance
Girart de Roussillon.

Carolingian Europe's few cities were small-scale affairs. Some were redesigned Roman towns—especially in Europe's Mediterranean south—and most early medieval European urban centers existed to serve the needs of kings, bishops and monasteries. Subsequent urban development, however, reflected the economic needs of local lords, and in northern Europe in particular new cities came into being as centers for the local
markets. From the tenth century onward, large numbers of mercantile and craft-based guilds were becoming established within towns in order to protect their members' interests. Merchants' guilds played a particular role in the emergence of self-governing cities or communes—a development that underlined the distinctiveness of urban life and set it apart from the rural world of the village and estate. Nonetheless, cities had to protect their food supplies, chains of communication and trade routes. In both northern and southern Europe, therefore, the surrounding rural region was closely linked to the city.

Many of Europe's newly flourishing urban and civic centers were associated with new manufacturing processes. The cities of the southern Low Countries, for example, had a particular expertise in dyeing, weaving and finishing wool. Other towns specialized in the manufacture of metalwork and armaments, and some operated as market centers for products that could not be produced locally, such as wine. These specialist goods were then transported and distributed along extensive trade routes, and the rivers of Western Europe, where many cities were located, provided an important network of communications.

The formulation dividing society into those who fought, prayed and labored enjoyed great vogue in the 11th and 12th centuries, and the structure of the second order, the clergy, was well established by
c
.1200. As the European economy developed and diversified from the 12th century onward those who “labored” came to include merchants, financiers and lay professionals as well as peasants and artisans. The distinction between warriors and “laborers” intersected with European society's more formal and legal divide between those who were free and those who were not. The un-free could not join armies at even the lowest level of soldiering, and ordinary soldiers were keen to maintain a clear difference between their own status as free men and the mere laborers of the countryside. That strenuous assertion by the lowest ranks of serving men shows the extent to which large numbers of once-free peasants had been coerced into serfdom.

The great territorial lords often had a family history extending back to the Carolingian period, and the term “noble” was used to describe kinship groups whose names and distinguished ancestry were known and widely respected. Noble groups intermarried and recognized, initially, the importance of both the female and the paternal line of ancestry when it came to establishing their identity, rights and inheritances. Charlemagne used this international nobility to rule his empire, and its descendants included the aristocracy of the central Middle Ages. By then however noble status had changed substantially. Aristocratic families were now defining themselves exclusively in
terms of the patrilineal line, and they were strongly identified with a particular piece of property which, handed down through the generations, often supplied the family's name. Titles such as “count” and “duke” were originally handed out in recognition of royal service, but although they increased a family's prestige these honors were not intrinsic to noble status. In early medieval Europe not even kings could turn those who were not noble by birth into members of the nobility.

R
IGHT
Charlemagne with his court, illustrated in
Spiegel Historiael,
Jacob van Maerlant's Dutch translation, written in the 1280s, of Vincent of Beaurais's S
peculum Maius.

Great territorial lords identified themselves as warriors, and their material needs in that regard grew during the central Middle Ages. Technological advances in warfare, such as the heavy cavalry, meant new costs, and since war had gained in complexity the nobility needed more time to train and prepare for battle. Europe's reorganized countryside produced the wealth that helped to meet these aristocratic requirements. Some nobles also asserted themselves by seizing territory that, along with its inhabitants, was then controlled from a castle. The very greatest of these aristocrats administered vast estates acquired through inheritance and by land grants from the king. Closely governed territorial principalities evolved as a result and, in the case of France, these were eventually absorbed by the Crown and redistributed to younger members of the royal family. As territorial monarchies increased in power during the later Middle Ages so the aristocracy adapted to new circumstances and decided to accept more royal offices, titles and patronage. The adoption of an elaborate system of ranking for groupings within the nobility demonstrated the aristocracy's determination to maintain itself as a separate and privileged cast. Nonetheless, they were all subordinated to the ruler, who could now ennoble whoever he wanted.

