Richard Huscroft - Power and Faith - Politics and Religion in Western Europe From The Tenth To The Thirteenth Century-Routledge (2023)

POWER AND FAITH
Examining the developments in the political and religious landscape of Western

Europe between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, Power and Faith explores the
origins of dominant nation states and religious institutions in the West that emerged
out of the fractured and fragmented post-Carolingian world.
As a foundational text for those new to the period, the book offers a clear
chronological framework for understanding and analysing the emerging polities
of Western Europe and an examination of the influence of the papacy and the
Crusades across Christian life and culture. Mixed with careful consideration of
major social and economic themes, including urbanisation, rural revolution, and
the role of women in politics, religion, and society, the book gives a uniquely
comprehensive overview of political and religious developments in Western Europe
during a neglected yet fundamentally significant period.
The introduction sets out the scope and aims of the book and includes a
discussion of the main sources used. Thereafter the book is divided chronologically
into three parts and within each part separate chapters deal in turn with the social
and economic context of the period, the main political developments across
Western Europe and the principal religious changes.
Power and Faith is an essential introductory guide for students and researchers
interested in politics, religion, and society in Western Europe during the middle ages.
Richard Huscroft is Head of History at Westminster School, London. His interests

are rooted in different aspects of European Medieval history, as is reflected in his
publications, including England’s Jewish Solution (2006), Ruling England, 1042–1217
(2016) and Tales From the Long Twelfth Century (2017).
POWER AND FAITH
Politics and Religion in Western
Europe from the Tenth to the
Thirteenth Century
Richard Huscroft
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Richard Huscroft
The right of Richard Huscroft to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Huscroft, Richard, author.
Title: Power and faith : politics and religion in Europe from the tenth to
the thirteenth century / Richard Huscroft.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022055592 (print) | LCCN 2022055593 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367821388 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367821395 (pbk) |
ISBN 9781003013662 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Europe—Politics and government—476–1492. |
Europe—Church history—600–1500.
Classification: LCC D121 .H87 2023 (print) | LCC D121 (ebook) |
DDC 940.1—dc23/eng/20230118
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055592
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055593
ISBN: 978-0-367-82138-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-82139-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-01366-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
Mapsvii
Prefacexvi
Introduction1
Power and Faith in Western Europe in About 900 1
How Do We Know? Sources and Interpretations 6
PART 1
The Tenth Century, c.890–c.1020 11
1 The Social and Economic Context 13
2 Power: The Political Framework, c.890–c.1020 20

The East Frankish Kingdom and the Renewal of Empire 20
The West Frankish Kingdom and the Challenge of Survival 35
Britain and Ireland: Kingdoms and Peoples 48
Southern Europe: The Multicultural Experience in Iberia and Italy 67
Frontier Europe: Christians and Pagans in the North and East 76
3 Faith: The Church in Western Europe, c.890–c.1020 87

The Papacy: Too Corrupt to Matter? 87
Bishops and Monks: Local Power in Cathedrals and Cloisters 92
Priests and People: Popular Practice and Everyday Belief 98
vi Contents
PART 2
The Eleventh Century, c.1020–c.1120 101

Germany: Royal Authority and Mighty Rebellion 112
France: Petty Kings and Potent Princes 123
Britain and Ireland: Conquest and Survival 129
Southern Europe: Spanish Kings and Norman Knights in Iberia
and Italy 148
Frontier Europe: Life on the Edge in the North and East 160

The Papacy: Revival and Reform 168
The New Monasticism 175
Popular Piety and Shades of Belief 180
The First Crusade and Its Aftermath: Beginner’s Luck? 186
PART 3
The Twelfth Century, c.1120–c.1220 203

Germany: Staufen, Welf and the Struggle for Imperium 218
France: A Real Kingdom at Last 230
Britain and Ireland: Civil Wars and Fights for Supremacy 244
Southern Europe: Reconquista and State Building in Iberia and Italy 274
Frontier Europe: Westernisation in the North and East 289

The Papacy: Schisms and Supremacy 299
Preachers and Friars: The Reinvention of Orthodoxy 309
Religion, Renewal and the Laity 316
Muslim Revival and the Crisis of Crusading 321
Closer to Home: Crusading in Europe and the Battle with Heresy 337
Conclusion 349
Suggestions for Further Reading 354

Index363
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PREFACE
This book is about the course of high politics and the development of the insti-
tutionalised Christian Church in Western Europe between the end of the ninth
century and the beginning of the thirteenth. Its chronological and geographical
scope are wide, therefore, but space is limited and my aims are modest. The book
is designed as an introduction to the areas it covers and as a useful summary of the
main events and topics. It uses a linear rather than a thematic approach in order to
provide a narrative backbone and a relatively straightforward and accessible point of
entry to the period and its themes. I have tried to say some interesting things along
the way and to make my account as engaging as possible, but my basic purpose
here is to provide a factual foundation. I hope that, with such a foundation to rely
on, readers unfamiliar with this extraordinary but insufficiently understood phase
of medieval history will in due course feel more comfortable about looking into
some of the more specialised and focused work available on the subjects I discuss.
I do not have a dominant, overarching thesis. It is hard, and not necessarily all
that helpful, to try and sum up a period of more than 300 years in a few sentences,
although it does seem pretty clear that, while in about 900 Western Europe was a
chaotic and violent place with little by way of strong, centralised political or reli-
gious power, by 1200 this was starting to change, and governments, both secular
and ecclesiastical ones, were exercising more direct, extensive and intrusive author-
ity over the territories and people they claimed to control. Having said all that, if
this book does have any wider ambitions, then one is to suggest how much the
period it covers deserves to be considered in its own right and not just as an after-
thought or prelude to something more important. This has traditionally been seen
as a time during which political developments laid the foundation for the next 800
or 900 years of European history, as the great empires of the earlier Middle Ages,
principally the Carolingian, gave way to the embryonic nation states that would
eventually dominate the international stage until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Preface xvii
As a result, these centuries have often been regarded as ones of political ‘progress’ –
as transitional ones between a long phase of post-Roman greatness at one end and
the start of a more recognisably ‘modern’ world at another. Such views are very
general, of course, and even the proponents of such theories would readily accept
that not all parts of Western Europe developed in the same ways or at the same
speeds during these centuries. Opinions often vary, too, according to the historio-
graphical tradition in which historians work: British, French and German medi-
evalists, for example, have tended to interpret ideas about their own histories and
about ‘the birth of Europe’ during this period in very distinct ways. Nevertheless,
there is no getting away from the fact that Western Europe in the early thirteenth
century was a very different place politically from Western Europe in the early
tenth. Why and in what ways this occurred is one of the two major themes of this
book and is dealt with region by region in Chapters 2, 5 and 8.
But what was ‘Western Europe’? The idea of Europe as a part of the world
separate and distinct from Africa to the south and Asia to the east was quite a new
one in this period. But even then, Europe tended to be seen not so much as a
geographical entity but as a religious one: the place where Christians lived. So it
is with this contemporary outlook in mind that I have labelled the areas covered
in this book as ‘Western Europe’. More precisely, I have used the phrase to refer
to those parts of modern Europe (and slightly beyond) where, between the end of
the ninth and the start of the thirteenth centuries, the majority of people defined
themselves as Christians, worshipped in Latin and accepted the pope in Rome as
their spiritual leader. On this definition, ‘Western Europe’ and another concept
used by historians, ‘Latin Christendom’, are effectively synonymous. This means,
for example, that European Russia and the Byzantine Empire are not considered
in this book, but the elasticity of the approach allows the so-called crusader states
established in the Holy Land during the twelfth century to be discussed, as well as
those parts of Europe which only really became integrated parts of Latin Christen-
dom during this period, such as Poland, Hungary and Bohemia in the east; most of
Scandinavia in the north; much of Spain and Italy in the south and Ireland in the
west. One long-standing view of this period holds that, during it, all these different
parts of Western Europe, under the influence of an increasingly influential Church
obsessed with Latinised orthodoxy, became culturally and spiritually more uniform
and homogenous. As will be seen, this view is simplistic: divisions and differences
over matters of belief and practice never went away, and arguably, they even became
sharper and more pronounced as the quest for standardisation and clearly defined
rules gained pace. Nevertheless, Latin Christianity did gradually give the peoples of
Western Europe, with all their diverse traditions, cultures, systems and languages,
a common structure to their lives and a shared set of assumptions and values; by
the end of the period covered by this book, the papacy had become a dominant
international force. How the institutions and powers of the Roman Church grew
and matured during this period – so that, by its end, it forcefully controlled and
influenced large parts of everyday life and thought across Western Europe – is my
second main theme, and it is tackled in Chapters 3, 6 and 9.
xviii Preface
Politics and religion are the primary concerns of this book then, and I readily
acknowledge that this is a decidedly traditional way of looking at medieval history.
There are many other different ways of approaching this period or aspects of it, but
I hope those will become visible once the reader has passed through the gateway
I have tried to construct. I have also tried to highlight some of the main social and
economic trends of the period in order to put my principal areas of concern in a
slightly wider context. Again, though, it is important to emphasise that Chapters 1,
4 and 7 give no more than an outline of some complex and controversial issues.
Western Europe changed dramatically and in many ways beyond the political and
the religious between about 900 and about 1200. The most obvious transforma-
tion was physical: over these 300 or so years, Western Europe grew as its frontiers
expanded. There was a variety of forces at work here. Population growth was one.
Accurate figures are impossible to find given the nature of the available evidence –
there were significant regional differences and rates of change, and different his-
torians have come up with different conclusions – but one estimate is that, in the
mid-tenth century, the population of Europe was about 40 million, whilst in 1200
it was about 65 million, an increase of more than 50 per cent. A warmer and drier
climate during these centuries which resulted in longer growing seasons and more
crops probably explains this to an extent, but whatever its causes, this demographic
shift was significant enough to prompt other developments. Put simply, more peo-
ple needed feeding, so in the countryside, where the overwhelming bulk of the
population lived, more land was brought under cultivation through the clearing of
forests, the draining of marshes or the reclaiming of land from the sea. This was one
of the primary driving impulses behind the physical expansion of Western Europe
during this period. These changes led in turn to further improvements in farm-
ing techniques and crop yields. At the same time, as agricultural surpluses became
more common and increased wealth in rural areas, the demand for more trade and
methods of exchange grew. From this came new trading centres, many of which
eventually evolved into towns: urbanisation was a key feature of this period. Levels
of literacy also increased significantly. The Church retained its near monopoly on
the use of the written word, although some of these changes also affected the more
prosperous laity which, particularly at the level of the aristocracy, began to see itself
as not just a group of competitive warriors but also as a superior social elite with its
own ways of dressing, eating, living and loving.
...
I should say something about my methodology. I have tried to keep my analyses as

up to date as possible, although given the scope of the book, the amount of avail-
able scholarship, the rate at which new work is being produced and the difficul-
ties of accessing material not written in English, there are doubtless many things
I have missed. Readers will also quickly notice that I have not used footnotes. To
give thorough citations would have increased the size of the book considerably
Preface xix
and, in my view, made it less accessible and more intimidating than it is intended
to be. Also, in the interests of keeping things clear and simple, and in order gently
to encourage further enquiry, I have only included a short list of suggested fur-
ther reading. In those works, readers will find deeper treatments of all the topics
I have covered; my intention here is to prepare them for those and provide some
solid context for the more focused and technical debates and arguments they will
encounter.
This book was a product of several years teaching these topics to my Year 12 and
Year 13 pupils at Westminster School and the difficulty I had finding appropriate
things for them to read about the Ottonians, the early Capetians and the Investiture
Contest, things that were informative and helpful, with sufficient detail to be useful
in an essay, but not overburdened with difficult language, technical concepts and
assumptions of prior knowledge. I have a lot to thank them for, and this book is
dedicated to them: they made it clear what they needed and helped me to develop
it. Others have read sections of the book in early versions – Tom Licence and David
Carpenter have been particularly generous with their time and their advice. Any
errors that remain are, of course, mine alone.
INTRODUCTION
Power and Faith in Western Europe in About 900

Much of Western Europe in about 900 can reasonably be described as ‘post-
Carolingian’. That is to say, by that point the empire ruled by the Frankish king
Charlemagne (768–814) and his son Louis the Pious (814–40), which had eventu-
ally covered most of modern France and Germany, the Low Countries, Switzer-
land and Austria as well as parts of northern Spain and much of Italy, had started
to break up. It had been divided into separate kingdoms in 843 by Charlemagne’s
feuding grandsons, and after various further squabbles, two of these kingdoms, usu-
ally referred to by historians as East and West Francia, had become established by
the end of the ninth century, although neither looked particularly strong or even
certain to last. Other kingdoms had emerged out of the Carolingian fog, too, such
as those of Burgundy and Italy (which was also known as the kingdom of Lom-
bardy, a name which gives a better idea of its location and extent), and they aspired
to some kind of autonomy. Other parts of Western Europe, by contrast, had never
been part of the Carolingian Empire either fully or at all; some that lay beyond the
old imperial frontiers in the north (Scandinavia), east (Poland, Hungary, Bohemia)
and south (Muslim Iberia and Sicily) were not even Christian in 900. That does
not mean Carolingian influence was not felt in these places; far from it when, for
example, the kings of tenth-century England, which had never been part of Char-
lemagne’s empire, arguably did more than anyone else to keep the practice and
ideology of Carolingian government alive. But it did mean that they lacked a shared
recent past which might act as a binding force in the future and that other things (a
common religious culture, for example) would be needed to give the different peo-
ples of tenth-century Western Europe a sense of community and collective identity.
By 900, then, there were kings of the East and West Franks, of Burgundy and of
Italy. Fledgling kingdoms were starting to emerge in Scotland and northern Spain,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-1
2 Introduction
too, whilst the kings of Wessex in southern England were about to begin creating a
single English realm. Expectations of what kings should do were also evolving into
obligations that would eventually be expressed in the oaths they gave at their coro-
nations. The king was responsible for enforcing justice and keeping the peace in
his kingdom, and with his God-given authority, he was expected to maintain laws
which dealt with crime and other wrongs, but also with the moral welfare, educa-
tion and spiritual wellbeing of his subjects. Kings were also expected to protect
Christianity and its institutions: the Christian faith was already well-entrenched
at the heart of the ideology of Christian kingship, and people were expected to
know and understand what their religion required of them both personally and in
relation to the structures of power which controlled them. But above all, the king
was a warrior: he had a duty to lead his armies to divinely approved victory against
external and internal enemies, and in turn, this would ensure security and inspire
the loyalty and trust of his people. Loyalty and trust could be further reinforced at
the elite end of the political spectrum by practices such as royal gift-giving (in the
form of land, weapons, jewels and more) or by the cultivation through hunting and
feasting of an aristocratic esprit de corps.
Things did not always play out like this, of course. Whatever theories under-
pinned royal rule, and however considerable the personal abilities of particular
kings might have been, the meaningful practical authority they enjoyed in Western
Europe by 900 was still typically weak and limited. They had favourite residences
and regions where they were at their strongest and most influential, and they were
habitually itinerant between and within these, travelling from place to place in
order to manifest their authority in a physical way and in order to use the food
and fodder which had been laid up for them and their animals by their officials and
servants. But poor communication systems, long distances, limited infrastructure
and natural obstacles in the form of forests, mountains and rivers militated against
the development of the kind of robust centralised institutions that would allow
kings to exert and enforce their power more remotely. Indeed, such institutions
and systems hardly existed in 900, and this remained the case in most areas for
the next 200 years at least. Authority was a matter for negotiation between kings
and their leading subjects as the former relied on the latter for the maintenance of
stability and the defence of their kingdom in those areas outside zones of direct
royal influence. This emphasis on personal relationships made political processes
febrile and unpredictable, and it left an enormous amount of power in the hands
of local lords who exercised it as they saw fit, often violently and almost always in
their own interests.
None of this was new at the start of the tenth century, of course. Rulers have
always both competed and collaborated with their most powerful subjects. How-
ever, the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire had diluted even further any
notion of systematised, sophisticated government. The Carolingians, no less brutal
than anyone else when they deemed it necessary, had also established at least some
relatively advanced and literate ways of exercising power over wide areas through
the regular use of large gatherings (historians call them assemblies) where the ruler
Introduction 3
or his local representative made decisions, settled disputes and heard requests in
company with other leading men and public officials. They had also issued laws
and regulations known as capitularies which covered more or less every aspect of
government activity and were supposed to be observed throughout their empire.
They had relied on groups of officials to carry out administrative functions at court
(clerics were as involved in running these systems as laymen) and further afield, but
most notably, they had employed envoys known as missi dominici to travel around
their territories and make sure that the capitularies were being complied with and
that things were running smoothly. But, even at the height of Carolingian power,
there always remained a limit to how effective such mechanisms could be, and the
kings had also relied on dominant individuals in the localities (called dukes, mar-
graves or, for the most part, counts) who controlled land in return for the service
and loyalty they gave to their ruler. Such men had been entrusted with official,
public powers over local tribunals, taxation and military recruitment which they
exercised on behalf of their royal lord. Loyalty to any ruler was often personal,
however, and based on the kind of continuing success in war that guaranteed loot
and enhanced status. And as the pace of Carolingian military expansion had slowed
by the mid-ninth century and as centralised authority within the Carolingian core
of Western Europe had begun to dwindle, the kings’ ability to reward (and, just
as importantly, to punish and replace) his agents had shrunk, lines of account-
ability had been stretched and public powers originally awarded by the ruler had
come increasingly and permanently to rest in private hands. This had led in turn
to the further attenuation of royal influence away from the centre, as a result of
which those dominant individuals in charge of local power blocs came to view the
authority they exercised as theirs by right and the lands they controlled as family
property to be inherited by their heirs. Inevitably in such circumstances, rather
than trying to uphold royal rights or any notion of public authority, these dominant
local lords became preoccupied with sustaining their own newly privatised power
in the face of challenges from ambitious men below them. Consequently, albeit on
differing scales, kings and lords during this period functioned in very similar ways.
Their power was not deeply rooted, and they held it contingently and tenuously.
Negotiation, concessions and compromises all played a part in maintaining local
supremacy, but lords stayed at the centre of their particular networks of competing
authority by exploiting the territorial and human resources around them and by
using violence against those who resisted or confronted them. The rulers of West-
ern Europe in the early tenth century certainly valued ritual, tradition and piety,
but their precedence depended ultimately on force, and at its heart, the culture they
operated in was a vicious and disorderly one.
Things were not very different beyond the post-Carolingian heart of Western
Europe in 900. In these regions (England was an exception to this rule) there was
nothing that could meaningfully be described as a kingdom in Ireland or Wales,
and much the same went for Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland and Hungary.
There was no Carolingian heritage to draw on, and the men who styled themselves
‘kings’ in these regions were little more than the most successful warlords of their
4 Introduction
day whose fortunes could decline as quickly as they had risen. There was nothing
necessarily lasting about their achievements, and any degree of dynastic entrench-
ment was still a long way off. They also had the rivalries and challenges of their
own political and military elites to deal with, and private warfare between and
within powerful families vying for control of lands and looking for treasure was
widespread. As has been seen already, though, this was also increasingly the case
within the splintering Carolingian core of Western Europe: allegiance was more
and more dictated by tribal or kinship links or simply by reference to which strong-
man in a particular area was best able to provide his followers with plunder, much
more than it was by loyalty to a ruling house. All the rulers of Western Europe
during this period would have to deal with the localisation and atomisation of
power within their realms and strive to find ways of asserting themselves over their
independently minded aristocracies. This transition away from ‘power’ (private,
localised, capricious) towards ‘government’ (public, centralised, accountable) has
been debated by historians. It was not a quick or a linear process, and it happened
more completely in some places than in others. Arguably it still had some way to
go when the period covered by this book came to an end.
For all the practical constraints surrounding it, kingship was a divinely approved
form of rule: the Old Testament made this clear. Therefore, the assumption by 900
was that the western Church would support royal authority, bolster royal claims
to legitimacy and provide divine endorsement for royal regimes. However, the
Church also lacked strong, centralised leadership, and the papacy, which would
bestride Western Europe as the arbiter of all things religious and many things politi-
cal by 1200, struggled even to extricate itself from the petty politicking of local
noble families in and around Rome. Meanwhile the ecclesiastical structures and
mechanisms which stretched across political boundaries and which were supposed
to establish uniform practices and orthodox beliefs were either only just emerging
(a well-defined structure of parishes only materialised from about 1000 onwards) or
rarely evident (like church councils). Religious authority, like political power, had
become intensely localised; individual bishops set the agenda in their dioceses and,
as a result, pastoral provision and modes of observance must have varied signifi-
cantly between regions. Nevertheless, rulers relied heavily on religious institutions
to bolster and support their power. Clerics had a near monopoly on literacy, for
example, and were thus essential to the workings of (at this stage rudimentary) royal
government; religious leaders would advise secular ones and act as their envoys and
regents. Monasteries were not simply places of spiritual retreat and contemplation –
the prayers of monks and nuns on behalf of a sinful laity were made to appease
God and boost domestic stability. These holy spaces were granted immunities,
exemptions and protection by rulers and local lords so that their residents could
be free to make their prayers for their patrons even more ardent and effective. Not
surprisingly, therefore, secular princes regarded the Church (not just its organisa-
tion and personnel but the minutiae of religious practice, too) as something they
needed to control and regulate, both for their own sake and for others’. There was
no meaningful separation between the secular and the spiritual; indeed, the two
Introduction 5
were intricately connected and mutually reliant. The sacred resources Christianity
controlled were harnessed to secure both the heavenly salvation and the earthly
success of kingdoms, their rulers and their people.
There was always the hope that missionary activity would bring more non-
Christians into the fold. Missionaries from Anglo-Saxon England had been instru-
mental in bringing Christianity to the Frankish empire in the eighth century,
for example. But this was highly dangerous work and anyway the initiative was
not in Christian hands by 900. The ninth century had seen increasing numbers
of attacks across Western Europe from seaborne Scandinavian raiders. They are
usually referred to as vikings, although this is a term some historians now avoid
because it is too modern (it was rarely used before the eighteenth century) and too
general. Given the stereotypical, popular images it tends to evoke, of bloodthirsty,
uncivilised brutes bent on pillage and plunder, some have argued that it does a
disservice to the multi-faceted and fluid nature of Scandinavian society during
this period and through to the end of what has been called ‘The Viking Age’ in
about 1100. Despite these reservations, however, the term ‘viking’ will be used in
this book: its vagueness is actually quite useful because it is often hard to know
where a warband or raiding army came from, and it also takes account of the fact
that the same people might be warriors, traders, settlers or a combination of two
or more of these things at the same time. But it should be remembered that not
all Scandinavians were vikings, and not all vikings were even Scandinavian. In the
end, ‘viking’ denotes more an activity or occupation than anything else – ‘pirate’ is
probably the closest modern English word. It certainly does not describe an ethnic-
ity, and it is a term of convenience for modern scholars which it would be difficult
to do without.
Contentious terminology notwithstanding, however, it is certainly the case that
from about the 840s, chroniclers in different regions described fleets of 50 or more
of these pirate ships which campaigned and plundered for several years at a time.
West Francia and England were particularly hard hit by these ‘Danes’, ‘heathens’ or
‘pagans’, three words contemporaries did use frequently to describe their attackers.
With perhaps 30 to 50 armed men on a typical longship, the raiders could cross
the North Sea in force. At the same time, their ships’ shallow draught made it pos-
sible to follow rivers far inland where they could strike quickly and leave before
local forces could respond. Eventually, as time went on, they also began to put
down roots and settle on the land they had taken by force. Meanwhile, as the tenth
century began, a different threat had emerged in the east as fast-moving mounted
archers known as Magyars harassed and plundered across much of Germany and
beyond. And elsewhere, Muslim dominance in Iberia and Sicily extended around
much of the Mediterranean and looked set to continue. These multiple and varied
threats had largely abated by 1000 (although not everywhere, as the continuing
English experience of attacks from Scandinavia shows), and it is possible to argue
that they acted as a stimulus to innovation and development across Western Europe
in all sorts of political, religious, economic and social ways. But contemporaries
could not have seen things like this. Western Europe in about 900 was effectively
6 Introduction
under siege from without and under pressure from within: beset by formidable
enemies on nearly all sides and challenged internally as fragile political and religious
systems struggled to remain vaguely stable, even the mere survival of Latin Chris-
tendom could not be taken for granted.
How Do We Know? Sources and Interpretations

This is a book about some of the main political and religious events that happened
in Western Europe between about 890 and about 1220. It is important to remem-
ber, however, that all historians struggle accurately and thoroughly to recover the
past, and any attempt to construct a comprehensive treatment of a particular period
is unrealistic. For the student of more recent times, a lack of information is not the
problem. Quite the contrary in fact: sifting through the mountains of material and
deciding what to use and what to omit, whilst weighing up the differing views of
those involved and giving some more credit than others, inevitably involves the
kind of personal judgements and nuanced choices which make objectivity elusive.
The medievalist faces these issues, too, and information still has to be weighed
and valued, but it is in part the relative dearth of evidence which makes finding
out ‘what really happened’ so hard. There is still a remarkable quantity and variety
of material available, of course, and during the period covered by this book, the
amount of information available to the historian gradually increases. But what sur-
vives tends to do so as much through chance as deliberate conservation; huge gaps
and uncertainties remain, and the reader should not be surprised to see words like
‘may’, ‘might’, ‘possibly’, ‘probably’ and ‘likely’ pepper this book.
It is a truism amongst medievalists that it is impossible to ‘get into the heads’
of our subjects. The kinds of evidence available to modern biographers (letters,
diaries, photographs) which might give insights into someone’s thought processes
and lived experiences simply do not exist in the same way or at all for earlier peri-
ods. Individuals did write letters in the middle ages, of course, but they tended to
be the preserve of an educated (usually male and religious) elite, and most were
composed according to established models and academic conventions: there is lit-
tle personal or intimate about most of them. It is also startling to realise how few
written accounts survive to describe what happened in Western Europe during the
tenth century, and even these deal with only a part of that period or with events
in a certain geographical area. Germany is relatively well-served by contemporary
writers such as Widukind of Corvey and Thietmar of Merseburg; there are French
chroniclers like Dudo of St Quentin and Ralph Glaber and commentators on Ital-
ian affairs such as Liutprand of Cremona. Historians of tenth- and eleventh-century
England have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to rely on by way of an over-arching,
albeit patchy and problematic, narrative, but in certain parts of Western Europe,
particularly on its western, eastern and northern edges, next to nothing by way of
narrative history has survived for the period before the mid-1000s.
The amount of narrative evidence available to the historian steadily grows from
the eleventh century onwards and reaches a high point of coverage and competence
Introduction 7
during the twelfth. By 1200, histories, partial or otherwise, of more or less all the
regions covered in this book had been written. Nevertheless, the need for cau-
tion remains. The surviving accounts certainly contain plenty of basic and some-
times verifiable information, but many were written with hindsight long after the
events they describe, and anyway, their more profound meaning and purpose may
lie buried deeper than the bones of what they actually document. No medieval
chronicler, even one like William of Malmesbury in twelfth-century England who
consciously set out to be even-handed, was able to compile a thoroughly neutral,
dispassionate catalogue of events. Many wrote for a high-status patron whose per-
son or family they flattered, or in order to portray the institution they worked for
(usually a church – most chroniclers were clergymen) in a positive light. Things
were left out if they were inconvenient, embarrassing or deemed irrelevant, while
those that were included might have their importance exaggerated or their details
embellished. Medieval chroniclers liked stories about individuals and events, cau-
tionary or inspiring tales that could be used to exemplify moral messages; they had
little interest, by contrast, in describing and analysing the development of govern-
ment and administration, something modern historians have identified as a key
feature of this period. There are other issues, too. Many of these texts rely on earlier
sources, often now lost, and texts within texts make it difficult to see where copy-
ing ends and original writing begins. Meanwhile the superficially straightforward
descriptions these accounts contain may actually be re-fashioned adaptations of folk
tales, legends, stories from classical history or myths, all of which were designed to
alert an informed contemporary readership to the timeless qualities, good or bad,
of the people and events they describe. Above all, many of these texts can be read as
attempts to establish an agreed version of the past, a version with which others who
wrote differently or who did not write their accounts down at all would almost
certainly have taken issue. In short, these sources can be selective, engineered and
tendentious, and historians today handle them very carefully, sometimes almost to
the point of viewing them not as reliable records of what happened in the past but
as vehicles for understanding the assumptions and expectations of the society that
produced them. This is even more the case with other categories of source mate-
rial. Saints’ Lives and miracle collections, for example, both very popular genres
during this period, may contain the occasional reference to something specific
that actually happened or some accurate information about the experiences of an
individual, but more often they are concerned with the symbolic meaning of the
events they describe rather than their historicity. As such they are most useful as
guides, not to the course of a particular life, but to the priorities of medieval men
and women and the ways in which they idealised their own world.
To understand our narrative sources at all, we need to know as much as possible
about the authors, their positions, when they wrote and their intended audiences.
We need to ask, too, why the authors tell us what they do and why they do so
in particular ways. These questions are not always easy to answer, and sometimes
they cannot be answered at all; this makes these sources awkward to use. That is
not to say they are useless, of course – far from it, they remain essential to any
8 Introduction
understanding of the period; only that any conclusions about what happened based
on what they say need to be suitably cautious and provisional. It is also important
to remember that most medieval chroniclers wrote for audiences that probably
were familiar to some degree with what they were being told. As a result, these
accounts needed to stay within the limits of what was plausible and credible, and
this imposed limits on how far these authors could go. In addition, and with luck,
there might be other, seemingly more ‘reliable’, sources to back up their descrip-
tions. The records of government and administration, for example, would appear
to contain firmer information (names, dates, places) than the slanted tales told by
partisan monks. Such records from this period come mostly in the form of char-
ters (or ‘diplomas’ as historians sometimes call them). Papal letters and privileges
also fall into this category. Plenty of royal charters survive from across Western
Europe, as do private ones; they mostly record land transactions or the settlement
of disputes. However, even here there are challenges. Royal charters were issued
in large numbers but not consistently over time and more in some places than in
others; further, there is no sign before the end of the twelfth century that details
of these transactions were kept centrally. So knowledge of their existence depends
on the chance survival of the original documents or on the efforts made by the
beneficiaries of the charter to keep their own record of what they had been given.
Monasteries liked to make their own copies of the grants they received in separate
documents known as cartularies or charter-books. A cartulary is often the only
source for many of the hundreds of charters it might record. The laity did this
far less, however, and so this kind of evidence is heavily skewed towards the con-
cerns and preoccupations of religious institutions. What is more, many surviving
charters (originals and copies) are forgeries, made considerably later than the dates
they carry in order, retrospectively, to ‘prove’ a landholder’s right to an estate.
Monasteries which had acquired a piece of land in the distant, undocumented
past were perfectly happy to concoct a royal charter which appeared to legitimise
their claim. Even if undoubtedly authentic, moreover, a charter can be much more
than just the bare record of a specific transaction. It might go to great lengths to
describe the history of the estate it conveys, or the details of the dispute it resolves.
In ways like this, an ostensibly neutral legal text comes to contain subjective his-
tories of its own which are just as difficult to take at face value as those in the
standard narrative accounts.
Other types of ‘official’ evidence present problems, too. Issuing laws, for exam-
ple, as the Carolingian kings appreciated, was one of the definingly unique features
of medieval rulership. However, whilst the kings of tenth- and early eleventh-
century England were enthusiastic law-makers, in other parts of Western Europe
there was much less legislative activity during this period. There was ecclesiastical
law-making, too, in the form of the recorded decisions made by church councils.
But whether issued by a secular or a religious authority, it is often hard to know
how to interpret these sources. What discussions lay behind their compilation?
Whose ‘mind’ do they reveal? Can we really use them, as often they are used,
to show what the kings or bishops who officially issued them ‘thought’ or ‘felt’?
What is more, if knowing what the laws were is one thing, understanding how, or
Introduction 9
indeed whether, they were enforced is quite another. Once again, the evidential
situation improves as this period goes on, but it remains very difficult to understand
how legal systems (courts in particular) actually worked. The record of a particular
dispute might survive in a monastic cartulary and provide revealing details about
procedures and principles, but it is probably only there because the monastery won
its case, so the story it tells is likely to be a one-sided one.
Most of the surviving written sources for this period were written in Latin,
which was the language of government, literacy and learning across the greater
part of Western Europe. In England, Old English was used for official as well as
artistic purposes, and other texts in the vernacular survive from other countries.
Often, but not always, these had not been part of the Roman Empire. Many such
texts have been published in more or less accessible modern editions, and earlier
publications and collections of documents put together by the antiquaries of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also preserve sources which might now be
lost or hard to access. Later, in the nineteenth century, huge efforts were made in
various parts of Europe to collect and publish important documents relating to the
histories of those countries. The English chronicles and records of English central
government published respectively by the Rolls Series and HMSO in England are
still consulted today, as are the documents on German history still being collected
by the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Nevertheless, any history of the Middle
Ages is inevitably lacking. Material remains can add further pieces to the jigsaw:
painting, sculpture, pottery, metal and woodwork, coins, ivories and architecture
are of course revealing, and archaeologists are constantly enhancing our under-
standing of the period. Even so, and whatever the evidence, the contemporary
context within which sources were produced is not always recoverable and even if
it is possible definitively to assert that something happened, identifying the causes
or the motivations behind that event is much more difficult. Rather arguments
that a particular scenario is ‘the most likely’ one, or that someone acted as they did
‘probably’ for this reason rather than that one, are much more common. What this
means, however, is more exciting. In order to favour one explanation over a range
of other possibilities, the medieval historian has to do a lot of what my doctoral
supervisor liked to call ‘tough thinking’. Where the same evidence is open to dif-
ferent and more or less equally plausible readings, it is over the lacunae within and
the gaps between sources that the most fruitful discussions and debates take place.
What possibilities do these open up? What are the texts concealing, and what do
they distort? We can read what they say, but what do they mean? Such considera-
tions also require the medievalist to cultivate a fertile historical imagination, not so
that things can be ‘made up’ to fill a vacuum but so that the inevitable speculation
and conjecture which these sources prompt can be both creative and pragmatic:
the questions we ask of the evidence may well take us further than the limited
answers it often provides. So we can only be sure of ‘what happened’ in Western
Europe during this period up to a point, and the ‘why’ is even harder to pin down.
Nevertheless, there is still more than enough evidence left to challenge our own
assumptions and to allow for an appreciation of an extraordinary world which is
strange to us. That is reason enough to study the medieval past.
PART 1
The Tenth Century,
c.890–c.1020
1
THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC
CONTEXT
In a book like this which is concerned primarily with political and religious devel-
opments, a brief overview of the social and economic structures in place across
Western Europe in the tenth century can only scratch the surface of some complex
areas. Those structures varied from place to place and evolved at different speeds,
and how they evolved depended on a wide variety of factors. Nevertheless, there
are some common themes. It is generally accepted, for example, that, whilst the
extent of these developments should not be exaggerated, during the tenth century
Western Europe started to become increasingly urbanised and commercialised.
Population growth, a more conducive climate and somewhat more settled political
conditions allowed for agricultural surpluses to be exchanged for goods only avail-
able through trade: merchants from Venice, as well as those from Genoa, Pisa and
other Italian cities, traded in exotic silks and spices with Byzantium and the Islamic
world, while in northern Europe the equivalent links were with the Baltic and
Scandinavia, whose traders provided animal skins, walrus ivory and amber amongst
other commodities. All of this encouraged and was in turn encouraged in the west
by the growth of existing urban centres, many laid over Roman foundations, and
the development of new ones where markets were set up from scratch. Increased
commercial activity extending beyond local internal markets was evident in Eng-
land, Flanders, West and East Francia and elsewhere, and although such activity
would pick up pace considerably and become more dynamic during the next three
centuries, its origins lay in the tenth. At this stage, however, long-distance trade
in luxury goods was still rare, and what was there serviced an almost exclusively
aristocratic market. The commercial centres whose development was encouraged
by such trade therefore tended to be places linked to the presence of an important
institution (a monastery or a castle) or individual (a king or a bishop). Indeed,
they were often established by these institutions or individuals, first (probably) as
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-3
14 The Tenth Century, c.890–c.1020
defensible sites where local populations could take refuge in times of danger: the
so-called burhs of late ninth- and tenth-century England are the best examples of
this, although the fortified places said to have been established in the East Frankish
kingdom by its ruler, Henry the Fowler (919–36), may have been similar. Many
of these places soon developed beyond their military origins: according to the
contemporary chronicler Widukind of Corvey, Henry ordered that all law courts,
assemblies and festivals should be held within the fortifications. It would be no
surprise if commercial business was conducted there, too.
As time went by, these fledgling towns were used to cement in place the power
and control that the local lords and rulers who had established them exercised over
the movement of high-value goods in and through their particular areas. As a result,
towns as centres of production in their own right were still unusual. Moreover,
because long-distance trade remained almost exclusively an aristocratic preserve,
it is probably safe to say that increasing urbanisation, especially in its early stages
during the tenth century, made little difference to most peasants and to their daily
struggle to survive. Around the year 1000 (and things did not change much in this
regard for most of the next millennium), approximately 90 per cent of the people
living in Western Europe were peasants, subsistence farmers who lived on the land
and worked it in order to feed their families. Amongst them would have lived a
small number of artisans (blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, bakers, brewers
and butchers) whose business it was to meet their neighbours’ immediate practical
needs and keep the agricultural work going. Peasants’ lives are poorly documented
throughout the Middle Ages, but what they did from day to day would certainly
have varied according to things like their gender, the time of year and the kind of
land they inhabited. The lives of peasant women, for example, were tightly con-
strained and heavily burdened: they would have spent their time rearing children
and feeding their families whilst also being expected to do their share of the farm-
ing work and other tasks such as weaving and making clothes.
In northern Europe, where the climate is more conducive and soils more fer-
tile, arable farming predominated, although of course livestock was farmed too.
Further south towards the Mediterranean, the climate is drier and more arid and
soils are thinner. Nevertheless, irrigation systems built in Muslim Sicily and Spain
meant these regions were already relatively prosperous as this period began. But
such differences notwithstanding, life for most peasants was very difficult indeed.
Small groups of people lived close to each other in nuclear (more than extended)
family units and scratched a meagre living with rudimentary tools from the soil
around them. Shortages were frequent, natural disasters (floods and famines) were
a persistent threat, illness and disease kept child mortality high and life expectancy
low. In areas free from war and plague, the dangers of childbearing and the perils
of childhood probably killed more people than anything else.
These small, largely defenceless communities might also find themselves at
the mercy of opportunistic raiders or, more commonly, local lords who saw the
peasants as a resource to be exploited. In the earlier Middle Ages, many peasants
across Western Europe had enjoyed a relatively autonomous status, one that had
The Social and Economic Context 15
allowed and required them to fight in armies and take part in public assemblies.
By the start of the tenth century, however, they were increasingly finding them-
selves stripped of these public obligations and subjected to the direct authority
and control of the local lords whose lands they lived on. Some historians have
used the French word encellulement to describe these trends. Variously translated
into English as ‘regrouping’, ‘compartmentalisation’ or even ‘caging’, it literally
means the division of society into a cellular pattern and in this context describes
the process whereby peasant families became less scattered across the countryside
and more contained in localised units dominated by local lords. The origins of
these phenomena are obscure, and the reasons why peasant populations started
to become less autonomous and more concentrated during this period are open
to debate. However, developments which increased lordly control over peasant
communities were certainly underway by 900 and picked up pace over the next
century. In much of France during the second half of the 900s, for example, where
the impact of viking attacks was intensified by a rapid fragmentation of centralised
authority, lords were able to acquire more lands for themselves along with powers
and rights over those lands which had previously been exercised in the name of a
superior ruler, a king, duke or count. This supreme power to command and pun-
ish (the Latin word for this is bannus), which had been retained by the Carolingian
kings, was effectively usurped, leading to the creation of what historians have called
banal lordships or seigneuries. Put more simply, powerful individuals and institu-
tions (aristocrats and churches) were assertively, by force or otherwise, taking direct
control of more land at the expense of their weaker peasant neighbours and forcing
the latter to come together in village communities and submit to their authority.
Having said that, it is important to emphasise that these trends were by no means
evident everywhere to the same extent across Western Europe. They were increas-
ingly apparent by 1000 in the fertile lowland areas of Germany, northern France
and England and less prevalent in Scandinavia, Italy and southern France. And even
where encellulement was more widespread, there was still plenty of so-called allodial
land held by its occupiers without any obligations to a superior lord. Nevertheless,
encellulement was a mainstream European trend by 1000.
What peasants did for their lord in return for the land they were allowed to
occupy depended to an extent on their particular status. A basic distinction in
medieval society was between those who were ‘free’ and those who were ‘unfree’.
A free peasant probably occupied his tenement in return for cash or goods given
directly to the lord, whilst unfree peasants would be required to perform labour
services on the lord’s demesne (so many days at particular times of the year) in
addition to farming their own plot. There were not just labour services either: in
many cases an unfree peasant could not leave their tenement or even arrange the
marriages of their own children without their lord’s permission. How onerous an
individual’s obligations were determined their degree of ‘unfreedom’. At the bot-
tom of the social pile were the thousands of slaves who were fed and housed at the
lords’ expense, but who owed all their labour to him and were bound permanently
to his service. It is impossible confidently to estimate the proportion of slaves in the
population of late ninth-century Western Europe, but it was probably higher in the
north than in the south.
As the effectiveness of centralised public power declined in many parts of
Western Europe at this time, local lords were steadily acquiring jurisdictional pow-
ers as well. They might monopolise certain crucial economic rights (milling flour,
pressing grapes), but the exercise of justice also characterised these new lordships.
Society was based as much on custom and tradition as it was on written laws, but
lords might issue regulations for the administration of their estates as well as settle
disputes between tenants and punish crimes they committed. This was another
reason why it was important to know whether someone was free or unfree. Those
who were free could take part in courts and local decision-making; the unfree
could not. The free also had military responsibilities. Under Charlemagne, every
free man was expected to be, from time to time, a soldier. And from at least the
ninth century, for example, first in Mercia and then across England, all free men
were required to take turns serving in the fyrd, a military force which might be
raised nationally by the king or locally by his representative. As lords intensified
their control over their tenants in the eighth and ninth centuries, however, it has
been argued that the free/unfree distinction became less important in many parts
of Western Europe: peasants played an ever-diminishing role in public life and were
simply more or less tied to their lords. There were exceptions to this, particularly
in England, where Carolingian practices of socially diverse participation in public
assemblies and service in the army were maintained; a paradox of course, given that
England had never been part of the Carolingian Empire.
Early medieval Europe was a peasant society dominated by a warrior aristocracy.
Birth was important in establishing status, but success in warfare and the wealth
that came with it created a political elite that claimed the right to rule over oth-
ers. The secular lords who controlled much of the land were soldiers, too, and
as they seized more of that land during this period and appropriated local pow-
ers, their d ominance was buttressed by the understanding that violence would be
used to protect what they had acquired. Such violence could be random and bru-
tal of course, but it could also be more organised and structured: the emergence
of knights and castles during the tenth century was another defining characteristic
of these processes at work. Warriors mounted on horseback had long been part of
Frankish armies, but the knights of the central Middle Ages were specialist caval-
rymen employed to garrison and defend the castles being built by an increasing
number of French lords and by major aristocrats across much of Western Europe
by about 950. Most of these early castles were rudimentary, small-scale affairs and
probably consisted of little more than a wooden tower or stockade built on top of
a motte, a man-made or natural mound. Some also had an enclosed space next
to the motte (the bailey) where stables, workshops and other buildings could be
protected. Basic though these structures were, however, they and the small private
armies of horsemen they housed were more than capable of dominating the coun-
tryside that surrounded them and of giving an embryonic sense of locally based
identity to the family that built it.
In parts of Western Europe, then, war was becoming a business for trained
professionals (milites, contemporaries called them) rather than untrained free men,
and, as a result, a new land-owning military aristocracy with an enhanced con-
sciousness of its own standing had begun to emerge, most obviously in France,
by the end of the tenth century. This model would spread across Western Europe
and dominate its social and political life for the rest of the Middle Ages. Prowess
in war as well as a readiness to use violence in order to keep social inferiors in line
remained the defining features of aristocracy; horsemanship, hunting and exces-
sive eating and drinking in company with the rest of the lord’s retinue were also
elemental. Clothes, equipment, residences – all indicated aristocratic status. But
as well as being reshaped by the emergence of knightly retinues and castles, the
tenth-century aristocracy was also growing in size. Not all knights were aristocratic
landholders, of course – plenty just worked for one, lived in a lord’s household and
hoped for some kind of material reward (ideally land, but also pay and plunder) as
a result. Nonetheless, and indeed as a result of this, more of them were coming to
regard themselves as belonging to the same elite, albeit at a lower level, as the aris-
tocrats who retained and rewarded them. And the links between these different lev-
els were being formally strengthened too. Early medieval war bands had certainly
been loyal to their leaders, but it was still possible at that stage to serve without any
material reward or to receive land without any kind of formal bond being estab-
lished between the donor and the donee. However, by 1000, and with the proviso
in mind that the evidence on this topic is anything but extensive, it seems that the
connection between a knight and his lord was starting to become more formalized
by promises of service and support from the former and guarantees of protection
and prizes from the latter. This relationship of mutual support might be embodied
in a ceremony of homage, where a symbolic, ritualised joining of hands resulted in
a subordinate becoming the man (or ‘vassal’) of a superior lord. Oaths of allegiance
were nothing new of course – in Carolingian Europe by the end of the eighth
century a free man was required to swear allegiance to his own lord and to the
king, and from round about the same time there is also evidence of men attaching
themselves to each other with oaths of loyalty secured by gifts of land and treasure.
However, during the tenth century it appears to have become more common for
the lord to grant his vassal an estate or fief (feodum in Latin) as an ordinary, routine
part of their relationship. This process had only just begun in any systematic fashion
by 1000, but eventually the combination of homage in return for land became the
defining characteristic of what historians much later called feudalism. At the same
time, knights also began to identify with their peers in other lords’ households.
This in turn led to the further encouragement and cultivation of a knightly ethos
or esprit de corps and to the notion that members of this group were inherently pres-
tigious, separate from the rest of society and superior to it. By 1000, knights were
already becoming a group with a distinct social status and a developing ideology.
These developments have sometimes been grouped together under a heading
such as ‘the feudal revolution’ or ‘the feudal mutation’. Such terminology is very
modern, of course, and can bestow an air of institutionalisation to processes that
were in practice fluid and informal. There was no sudden change from one way
of doing things to another, and important though they were, the changes that
did occur did not take the same form or progress at the same pace everywhere
in Western Europe. They were most prominent in the heartland of the former
Carolingian Empire where centralised authority was less effective, between the riv-
ers Rhine and Loire and in central France. Elsewhere they spread in varying ways
and at different speeds to Italy, eastern Germany and the emerging kingdoms of
central eastern Europe. Knights and castles only began to appear in Britain in a sys-
tematic or widespread way after 1066. Nevertheless, and perhaps with the excep-
tion of Scandinavia where such hierarchies were slowest to emerge, aristocratic
power, that is control over land secured by the threat and use of military force,
dominated everywhere across Western Europe by 1000. This may seem obvious,
but since the dissolution of the western Roman Empire it had not always been the
case, and it was only under the Carolingians and their imitators that the revival of
aristocratic domination had begun.
Aristocratic society was dominated by men as the public exercise of political
and military power remained an overwhelmingly male concern. The Church jus-
tified this on the basis that women had a secondary place in Creation and were
responsible for Original Sin; the more secular view was simply that women were
of limited intelligence and naturally predisposed to instability and unpredictability.
So a woman could not hold political office or serve as a judge or a military com-
mander, and the societal assumption was that women should confine themselves
to their domestic duties. With all this in mind, it is not surprising that a male-
dominated narrative of events has come down to us, given that it was constructed
largely by monks and other clergymen who held these views. In reality, of course,
matters were not as clear-cut or simple as their modelling suggests. Power was not
an exclusively male preserve. For example, Aethelflaed of Mercia led in her own
right both politically and militarily only for her achievements to be largely ignored
by the men who recorded what happened in England in the early tenth century.
Royal women were of course closest of all to the centres of political power, and in
the tenth century queens played a variety of different political roles. Royal mothers
were regularly involved in the discussions, manoeuvres and plotting that inevitably
surrounded royal successions; it would not be going too far to say that they acted as
kingmaker on several occasions. For example, Aelfthryth, the mother of the Eng-
lish king Aethelred II, was instrumental in her son’s accession to power in 978 (she
may well have been involved in the murder of her stepson Edward, Aethelred’s pre-
decessor), whilst Queen Constance of France played a central role in the struggles
which led eventually to the accession of her son Henry I in 1031. Royal women
might also act as regents for an under-age ruler, as Otto III’s mother Theophanu
and grandmother Adelaide did for him. Aristocratic, non-royal wives and mothers
might perform the same role if they were left with young children to raise. And
other forms of feminine power existed as well. For one thing, although the more
intimate and personal influence wives had over their sons, daughters and husbands
is impossible to measure, it must have been significant in many cases. Also, not
all noble women married; many became nuns and some, later in life, influential
abbesses who controlled the resources and connections of their churches. But mar-
riage was one of the principal ways of increasing a family’s influence, prestige and
wealth. A king or a nobleman might choose a wife for himself or his son because
he thought her family connections would bolster his own position or that of his
dynasty: in England, for example, King Edgar’s wives were all the daughters of
powerful regional nobles. The dowry that a woman brought with her into mar-
riage gave her significance as did her primary role as the provider of a male heir,
but when a noblewoman was widowed, she took personal possession of her dowry,
and there was at least some scope for her acting more freely and with greater legal
autonomy. Nonetheless, although power should not be described in narrowly mas-
culine terms, men retained the upper hand over women: husbands controlled their
wives’ dowries during their marriage, a wife who failed to produce a son would
probably be replaced and widows could be forced to remarry. So, whilst women
had important roles to play, their ability to act independently of what was pre-
scribed in a world dominated by male power remained limited.
By the end of the tenth century, it was not unusual to see the fundamental
divisions within Western European society being expressed in the theory of the
three orders: there were those who prayed (priests and monks), those who fought
(the aristocracy) and those who worked (the peasants). There were other divisions,
too (free and unfree, male and female), but all of these overlapping and mutually
reinforcing distinctions suggest how deeply unequal in terms of power, wealth and
rights Western Europe remained at the start of the second Christian millennium.
Nevertheless, if things were not getting better for the bulk of the population (and
in some ways, such as the intensification of lordship through the development of
seigneuries, they were getting worse), they were certainly changing. Although
the evidence is hard to gather and difficult to interpret, commerce was increas-
ing, the countryside was changing and a new aristocracy was evolving. The course
of these changes was by no means set, however, and they had only just begun to
pick up speed by 1000. Even so, this was the fertile context in which the political
and religious developments described in the following chapters took place. Roman
and Carolingian Europe were in the past, and although their legacies remained
potent and pervasive, something new was materialising in those regions previously
dominated by the two great empires of classical and late antiquity. These regions
would expand, too, to take in areas where the Romans and Carolingians had never
ruled. To be sure these processes were neither smooth nor uniform, but out of
them ultimately would emerge a Western Europe recognisable to the modern eye.
2
POWER
The Political Framework, c.890–c.1020
The East Frankish Kingdom and the Renewal of Empire