Knights started to appear on the European scene from the 11th century onward, and the spread of knighthood as both an institution and an ethical code affected the warrior group in profound ways. Early medieval armies were composed of free men who differed widely in terms of their wealth, and knights likewise differed greatly in terms of their material riches as well as in social status. Great aristocrats called themselves knights, and so did lords whose lands could be decidedly modest. It was, however, the professionalism of the knight that established his distinctiveness as a specialist warrior—a category of the fighting man which was new in European history and thought. All knights moreover, whether possessed of broad acres or not, were equally bound by the code of chivalry. Despite the extreme diversity between the lesser knights and minor nobles on the one hand, and great aristocrats on the other, the common warrior-culture, expressed in the literature and ideology of chivalry, was a real social bond that excluded those who did not share it.

The exchange of loyalties between superiors and inferiors was a fundamental feature of European social order in the central Middle Ages. Its expression was various. Aristocrats, lesser nobles and knights asserted themselves by promising to protect inferiors who undertook vows of obligation. Myriad relationships of power were thereby asserted between, for example, the great nobles of the warrior class and fighting men of lower status who depended on them for support, with grants of land and income drawn from the lord's resources carrying with them the hope of social advancement. Some knights of a modest social standing were therefore owed loyalty from their “vassals” while in turn incurring obligations to great territorial lords. Similarly, the territorial lords were themselves vassals of monarchs as a result of receiving royal favors—most typically in the form of land grants. The recurring link in all these relationships is “lordship,” and that institution provided the context for the reciprocal transmission of respect and obligation that was such a defining feature of European society between the 11th and 14th centuries.

The “
feudum
” (also called a “fief”)—a form of property holding common in France and England—provided a localized and specific application of lordship, and its tenures could be either free or un-free. Knight service was the principal form of a free tenure, with military duties being performed for the king or another lord, although by the mid-12th century this service was usually commuted in England on payment of a tax called
scutage. Socage
was another free tenure, and its principal service, provided usually by tenants of more modest standing, was frequently agricultural—such as performing a certain number of days' plowing for the lord. All these tenures were subject to a number of conditions such as
relief
(the payment made on transferring a fief to an heir) and
escheat
(the return of the fief to the lord when the tenant died without an heir). The main type of un-free tenure was
villeinage
, which started as a barely modified form of
servitude. Free tenants' duties were predetermined, but those who were un-free never knew in advance what they might be asked to do for their lords, although the legal ruling that
villein
tenants could not be ejected in breach of existing custom eventually came to apply.

By the mid-14th century the effects of famine and plague were starting to drive down Europe's population levels. But those who survived could also prosper. Competition for labor drove up wages in real terms, and the scarcity of workers depressed rural rents. A falling population led to a drop in the cost of basic foodstuffs such as wheat, and workers could therefore diversify their diets. The increased consumption of dairy products and meats was a feature of the subsequent population increase, and the greater purchasing power enjoyed by workers also meant they could afford the manufactured products developed in the towns. That level of demand therefore benefited the urban economies, and despite the overall decline in Europe's population levels during the 14th and 15th centuries the number of European towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants increased.

The European recovery of the 15th century saw a cycle of growth re-establishing itself with increasing population levels, civic development and governmental activity producing a renewed demand for goods, food and services. The manorial system had long since been in decline, and it was further undermined by the period's emphasis on large-scale commercial crops such as wool and grain, as well as by the emancipation of servile labor. Manufacturing boomed, especially in areas geared to supplying armies and fleets with cloth, armor, weapons and ships. Technological advances produced labor-saving devices—such as the printing press—that increased worker productivity. Central Europe's large deposits of iron, copper, gold and silver were intensively worked by new mining techniques, and metalworking technology attained greater levels of refinement. All these economic developments gave new opportunities for the substantial capital investment that was fast becoming the defining feature of the European economy and the basis for its future sustained growth.

A
BOVE
The Black Death, which peaked in the mid-14th century, killed up to half of Europe's population. This illustration of plague sufferers is from the 1411 Toggenburg Bible
.

Until the late 11th century Jews in Europe had faced little persecution. Adherence to Judaism was regarded as an inexplicable rejection of the Christian gospel, but papal commands forbade the use of force to convert Jews and they often pursued the same careers as Christians. However, from the time of the First Crusade onward hostility to Judaism became very widespread in Europe as the continent's culture started to define itself in an increasingly aggressive Christian fashion
.