In 843, the Treaty of Verdun had carved the empire of Charlemagne and his son
Louis the Pious into three separate kingdoms: a western one, an eastern one and a
middle one wedged between the other two. In 884, all three were briefly reunited
under the sole rule of Charles ‘the Fat’ (the nickname dates from the twelfth cen-
tury), Charlemagne’s great grandson. This happened more through the inability of
Charles’s rivals to live very long than through his own abilities: a weak, indecisive
and uninspiring leader, Charles was deposed in 887 and died the following year.
What happened in the West Frankish kingdom after this will be dealt with in the
next section. In the East, meanwhile, power was seized by the man who had led
the coup against Charles, his illegitimate nephew Arnulf of Carinthia. Arnulf was
crowned emperor in 896, but when he died in 899, his one legitimate son, Louis
‘the Child’, was just six years old, and in the end he only survived until 911. Louis
left no male heirs, and so with his death the Carolingian line in East Francia came
to an end.
The East Frankish kingdom was a delicate and unsteady entity at the start of the
tenth century. It consisted principally of the five so-called stem duchies (from the
German word stamme, meaning tribe) of Saxony, Franconia, Lotharingia (Lor-
raine), Bavaria and Swabia. Each had its own duke who regarded his duchy largely
as his to rule as he pleased. The ruling families (the Liudolfings in Saxony, the
Liutpoldings in Bavaria, the Conradines in Franconia and the Hunfridings in Swa-
bia) had gained their power and position as successful military commanders under
the late Carolingian kings, and the duke’s primary role continued to be as military
leader of the nobility in his particular duchy. The king invested the dukes with
their authority, and they swore fealty and performed homage to him; neverthe-
less they had a large amount of independence and tended to regard their positions
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-4
Power 21
as hereditary. The dukes were also responsible for keeping the peace within their
duchies and managing their own nobles, disciplining them when necessary and
arbitrating disputes between them. This was not always straightforward as by the
early tenth century each duchy also had an assertive and independently minded
aristocracy of margraves (a margrave was originally the military commander of a
march or frontier) and counts that carried out the bulk of administration and war-
making. The duchies also had their own dialects, customs and social structures, and
several of them (Saxony, Swabia and Bavaria) had only recently been incorporated
into the Carolingian empire.
As for the king himself, according to the biographer of Conrad II (d.1039) writ-
ing in the eleventh century, it was his job ‘to render judgement and justice, and
peace for the fatherland’, to protect the Church, widows and orphans and defend
his kingdom from enemies. A hundred years before this, however, the king’s power
to do any of these things was still severely constrained and, given that it was made
up of effectively autonomous provinces with no shared institutional framework,
there was every possibility in the early 900s that the East Frankish kingdom would
break up and that one or more of its duchies would go their different ways as sepa-
rate principalities. By the early eleventh century, however, things had changed. The
rulers of East Francia still lacked the institutional structures required to impose their
will across their kingdom. Nevertheless, the kingdom of East Francia was regarded
as an indivisible political entity under the rule of a single, universally acknowledged
ruler. This was the achievement of the Ottonian kings.
In East Francia, just as in England at the same time, the threat of foreign invasion
contributed significantly to an embryonic sense of political togetherness. Viking
raiders had caused problems, but by 911 decisive military leadership was required
in the face of an even greater threat: the Magyars. These descendants of nomadic
horsemen from the middle Urals, east of the Black Sea, first appeared in Western
Europe in the 860s, but they feature regularly in East Frankish sources from the
890s, and in the early 900s they attacked across the kingdom. The dukes responded
following the death of Louis the Child in 911 by electing one of their own num-
ber, Conrad of Franconia, as their new king. He was not a great success. In terms
of descent and reputation, he was no more than the equal of the dukes who had
made him king, and at various points during his reign, Conrad quarrelled with
and fought against the dukes of Swabia, Saxony and Bavaria. Indeed, by the time
he died, the dukes of Bavaria and Swabia had taken independent control of their
regions, and East Frankish control of Lotharingia had been lost to the West Frank-
ish king, Charles the Simple (898–923). In addition, Conrad did little to deal with
the Magyar threat (during his reign they attacked Swabia, Saxony and Thuringia),
so he lost the chance to acquire plunder with which to reward his followers; so as
well as possessing only limited abilities, he evidently lacked the old pagan virtues of
fortuna (luck or divine approval) and charisma (prowess) which would have bolstered
his credibility. Conrad was defeated and fatally wounded in battle against Duke
Arnulf of Bavaria in 918, and on his death bed he is reported to have urged his
leading subjects to overlook his own relatives and make Duke Henry of Saxony his
successor: Henry was the most powerful of all the German dukes, but, according
to the dying king, he also possessed the fortuna that Conrad had never enjoyed, and
this would allow him, in the words of the contemporary chronicler Widukind of
Corvey, to be ‘truly a king and ruler of many peoples’. Later known as ‘the Fowler’
for his love of hunting, Henry I was elected king in May 919, and the political
centre of gravity in East Francia immediately shifted to eastern Saxony, where
Henry’s family lands lay. He was the first king of what historians call the Ottonian
dynasty. Named after the new king’s father, Duke Otto of Saxony (d.912), it would
last until 1024.
Like his predecessors and successors, Henry was an itinerant ruler. The Ottonian
kings were on the move throughout the year with their courtiers (perhaps several
hundred of them), showing their authority in person and moving every few days
from one place to another in order to receive hospitality or use up the supplies that
had been collected for them and their animals. This routine would only be inter-
rupted by exceptional circumstances: the need to conduct a military campaign,
suppress a rebellion or leave the kingdom. Most at home in eastern and southern
Saxony where they owned most personal property, the Ottonians also spent con-
siderable amounts of time in the lands they had inherited from the Carolingians in
the Rhineland and Lower Lotharingia, centred around Mainz and Aachen. Other
parts of the kingdom were visited less frequently for a range of political and eco-
nomic reasons. In Bavaria, Swabia and northern Saxony, for example, there were
far fewer private resources for the kings to draw on, while powerful local rulers and
families were not particularly welcoming.
On their travels, the Ottonian kings often stayed at a monastery or convent
run typically by an abbot or abbess from an aristocratic, or even the royal, family.
Convents such as Quedlinburg (founded by Otto I in 936 on the site of his father’s
burial) and Gandersheim would become more important still as the tenth century
went on, not just as providers of hospitality and favoured royal residences, but as
centres of royal ritual and ideology and storehouses of dynastic memory. Both were
led for long periods by abbesses who were members of the Ottonian ruling house;
Quedlinburg would have royal abbesses, all daughters of kings and emperors, con-
tinuously from 966 until 1096. The first of these, Matilda, was the daughter of
Otto I, and she ruled over Quedlinburg from 966 until 999. She also played an
active political role. Along with her mother, empress Adelaide, and her sister-in-
law, empress Theophanu, she was heavily involved in the accession of Otto III in
983–4, and when the young king travelled to Italy in 997, he left Matilda in charge
of Saxony as his regent. But it was through the use of assemblies attended by the
bishops and secular princes that the Ottonian kings, like their Carolingian prede-
cessors, held their kingdom together. Often scheduled to take place on an impor-
tant religious festival and often held at locations of religious or cultic significance,
the lay and ecclesiastical aristocracies would be summoned to these assemblies in
order to discuss important political, diplomatic and judicial matters. But assemblies
were more than just elite focus groups. Decisions would be reached on all man-
ner of things – laws, coinage reform, relations with neighbours and much more.
Power 23
The cultivation of consensus was at the heart of this process, however, and in a
sense the decisions made at assemblies mattered less than the way they were arrived
at, through discussion, negotiation and collaboration. Links between the king and
his great men were forged and reforged on multiple occasions of this kind. Feast-
ing, gift-giving, marriage negotiations and what we would call networking were
central to the assemblies’ work. An elite community was built and shaped through
these meetings and given a royal focus for its activities and ambitions. So when
Otto I summoned what Widukind of Corvey called an assembly of ‘the entire
people’ in 938 to discuss the differences between Frankish and Saxon inheritance
laws, those who attended knew that there would be much more to the gathering
than this.
Henry I’s overriding priority on becoming king was to restore the territorial
integrity of the East Frankish kingdom, which had begun to disintegrate under his
predecessor. Relentless military campaigning would underlie everything Henry
did in this regard, but beyond shows of force, he also needed to establish a way of
working with the German dukes once they had submitted to him. Despite having
been nominated king by his immediate predecessor, the assembly that eventually
elected Henry I in 919 was not held until five months after Conrad I’s death, and
it only contained nobles from Saxony and Franconia, not the whole kingdom. So
Henry had to tread carefully from the start of his reign, and he treated the dukes
more shrewdly than Conrad I had done. The latter’s consecration with holy oils at
his coronation in 911 had endowed him with a quasi-priestly mystique denied to
mere dukes. So Henry I’s decision in 919 not to be anointed could be taken as a
signal that he intended to rule with the dukes rather than, as Conrad had tried to
do, above them. Once the king had secured the acknowledgement of his author-
ity by his subordinates, his favoured means of expressing his new relationship with
the dukes was to describe them in documents as his ‘friend’ (amicus). Whatever
the practical reality, this implied they were more his collaborative partners than
his fearful subordinates. For example, in 919 Duke Arnulf of Bavaria had declared
himself king, probably of Bavaria only, which indicates how close to fragmentation
the entire kingdom had been at that point; but in 921, after Henry had besieged
Arnulf ’s stronghold at Regensburg, he submitted to Henry and became his friend.
Then, after they had transferred their allegiance to West Francia in 911, in 923–5
Henry began to pressure the Lotharingians into acknowledging his kingship. After
another campaign that resulted in the capture of the fortress of Zülpich by Henry’s
forces, in 925 Duke Gilbert submitted to Henry, became his friend and married his
daughter, thus restoring the duchy to the East Frankish realm.
For the dukes, being Henry’s friend meant that they acknowledged him as king
and might support his military campaigns. Henry, for his part, allowed the dukes
extensive authority in their duchies (making war, holding their own assemblies of
local magnates and controlling the church), but he still took the chances he got
to involve himself in ducal politics. In 926, for example, Henry installed the new
Duke of Swabia. Hermann was not a Swabian but an outsider who relied solely
on Henry’s authority to establish himself, although he did marry his predecessor’s
widow so as to establish some link with the previous regime. The success of Hen-
ry’s approach was seen in 929–30 when he travelled through his kingdom, staying
in Franconia, Bavaria, Swabia and Lotharingia: the royal progress was marked by
feasts and not by displays of military might.
Henry’s ties of friendship with neighbouring rulers also point to his growing
stature. By the mid-930s both King Raoul of West Francia and King Rudolf II of
Burgundy had become Henry’s ‘friends’, thereby acknowledging his position as the
dominant ruler north of the Alps. Also, in 930 Henry made an alliance with the
English king Aethelstan, and Henry’s son Otto married Aethelstan’s sister, Edith.
By this point, Henry’s prestige had also been significantly enhanced by a series of
successful military campaigns he had fought from 928 against the Slavs on his east-
ern border. Henry reimposed tribute payments on all the Slavs across his frontier,
and he asserted lordship in Bohemia for the first time and pressured their ruler into
accepting baptism. As well as proving that Henry possessed the charisma et fortuna
that Conrad I had lacked, these campaigns gave his troops essential battle experi-
ence. Because whilst the Slavs were militarily tough, the more serious threat still
came from the Magyars.
The monk Widukind of Corvey, writing in the 980s for Henry I’s daughter,
was not the most objective commentator, and he may have exaggerated the scale
and nature of Henry’s achievements. Having said that, he does record Saxon defeats
to the Magyars in 919, 924 and 926; but the turning-point in the conflict came,
also in 926, when Henry captured an important Magyar chieftain and negotiated a
truce in return for the chief ’s release and a payment of tribute by Henry. According
to Widukind, Henry used this breathing-space to do three things. First, he built a
series of new fortifications. The mobilisation of labour for building and manning
these structures is a potentially impressive indication of Henry’s authority in Sax-
ony, although hard archaeological evidence of the fortifications has proved elusive.
Second, Henry trained his vassals to fight more effectively on horseback and with
heavier body-armour. Third, Henry’s campaigns against the Slavs in the late 920s
hardened his troops and prepared them for bigger battles to come. When Henry
felt ready in 932, he stopped paying tribute to the Magyars. This was a deliberate
challenge, made knowing that the enemy would return to extract the overdue pay-
ment by force. Sure enough, the Magyars invaded Saxony in 933, and Henry won
a great victory over them at ‘Riade’, an unidentified place on the River Unstrut
on the Saxon-Thuringian border. News of Henry’s victory at the Battle of the
Unstrut reverberated around Europe (it was mentioned in foreign chronicles) and
immeasurably enhanced Henry’s prestige and personal authority. More practically,
it provided plunder and future tribute to enable Henry to reward his vassals and
keep their loyalty.
Henry I fell from his horse while out hunting in 935. He never fully recov-
ered, and he died on 2 July 936. Over the course of his 17-year reign, Henry had
restored the frontiers of his kingdom by asserting his power over the East Frankish
duchies, he had fixed the river Elbe as his eastern frontier in his campaigns against
the Slavs and Magyars and he had become the dominant ruler in Western Europe
Power 25
by establishing his supremacy over his neighbours. Before he died, moreover, he

had secured Frankish and Saxon consent to the succession of his son Otto, whom
he had designated as his heir in 930. Otto had none of Henry I’s scruples about
being anointed when he was crowned in August 936, and the choice of Aachen,
Charlemagne’s favourite residence and burial place, as the coronation site was a
conscious attempt by Otto to associate his rule with that of his illustrious predeces-
sor and assert his authority from the start outside his Saxon homeland (Aachen is in
Lotharingia). However, Otto’s enhanced status did not prevent a series of rebellions
at the start of his reign. In 938 the new king led two campaigns into Bavaria which
led eventually to the defeat and exile of Eberhard, the new duke there; the latter
had refused to accept Otto’s authority after succeeding his father Arnulf in 937. But
more intractable problems came from within the king’s own family. Henry I had
left three other sons: Thankmar (by his first wife), Henry and Brun. The traditional
Carolingian practice of partible inheritance would have seen the kingdom divided
between the four sons, and all may originally have expected to become kings in
their own right. It was clear by the 930s, however, after he had nominated Otto as
his sole heir, that Henry I intended his realm to remain undivided after his death.
Given these tensions, it was all but inevitable when Otto inherited everything in
936 that he would face a challenge from his own relations. The route to kingship
had always been narrow, and now it was accessible to even fewer men.
Otto had defeated three revolts in Saxony by 941. The main cause of this ongo-
ing crisis was indeed the disagreement between him and his brothers Thankmar
and Henry over their father’s inheritance. Henry, for instance, wanted to be king
instead of Otto and even plotted to kill him in 941, but after Henry spent a brief
period in prison, the two brothers were reconciled, and Otto eventually installed
Henry as Duke of Bavaria. These family quarrels were compounded by feuds
within other aristocratic kin groups. For example, in 938 Wichman Billung, one
of the most powerful lords in Saxony, joined the rebellion in which Thankmar was
killed because Otto had just given command of the frontier march in northern
Saxony to Wichmann’s brother Herman rather than to him. Thankmar, for his
part, rebelled because he did not receive the march of his cousin, Count Siegfried
of Merseburg, on the latter’s death; instead it went to Siegfried’s brother Gero.
Also, some of the dukes may have been worried that Otto’s style of kingship would
allow them less autonomy than they had enjoyed under Henry I. Otto’s handling
of the duchies certainly suggests that he planned to influence them as much as he
could. The dukes of Franconia and Lotharingia both died fighting against Otto’s
supporters at the battle of Andernach in 939. Otto followed this up by making
Franconia part of the royal domain and imposing royal jurisdiction there. And as for
Lotharingia, by the end of the 940s Otto had appointed an ally, Conrad the Red,
as duke and arranged Conrad’s marriage to his daughter, Liutgard. Meanwhile in
947, Otto’s brother Henry was made Duke of Bavaria, and in 949 Otto’s eldest son
and designated heir, Liudolf, became Duke of Swabia. Otto’s installation of his son-
in-law, brother and son as dukes of, respectively, Lotharingia, Bavaria and Swabia
was an attempt to develop the authority of the ruling family across the kingdom
and to satisfy the demands for resources and power from within the family itself.
It was a bold attempt to consolidate the kingdom, but it was not a wholly success-
ful one. In 953 Otto faced another serious family revolt led by Liudolf of Swabia
and Conrad of Lotharingia. The causes of this latest uprising, however, lay not in
Germany but in Italy.
The kingdom of Italy stretched from the northern end of the Italian peninsula
down to Rome. It had been under Carolingian control until the overthrow and
death of the emperor Charles the Fat in 887–8, and during the first half of the
tenth century royal rule was competed for by aristocratic families from within
and outside the kingdom. Following the death in 950 of the latest of these kings,
Lothar, the throne was seized by the much more powerful Berengar, margrave of
Ivrea, who had himself and his son Adalbert crowned co-kings of Italy. Lothar’s
widow, Adelaide, was imprisoned, and her supporters appealed for help from north
of the Alps. In response, in 951–2 Otto I travelled to Italy for the first time. He had
himself crowned with the Iron Crown of Lombardy at Pavia and married Adelaide.
Now king of Italy himself, Otto had the enticing prospect of imperial coronation
in his sights. The model once again, of course, was Charlemagne, who had been
crowned emperor in Rome in 800. By the early tenth century, however, the impe-
rial title had been devalued as the Carolingian Empire had broken up and as impe-
rial authority was squabbled over by a string of ineffective claimants to the throne;
there had been no emperor at all since 924. In 951, however, Otto’s first attempt
to have himself crowned emperor in Rome was frustrated. From Pavia, Otto sent
a request for coronation to the pope, but he was refused. Power in Rome was held
by Alberic II, self-styled ‘prince’ of the city. He had nothing to gain from Otto’s
imperial coronation, and in 951 Otto was not strong enough to challenge him, so
he returned to Germany. Subsequently, however, in 952 Berengar and Adalbert
submitted to Otto, acknowledging him as their overlord. Father and son continued
to rule in Lombardy, but Otto exerted his influence there through Berengar, much
as he wielded power in Burgundy through King Conrad.
Closer to home, Otto’s marriage to Adelaide and the new sons it promised (one
was born as early as 952) directly threatened his eldest son Liudolf ’s position as
Otto’s heir. There were rumours that Otto had disinherited Liudolf, but whether
they were true or not the situation was unclear enough to push Liudolf into revolt
against his father in 953. Others who joined Liudolf did so more opportunistically,
but once again in the hope of gaining more resources of their own. The revolt was
crushed by Otto: Liudolf lost Swabia and Duke Conrad lost Lotharingia, where
Otto’s younger brother Brun, who had already become archbishop of Cologne in
953, succeeded him as duke. Liudolf died in 957, and Otto was eventually suc-
ceeded as king by a son of his second marriage.
The peace established after the revolt of 953–4 also owed much to the renewal
of the Magyar threat. In August 955, Otto led a force made up of troops from all
the East Frankish duchies to victory against a Magyar raiding army at the river
Lech, south of Augsburg. This victory has traditionally been seen as ending the
Magyar menace to Western Europe once and for all, although in reality the danger
Power 27
they posed was already waning by then – the Magyars had not troubled Saxony
since the 930s, and they were not the threat they had once been. Then in October,
Otto, this time at the head of a Saxon army, defeated a Slav host at the Battle of
Recknitz. These two triumphs massively increased Otto’s prestige (he was hailed
by his troops as ‘father of the fatherland and emperor’ after the victory on the Lech,
according to Widukind, who added: ‘No king in the two hundred years before him
had celebrated a victory of this size’), and they also left the way clear for the Saxons
to try and further extend their influence over the neighbouring Slav peoples and
the other principalities of eastern Europe.
This process was already underway by the mid-950s. Henry I had led successful
campaigns against the tribes to the north and east of Saxony and had forced the
Bohemians to the south-east to submit to him. There was more to these devel-
opments than military victory, however. Otto I had established a monastery at
Magdeburg on the furthest limit of Saxony’s eastern frontier in 937, and in 968 it
became the centre of a new archbishopric. Its principal role was to spread Chris-
tianity further east still and to help absorb converted pagans into Latin Christen-
dom. Three new suffragan bishoprics were also established, subject to the new
archbishop’s authority, at Meissen, Merseburg and Zeitz, whilst Otto II’s founda-
tion of a monastery at Memleben in 979 was deliberately designed both to foster
reverence for his dynasty (Henry I and Otto I had both died at Memleben) and
stabilise his eastern frontier along the Saale river. Meanwhile amongst the other
missionary bishoprics Otto I founded were those on his northern frontier with
Denmark at Schleswig, Århus and Ribe, and others facing Poland at Brandenburg
and Havelburg. When King Harold Bluetooth of Denmark converted to Chris-
tianity in 965, it may have been at least partly a result of such measures. But the
Saxons used more conventionally military tactics to extend their influence too. In
957, 959 and 960 large Saxon armies were led against the Slavs and the Poles by
Hermann Billung and Gero, the men Otto had appointed at the start of his reign
to dominate and extend his north-eastern frontier; the Polish ruler Mieszko I was
among those who paid tribute, and in 966 he converted to Christianity. The vast
territories conquered by Hermann and Gero were soon named after them (‘The
March of the Billungs’ and ‘Gero’s March’), and Gero had expanded the size of his
territory so much by the time of his own death in 965 that it was felt appropriate
to divide it between no fewer than six successors: in this way several new ‘marks’ or
marches were created in these frontier regions: the Northern and Eastern Marches
(Nordmark and Ostmark), Meissen, Zeitz and Merseburg.
But it was not just in the east that the impact of the Ottonians was increasingly
felt. The rulers of West Francia thought it worth their while to become (in varying
degrees) Otto’s clients or dependents. Louis IV, the feeble Carolingian king of the
West Franks, married one of Otto’s sisters in 939. In 940, Louis’s great rival Hugh
the Great, Duke of the Franks, also married one of Otto’s sisters. When Louis and
Hugh died in 954 and 956 respectively, both left a minor heir in the care of an
Ottonian mother, and each was watched over by Archbishop Brun of Cologne. It
was his job as Duke of Lotharingia to maintain East Frankish hegemony over its
neighbour, and several times during the rest of the 950s Brun led Lotharingian
armies west to support King Lothar IV (954–86) and remind everyone concerned
where the greatest power still lay.
Otto did not attempt to rule his neighbours directly or incorporate their territo-
ries into his realm. Instead, building on what his father had begun, he constructed
a network of dependent, subordinate rulers who accepted his superiority. Histo-
rians have called this approach ‘hegemonial kingship’. Otto asserted his authority
over northern Italy and Burgundy, as has been seen, and he made several military
interventions in West Francia in the 940s and 950s: these were intended to help his
brother-in-law Louis IV in the latter’s struggles against his own internal opponents,
but they also served to reinforce Otto’s own dominance over his western neigh-
bour. Otto’s earlier interest in Italy was also revived in the early 960s. Nationalist
German historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw this as a cru-
cial moment when their medieval rulers became infatuated with ill-fated dreams
of recreating the Roman Empire, at the expense of the more important business of
overcoming the Slavs and expanding German power eastwards. Nevertheless, there
were sound political reasons behind Otto’s actions. If Otto had not come to Italy
and married Adelaide in 951, his son Liudolf or his brother Henry might have tried
to do so, and Otto could not have afforded to let either of them establish a pow-
erbase there. Secondly, strong economic and urban development was taking place
across Lombardy, and there were profits to be had for the man who controlled the
region. Thirdly, kingship in northern Italy opened the door to imperial rule – tak-
ing power there in 774 had been an essential prerequisite for Charlemagne before
becoming emperor in 800. Fourth, Adelaide was the daughter of King Rudolf II of
Burgundy who died in 937, and the sister of King Conrad of Burgundy who had
recognised Otto as his overlord in 939. Through her Otto acquired not only a right
to rule in Lombardy, but also a means of consolidating his influence over Burgundy,
thus strengthening his south-western flank.
After 951–2, however, as Otto was preoccupied with the revolt of his son
Liudolf and then the Magyar and Slav invasions (955), his authority in northern
Italy had dissolved. A steady stream of political refugees flowed north across the
Alps to complain about Berengar’s rule. By 959 he was strong enough to threaten
the papal states around Rome, and Pope John XII appealed to Otto to intervene.
Otto set out for Italy for the second time in late summer 961, and this time, on
2 February 962, he and Adelaide were crowned emperor and empress by the pope
in St Peter’s Basilica. For John XII this was a necessary evil; for the Roman nobil-
ity, which looked on the East Franks as uncultured barbarians, it was a resented
humiliation. On 13 February 962, Otto confirmed the earlier ‘donations’ of lands
made by the Carolingian rulers to the papacy, which defined the papal states, in
a solemn privilege called the Ottonianum. It also gave Otto’s representatives rights
of inspection over the papal lands and effectively extended Ottonian hegemonial
rulership there. Meanwhile, papal elections were to be ‘free’, but this was subject
to imperial approval of the man elected who had to swear an oath of loyalty to the
emperor. The Ottonianum left little room for doubt about where power lay in the
Power 29
relationship between pope and emperor. Otto then set off to subjugate the lands
designated as the papacy’s in the Ottonianum, extracting oaths of loyalty to himself
rather than the pope as he went.
As soon as Otto was back in northern Italy, the pope began trying to recover
the control he had lost. As a result, by October 962 Otto had returned to Rome
to preside over a council of bishops and clergy which deposed the allegedly
dissolute and depraved John XII and ‘elected’ (with Otto’s approval) a replace-
ment, Leo VIII. But when Otto left Rome again in April 964, another coup was
launched, the supporters of Leo VIII fled and John XII returned. When he died
in May 964 (he had a stroke while in bed with a married woman, it was alleged),
John’s supporters elected a successor, Benedict V. In response, in June Otto suc-
cessfully besieged Rome, had Leo restored and Benedict removed. Otto returned
to Germany in early 965, and for a while, his party remained in control of Rome.
When Leo VIII died later in 965, indeed, the Roman nobility sent envoys to Otto
asking him to choose the next pope. Otto’s nominee took the name John XIII,
but by D ecember 965, the imperial party had lost control of Rome again, and in
December 966 Otto was back in the city to have John XIII reinstated.
This was the start of a six-year residence by Otto in Italy (966–72), which
together with his previous stay (962–5) meant that 9 of his last 11 years were spent
south of the Alps. By his presence Otto was able to strengthen his hold on Rome
and central Italy, and naturally his thoughts turned to the rich lands further south
(olives and grain), where more political and territorial gains might be made at the
expense of the Byzantines who currently ruled the region. His aim was to pressure
the Byzantines into making peace and recognising his imperial title, but in 968,
969 and 970, Otto’s attempts to capture Bari, the key port which was the lynchpin
of Byzantine power in southern Italy, were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, a deal was
finally struck with the Byzantine emperor John Tzimisces in 971, sealed by the
marriage in March 972 of Otto’s eldest son, also called Otto (aged 16) to John’s
relative Theophanu (also aged 16).
Otto I at last returned to Germany in August 972, where he died the follow-
ing year (7 May 973), but not before he had held a magnificent and celebratory
Easter court at Quedlinburg. In view of the number of subject rulers (Slav dukes
of Poland and Bohemia) and foreign envoys (Byzantine, Magyar, Bulgar, Danish,
Slav, Anglo-Saxon and Arab) who attended, contemporaries saw this as the summit
of Otto’s political achievement. With his western frontiers secure, his eastern ones
expanding towards the river Oder and his authority in Italy secure as far south as
the duchy of Spoleto, this was indeed the high watermark of Ottonian hegemonial
kingship.
Otto I looked to his son Otto II, crowned co-king in 961 and co-emperor at
Christmas 967 in Rome, to continue his work. But like his father at the start of
his reign, Otto II faced opposition from those eyeing a larger share of the power
the new king had inherited. Late in 973 a rebellion was launched by Otto’s cousin,
Henry II the Quarrelsome, Duke of Bavaria. This may have been provoked by
Otto’s grant of the vacant duchy of Swabia to his nephew rather than to Henry,
who seems to have expected it. Henry was joined in revolt by the leaders of the
Poles and the Bohemian Slavs, both of whom were keen to shake off the over-
lordship and tribute payment which Otto I had imposed on them. Otto II cap-
tured Henry’s capital, Regensburg, forcing the duke to flee; Henry was declared
deposed, and he lost his duchy. This did not prevent him from rebelling again in
976, but by 978 the war was over: Otto had imposed himself, and the two Slav
dukes had accepted Ottonian overlordship.
Further difficulties followed, however. Otto’s two West Frankish cousins, King
Lothar IV of West Francia and his brother Charles, fell out. Otto’s support for
Charles (whom he had made Duke of Lower Lotharingia in 977) led to Lothar
making a surprise attack on Aachen in 978. Otto was forced to flee, Lothar looted
the city and Otto’s attempt at revenge failed ignominiously when he was forced to
retreat from a retaliatory siege of Paris and lost his baggage on the way. He made
peace with Lothar in 980. Ottonian hegemony over the West Frankish kingdom
was slipping away, but by 980 Otto II had pacified his own lands north of the Alps.
Now he turned to reasserting the authority his father had enjoyed in Italy. At
Christmas 980, Otto was crowned king of Italy, and in 981, backed by a large army,
he restored imperial authority in Rome. Then, encouraged by his Byzantine wife,
Theophanu, Otto looked to increase his power in southern Italy. Theophanu’s rela-
tive, Emperor John Tzimisces, had died in 976, and the new Byzantine emperor,
Basil II, was from a different noble faction. So in early 982 Otto captured Taranto
from the Byzantines, and in the same year he first made use of a new title in his
official correspondence: ‘emperor of the Romans’ (imperator Romanorum augustus).
But the reality was less certain. In July 982, Otto won a victory over the Muslims,
but shortly after that his army suffered a shattering defeat by the same enemy at
Cap Colonne in Calabria. Otto himself narrowly avoided capture. News of Otto’s
defeat in Italy set off a Danish invasion in northern Germany and, worse still, a
large-scale revolt of the Slavic tribes living reluctantly and mostly unconverted
under Ottonian (that is to say, mainly Saxon) lordship. Efforts to Christianise these
regions had been only partly successful at best, and the ruthless methods of the
Saxon lords who had attempted to secure their tenuous hold between the Elbe and
the Oder by building forts were deeply resented. The bishoprics and fortifications
at Havelberg and Brandenburg were destroyed, Hamburg was burnt to the ground
and all the conquests east of the Elbe made so recently by the likes of Hermann
Billung and Gero were lost for the time being, although there continued to be a
line of margraves who retained some limited authority along the Elbe as well as
bishops of Havelburg and Merseburg, albeit ones without dioceses or cathedrals.
With hindsight, it is possible to see that these events brought the first era of Ger-
man eastward expansion to an end. This was less of a problem for the kings than
it was for the Saxon nobility: for the former, the discovery of large silver deposits
near Goslar in 968 meant that the loss of tribute from the Slav peoples east of the
Elbe was not the blow it might have been. The latter, by contrast, had nothing to
replace the plunder that the subjugated Slavs had provided.
Power 31
Although his authority north of the Alps clearly faced a major challenge in 983,
Otto II chose to remain in Italy. The magnates of Germany were instead called to
a council at Verona in May 983 to discuss the crisis. Other issues were attended to,
as well: Otto’s infant son aged three (the future Otto III) was designated co-king.
Otto II never went back to Germany. He had returned to Rome and had just
appointed a new pope, John XIV, when he died from malaria in December 983
aged 28. He was buried in St Peter’s, the only German emperor to enjoy this
privilege. Otto III was only three years old when his father died, and his mother,
Theophanu, planned to act as regent for him in Germany whilst his grandmother,
Adelaide, oversaw imperial business in Italy. Predictably, however, Otto’s succession
was challenged by his father’s old adversary Henry the Quarrelsome. Henry had
significant support, and he soon got his hands on the young king himself, initially
by claiming the right, as his closest male relative, to act as his guardian. Henry
soon looked impregnable, and at Easter 984 he held court at Quedlinburg and had
himself acclaimed as king. However, over the next few months Henry’s position
collapsed, and his support dissolved. The reasons for this remain unclear, but by
July 984 Henry had given up possession of Otto, and in June 985 he submitted to
the king’s representatives at Frankfurt and renounced his claim to the throne. By
the time Theophanu died in 991, the political situation in East Francia and on its
frontiers had stabilised and the crisis was past. She had even secured Lotharingia as
the price of imperial support for the new West Frankish king, Hugh Capet. The
empress Adelaide took over the regency in Germany and held it until 995. Between
them these two royal women ruled the imperial territories in Germany and Italy
for nearly a decade. Consensus within the ruling elite, so often riven by factional
and dynastic squabbling, was maintained, and the empresses successfully steered a
course between the competing claims and interests of different groups. There were
no grand strategies to deal with Italy or with the fallout from the Slav revolt, but
Theophanu did travel to Italy in 989–90 where she issued imperial decrees in her
own name, and campaigns in the East were organised by her in most years of her
regency. Theophanu was given grudging respect by at least one contemporary for
her work as regent. Thietmar, bishop of Merseburg, writing in the early eleventh
century commented that, ‘Although of the fragile sex, her modesty, conviction
and manner of life were outstanding, which is rare in Greece. Preserving her son’s
rulership with manly watchfulness, she was always benevolent to the just, but ter-
rified and conquered rebels’. Most importantly, this was a period notably free of
internal conflicts and crises, something that hints positively at the political skills of
Theophanu and Adelaide and the quality of the governance they provided.
Otto III himself came of age in 994, but he would rule for only seven years,
until his death in 1002. Italy was perhaps his main concern. Ottonian authority in
Rome had dissolved soon after the death of Otto II in 983. The powerful Cres-
centii family had gained control of the papacy by the 970s, and they retained it for
the next decade until Otto III came to Rome in 996. Otto appointed a new pope,
the first man from north of the Alps to hold the office, his chaplain and cousin
Bruno, who was 24. He took the name Gregory V and promptly crowned Otto
III as emperor in Rome in May 996. Having restored Ottonian rule in Rome,
Otto returned to Germany. Early in 997, however, Pope Gregory was driven out
of Rome, at which point it appears that a conspiracy was formed there against
Otto. The plot involved the emperor’s old tutor, John Philagathos, archbishop of
Piacenza, and the plan was to keep Otto out of Rome, open up southern Italy to
the Byzantines and install John as pope. In May 997, Philagathos duly became Pope
John XVI, but after successfully campaigning against the Slavs in 997, Otto was
back in Rome with a large army by March 998. Pope John was seized, tortured
and mutilated – he lost his eyes, nose, tongue and lips. Gregory V was reinstated as
pope, but he died in February 999 and was replaced by one of Otto’s leading advis-
ers, the Frenchman Gerbert of Aurillac, whom he had previously made archbishop
of Ravenna. Gerbert took the name Silvester II, thus symbolically suggesting a
revival of the age of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, who had Silvester I as
pope in the early fourth century.
Otto III was clearly able to act with ruthlessness and brutality when he thought
it necessary. But his advisers went to great lengths to portray him as a figure of
majesty and as an archetype of Christian modesty. Otto considered public acts
of humility and penance to be impressive and exalting rather than degrading. In
999 he travelled on foot as a penitent pilgrim to the shrine of Monte Gargano,
south-east of Rome. On the way he visited the famous saintly hermit Nilus and
publicly placed his crown in the hands of the holy man as a gesture of earthly
surrender. Then in 1000 Otto set off for a ceremonial tour of great churches and
shrines. Amongst his destinations was Gniezno in the lands of the Polish Slavs.
There he entered the city barefoot before venerating the relics of St Adalbert of
Prague (he had been martyred in 997 attempting to convert the Slavs), and in
April he visited Aachen and opened Charlemagne’s tomb. He found his illustri-
ous predecessor sitting on a throne, crowned, holding a sceptre and physically
well preserved. Otto cut Charlemagne’s fingernails, which had grown through his
gloves, and took away one of his teeth and the golden cross he had around his neck.
By this time, Otto III was using the title ‘servant of Christ and emperor of the
Romans’, thus emphasizing his meekness and magnificence alike. On his seal, too,
Otto announced the ‘Renewal of the Empire of the Romans’ (Renovatio Imperii
Romanorum). Such declarations, combined with Otto’s obvious interest in the city
of Rome itself, have led historians to credit him with the striking ambition of
reviving the glories of Ancient Rome and using the city itself as his base. However,
Otto III’s Renovatio had more in common with the policies of his immediate prede-
cessors than has been commonly supposed. He was following the precedent estab-
lished by Otto I and continued by Otto II of southwards expansion into northern,
central and southern Italy. Like his predecessors, he needed to reassert Ottonian
control in Rome as a matter of authority and prestige. He built a palace there,
but it is hard to be sure that he intended it as a permanent seat of government.
He was not there permanently after 996 (he went back to Germany for decent
periods), and he only went there in 998 after he was sure he had defeated the Slavs.
Power 33
Interestingly, too, when he died Otto was buried in Aachen not Rome. When in
Italy Otto and his advisers may have thought it sensible to emphasise the ‘Roman’
nature of Otto’s rule for political reasons, whilst using the style ‘Roman emperor’
(Romanorum imperator augustus) gave him claims to various rights in Rome and
southern Italy. But once again this was arguably just an intensified version of previ-
ous policy as expressed, for example, in the Ottonianum of Otto I.
Above all, by Renovatio Otto meant the spiritual renewal of the Latin (Roman)
church, whose health and welfare were, in the view of Otto and his advisers, the
responsibility of the emperor. First with Gregory V and then Silvester II, Otto con-
ceived of a harmonious partnership between pope and emperor that would work
for the reform of the church and the spread of Latin Christianity. Good evidence
of this are the archbishoprics and bishoprics established in those parts of eastern
Europe newly converted to Christianity. As has been seen, Otto I had attempted
to extend the Christian church in the new regions under his control, and yet more
new dioceses were founded in the 960s and 970s at Prague (in Bohemia), at Posen
(in Poland). Meanwhile Magdeburg, where Otto I had found a monastery in the
930s which was intended to be the centre of a large missionary effort to convert
the pagan Slavs beyond the River Elbe, became an archbishopric in the 960s. In
1000, once more following his predecessor’s example, Otto III established a new
archbishopric at Gniezno and three suffragan bishops at Colberg for Pomerania,
Cracow for Little Poland and Breslau for Silesia. Such activity fits into a wider
context in which the Ottonian kings steadily established and then developed their
relations with the princes on their eastern frontier. Mainly in an effort to prevent
them intervening directly in their affairs, the Premyslid rulers of Bohemia and
the Piast rulers of Poland were usually keen to construct good working links with
their more powerful neighbour. Both Mieszko I of Poland (c.963–92) and Bole-
slav II of Bohemia (972–99) paid tribute to the Ottonians, but they also took part
in Saxon politics – in the succession disputes of the 970s and following Otto II’s
death and in the campaigns against the Elbe Slavs of the 980s and 990s. Mieszko’s
son, Boleslav Chrobry (992–1025) wanted to expand his territory southwards. To
do so, he tried hard to keep on good terms with Otto III. So it was Boleslav who
recovered the body of Bishop Adalbert of Prague after he had been martyred while
trying, with Boleslav’s encouragement, to convert the heathen Prussians in 997,
and brought it to Gniezno. Polish sources even report that Otto endowed Boleslav
with a royal title, although Boleslav is not called king in any contemporary source
before he had himself crowned in 1025. Otto also approved the grant of a crown
to the recently converted king of Hungary, Stephen, in 1001. All of this could be
seen as an attempt by Otto III to establish his own version of Otto I’s system of
hegemonial kingship.
There was an uprising against Otto in Rome in 1001 which forced him to
flee the city, and rumours of one stirring in Germany at the same time. He died
unexpectedly (of malaria, like his father) near Rome in January 1002, and his body
was taken back to Aachen for burial. He left no sons, nor any surviving brothers or
uncles to succeed him by hereditary right. His closest male relative was his second
cousin, Duke Henry IV of Bavaria, the son of Henry the Quarrelsome and great-
grandson of Henry I. So, in June 1002 in Mainz, Henry was elected as king by his
supporters from Bavaria, Franconia and Upper Lotharingia. The Saxons gave him
their support in July and the Swabians in October. Henry II focused on Germany
throughout his reign rather than Italy in the south or the Slav lands in the east. On
his seal he used the legend ‘Renewal of the Kingdom of the Franks’ (renovatio regni
Francorum) in preference to Otto III’s ‘Renewal of the Empire of the Romans’.
He was rarely free of trouble there, although the problems never overwhelmed
him. Most of the issues he faced were within duchies rather than threats against
him. Henry took over the Ottonian heartlands in east Saxony and added these to
his family lands in Bavaria. He also extended the areas where the court stayed for
longer periods to include the south German duchies, and he increased the speed
of his itinerating and shortened the lengths of his stays. So, Bavaria, Swabia and
Alsace, for example, previously distant zones as far as royal lordship was concerned,
now became less remote.
The only overt acts of rebellion Henry faced were from his own duchy of
Bavaria, from his wife’s family in Lotharingia and, later, in Saxony. Henry did not
retain the duchy of Bavaria in his own hands after becoming king, nor did he give
it to the man who expected to get it, the margrave of the Northern March, Henry
of Schweinfurt. Disappointed, Henry rebelled in 1003 with the backing of Bole-
slav Chrobry of Poland, but the rising was crushed by the king and the ringleaders
pardoned. Bavaria was actually given to another Henry, the eldest brother of the
queen, Kunigunde of Luxembourg. But he and his brothers were not satisfied with
this, and over the next dozen years or so they defied Henry on several occasions.
Henry was deprived of his duchy, but it was returned to him in 1017 when the
family feuding was resolved. Meanwhile in Saxony, the king opposed the attempts
of the local nobility to extend their own power at the expense of the church, and
in 1019–20 there was a full-scale uprising by the Saxon duke and counts. All of
this gave the king plenty to deal with. No single piece of opposition was signifi-
cant enough to threaten him, however, and there was never any suggestion of a
combined uprising. Henry was always eventually successful in restoring order or
reaching a compromise. But it might be fair to say that he commanded respect from
his leading subjects rather than awe. Perhaps he lacked the latter because he won no
striking military success like Henry I or Otto I, and because he lacked the strong
hereditary links to this success enjoyed by Otto II and Otto III.
Henry II was also less interested than his predecessors had been in establishing
or maintaining hegemonial rule over neighbouring powers. Nevertheless, Henry
was still drawn into defending his interests outside his realm. In return for support-
ing Polish expansion, the Polish rulers had helped the Ottonians fight against the
Slavic tribes. At the start of 1003, however, Boleslav Chrobry, who had not backed
Henry for the German throne, seized Bohemia, and when Henry demanded that
he perform homage for it to him, Boleslav refused. In response, Henry allied with
the Slavs, intending to drive Boleslav out of Poland. This reversal of policy (and the
alliance with pagans) was unpopular with the Saxon nobility. Nevertheless, Henry
Power 35
fought three campaigns in all against Boleslav, in 1003–5, 1007–13 and 1015–18.
He was unable to defeat him, and eventually peace was made in 1018; but at least
Henry retained lordship over Bohemia, which from this point remained part of the
wider German empire.
Henry also went on three expeditions to Italy. In 1004, in the face of a chal-
lenge from the margrave of Ivrea, Arduin, who had been crowned king of Italy
following Otto III’s death, Henry was himself elected king and crowned. However,
he quickly returned to Germany and did not go to Italy again for nearly ten years,
during which time Arduin continued to promote his own cause. Henry finally
returned at the end of 1013 in response to an appeal from Pope Benedict VIII
who was under pressure from his local rivals, and on 14 February 1014 Henry
was crowned emperor in Rome. On his third Italian outing, in 1021–2, Henry
confirmed the Ottonianum, led a powerful army against the Byzantines in southern
Italy and jointly held a church council with the pope. All three of Henry’s Ital-
ian expeditions were short (seven, three and nine months respectively), and his
two stays in Rome lasted only days. He thus broke with Otto II’s and Otto III’s
orientation towards Rome and saw his visits to the Holy City as pragmatic neces-
sities. Inevitably, Ottonian power in Italy suffered as a result. Arduin’s death in
1015 removed the challenge he presented, but, more broadly, Henry’s occasional
interventions in Italy were not enough to prevent political power there becoming
more localised than ever.
Henry was pious. Interested in relics and concerned for the welfare of the
Church, he may have been celibate. However, he was dictatorial, too. He con-
tinued the Ottonian policy of integrating the imperial church (mainly bishoprics
and the larger monasteries) into royal lordship and of orienting them towards the
court through personal connections. Between 1002 and 1021, 22 of 36 episcopal
vacancies were filled by royal chaplains. Determined to have his candidates elected,
Henry occasionally invested them (ceremonially gave them the symbols of their
office) against the will or suggestion of the cathedral chapter, and he was not averse
to quashing elections he was unhappy with. Henry was also a keen supporter of
the restoration of pure Benedictinism in the monasteries under his control. His
pet project was the foundation of the cathedral and see of Bamberg in 1007, stra-
tegically sited at a point midway between the northern and southern halves of his
realm. Henry was eventually buried there after he died childless on 13 July 1024.
A cult soon developed around his tomb at Bamberg, and he was canonised in 1146
(his wife, Kunigunde, was canonised in 1200). Henry is the only saint among the
German kings and emperors, and his death is reckoned to mark the end of the
Ottonian line. His successor, Conrad II (1024–39) was the first of a new dynasty,
the Salians.
The West Frankish Kingdom and the Challenge of Survival

For the kings of West Francia, the tenth century was a singularly unsuccessful time.
They controlled little land and commanded few resources. Typically, the limit of
their ambition was holding on to what they had; sometimes it was just survival.
Elsewhere in the kingdom, outside the small amount of land controlled directly by
the kings, the dukes and counts of West Francia spent much of the century build-
ing up their own regional powerbases and had little interest in acknowledging, let
alone submitting to, any kind of centralised royal authority unless it suited their
own political purposes to do so.
The viking attacks of the ninth and tenth centuries contributed to a collapse of
the kings’ wider authority as they struggled in vain to defend their enormous king-
dom. The resulting political vacuum was filled by local aristocrats whose predeces-
sors had originally been given their powers by earlier kings. The duchy of Aquitaine,
for example, had originally been created as a sub-kingdom by C harlemagne for his
son Louis in the 780s. Then there were the counties (about 600 by the end of the
eighth century) where counts appointed by the king represented him, administered
his justice and defended his territory. As royal power declined during the ninth
century, however, and as the threat from viking marauders grew, these dukes and
counts were left largely alone to defend the regions they controlled. As they did so,
their ambitions grew: they began to cherish their autonomy and build their own
fortresses to protect it. They also began to challenge each other, and they started to
overshadow the increasingly remote, irrelevant kings.
So the consensus amongst historians has long been that, during the tenth cen-
tury, the balance of political power in West Francia shifted significantly towards
the regional princes and away from the kings. Nevertheless, despite the differences
between them, these rulers all operated within the same political culture, many of
their priorities were shared, the challenges they faced were comparable and the
tactics they used to achieve their ends were similar. Just as the kings struggled to
hold their own within their lands and against the princes who surrounded them,
so the princes themselves faced competition from those below them in their duch-
ies and counties and from their neighbours. Power fragmented and was wielded
in smaller, more localised units within which castles were coming to dominate by
the end of the tenth century. Ultimately, however, despite the problems it faced,
the West Frankish monarchy did endure; it even weathered the end of Carolingian
rule when a new dynasty, the Capetians, was established permanently in power
after 987. And by the time King Robert II died in 1031, although royal authority
was still far more notional than real across most of the wider West Frankish realm,
from Flanders to the Pyrenees the regional princes all acknowledged one king
and accepted that he was their royal lord. In practice the kings were still weak and
diminished, but the underpinnings of something greater had survived.
An important moment came in 887–8 when the Carolingian emperor Charles
the Fat was overthrown and died. His heir, Charles the Simple, was only eight years
old, and rather than set up a regency, another king entirely was chosen – Odo, from
the family historians refer to as the Robertians or Robertines (after Robert ‘the
Strong’ [d.866], Odo’s father). Odo already ruled Neustria, the land in northern
France between the rivers Seine and Loire, as his father had done before him, and
he was the obvious candidate to defend the kingdom against the serious viking
Power 37
threat it faced. When Odo died in 898, however, Charles the Simple did become
king, only to be eventually deposed in 922 in favour of the late King Odo’s brother
Robert. Charles had been largely content to leave the defence of his kingdom
against the vikings to others, not least the rulers of Burgundy and Poitou, who
routed a raiding army at Chartres in 911. He did intervene occasionally, however,
and this led to perhaps Charles’s most notable act, also in 911, when he made a deal
with a viking leader, Rollo. By what historians refer to as the Treaty of Saint-Clair-
sur-Epte, Rollo was installed by Charles as Count of Rouen. The lands Rollo and
his followers retained formed the nucleus of what would become the duchy of
Normandy.
This was a time when a ruler’s effective power depended on his ability to com-
mand and control his leading men. The Carolingian kings’ principal way of doing
this had been through the use of force when they thought it necessary, but also
through the holding of regular assemblies where, in company with their most
important subjects, they had issued laws, settled disputes and, crucially, dispensed
patronage. Indeed, it was the king’s ability to give rewards and distribute lands
which persuaded men to travel long distances to attend these gatherings: the gravi-
tational pull exerted by the royal court was very strong, so cooperating with the
king and following his lead made good political and financial sense. But if the
king had nothing to give, the main reason for attending assemblies and working
with him disappeared, and if there were no assemblies, the king lost control over
his leading subjects. So Charles the Simple’s greatest problem, aside from a lack
of evident talent, was a shortage of land of his own and therefore a critical dearth
of resources with which to attract supporters and bind powerful men to the royal
cause. The royal principality was a small, ill-defined area centred on Paris and
Orléans, and even within it the king’s control was far from complete. And when
he did acquire more land (Lotharingia became part of the West Frankish realm
again when Conrad of Franconia became king of the East Franks in 911, giving
Charles some much-needed wealth and prestige) he also acquired some unpopular
Lotharingian advisers. Opposition from his more powerful magnates and eventual
deposition in 922 were the results. Charles’s successor Robert died in battle in
923, and his son-in-law Duke Rudolf of Burgundy was crowned king in his place.
Rudolf managed to hold on to the throne until he died in 936. He had to cede
control of Lotharingia to his East Frankish counterpart Henry I in 925–6, and
after several more diplomatic and military interventions in West Francia by Henry,
Rudolf accepted his status as his more powerful neighbour’s ‘friend’ or subordinate
ally. In other ways, however, he bolstered the position of the crown by winning
significant victories against viking armies in 925 and 926. Rudolf also campaigned
in the south of his kingdom and gradually secured the acceptance of all the major
princes on that side of the Loire. By the end of his reign, indeed, the kingdom was
at peace and Rudolf was popular: had his son Louis not predeceased him, the his-
tory of West Francia might have taken a decidedly different course.
By the 930s, thanks in no small part to King Rudolf, the threat posed to West
Francia by the vikings had more or less gone. This should have helped the new king,
the young Carolingian Louis IV ‘d’Outremer’, but unfortunately for him the threat
of foreign invasion was soon replaced by the danger of internal conflict. Louis was
Charles the Simple’s son and had been in exile in England since his father’s deposi-
tion. He was recalled to become king even though Hugh the Great, the son of King
Robert, was undoubtedly the most powerful individual in the kingdom. In fact, it
was Hugh’s idea to bring Louis back from England, and initially he acted as the new
king’s guardian, received the title Duke of the Franks in 936 and married Hadwig,
the sister of the East Frankish king, Otto I, in 938. King Louis, meanwhile, for
all his Carolingian pedigree, still had little land or power of his own, and his reign
was marked by constantly shifting alliances between him, Hugh, Otto I and other
great West Frankish nobles. For example, in 939 Duke G ilbert of Lotharingia,
whose duchy had reverted to East Frankish rule once again in the mid-920s, joined
a rebellion against Otto I that had been engineered by Duke Henry of Bavaria.
To strengthen the anti-Ottonian cause, and in return for King Louis’s support,
Gilbert offered to reincorporate his duchy into the West Frankish kingdom. Louis
agreed, but at the cost of antagonising Hugh the Great, who rallied to the side of
his Ottonian brother-in-law. After Otto defeated his opponents (Duke Gilbert was
drowned while crossing a river), Louis married Gilbert’s widow, Gerberga, also a
sister of Otto I, and by 942 Louis had renounced his claims to Lotharingia in the
interest of peace with his new, much more powerful, brother-in-law.
Louis’s problems within West Francia continued, however. Hugh the Great was
now his principal adversary. In 945, Louis tried to intervene in the succession to
Normandy after the murder of its ruler William Longsword in 942, but this back-
fired. Louis was captured by the supporters of William’s son, Richard, and handed
over to Hugh who imprisoned the king. This prompted an outraged response from
the other rulers of Western Europe; Louis was released, but a compromise was not
reached until 953 when Hugh unreservedly accepted Louis as both his king and
his lord. A repetition of the events of 922 had only just been averted, but at least
when Louis died as a result of a hunting accident in 954, he was replaced as king
by his 13-year-old son, Lothar IV (954–86), a male heir with both Carolingian and
Ottonian blood in his veins. Hugh the Great was of Carolingian descent on his
mother’s side, and both his uncle and his father had been kings of the West Franks.
He was persuaded to accept Lothar’s accession when Burgundy and Aquitaine
were given to him by the new king. This deal was probably negotiated by Lothar’s
mother, Gerberga, who acted as her son’s regent for several years; meanwhile wider
East Frankish influence on the western realm was exercised by Gerberga’s brother,
Archbishop Brun of Cologne, who had been put in charge of Lotharingia by Otto
I in 953. More than once Brun led Lotharingian troops into West Francia to sup-
port Lothar and bolster his regime.
When Hugh the Great died in 956, his lands were divided. His 11-year-old
eldest son, Hugh, later known as ‘Capet’, took the northern French lands, and his
second son took Burgundy. This gave King Lothar some breathing space, but the
pattern of unstable alliances which had characterised the previous reign continued
in this one. Lothar’s attempts to expand his own lands by invading Lotharingia
Power 39
brought him into conflict with his cousin Otto II. Archbishop Brun of Cologne
had died in 965, and East Frankish dominance in the region was no longer unchal-
lengeable. Lothar attacked and sacked Aachen in 978, and, in a striking exam-
ple of rare kingdom-wide solidarity, Otto’s retaliatory attack on Paris was seen
off by a royal army supplemented by Capetian, Angevin and Burgundian troops.
Meanwhile, however, opposition to Lothar was growing in West Francia, not least
from Hugh Capet who was now out of his minority. Lotharingia was the focus of
antagonism once again. Lothar was as keen as ever to add it to his kingdom, but
Hugh was mindful of his nephew’s claims to Upper Lotharingia (the latter was the
son of Hugh’s sister, Beatrice, widow of Duke Frederick who had died in 978). In
985, Lothar’s supporters besieged and captured the town of Verdun, along with the
young duke who was sheltering there. Despite the growing tension between the
king and Hugh Capet, however, Lothar was doing well and promising to achieve
even more when he fell ill and died in March 986.
Lothar’s son Louis V succeeded smoothly – he had already been crowned king
in 979 when only 13, the first West Frankish monarch to be designated as his heir
in this way by a ruling king. However, he only survived until 987 when, like his
predecessor Louis IV, he was killed while out hunting. Thereupon a council of
West Frankish magnates, advised by Archbishop Adalbero of Reims, rejected the
claim to the throne of Charles of Lotharingia, Lothar IV’s brother, and elected
Hugh Capet as king instead, thus bringing the Carolingian line in West Francia to
an end. Hugh was the grandson of a king (Robert I) and the son of an Ottonian
princess; his brother was the Duke of Burgundy, his brother-in-law was the Duke
of Aquitaine, and he was a firm ally of the Duke of Normandy. He was crowned
king in July 987.
Hugh Capet was the fourth Robertine to be king, but he gave his name to a
dynasty, the Capetians, which lasted in the direct line until 1328, and thereafter
in subsidiary branches until 1792. His reign is a poorly documented one. Only a
dozen or so indisputably genuine royal charters survive, and the narrative sources
are patchy at best. His first task was to secure his dynasty against the claims of
Charles of Lotharingia, the surviving Carolingian claimant, who was the uncle of
Louis V and brother of King Lothar. Hugh moved quickly at Christmas 987 to
have his eldest son, Robert, crowned joint king. Then Robert married Rozala,
daughter of former King Berengar of Lombardy and widow of Arnulf II, Count
of Flanders. It was clear that Hugh intended his successors to stay in power, and
this compelled Charles to defy him and fight for the kingship. Charles seized Laon
and also got his hands on Reims when the archbishop, Arnulf, who had only just
been given the position by King Hugh, sided with him. However, Charles’s resist-
ance eventually came to an end in 991 when further treachery, this time from the
archbishop of Laon who had previously sworn allegiance to Charles, led to the
latter’s capture and imprisonment. Charles died in about 993: he had considerable
ability and arguably a stronger hereditary claim to the kingdom of the West Franks
than Hugh Capet, but in the end these qualifications were not enough to secure
him victory in a ferociously competitive fight for the throne.
Hugh had seen off the challenge of Charles of Lotharingia and had secured con-
trol of the Carolingian royal demesne around Reims and Laon. Nevertheless, the
monarchy’s landed base, and therefore its available resources, remained cripplingly
limited. The territorial axis of royal power still ran down a line approximately
120 kilometres long between Paris on the River Seine and Orléans on the River
Loire. Hugh could collect rents and profits from lands, tolls on trade and the work-
ing of the courts from within the lands he controlled directly (his demesne), and he
also had the right as king to appoint bishops across a wider area of northern France.
The royal principality extended beyond the king’s demesne, moreover, and across
it the king claimed a general authority, although this was often resisted and frus-
trated by stubborn local lords and castellans. Meanwhile across the rest of northern
France, royal authority remained feeble, and Hugh lacked the material resources
required to build up a substantial political following: he had nothing to offer and
little to spend. The Dukes of Normandy and Flanders (Richard II and Baldwin
IV) were generally well-disposed towards him, but there were counterbalancing
developments in the growing power of the counts of Anjou (Fulk Nerra) and Blois
(Odo I). It was Odo, in fact, who proved to be Hugh’s other main adversary, and
when he rebelled in 993, the king relied on Fulk Nerra to deal with the situation.
Fulk was successful, but by allowing him to enhance his own power and prospects
in the process, Hugh had contributed to the creation of another threat to Capetian
security. Meanwhile, south of the Loire, Hugh had no influence to speak of. He
had married Adelaide of Poitou, the daughter of Count William III, in the late
960s, but this had little discernible impact in Aquitaine. Nor did Hugh respond to
the Count of Barcelona’s request for military assistance against his Muslim oppo-
nents in 987. The long-term consequence of this to the French kingdom may have
been the loss of Catalonia.
Historians typically suggest that, as king, Hugh Capet did little more than sur-
vive. There is much truth in this, but survival was no mean feat given the unsettled
and fractious nature of West Frankish politics at the turn of the tenth century. What
is more, Hugh was succeeded smoothly by his son, Robert, which perhaps suggests
that the new regime had established at least some sense of increased stability. The
nickname bestowed on Robert by a sycophantic biographer, ‘the Pious’, seems to
have been undeserved, and the king’s marriages show him in a less flattering light.
He quickly divorced Rozala and married Bertha of Burgundy when her husband,
Count Odo I of Blois, died in 996. This was frowned on by the Church – the cou-
ple were too closely related for canonical comfort. What is more, the political aim
of the marriage was only partly achieved as Robert’s better relations with Blois only
halted the growth of Angevin power temporarily. In about 1003 or 1004, the royal
marriage was dissolved on the grounds of consanguinity (it was just as significant
that Bertha had produced no children) and Robert married Constance, daughter of
the Count of Arles and Adela of Anjou. A connection with the Angevins through
marriage was probably what attracted Robert to this match – Constance was a
cousin of Fulk Nerra – but her arrival at court was divisive, and factions developed
around her and her discarded predecessor. King Robert himself seems soon to
Power 41
have lost interest in his new wife and turned back towards Bertha; inevitably this
provoked an Angevin response when, in 1008, Count Fulk arranged the murder
of one of the king’s favourites. In the end, although he tried unsuccessfully to
separate from her in 1010, Robert and Constance stayed married for the rest of his
reign. Indeed, they had six children in all, and although Constance was explicitly
condemned at the time by some who saw her as a foreign interloper responsible for
introducing scandalous southern habits and immoral southern followers into the
northern royal court, and although she has typically been seen ever since as unscru-
pulous and ruthless, it is clear that she was an able and resilient politician. ‘Because
of a woman’s counsel the state is neglected and groans’, complained the Burgun-
dian monk and chronicler Ralph Glaber at the time, but Constance successfully
negotiated her early years of marriage to Robert and withstood his attempts to
repudiate her, and by the 1020s she was strong enough to exercise considerable
influence over the royal succession. Her English contemporary, Queen Emma, has
tended to attract more attention from historians than Constance, but in their deter-
mination to protect themselves and pursue what they saw as their own dynastic
interests, the two women had much in common.
Meanwhile, Count Odo II of Blois (Bertha’s son by her first marriage) remained
hostile to the king. He and Robert fought a largely fruitless five-year war between
1022 and 1027 which ended in a negotiated stalemate. Robert’s biggest success,
by contrast, came when he took control of the duchy of Burgundy following the
death of Duke Henry (Robert’s uncle, the brother of Hugh Capet) in 1002. The
king ruled Burgundy personally until about 1006 when, after detaching Auxerre
from the duchy and adding it to the royal demesne, he installed his second son,
Henry, as duke. Henry then became Robert’s heir in 1027 when Hugh, the king’s
eldest son by Constance, died. Henry was quickly crowned, but despite this asser-
tive clarification of the king’s plans, Constance favoured the succession of her third
son, Robert. The early years of the next reign would be dominated by this strug-
gle between Constance and her sons, and in 1032 Henry was forced to surrender
Burgundy to Robert, probably as the price for being accepted by Robert as king.
The events of 922–3, 945 and 986–7 had brought the future of the West Frank-
ish monarchy into question. By the 1030s, the situation had steadied, although
tensions within the ruling family retained the potential to jeopardise its chances
of long-term survival, and the kings were grateful for those persistent rivalries
between territorial princes which distracted them from preying more on the royal
principality. But the first two Capetian kings had salvaged an unpromising situation
and, without actually increasing their authority in very significant ways, had firmly
established their dynasty on the West Frankish throne. They had also reinforced
their relationship with the Church. The kings owed their unique status to the cler-
gymen who crowned and consecrated them. The oil used to anoint them reputedly
came from a flask brought from Heaven by a dove for the coronation of Clovis, the
unifier of the Frankish tribes, in the late fifth century, and the flask was believed
miraculously to refill for every subsequent consecration. Robert II’s biographer,
writing shortly after the king’s death in the early 1030s, also credited him with the
power to heal scrofula by touch. Such miraculous abilities, along with their ances-
tral links to Charlemagne, gave the West Frankish kings an ancient pedigree and a
unique charisma which helped compensate to some degree for their lack of signifi-
cant hard power in the form of extensive lands, large armies or robust institutions.
There were more practical aspects to the kings’ relationship with the Church, too.
The kings claimed the right to appoint bishoprics and abbeys within their prin-
cipality, but also in certain areas outside it. In 987, with Hugh Capet’s accession,
these royal powers were extended over the churches previously in the Robertine
lands so that the archbishopric of Tours, the bishoprics of Paris and Orléans and the
abbeys of St Martin of Tours, Fleury and St Denis came into the kings’ orbit. The
king also relied on their bishops to help them govern. Bishops could be granted
the same kinds of powers and rights as secular princes by the kings, and by 1031,
Reims, Laon, Beauvais and Paris were just the most significant dioceses to which
such authority was devolved. Along with other royal dioceses, such as Chalons,
Noyon, Langres and Auxerre, they gave ideological support to the monarchy, but
they also reinforced royal authority in these areas and together formed a defensive
ring around the royal principality which helped keep greedy neighbouring princes
at arm’s length.
...
Whilst the kings of West Francia struggled to maintain their standing and their
power during this period, the territorial principalities which covered the bulk of
their kingdom remained in effect autonomous. The origins of these political units
are often obscured by myth and legend, but there is no doubt that the tenth century
was a formative one in the histories of Flanders, Normandy, Anjou, Blois-Chartres-
Tours, Brittany, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Gascony and Toulouse. Relentless violence
lay at the heart of these developments, although the ruthless men who won the
competition for regional power and succeeded in turning themselves from local
warlords into rulers of international significance were more than just brutal thugs.
In Flanders, the story in broad terms was one of territorial expansion and the
accumulation of enormous landed wealth, mostly at the expense of the church,
by a series of ambitious and long-lived rulers. Building on the foundations laid
by Count Baldwin I (d.879), his son Baldwin II Iron Arm (879–918) and his
successors Arnulf I (918–65) and Baldwin IV the Bearded (989–1037) increased
the size of their principality to the north, south and west. The only interruption
to this process came towards the end of the reign of Arnulf I when his son and
heir Baldwin III died in 962. Baldwin’s position as heir was assumed by his infant
brother, who became Count Arnulf II, but only after Arnulf I had tried to protect
his position by swearing fealty to King Lothar and placing the county under royal
protection.
What came to be known as the duchy of Normandy did not exist before 900,
but during the tenth century this formidable political unit was founded, estab-
lished, threatened with destruction, consolidated and expanded greatly in size; in
Power 43
that time, too, its rulers developed from pagan Scandinavian pirates into Christian
French warriors. The main narrative account of these developments is the Historia
Normannorum by the monk Dudo of St Quentin. This work was commissioned by
the Norman dukes themselves sometime during the first quarter of the eleventh
century, so its account of the smooth progress towards ducal domination and cen-
tralised statehood must be treated cautiously. The power of the Norman dukes in the
tenth and early eleventh centuries may have been more contested and contingent
upon good relations with the Norman aristocracy than Dudo allows. Nevertheless,
a broad outline of Norman history during this period is still discernible. Normandy
grew out of a series of grants and seizures of land made to and by the successors
of viking raiders who had been harassing the Seine valley since the middle of the
800s. The first of these grants, and the most famous, was probably made in 911 by
King Charles the Simple to a viking warlord called Rollo, although later Norman
accounts of this deal, the so-called Treaty of Saint-Claire-sur-Epte, may give it a
formality and a significance it lacked at the time. Nevertheless, the lands acquired
one way or another by Rollo and his successor William I Longsword (c.927–42)
formed the foundation of what eventually became the duchy of Normandy. The
period until about 960 was characterised by heavy Scandinavian migration and
hostile Frankish intervention, but also by the successes of the rulers of Normandy
in establishing control over their lands and by the recovery of some sections of
the Church. During this period, however, there also appears to have been almost
continual and indiscriminate fighting between the Normans, their neighbours and
the West Frankish kings, and the early expansion of the duchy was abruptly halted
in 942 when William Longsword was assassinated on the orders of the Count of
Flanders. William was succeeded by his young son Richard. He ruled until 996
after overcoming the opposition to him and securing his inheritance.
By the start of the eleventh century, the duchy of Normandy was almost fully
formed. The reign of Duke Richard II (996–1026) was a period of relative stability
and consolidation. Richard was loyal to King Robert II and accompanied him on
campaigns in Burgundy and Flanders; the duke’s eldest son, also called Richard,
married the king’s daughter Adela. Richard II’s sister Hawise married count Geof-
frey of Rennes in 996, while Richard’s own first wife was Geoffrey’s sister Judith.
This double match paved the way for Norman claims to lordship over Brittany.
Another of Richard’s sisters, Matilda, married Odo II, Count of Blois-Chartres,
while a third, Emma, the widow of King Aethelred II, married her late husband’s
Danish successor, Cnut. The duke’s kinsmen were placed in control of castles on
Normandy’s southern frontier, and their knights helped keep the peace. The Nor-
man church pulled in the same direction: Robert’s brother was the archbishop of
Rouen, and his cousin was bishop of Bayeux.
As Rouen developed into an increasingly significant commercial centre, Nor-
mandy retained its economic and political connections with Scandinavia, but at
the same time the province became more and more assimilated into its Frankish
environment. By the early eleventh century, the Scandinavian language had largely
disappeared from the duchy, and Normandy’s government, laws, social structure
and Church conformed to essentially Frankish, and ultimately Carolingian, mod-

els. Ducal authority was increased by other means, too. Like his father, William
Longsword, Richard I minted his own coins, and a money economy developed
within his lands and inevitably increased Richard’s own wealth. He also set about
restoring the standing and reputation of the Church within his lands, which
had been devastated by the viking raids. The old bishoprics of the archdiocese
of Rouen, which had faded into obscurity by the end of the ninth century, re-
emerged, and new monasteries were established at Mont St Michel and Fécamp.
By the early 1000s, the Norman church was probably the most admired in north-
western Europe. None of this guaranteed peace, of course. When Richard II died
in 1026, he was succeeded as duke by his eldest son, Richard III. The new duke’s
younger brother, Robert, rebelled, and although he was defeated, Duke Richard
was dead before the end of 1027, poisoned according to some. Robert took his
place. By then, Normandy was well on the way to becoming a fully-formed, well-
organised territorial principality.
By 929, Fulk the Red was calling himself ‘Count of Anjou’. His origins are
obscure, but he appears to have been a protégé of the Robertines and remained
under their influence until his death in 942. Thereafter, his successors, princi-
pally Geoffrey Grisegonelle (960–87) and Fulk Nerra (987–1040), broke free of
Robertine power, and from their base at Angers on the river Loire, they vastly
extended the territories under their own control to take in Maine and Touraine
as well. The growing strength of the counts of Anjou did not go unchallenged,
however. Their great rivals during this period, to the east of Touraine, were the
rulers of Blois-Chartres-Tours. As obscure as Fulk the Red as far as his background
is concerned, Theobald le Tricheur (d.975) was calling himself ‘Count of Blois’ by
about 940. He was probably also promoted by the Robertines, who sought to use
these two families to protect the frontiers of their powerbase in the north, south
and west. Theobald took control of Chartres in about 950, while his grandson
Count Odo II the Great (996–1037) had acquired the counties of Sancerre and
Champagne by the early 1020s. The principalities established by these two fami-
lies were not as cohesive in territorial terms as Normandy or Flanders, and both
princes had followers and interests in lands where their rivals also had influence and
power. This led to intense competition and frequent conflict between Anjou and
Blois during this period. The struggle for supremacy was not settled until 1044
when Count Geoffrey Martel of Anjou (1040–60), the son of Fulk Nerra, defeated
and captured Count Theobald I of Blois (1039–89) at the battle of Nouy. Follow-
ing this, and after half a century of struggle by him and his father, Geoffrey seized
the city of Tours which Theobald’s family had held since the early 900s.
Brittany was widely seen as a kingdom in its own right during the ninth century,
an ancient political entity which the Carolingians had never assimilated into their
empire. Alan the Great styled himself ‘King of Brittany’ by the time he died in 907,
but the territory he had controlled collapsed in the face of heavy viking raids over
the next two decades. A version of this ‘state’ was reconstructed by Alan’s grandson,
Alan II, who returned from exile in England in 936, defeated the vikings by 939
Power 45
and established himself as Count of Nantes. But the lands Alan controlled were
significantly less extensive than those his grandfather had ruled, as Norman and
Angevin expansion in the east and south of previously Breton territory ate into the
old principality. Alan and his heirs also faced a challenge for local supremacy from
the counts of Rennes. This power struggle meant in turn that the tenth-century
Breton counts regularly found themselves in need of external help. They were
caught in the crossfire between the rulers of Anjou and Blois, with the counts of
Nantes usually allied with Anjou and the counts of Rennes with Blois. In 988, for
example, Guerech, Count of Nantes and a vassal of Anjou, was assassinated by the
Count of Rennes, allied with Blois. The counts of Rennes also formed an alliance
with the Normans in the mid-990s, which eventually led to a Norman regency in
1008. The counts of Nantes and Rennes continued to compete with each other for
ascendancy over Brittany until well into the eleventh century.
The duchy of Burgundy, to the south of Champagne, came into Capetian hands
in the early eleventh century. But despite this association with the royal house,
ducal power within Burgundy would steadily wane over the next hundred years.
This marked a steep decline for what had originally been part of a Carolingian sub-
kingdom. Some of this sub-kingdom became the kingdom of Burgundy (not to be
confused with the duchy), subject to imperial authority. Meanwhile the truncated
duchy of Burgundy initially prospered under Duke Richard the Justiciar (d.921),
famed in particular for his part in the great victory over the vikings at Chartres in
911, only for his heirs to become embroiled in royal intrigues and disputes over the
French throne. These gradually undermined and diluted the influence they were
able to exert beyond those areas (Autun, Nevers, Sens and Auxerre) where their
main power was concentrated.
In all of the territorial principalities north of the river Loire during this period,
the French kings continued to play some kind of role, albeit an irregular and infre-
quent one, granting or confirming titles, making grants of land or involving them-
selves in disputes. Odo II of Blois benefited greatly from his association with his
stepfather Robert the Pious at the turn of the eleventh century, for example. The
king’s determination to marry Countess Bertha of Blois led to him giving a good
deal of support to Odo in the face of Angevin aggression, although this relationship
turned sour in the 1020s. At the same time, the northern princes often played a
decisive part in determining the future of the monarchy. South of the Loire, things
were different in linguistic, legal and social terms as well as political ones, and the
principalities there developed largely without reference to the king. It is also fair
to say that most of the region was orientated much more towards the south and
east and the Mediterranean than it was towards the north and the Atlantic. At the
start of the tenth century, William the Pious (d.918) was the dominant figure in
central and eastern Aquitaine and called himself ‘Duke’. But the reign of William
III Towhead (d.963) was more significant in the formation and stabilisation of a
principality. With his power centred in Poitou, he saw off a major attack on Aqui-
taine by Hugh the Great in 954–5, after which he and his successors successfully
obtained recognition as the rightful rulers of the duchy. By the time Duke William
IV Fierebras retired to a monastery in 990, he enjoyed hegemony of some kind

from Burgundy to Gascony, and from the Loire south to Périgord. The extent of
his practical authority varied between areas, but his dynasty was secure enough to
allow his wife, Emma, to act as regent for their son William V the Great for the
next decade or so without apparent difficulty. William’s relations with the other
great counts of his duchy, La Marche and Angoulême in particular, were by no
means untroubled, but when he summoned an ecclesiastical council to Poitiers
in 1010, churchmen from across Aquitaine attended. By the time William died in
1029, his duchy was an established political presence, and its eventual shape had
been delineated.
Of all the West Frankish principalities during this period, Gascony and Toulouse
are perhaps the most obscure owing to the dearth of surviving evidence about what
happened there. The same family ruled Gascony from 836 until 1063, but prob-
ably the most successful member of this dynasty was William Sanchez (960–99).
An important moment in the history of Gascony came sometime between 977
and 988 when he succeeded his cousin as Count of Bordeaux, thus establishing
an extended principality which stretched from there to the Pyrenees. To the east,
there was much more political fragmentation and little sign of the increasingly
strong centralised control and developing political integrity evident in other prin-
cipalities. The principality of Toulouse was not a coherent whole, but a loosely
associated collection of 14 counties. The counts of Toulouse themselves con-
trolled the counties of Albi, Cahors and Rodez along with Toulouse itself, whilst
most of the rest of the principality made up the so-called march or marquisate of
Gothia, the area stretching from Narbonne to Nimes. Count Raymond III Pons of
Toulouse (924–50) asserted his authority over coastal Gothia, but what this meant
in practice is far from clear, as is what happened in this region over the next century
or so. Lesser but still powerful nobles, particularly the viscounts of Narbonne and
the Trenceval family, assumed comital powers and asserted control over the church
in their spheres of influence, making it difficult to establish strong central authority
or any degree of administrative coherence.
North and south of the Loire, the West Frankish princes became increasingly
assertive and self-confident as the tenth century turned into the eleventh. In the
north, political entities with clear territorial identities, robust administrations and
vigorous military instincts had been established by the 1020s. This did not make for
stability or peace, however, as Normandy, Anjou and Blois in particular vied with
each other for resources and pre-eminence. In the south, politics were even more
feverish, and power was much more dispersed. Nevertheless, those competing for
power there were effectively autonomous and free to battle for local supremacy as
the shortcomings of the West Frankish kings meant that there was no dominant
central power capable of keeping the peace, settling disputes or asserting universal
authority. The spread of private castles during this period has been seen as further
evidence of crumbling royal power. Most famous of all the castle-builders was
count Fulk Nerra of Anjou, who, over the course of the half century from about
980 onwards, constructed a network of castles, fortified houses and towns no more
Power 47
than a day’s march apart. These were designed to establish safe lines of supply and
communication across Anjou and to surround and isolate his enemies, but they also
served as bases for further expansion and allowed Fulk to increase the size of his
principality. However, castles were also built by ambitious local lords to confront
the power of their regional princes. By the early eleventh century, indeed, castles
were changing the landscape across West Francia, and independently minded cas-
tellans were posing a challenge to princely authority throughout the kingdom.
The princes had this in common with their king, then. Hugh Capet and Robert
II could travel around their principality, but even within their own territories, their
practical authority was constrained by local lords and castellans prepared to resist
attempts to impose direct royal control. Such shared constraints on their power
sometimes pushed the king and one of his great vassals together, usually to counter
the threat of another prince who threatened their power in some way, and their
occasional usefulness as an ally was one reason why the kings were able to survive.
Another was an abiding, if sometimes grudging, respect for the idea that law-
ful authority could not be challenged without exposing the challenger himself to
questions about his own legitimacy from his own subordinates. Even so, the kings
had little if any power to summon their leading subjects to their court, and old-
style Carolingian assemblies, which were used so effectively by the kings of tenth-
century England to assert and enforce royal control over their great men, were
rare in West Francia during the same period. Even at the emergency assemblies
summoned to elect Robert I, Rudolf and Hugh Capet, there were many absentees
whose allegiances had to be secured later by the new kings. The English kings of
this period had extensive lands of their own to draw on when distributing patron-
age, so their assemblies acted like magnets drawing the elite to the political centre.
Their West Frankish counterparts, by contrast, had nothing material to offer and
nothing with which to compel attendance, so there was no reason to seek the kings
out or worry about the consequences of losing touch with them. The dwindling
number of royal charters issued during the tenth century and the ever-smaller area
from which requests for charters came reinforce the sense that the West Frankish
kings’ political isolation increased as time went on. And the same goes for the royal
coinage which, by the time Hugh Capet became king, was just one of several cir-
culating currencies in the kingdom, whereas under Charles the Simple, all coins
had been issued in the king’s name. South of the Loire in particular, kingship had
simply ceased to exist as a meaningful element of political life by the early 1000s.
Even so, the West Frankish monarchy survived, and there is no evidence to sug-
gest that the princes ever contemplated doing away with it. Quite the opposite, in
fact, as there are plenty of examples of continuing esteem for at least the idea and
prestige, if not the active fact, of royal authority. Even feeble kings had their uses
and could be asked to give a sheen of royal endorsement by confirming princely
acquisitions of territory, approving princely marriages and acting as princely allies.
The kings’ relations with the Church were mutually reinforcing, too, and served
to maintain the special mystique and aura of the monarchy. So whatever its weak-
nesses and failings during this period, West Frankish kingship remained prestigious,
and the kings retained a fundamental authority that their domestic rivals could
not match – an authority, moreover, which those rivals needed to draw on as the
definitive source of their own legitimacy.
Britain and Ireland: Kingdoms and Peoples

At the end of the ninth century, Britain and Ireland (or the North Atlantic archi-
pelago, as some historians now call the region) contained many different kings and
many different peoples. There was a wide variety of religious beliefs, languages,
cultures and political systems, too. Southern and eastern Britain, where the bulk of
the population lived, were more fertile and wealthier than the north and west, and
largely because of this rulers in the south tended to be more powerful and success-
ful than those in other parts of the two islands. By 900, however, all the rulers and
peoples of Britain and Ireland had their experiences at the hands of the vikings in
common. For over a hundred years, these Scandinavian raiders had ravaged their
way around the British and Irish coastlines and in some areas, most notably in parts
of eastern and northern England, the far north and west of Scotland and the west
of Ireland, they had started to settle and farm the land. On one level, therefore, the
story of Britain and Ireland in the tenth century is about how the established pow-
ers and peoples of the region adapted to this changed environment and responded
to the viking challenge. In the process, kingdoms rose (in England and Scotland)
and fell (in viking Dublin and York), whilst in Wales and Ireland powerful indi-
viduals emerged to strive for more than just local power. Alongside these political
developments, moreover, forged in conflict and tempered by developing ideolo-
gies of royal rule, notions of what it meant to be English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish
continued to evolve.
The kingdom of England did not exist in 900, although the notion of a single
English people (gens Anglorum in Latin) united by a common language and a shared
Christianity had existed at least since the eighth century when the Northumbrian
monk and historian Bede had used the phrase in his Ecclesiastical History of the Eng-
lish People, the great work that described the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to
Christianity. The kingdom’s creation by the last quarter of the tenth century was
one of the most remarkable pieces of state-building in medieval Europe. How-
ever, the process was far from smooth, and the eventual outcome was anything
but predictable. At various points England could have been permanently divided
between different members of the same ruling family or between English rulers in
some parts and viking ones in others. How it became something close to a unified
kingdom within only three or four generations, therefore, one with established
structures of government, a system of national taxation and a sophisticated coinage,
cries out for explanation. There are plenty of sources – chronicles, charters, coins
and legal codes all exist in abundance. However, they have to be used with care
and their limitations recognised. They might tell us that something happened, but
not really why it did, and when it comes to the official products of government
(the charters, coins and codes), it is often hard to know where objectivity ends and
Power 49
propaganda begins. In other words, the available evidence raises as many questions
as it answers about the formation and nature of the new English kingdom.
When Alfred the Great (871–99) died, the land that would become the king-
dom of England was still traumatised after more than 50 years of conflict with the
vikings. As recently as the mid-860s, England had been divided into four separate,
stable kingdoms – Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia and Wessex. But in the space
of only seven years between 867 and 874, the first three of these had been con-
quered by viking invaders. There seemed every chance that Wessex would also fall
to the Danes, as English contemporaries liked to call all Scandinavian raiders, but
under its king, Alfred, it survived three invasions in the 870s, a period of intense,
relentless warfare which culminated in Alfred’s great victory over the vikings at
Edington in 878. From that point on, Alfred was able to rebuild and strengthen
his kingdom against future attacks, and by the time of his death he had not only
held on to Wessex, but he had extended his authority into what historians refer
to as English Mercia. This area covered roughly the territory below a line drawn
between the south-east and north-west corners of the old kingdom of Mercia; it
included London, and it was governed by Aethelred, who submitted to Alfred in
the 880s and married his daughter, Aethelflaed. Its incorporation into their sphere
of influence by the rulers of Wessex seems to have given rise to a new political
entity in southern England, one which those close to Alfred called ‘the kingdom
of the Anglo-Saxons’. It was also Alfred and his court circle who coined the term
Angelcynne (literally ‘English-kin’ and essentially a vernacular version of Bede’s gens
Anglorum) to describe the people over whom the West Saxon dynasty claimed
authority.
It is tempting to see Alfred of Wessex as the king who began a process which
led inevitably to the creation of a single, unified kingdom of England. However, at
the start of the tenth century, there was no guarantee that the problems Alfred faced
had gone away. He was succeeded as king of the Anglo-Saxons by his son Edward
‘the Elder’, but Edward’s first task was to overcome a revolt by his cousin Aethel-
wold, the son of Aethelred I (865–71), who had ruled Wessex before his brother
Alfred had succeeded him. Conflict within the ruling family had the potential to
undermine what Alfred had subsequently achieved, and it was only after Aethel-
wold had been defeated and killed in battle late in 902 that Edward could feel
secure. Little is known of the events of the next few years, but in 909 conflict with
the vikings resumed, and in the following year a joint Mercian-West Saxon force
defeated Northumbrian Danes at Tettenhall in Staffordshire. This was an impor-
tant moment and seems to have encouraged Edward to take the military initiative.
Between 910 and 918, through a combination of aggressive campaigning and sys-
tematic fortress-building, Edward and his sister Aethelflaed obtained the submis-
sion of Danish Mercia (the other half of the old kingdom of Mercia) and East
Anglia. Edward and Aethelflaed formed a remarkable partnership, and it is clear,
despite the attempts of some contemporary sources to minimise her contribution,
that Aethelflaed was as active and successful as her brother in the areas she set out
to conquer. Her campaigns are recorded in the Mercian Register, which is preserved
within some texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and was probably compiled by
someone close to her court. Following the death of her husband Aethelred in 911,
Aethelflaed replaced him as ruler of English Mercia, and as ‘lady of the Mercians’
took the initiative in extending her control over that region and beyond through
a combination of military campaigning, fortress building and diplomacy. Few if
any royal women in tenth-century Western Europe acted on the public stage more
independently and effectively than Aethelflaed, and it is abundantly clear that the
successes of the West Saxon dynasty during this period were owed at least as much
to her as they were to her brother Edward. Even so, despite the signs that Edward
and Aethelflaed collaborated politically and coordinated their military activity, the
precise nature of the relationship between Wessex and Mercia during this period is
hard to define. If Edward regarded Mercia (English and Danish) as part of his king-
dom, one which Aethelred, who died in 911, and then Aethelflaed ruled on his
authority, the Mercians themselves clearly saw things differently and held on to the
idea that they could still have their own independent kingdom under Aethelflaed
and her descendants. Either way, whether in a coup or as its legitimate overlord,
Edward seized control of Mercia personally following Aethelflaed’s death in 918,
taking care in the process to have her daughter and potential successor Aelfwyn
removed into Wessex. By the time Edward himself died in 924, Mercia had been
fully subsumed within the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons, which now extended as
far as the Humber estuary.
The lands beyond the Humber remained under viking control for the time
being. The two most important individuals in this context were Ragnall and
Sihtric. They were probably brothers, but they were certainly grandsons of Ivarr
the Boneless, one of the viking leaders against whom King Alfred had fought in
the 870s. Having been expelled from Norse-controlled Dublin in 902, for the next
dozen years or so they had various adventures in Scotland, northern England and
back in Ireland, but it was in the 910s that their campaigns began to have a signifi-
cant political and military impact. In 918 Ragnall sailed north to the river Tyne and
seized the lands of Ealdred, the ruler of Bamburgh. Forced to flee, Ealdred joined
forces with his northern neighbour Constantine, the king of Scots, and returned to
confront Ragnall, only to be defeated by him in battle at Corbridge. Ragnall now
felt strong enough to take power in York early in 919, the same year his brother
Sihtric recaptured Dublin. Sihtric then followed this up with an attack on north-
western Mercia in 920, getting as far as Davenport in Cheshire. It is within this
context of the rise to power of Ragnall and Sihtric in York and Dublin that other
important events in 920 should be placed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the principal
narrative source for English history before 1066, records that in that year, King
Edward was met by Constantine and Ragnall in the Peak District; with them were
other leading men of the north and ‘all who live in Northumbria, both English and
Danish, Norsemen and others, and also the king of the Strathclyde Welsh and all
the Strathclyde Welsh, chose him as father and lord’. This sounds like a definitive
series of submissions by the rulers of Britain to a dominant southern king. But such
an emphasis may have been deliberately misleading. Rather than an acceptance of
Power 51
Edward’s superiority, this meeting perhaps amounted more to a declaration of a

general truce between all those who took part – an attempt to stop events getting
out of control and to prevent Sihtric’s raid of 920 becoming the first of many. To
be sure, Edward seems to have been perfectly content to permit Ragnall to wield
power over Northumbria from his base at York until his death in late 920 or early
921, and to allow Sihtric to succeed him.
Lingering tensions between Wessex and Mercia resurfaced following Edward’s
death in 924. Aethelstan, his eldest son by his first wife, was installed as ruler in
Mercia, whilst Aelfweard, his son by his second marriage, was accepted as king
of Wessex. Whether there was a plan to divide Edward’s kingdom in this way is
unclear, but if there was, it was quickly frustrated by Aelfweard’s death only two
weeks after his father’s. Aethelstan was eventually recognised as king in Wessex,
too, and the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons was revived. It was soon expanding
into something different again, however. In 926, Aethelstan made an alliance with
the northern king Sihtric and married his sister to him. Then, when Sihtric died
in 927, Aethelstan entered Northumbria, and at Eamont near Penrith in July, the
king of Scots, the ruler of Strathclyde, two Welsh princes and the lord of Bamburgh
made peace with the English king and accepted his overlordship. Aethelstan fol-
lowed this up with a trip to Hereford, where he compelled the Welsh princes to
submit to him once again, imposed a huge annual tribute and set his frontier with
Wales at the river Wye. He then travelled further south-west, refortified Exeter and
fixed the limit of Cornish territory at the river Tamar. Submissions like those at
Eamont and Hereford had taken place before, most notably in 920, but the events
of 927 were more profoundly significant. In 920, there was no suggestion that King
Edward would exercise any practical authority over territory north of the Humber.
After 927, by contrast, it is clear that Aethelstan regarded Northumbria as part of
his kingdom, and a southern king was intending to rule the north directly for the
first time. At the same time, using force or at least the threat of it, he had taken
active and assertive steps to define his frontiers with the Welsh and the Cornish,
whom he had confined to the extreme south-west corner of Britain. It is almost
certainly no coincidence that from this point on, according to his charters and
coins, Aethelstan was no longer regarded just as king of the Anglo-Saxons but as
Rex Anglorum (‘King of the English’) and even Rex totius Britanniae (‘King of the
whole of Britain’). Even so, Aethelstan’s supremacy was not unchallenged, and his
grip on the north remained weak. In 934, he led an army and a fleet into Scotland,
probably as a punitive exercise of some kind, and in 937, he defeated a coalition of
Scots, led by their king Constantine, and the vikings of Dublin led by their king
Olaf Guthfrithson, at the battle of Brunanburh. The record of this encounter in
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the form of a specially composed poem, has contrib-
uted to its reputation as one of the most significant battles of English history, and
60 years later the chronicler Aethelweard remarked how it was ‘still called the great
battle by the common people’. Important though it was, however, Aethelstan’s vic-
tory at Brunanburh did not secure southern control of northern England for good
or even for very long. Events in the north over the next 15 years were confused
and unpredictable. Aethelstan’s kingdom could easily have ended up in pieces, but
in the end it somehow survived.
Aethelstan never married and left no direct heirs. It is impossible to know for
sure why this was the case. Perhaps he was not attracted to women, or he may have
chosen chastity for religious reasons; alternatively, his decisions in this regard may
also have been made as part of a succession strategy. Aethelstan’s own accession in
Wessex had been controversial, and the leading men may have accepted him then
because he agreed not to try and pass the throne on to children of his own. Aethel-
stan’s successor was his half-brother Edmund (939–46), and this may have been
the plan all along. King Edmund had to stand by and watch as the vikings of York
reasserted themselves under their now restored king Olaf Guthfrithson. By the end
of 940, the kingdom of York had been recreated; Northumbria had been lost as
well as Mercia north of Watling Street. Edmund fought back on Olaf ’s death in
941, however, and reconquered Mercia in 942 and Northumbria in 944. Not long
after this, Edmund was killed in a brawl, and although he had two sons, neither
was old enough to succeed him, and his brother Eadred (946–55) became king.
Once again, the most significant events of Eadred’s reign took place in York. Eric
Bloodaxe became king of York in 947 and again in 952, but power struggles within
the kingdom led ultimately to his expulsion and murder in 954.
With Eric’s death, the viking kingdom of York finally came to an end, and
Eadred, apparently unopposed, took control of it. Eadred died in 955, and much
about the reign of his successor, his nephew Eadwig (955–9), the eldest son of King
Edmund, is obscure. Surviving accounts depict Eadwig as a foolish wastrel with no
talent for ruling. But his numerous surviving charters at least hint at an energetic
ruler, and the dominant narrative source, a one-sided biography of the archbishop of
Canterbury, Dunstan who was exiled during Eadwig’s reign, is hostile to the king.
In 957, however, Eadwig’s younger brother Edgar became king of the Mercians.
Contemporary and near-contemporary opinions differed greatly over whether this
was Eadred’s idea, a result of an agreement between the brothers, or a coup by Edgar
which could have led to civil war. Eadwig appears to have retained overall authority,
however; in his charters he was still rex Anglorum, and coins were issued in his name
on both sides of the Thames until his death. Whatever the truth was, the possibility
of a divided English kingdom had rematerialised, and it is important to remember
that those involved in such events, like those involved in 918 and 924, may not nec-
essarily have seen English unity as something to be achieved for its own sake.
Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria were once again brought together by Edgar
(959–75), following Eadwig’s death in 959. Edgar is commonly regarded as one
of the most successful Anglo-Saxon kings: his reign was reasonably long, and the
peace which prevailed throughout it provides a stark contrast with the violent
events of the 940s and 950s and with the tumultuous reign of his son, Aethelred
II. Having said that, there is relatively little evidence with which to assess Edgar’s
achievements. His charters and law codes are revealing only up to a point, and the
narrative record is thin. Edgar was closely associated with the cause of monastic
reform, but it is hard to know just how actively involved he was in the movement;
Power 53
his famous reform of the coinage in about 973 may in the end have turned out
to be much more significant than he originally intended it to be. Even the most
famous recorded event of his reign is difficult to interpret. On 11 May 973, the
feast of Pentecost, Edgar was consecrated king at Bath. This may have been his
second consecration (following an unrecorded one at the start of the reign) and
the first stage of a symbolic declaration by Edgar of authority over the whole of
Britain. The second stage followed immediately after the rituals at Bath when the
king sailed with a large fleet around Wales to Chester. Versions of what happen
there differ in detail, but two texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described how ‘six
kings came to meet him, and all gave him pledges that they would be his allies
on sea and on land’. Amongst these ‘kings’ were Kenneth II of Scots, Malcolm of
Strathclyde, the ruler of Man and the Isles and two princes of north Wales. Then,
according to later sources, once they had made their pledges to Edgar, they all pro-
ceeded to get on board a boat and row along the Dee, with Edgar at the helm. King
Kenneth’s reward may have been an acknowledgement of his control over Lothian
by Edgar (this is recorded, but undated, in an early twelfth-century source), but if
it was, it only added to the overall impression of the English king’s dominance over
his British rivals. To be sure, the English sources had a vested interest in portray-
ing Edgar in this way. Nevertheless, something significant certainly happened at
Chester in 973. At the very least, it was a summit meeting arranged to delineate
the spheres of influence of the rulers involved, but it is also realistic to see it as a
ceremonial assertion of overlordship by the most powerful ruler in Britain.
But even Edgar’s supremacy was threatened after his death, first by factional
infighting and then by renewed viking attacks. Like Edward the Elder in 924,
Edgar left sons from different wives when he died in 975. Both were young: the
eldest, Edward, was probably 15 or 16, whilst the younger, Aethelred, was no more
than 9 or 10. Different groups at court vied with each other for control of the two
princes, and although Edward was installed as king and soon enjoyed the support of
a broad cross-section of the English elite, tensions within the ruling elite did not go
away. Edward was eventually murdered by supporters of Aethelred in 978. Aethel-
red’s mother, Aelfthryth, has often been seen as the prime mover behind Edward’s
murder. Stereotypes of evil stepmothers notwithstanding, she had certainly wanted
her own son to succeed Edgar in 975, and once Aethelred became king, she led his
minority regime until the middle of the 980s. It seems inconceivable that, if she did
not plan it herself, she did not know who was behind Edward’s murder, and at the
very least the idea that she was complicit in the murder cannot be rejected. Hav-
ing said that, no contemporary source implicates Aelfthryth, and there were plenty
of men who would have wanted to see Edward replaced; if Aelfthryth ultimately
benefited from other people’s grievances, she had fought hard for the opportunity
to act as kingmaker. In this respect she can be compared with some other queens
of this period, Constance of Arles in France, for example, and Aelfthryth’s own
successor in England, her daughter-in-law Emma of Normandy.
Aethelred himself was almost certainly too young to have been involved in his
brother’s death, but he became king under a cloud, and the ultimately disastrous
events of his reign were seen by some as the inevitable outcome of a reign begun
in blood. And indeed, the standard accounts of Aethelred II’s reign make for
increasingly calamitous reading. Viking raids on England resumed in the 980s and
increased in frequency and size during the 990s. Then, in the early 1000s, the Eng-
lish were battered into capitulation by three separate invasions from Scandinavia, all
of increasing size, in 1006–7, 1009–12 and 1013–16. The last of these, initially led
by King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark and then, following Sweyn’s death, by his
son Cnut, led to the final collapse of English resistance, the toppling of the dynasty
of Alfred the Great and its replacement by a new line of Danish kings.
The course of these events can be found described in the principal narrative
source for Aethelred’s reign, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. And therein lies a major
problem, because the Chronicle’s account was composed in the immediate aftermath
of Danish conquest by those seeking, with the benefit of hindsight, to find reasons
for English failure. Most powerful amongst these were English ineptitude and cow-
ardice. A modern view might emphasise external factors as much as internal ones,
however, not least the sheer number and scale of the attacks which were themselves
both a cause and a consequence of increasing political centralisation within Scan-
dinavia under kings such as Harald Bluetooth and Sweyn Forkbeard. A great Old
English poem was written about the first major English defeat in living memory,
at Maldon in Essex in 991, something which in itself testifies to the trauma this
event inflicted on the ruling English elite. Then later, when the raids increased in
frequency and intensity from 1006, they would have tested the resources of any
kingdom and the abilities of any king. As time went on, and as the invading armies
became not just bigger but more professionalised and experienced, their unrelent-
ing belligerence simply drained the English defenders’ capacity to resist. Aethelred
also tried various strategies to deal with the vikings. More than once, and with
some success, Aethelred tried to divide his enemies by paying sections of it to join
him against their erstwhile partners. Other approaches were less successful, how-
ever. Aethelred’s plan to rid England of its Danish inhabitants (or at least some of
them) in the so-called Massacre of St Brice’s Day in 1002 only tarnished his repu-
tation, while his attempt to construct a new fleet in 1008–9 ended in humiliating
failure when many of the ships were destroyed as a result of squabbles within the
English elite. In the last decade of his reign, Aethelred introduced a series of new
laws requiring the English people to atone for their sins (which contemporaries
saw as the cause of the viking raids) and perform penance in the hope of regaining
God’s favour and support. This scheme, orchestrated by Archbishop Wulfstan of
York, amounted to a programme for the spiritual purification and moral cleansing
of the English kingdom and its people, but there is little sign that it made a differ-
ence to the outcome of the struggle. And most notoriously, Aethelred’s apparent
eagerness to pay tribute to the vikings in the hope that this would dissuade them
from further raiding was an obvious failure. It was not a new idea (Alfred the Great
had used it as far back as the 870s), but if the Chronicle is to be believed (and some
historians have doubted these figures because of their size), Aethelred paid the
vikings something like £140,000 between 991 and 1012, an enormous amount.
Power 55
Hindsight probably made this policy appear more shameful than it was felt to be
when the sums of money were actually paid, and that they were paid at all sup-
ports the idea that Aethelred’s regime continued to function efficiently and that he
retained control over it. Nevertheless, it is hardly surprising that the vikings kept
coming back for more.
Aethelred also made alliances with Normandy in an attempt to keep the Eng-
lish Channel free of viking ships – the Norman rulers had Scandinavian roots,
and the raiders probably saw the duchy as an obvious refuge. The culmination of
this diplomatic activity came in 1002 when the English king married Emma, the
sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy. The marriage of course set the seal on
this new Anglo-Norman alliance, but it also introduced into England one of the
most remarkable figures of the eleventh century. Emma’s story is extraordinary in
part because she told most of it herself in a work she commissioned in 1041, the
Encomium Emmae. It was produced to explain and justify the choices she made as
queen and mother, so it is hardly objective. Its importance goes beyond this, how-
ever, and lies in the way it places a woman’s perspective at the heart of the political
narrative. Emma’s position in 1002 was difficult: like her contemporary Queen
Constance of France, who married Robert II in 1003 or 1004, her foreignness was
regarded as suspect by vested interests at the royal court. She was Danish through
her mother, Gunnor, as well as Norman through her father, and taking an English
name, Aelfgifu, can have done little in the short term to alleviate the disquiet her
arrival in England provoked. There would have been language and cultural barriers
to overcome, while the political dynamics at Aethelred’s court and within the royal
family must have altered profoundly. Aethelred’s sons by his first wife will have
viewed with unease the prospect of their father producing more sons: what would
their status be as far as the succession was concerned? In fact, although claims were
later made that Emma’s sons by Aethelred, Edward and Alfred, were supposed
to supplant their older half-brothers as heirs to the throne, there is no compel-
ling reason to believe this, and although the narrative accounts reveal little about
Emma’s life during Aethelred’s reign, their silence may indicate that she negotiated
the challenges she faced sensibly and well. Meanwhile her occasional appearances
in the witness lists of royal charters suggest that she was close to her husband and
to their sons. By the end of the reign, it is clear she had become a respected and
influential figure – so much so, in fact, that Aethelred’s successor, the Dane Cnut,
felt it prudent to marry her himself. During his reign, Emma would rise to even
greater prominence.
According to contemporary accounts, Aethelred’s biggest problem was not with
his family but with his followers. The Chronicle is full of examples showing English
nobles avoiding battle and changing sides – treachery was common, and the even-
tual rise to prominence within the ruling elite of the Chronicle’s turncoat-in-chief,
ealdorman Eadric Streona of Mercia, led directly to the breakdown of English
resistance. However, it is also fair to say that, at a time of national crisis, a king
was required first and foremost to be a warrior: there are no reports of Aethelred
leading his troops into battle. At the same time, a king was expected to manage his
nobles with a balanced mixture of generosity and threats. The nickname Aethelred
later acquired, ‘the Unready’, which suggests incompetence and ineffectiveness, is
actually a mistranslation of the Old English unraed, which means ‘badly-advised’.
Be that as it may, Aethelred appears to have lacked the masterful qualities and the
decisive instincts required of a successful king, and the evidence suggests that his
leading subjects became increasingly unsure of either his abilities, his trustworthi-
ness or both. The rise of Eadric Streona, for example, was a process that Aethelred
either supported or failed to prevent. Much the same may have happened again
when Aethelred fell out with his eldest son, Edmund, just before the end of his
reign. The causes of this quarrel are obscure, but a potential civil war was only
averted when Aethelred died in 1016. This left Edmund to face Cnut, and in a
series of campaigns and encounters across southern England, the new English king
showed all the martial skill his father had lacked – he was later known as ‘Ironside’
because of his valour. Even so, Edmund was eventually defeated by Cnut at the
Battle of Ashingdon in October 1016 and died, probably of his wounds, a month
later. Immediately following the battle, Edmund and Cnut had agreed to divide
England between them: Cnut would take control in Mercia and (probably) the
north, whilst Edmund would rule below the river Thames in the old kingdom
of Wessex. It is not clear whether this arrangement was designed as a temporary
truce or whether it was supposed to be permanent. Even at this stage, the division
of England into smaller realms was a real possibility. Only Edmund’s death averted
this, and Cnut became ruler of the whole English kingdom.
The major exception of Aethelred apart, success in warfare and the acquisition
of new territory were the most obvious achievements of England’s tenth-century
kings. The clearest manifestations of this, apart from victory in battle, were the
numerous fortresses (burhs in Old English) built across central England by Edward
the Elder and Aethelflaed. As to the practicalities of campaigning, powerful and
wealthy individuals, including the king, would fight alongside the professional
warriors they kept in their households, their ‘hearth troops’, whilst holders of
bookland (land conveyed by a boc or charter which the holder could bequeath to
an heir of their choice) were required to take their turn (or provide men to do so
based on the size of their estates) serving in the army (fyrd), garrisoning the burhs or
maintaining bridges. A sophisticated system of local government and administra-
tion was required to manage these and other burdens. The kingdom of Wessex had
already been subdivided into smaller units known as shires by the end of the ninth
century, and as Alfred’s successors extended their rule beyond their West Saxon
heartland, they imposed this familiar system on their new territories. New shires
in the midlands, most (like Warwickshire and Leicestershire) centred on the burhs
built by Edward the Elder and Aethelflaed during the first quarter of the tenth
century, gradually came into existence during this period. The chronology of shire
formation is not at all clear, however, and the process was still continuing in the
eleventh century; most of England north of the Humber, indeed, was not shired
until after 1066. Nevertheless, those shires which did exist at the end of the tenth
century were probably already subdivided by then into smaller administrative areas
Power 57
called hundreds (or wapentakes in the former viking-controlled parts of England),

because they were originally made up of 100 hides of land. Hundreds were used
to raise troops, facilitate tax assessment and collection and to organise other public
obligations. This enabled the king, through his officers, to supervise and control
the behaviour of his subjects in new and direct ways. Both shires and hundreds also
had their own courts, as did the burhs. The meetings of these courts were impor-
tant, not just for the administration of justice, but for the exercise of royal power by
the king’s agents on his behalf. Meetings of the shire court every six months were
political occasions as well as legal ones, at which the great men of the shire would
gather and come into contact with royal authority. Something similar, perhaps a
little lower down the social scale, happened at monthly meetings of the hundred
court.
Like their royal neighbours abroad, English kings spent much of their time tour-
ing their estates with their retinue of family, domestic servants, officials and troops.
However, elaborate attempts were also made during this period to enhance the
image and develop the mystique of the English monarchy. Charters which recited
the king’s titles and coins which displayed his image proclaimed his power in tan-
gible, physical ways. Meanwhile, the law codes issued in the king’s name asserted
his duty and his determination to maintain public order. At coronations and royal
assemblies, the majesty of the king was celebrated with ceremonies and rituals,
whilst the assemblies also gave the king the opportunity to gather his leading sub-
jects together, involve them in decision-making, give judgements in legal disputes,
distribute patronage and create an aristocratic esprit de corps. The king’s most impor-
tant secular subjects were the ealdormen he appointed. They had authority over
a shire or a group of shires and, with the help of lesser officials, were expected to
carry out a range of military, financial, judicial and administrative activities on the
king’s behalf. From about the 920s onwards and for the rest of this period, there
were about a dozen ealdormen in office at any one time. Some of them became
very powerful indeed. Aethelstan ‘Half-King’, for example, was ealdorman of East
Anglia from 932 until 957, but the territory under his control also included eastern
Mercia. There was an obvious risk to the kings in placing so much authority in
the hands of men like this: they might try to establish ruling dynasties of their own
or at least networks of influence in which they, not the king, were central. Eadric
Streona, ealdorman of Mercia in the last decade or so of Aethelred II’s reign, is the
obvious example of an ealdorman whom the king failed to control.
Wealth underpinned royal powers and pretensions. Much of this came from
the king’s own estates, but he could require others to pay him money, too, and the
frequent and increasingly large amounts of tribute paid to viking invaders from
the 990s is clear evidence of just how much money an English king could raise.
Most of these payments would have been made with coins produced at the 60 or
70 mints which probably existed in England by then, and they were the product of
the most-developed system of its kind in Western Europe. The Anglo-Saxons had
a long tradition of coin-production, but by the mid-tenth century, coins of variable
quality produced in the reigns of multiple kings were in circulation. So in about
973 a reform of the coinage was implemented. New coins of a prescribed uniform
size, silver content and design were to be introduced across the kingdom, and no
other coins (mainly those of previous kings) would any longer be legal tender. The
design of the coins would be changed every few years, but each coin would still
carry the king’s name and title and also the names of the mint where it was struck
and the moneyer who struck it. And to enforce centralised control even more, the
dies used to make the coins were all manufactured together at a single location,
probably Winchester, where the moneyers had to collect them, presumably after
payment of a hefty fee. The coinage system showed more clearly than anything else
just how tight a hold the English kings had over their kingdom.
These governmental institutions and structures evolved gradually during this
period, and they continued to develop for the rest of the eleventh century. A strik-
ing feature of English administrative growth after 900, however, was how influ-
enced it appears to have been by continental, particularly Carolingian, precedents.
The written word was extensively used in English government as it had been under
the Carolingians; the oath of loyalty to the king taken by all men of a certain age
and status, which Alfred the Great instituted and his successors continued, was
originally a Frankish import, as was, it seems, the hundred. Most notably, the
royal assemblies used so frequently by the English kings had much in common
with those held by Charlemagne and his East Frankish successors, whilst English
royal law codes, of which there were plenty between the 920s and 1020s, often
closely resembled Carolingian capitularies. These similarities should not be pushed
too far: local aristocrats still retained a great deal of personal power, both through
their influence over the operation of royal structures (like the shire court) and in
their own right, and royal authority was not evenly distributed across the king-
dom – beyond the midlands it became increasingly symbolic rather than practical.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the tenth-century English kings were heavily
influenced by the political standards and approaches of the Carolingian rulers. This
is surprising, given that England had never been part of Charlemagne’s empire and
because the systems he had developed were themselves in decline on the continent
from the later ninth century onwards. But somehow or other – through the use
of imported foreign texts by influential intellectuals like Wulfstan of York; the
developments of foreign contacts through royal marriages, alliances and trade; and
the cultivation of a sense of common military and political endeavour between the
king and his aristocracy – England became arguably the most Carolingian of all the
post-Carolingian states in Western Europe.
These processes were not comprehensive or equally pervasive across the king-
dom, of course. England north of the river Tees remained largely untouched by
them until after the Norman Conquest. Nor were these sophisticated institutions
and systems the only means by which political power was exercised: much still
depended on the personal relationships the kings established with their leading
subjects and their families. But even though these developments were ongoing and
incomplete, the continuing emergence of kingdom-wide systems of administra-
tion, justice and taxation meant that England in the early eleventh century was
Power 59
more intensively governed than any other part of Western Europe and that the
English kings had more power and wealth in relative terms than any of their conti-
nental contemporaries. It was these robust systems that allowed Aethelred II to raise
the vast sums he paid in tribute to the vikings and which enabled the kingdom itself
to avoid the kind of fragmentation and regional breakdown that had happened
across the Channel in the face of viking attack. The details of how the English
state managed to achieve this kind of administrative success at a time of enormous
military stress are still obscure: it presupposes a detailed system of assessment and
extensive written records of which few helpful details survive. But if the chronicles
are to be believed, these sums were raised quickly and often, even easily, and it was
probably the ease with which the money was collected, as much as the amounts,
that kept the vikings coming back for more. The tenth-century kingdom of Eng-
land was institutionally precocious, but therein lay the seeds of its own downfall.
...
Whilst the development of England as one united kingdom may have seemed
improbable at the start of the tenth century, the eventual emergence of a single
Scottish realm was arguably even more unlikely. What came to be modern Scot-
land was divided geographically, ethnically, linguistically and culturally, and there
was no obvious political, economic or religious centre. Even Christianity, so often
a unifying force between different peoples, was represented in Scotland by two
different traditions, the Irish and the Pictish, and most of the Scandinavian inhabit-
ants of tenth-century Scotland were probably not Christians at all. On the other
hand, traditional accounts describe the emergence of a line of Gaelic-speaking
kings, established (as much according to legend as to reliable historical evidence)
by Kenneth I MacAlpin (d.858) in the 840s. His reputation rests on having brought
together two of the different peoples in Scotland, the Picts and the Scots, to create
the single kingdom which came to be known in Gaelic as Alba (Scotia in Latin).
One long-standing tradition goes further, however, to assert that, rather than unit-
ing Gaels and Picts, Kenneth simply wiped the latter out, but the evidence for
this is very problematic. The Picts are difficult to pin down but are probably most
simply described as the indigenous tribes inhabiting the area north of the Forth and
the Clyde. The Scots, by contrast, were the descendants of migrants who had come
from Ireland in the sixth century; they called themselves ‘Gaels’.
The sources for early Scottish history are few, and most of the available narrative
material comes from Ireland. Significant though this fledgling Scottish kingdom
was, therefore, its outline is hard to draw. It probably only covered a relatively
restricted area of central Scotland, roughly focused on the River Tay between the
Forth–Clyde line to the south and, to the north, Scotland’s principal east–west
mountain range, the Mounth, reaching from Ben Nevis to the North Sea near
Stonehaven. It did not extend to the far north, south or west, and it excluded
several other peoples. There were Britons in south-west Scotland who had been
pushed or left there after the Anglo-Saxons had come to England centuries before.
They had their own kingdom, Strathclyde, which extended from Cumbria to the
Clyde. There were also Galwegians in Galloway to the west and English in Lothian
(the area between the Tweed and the Forth). The former looked across the Irish
Sea for their political and economic contacts rather than north into Scotland,
whilst the latter had stronger ties with the Anglo-Saxon rulers of Northumbria
than they did with the kings of Scots. Then there were the Scandinavian raiders
and settlers who effected Scotland so much from the late eighth century onwards.
Two hundred years later they were in control of Shetland, Orkney and the Western
Isles, while Caithness on the mainland was also becoming a largely Norse province.
Indeed, the whole Irish Sea region, encompassing these territories but also the
Isle of Man and much of Wales and Ireland, looked far more likely than diverse,
divided Scotland to become a single political entity under Scandinavian overlord-
ship. Having said that, it was almost certainly in response to the viking attacks of
the ninth century that the Picts and Scots decided to join forces in their defensive
union (if this is indeed what they did). In Scotland, just as they did in England,
Germany and elsewhere during this period, the sustained attacks of foreign invad-
ers may have encouraged the beginnings of state formation and the first signs of a
common identity.
When Donald son of Constantine I died in 900, killed by viking raiders, he was
the first man to be described as ‘King of Alba’. ‘Alba’ was a Gaelic word which
had previously been used to refer to the whole of Britain. It is clear that Donald
was never the ruler of the whole island, so by 900 ‘Alba’ had acquired a differ-
ent, narrower meaning which served to locate the power of Kenneth MacAlpin’s
descendants in a particular region of northern Britain. It may have been adopted
deliberately as a name around which different groups, all under pressure from the
vikings, could coalesce. In any event, it seems that the reign of Constantine II was
particularly significant in this context. For one thing, it was very long – at least
40 years (he succeeded Donald after 900, retired to a monastery in the 940s and
died in 952) – but it was also a period during which an embryonic kingdom began
clearly to emerge in northern Britain. Precision in these matters is elusive, how-
ever, given the nature of the sources available for the next phase of Scottish history.
The chronicles are patchy, and their meaning is frequently obscure: there is little if
any record of what happened in northern and western Scotland, and such accounts
as do survive concentrate on the kings’ relations with the rulers of southern Britain.
It is clear enough, however, that Constantine played a crucial role in the struggle
for control of the north during this period. The entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
which records Constantine’s apparent submission of Edward the Elder in 920 may
obscure what really happened – more a collective agreement than an acceptance
of English supremacy – but it is also notable for containing the first use in English
of the term Scottas to describe the inhabitants of Constantine’s kingdom. Whatever
happened in 920, however, King Aethelstan’s annexation of Northumbria in 927
profoundly changed the dynamic in northern Britain once more. In the summer of
that year, when Constantine and other British rulers again submitted to a southern
king, for the first time it was one in direct control of the whole of England.
Power 61
Political events in the years immediately after 927 are poorly recorded, and it
is impossible to know what was happening in northern Britain. But by 934, for
reasons which are unclear, Aethelstan’s peace with the Scots had broken down,
and Constantine had made common cause with his erstwhile viking opponents.
Aethelstan took an army and a fleet to Scotland, the former as far north as Dun-
nottar (south of modern Aberdeen) and his fleet even farther north, to Caithness.
No English king had campaigned on such a scale or over such distances before,
and Aethelstan’s awe-inspiring show of force quickly persuaded King Constan-
tine to submit to him once again and this time hand over his son as a hostage.
Constantine’s submission seems evident, too, from a charter issued by Aethelstan
in September 934 when the two kings were together at Buckingham. Not only
did the king of Scots find himself deep in Aethelstan’s territory (not something
he would have relished), but in the witness list to the charter, he is described as
subregulus – a king, yes, but without question an inferior one. Nevertheless, even
these intimidating demonstrations of force and authority did not keep Aethelstan’s
enemies subdued for long. Having concluded that they would stand a better chance
of defeating him if they acted together rather than separately, by 937 a coalition
had been formed, and armies led by Constantine; Olaf Guthfrithson, the ruler
of Dublin; and Owain, the ruler of Strathclyde, confronted Aethelstan and his
forces at Brunanburh. A hard-fought but decisive English victory forced Olaf and
Constantine to flee for their lives, with the latter leaving his dead son behind on
the battlefield.
Constantine outlived his English adversary long enough to see Aethelstan’s con-
quest of Northumbria reversed after the latter’s death in 939 and then reinstated
by his successor Edmund in the following decade. Constantine himself appears to
have resigned the kingship to his cousin Malcolm I in about 943 and retired to a
monastery, where he died in 952. It is unclear whether or not Constantine stood
down willingly, although he was in his late sixties or early seventies when he did,
but the accession of his cousins rather than one of his sons raises some interest-
ing questions about Scottish succession practices. Throughout the tenth century
and into the eleventh, every Scottish king was succeeded by a cousin rather than
a son: it seems that the kingship was deliberately being shared by two different
branches of the same family (the descendants of Kenneth I’s two sons, Constantine
and Áed), perhaps in an attempt to ensure the regular succession of adult kings
and avoid the instability that minorities and family resentments always brought
with them. In any event, the surviving sources suggest that the Scottish kings’
main preoccupation during the second half of the 900s was still with events in the
south of Britain. Having regained control of Mercia and Northumbria, in 945
King Edmund ravaged the kingdom of Strathclyde and reportedly handed it over
to Malcolm. What this meant in practice is hard to say, but even if Malcolm did
not immediately incorporate Strathclyde into his kingdom and rule it directly, an
extended sphere of Scottish influence in the south and west had been recognised
by the English king, and Malcolm’s successors now had a basis for more forceful
intervention in the region.
The confused and chaotic events that overwhelmed the kingdom of Northum-
bria and which came to an end with the murder of Eric Bloodaxe in 954 must have
concerned the Scottish kings greatly. Perhaps the agreement of 945 was designed to
secure Scottish help against Norse attacks on Northumbria from Ireland. However,
such references are frustratingly difficult to interpret. It is difficult to know what to
make of the raiding expedition against ‘the English’ Malcolm is reported to have
made as far as the river Tees in about 950, or of the reference in Irish sources to a
battle fought and lost by the Scots, their allies from Strathclyde ‘and the Saxons’ at
about the same time. The former may have been as much about stealing cattle as
it was about setting a clear boundary between areas of Scottish and Northumbrian
influence, whilst the ‘foreigners’ Malcolm fought against on the latter occasion
were presumably the followers of Eric Bloodaxe trying to take back the kingdom
Eric had lost in 948. Both the Scottish and English kings had much to gain from a
stable Northumbria shorn of its independent ambitions, and it is reasonable to see
them cooperating to some extent in the 940s and 950s to achieve this. However,
the assertion of southern control over Northumbria and its proper incorporation
into the English kingdom after 954 changed the political dynamic once again, as
did fierce dynastic conflict within the Scottish ruling élite.
Malcolm I was murdered in 954 for reasons which remain unclear, but the posi-
tion of king continued to be shared between alternating segments of Kenneth I’s
family. This arrangement was soon challenged, however, by a feud between Dub,
son of Malcolm I (962–7), and his heir and rival, Cullen son of Indulf. King Dub
was killed in 967, as was King Cullen in 971. Between 967 and 997, indeed, no
fewer than five Scottish kings were killed, all but one of them, it seems, by his own
people. It is not even clear at times whether there was a single Scottish king with a
rival or two men who both called themselves king. Garbled references to a raid as
far as Stainmore by Kenneth II (d.995), probably sometime in the 970s, are hard to
understand; whether a Scottish king (and if so, which one) was one of those who
rowed King Edgar along the River Dee in 973 is far from certain; and the claim
made in a twelfth-century English source that Edgar ceded Lothian to Kenneth
may have been fabricated to justify later Scottish claims to the region. Clarity of
some sort returns with the reign of Malcolm II (1005–34), but even here it is not
easy to assess the significance of his achievements. Almost as soon as he became
king, he launched a raid into northern England (Durham may have been the target)
to show off his kingly credentials. He was thrown back by the English defenders,
but Malcolm bided his time and alongside his ally Owain, king of Strathclyde,
probably in 1018, he inflicted a major defeat on the English at Carham-on-Tweed,
between Kelso and Coldstream.
Malcolm had almost certainly been able to take advantage of the upheavals
which were convulsing the English kingdom at this time – events in the north were
probably not the first priority of England’s new king, Cnut. Indeed, and despite
their own internal wrangling, the Scottish kings of the tenth and early eleventh
centuries had significantly extended their authority below the Clyde to incorpo-
rate Strathclyde (Owain was the last recorded king there, although he may have
Power 63
had successors) and southwards into Lothian as far as the Tweed. The outlines
of an extended Scottish kingdom were emerging, but there were still significant
limits to the kings’ power. Next to nothing is known about the internal workings
of the kingdom, and while this may be explained in part by poor rates of eviden-
tial survival, it is just as likely that there was little to record. Meanwhile, further
south the Scottish kings had helped to see off the threat of vikings from the other
side of the Irish Sea, although in the process they had perhaps only added to the
potential strength of their English neighbours who were now firmly in control of
Northumbria. And to the far north, Scandinavian control over Orkney, Shetland,
Caithness and the Western Isles was as firmly entrenched as ever. A single Scottish
nation under a single Scottish king was still some way off when Malcolm II died
in 1034.
...
By the tenth century, the inhabitants of Wales (or at least those amongst them who
thought about such things) had a clear sense of themselves as a single, distinctive
people. They even had their own name: Cymry, meaning ‘compatriots’. The Welsh
all spoke a single language, and there was a widely held view of the Welsh people’s
common descent from the Britons who had been supplanted in England by the
Anglo-Saxons and, in more legendary terms, from Brutus and the Trojans. By the
mid-900s, moreover, the Welsh may have had a single set of laws to reinforce their
sense of national identity. No manuscripts of these laws survive from before the
twelfth century, but the texts all agree that the laws were brought together by
the command of King Hywel Dda (‘the Good’) (d.949/50), who is reputed to
have gathered experts from across Wales to collate and codify the different legal
practices in use there. However, even if the Welsh sense of national identity was
already strong by this time, it was lacking in the kind of institutions which might
have helped make a people into a nation. Christianity was long-established in Wales
before 900; however, the Welsh church had bishops but no dioceses, and Wales
was divided and fragmented politically. Natural features in the landscape (rivers
and mountains) militated against the establishment of dominant, centralised rule.
So did succession practices within the Welsh ruling classes, which allowed for the
division of inheritances and therefore tended to encourage disputes and feuds.
Some who managed to make themselves particularly powerful for a time might
call themselves kings (like Ireland, Wales had many of these), but in reality most
were never anything more than warrior chiefs whose priority was securing plun-
der and tribute with which to reward the followers who made up their war bands
(teulu) and see themselves through the next winter. Individual kingdoms could be
divided into smaller administrative areas called cantrefs and commotes. Sometimes,
but not always, the latter were subdivisions of the former, but both served as cen-
tres of lordship for the payment of dues. However, these structures also made the
kingdoms easier to divide, whether by inheritance or warfare. This made politics
in tenth-century Wales even more viciously competitive, to the extent that the
construction of robust national political institutions and stable hierarchies was all
but impossible.
A king’s claim to authority depended on his lineage, his abilities as a war leader,
his wealth and his personal charisma. Occasionally a Welsh king was able to com-
bine all these components and assert himself for a time over most if not all of Wales.
Probably the first to do this was Rhodri Mawr (‘the Great’) (844–77) in the ninth
century. From his base in Gwynedd (north Wales) he had extended his authority
over Powys and Ceredigion. His grandson, the lawmaker Hywel Dda, took things
further in the tenth century. He inherited Seisyllwg (Ceredigion and Ystrad Tywi)
from his father, and his wife’s dowry was Dyfed (modern Pembrokeshire). This
new kingdom in the south-west of Wales came to be known as Deheubarth. And
when the ruler of Gwynedd (north Wales) and Powys was killed in battle with the
English in 942, Hywel took possession of all his territory. He thus became ‘ruler
of all Wales’, although Morgannwg (Glamorgan) and Gwent continued to have
independent kings of their own. Remarkably, Hywel also went on a pilgrimage
to Rome in 928, perhaps following the example of King Alfred of Wessex, who
visited Rome twice when he was a boy. It is possible, too, that Hywel decided to
codify the Welsh laws because Alfred and his successors had done something similar
during their reigns. And when coins were issued at Chester in Hywel’s name, this
may have been another conscious attempt to emulate English state-power. Hywel
certainly had close links to the English kings. He was a contemporary of Edward
the Elder and Aethelstan and took care to maintain his position as their subordinate
ally: Hywel was one of the British rulers who submitted to Edward in 918 and to
Aethelstan in 927, whilst the witness lists to the latter’s charters show that Hywel
was in regular attendance at Aethelstan’s court. Hywel even gave one of his sons an
English name, Edwin.
The dominant position Hywel had constructed in Wales collapsed after his
death, and for the next 50 years, Welsh politics reverted to a series of ongoing
contests for power within and between dynasties. For a while from the end of
the 980s, Hywel’s grandson Maredudd ap Owain (d.999) managed to reassert his
family’s authority over north and south Wales, but his successors were unable to
sustain this, and his work was quickly undone. The instability within Wales was
compounded by pressures exerted from outside. The English attitude towards the
Welsh appears to have become more guarded, and sometimes overtly hostile, by
the start of the eleventh century, and it was not uncommon for the ealdormen of
Mercia to launch raids across the frontier in order to keep the Welsh in line. But
worse damage was caused by the vikings. Attracted by the plunder to be found in
the Welsh monasteries (which included people – the vikings were slave-traders as
well as pirates), numerous raids along much of the Welsh coastline are recorded in
contemporary chronicles. In 987, for example, 2,000 captives were carried off from
Anglesey, and in 999 St David’s itself was plundered and its bishop killed.
In spite of all this, by the start of the eleventh century, the main political outlines
of Wales were coming into focus. There were three main kingdoms: Gwynedd in
the north, Powys in the centre and Deheubarth in the south-west. However, only
Power 65
Rhodri Mawr, Hywel Dda and Maredudd ap Owain had come close to asserting
their authority over the whole of Wales, and the power they accumulated soon
dissipated after their deaths. One more king in this period tried to emulate their
achievements. In the space of only four years between 1018 and 1022, the previ-
ously obscure Llewelyn ap Seisyll won control of Gwynedd, Powys and Deheu-
barth, but he died in 1023. His most important legacy, however, was to leave a son,
Gruffudd ap Llewelyn, who would in due course become the most powerful ruler
Wales had yet seen.
...
On the edge of Western Europe, early medieval Ireland was hardly a backwater.
In the fifth century, thanks to the efforts of St Patrick and other missionaries, it
had been the first place outside the Roman Empire to convert to Christianity. The
new religion brought with it the Latin language and stimulated the development
of writing in the vernacular, too; in due course Ireland became what was by con-
temporary standards a highly literate society. Much of this work was done in the
monasteries which dominated Ireland’s religious landscape (they were more impor-
tant than bishops and dioceses) and became centres of scholarship and art as well as
piety. The Bible and the Church Fathers were studied, whilst manuscript produc-
tion, metalwork and stone carving developed to the highest levels of sophistication,
as The Book of Kells, the Ardagh Chalice and the numerous elaborate stone crosses
scattered across the Irish countryside magnificently demonstrate. Early Christian
Ireland was also far from inward-looking. During the sixth and seventh centuries,
Irish monks such as Columba, Columbanus and Aidan were instrumental in bring-
ing Christianity to the pagan peoples of northern Britain and Francia.
Ninth-century Ireland was a pastoral, pre-urban society, although as monas-
teries exploited their estates using local labour, some of them became important
economic hubs. How far such activities were disrupted by the vikings is hard to
say. The first recorded viking raid on Ireland took place in 795, and the monas-
teries were certainly attacked then and later: they were soft targets with plenty of
treasure to plunder, but just as importantly, they were attractive to the vikings as
storehouses of essential goods and supplies. The vikings were not just a destructive
force, however: they founded Ireland’s first urban settlements at Dublin, Wexford,
Waterford, Limerick and Cork, their trading links with mainland Europe can only
have increased Ireland’s wealth and they ultimately gave Ireland its first coinage.
Nevertheless, probably the most significant impact the vikings had on Ireland in
this period was political. The Irish were a single people with a single language, but
pre-viking Ireland, like Wales, was a land of many kings and competing dynasties.
Irish law books from the seventh and eighth centuries stipulated three grades of
king: petty kings who ruled locally, over-kings who ruled several of these, and
kings of provinces who dominated the over-kings. There were several of these:
Munster, Leinster, Ulster, Connacht, Meath, Brega and the lands in the north-west
of Ireland dominated by the Uí Neill. In reality, however, things were probably
more complex than this, and power in Ireland flowed and fluctuated rapidly as dif-
ferent kings and their dynasties achieved some kind of local or regional dominance
at one point, only quickly to lose it as rivals chipped away at their power or as a
masterful king was followed by less able successors.
This was a society in which status and honour were highly prized, and a king’s
survival probably depended more on how many followers he had than direct con-
trol of land; whilst another way of gauging rank was to count the number of cat-
tle a man owned. Dairy farming was the core of Ireland’s agricultural system and
cattle-raiding was a regular occurrence. A successful raid would deprive a rival
of the symbols of his success whilst also undermining his economic wellbeing.
There was more to kingship than successful plundering, however, although this
always remained crucial. Kings were required to administer justice, and they held
assemblies where laws were issued and judgements delivered. They travelled around
their kingdoms, too, receiving hospitality and demanding obedience. Despite all
the local and regional competition, however, there was one dynasty above all
that dominated the Irish political landscape until the early eleventh century. The
power of the Uí Néill was divided into two branches, the northern Uí Néill in the
north-west of the island and the southern Uí Néill in Meath and Brega. Whoever
controlled both branches of the dynasty was regarded as the most powerful king in
Ireland, and the Uí Néill proclaimed their supremacy and their status as over-kings
from their ceremonial centre at Tara. They developed the myth that there had once
been a kingship of all Ireland based there and that they were the legitimate heirs
to that power.
Irish kings both great and small, however, fought against the vikings in the ninth
and tenth centuries. Some kings also allied with them against their Irish rivals. By
the 850s, arguably the most powerful viking warlord in Ireland was Ivarr the Bone-
less. His family would continue to play a significant role in Irish politics for several
generations, and, as has been seen already, when his grandsons were thrown out
of Dublin in 902, they became entangled in the affairs of northern England and
western Scotland. Ivarr’s great grandson, Olaf Guthfrithson, was killed at Brunan-
burh in 937, and the resulting weakness this caused within the family was exploited
by the kings of Leinster and Brega when they attacked Dublin (back under viking
control since the 910s) in 944 and 948. The Irish kings inflicted further damaging
defeats on the vikings in the second half of the tenth century, most notably when
Máel Sechnaill, over-king of southern Uí Néill, defeated the ruler of Dublin, Olaf
Cuáran, at the battle of Tara in 980. These wars led to the decline of some Irish
dynasties and the emergence of others, such as the Dál Cais in Munster. Their
most famous son was Brian Bóruma (Brian of the cattle-tribute) who, after more
than 20 years of fighting against vikings and his Irish neighbours, was recognised as
king over the southern half of Ireland by the Uí Néill over-king in 997. Only five
years later, however, Brian had turned the tables and was himself acknowledged as
over-king, and during the next decade or so he successfully established his author-
ity over much of Ireland. An entry under the year 1005 in the Book of Armagh, a
contemporary Irish chronicle, called him imperator Scottorum (emperor of the Irish).
Power 67
Brian was killed at the battle of Clontarf in 1014, but his army defeated a joint
force of Leinstermen and Dublin vikings, reinforced by contingents from the Isle of
Man and the Scottish islands. By breaking the Uí Néill stranglehold on power and
then going on, albeit briefly, to be even more dominant within Ireland than they
had been, Brian set a standard for Irish rulership which later generations would
find very hard to match. The myth of a unified Ireland ruled over by a single king
would be impossible to achieve, but it was potent and it lasted.
Southern Europe: The Multicultural Experience

in Iberia and Italy
It is difficult if not impossible to write an overarching political history of either Ibe-
ria or Italy during this period. Politics in these two regions was intensely localised,
and over-arching themes or developments are hard to identify. The tenth century in
Iberia and Italy has also sometimes been overlooked, not just because it is d ifficult
to describe what happened where and when, but because on some level, it has
been impatiently seen as a relatively uninteresting prelude to something much more
important that really only began a hundred years later, namely the Reconquista in
Spain and Portugal and the Norman conquest of Apulia and Calabria. It is impor-
tant to remember, however, that contemporaries did not see things in such ways.
For those who lived through it, whether Muslims or Christians, the tenth century
in the Iberian and Italian peninsulas was as vital and as unpredictable as any other.
As the western Roman Empire disintegrated in the fourth and fifth centuries,
most of the Iberian Peninsula shared the same experience as the lands further north
and was taken over by Germanic tribesmen, in this case the Visigoths. From their
base at Toledo, the Visigoths established a reasonably strong and stable kingdom,
and by the early eighth century they controlled most of the peninsula. However,
for reasons which remain unclear, they were unable to withstand the attacks of
Arab and Berber armies which invaded from north Africa in 711, and by about
720, they had been conclusively defeated. Then, over the next 75 years, Muslim
armies battled with Frankish ones for control of the fertile lands north of the
Pyrenees. The Christian victory at Poitiers in 732, which put an end to Muslim
penetration in the north, was followed in 778 at the battle of Roncesvalles by the
thwarting of Charlemagne’s attempt to expand south. Charlemagne and his follow-
ers from southern France had been able to set up a Christian ‘Spanish March’, the
future county of Barcelona, in Catalonia, however, and eventually, by about 900,
the wider boundaries between Christian and Muslim territories had been broadly
established across the peninsula. The Christians of the barren Asturian mountains
had secured most of its north fringe, and the Muslim rulers further south had
withdrawn their frontier to the line of the River Duero which they fortified with
a series of strongholds.
At first the Muslim conquerors of Visigothic Spain had expressed continuing
allegiance to their overlords in distant Damascus, but in 750, the ruling Umayyad
dynasty was overthrown and massacred in Syria. Only one member of the family,
Abd ar-Rahman, survived, and eventually he made his way to Spain. At Cór-
doba in 756, he was proclaimed emir of al-Andalus (the Arabic name for Muslim-
controlled Iberia). He ruled as emir until 788, and the dynasty he set up would last
until 1031. Córdoba itself had become the largest city in Western Europe by the
tenth century (it reputedly had 70 libraries and 900 public baths, and its population
may have been at least 100,000) and a centre of great political, commercial and cul-
tural power. In the tenth century, Córdoba was described as ‘the ornament of the
world’. The writer, Hroswitha, a canoness from Gandersheim Abbey in Saxony,
had not seen the city herself, but evidently stories of its splendour had spread far
beyond Muslim Iberia by the time she wrote her Life of the Christian martyr
Pelagius. He had been killed in Córdoba in the 920s, reportedly after rejecting the
sexual advances of the Muslim caliph and refusing to convert to Islam.
Details of the martyrdom of St Pelagius vary between several different accounts
and contain much by way of conventional anti-Muslim misinformation. In reality,
the Muslim rulers of al-Andalus were at pains neither to exterminate nor convert
the people they had conquered. In the main, this was just common sense: Spain
was a land of many diverse regions, communications were difficult, there was no
centralised system of administration to inherit and only a very basic tax system to
exploit. Muslims arrived in greater numbers from the 740s onwards, but the sys-
tematic settlement and subjugation of the whole peninsula was never practicable.
So as long as they did not challenge their new overlords and accepted their status
as dhimmis (subject peoples who paid specific taxes and were forbidden from pros-
elytising), Christians and Jews were tolerated and allowed to practise their religions.
Many Christians, moreover (they are generally referred to as Mozarabs) learned
Arabic and adopted Muslim customs. However, over time, conversion to Islam
became more common, and as the new Muslim population mixed with the indige-
nous ones, a distinctive and unique culture emerged in al-Andalus which combined
Islamic and north African practices with local customs and traditions. Existing eco-
nomic links with the Mediterranean were complemented by new ones with the
wider Muslim world: the port of Almeria, established in 955, was a product and a
further promoter of these developments. New industries and crops were introduced
to the region. Oranges from Seville and dried fruits from Malaga were highly val-
ued in the rest of Europe, whilst the leather and iron work of Córdoba and Toledo
provide the finest examples (carpets and cloth are others) of the kind of high-quality
artisanal work characteristic of this increasingly complex economy. Al-Andalus also
saw the developments of new architectural styles well before the Romanesque and
the Gothic had begun to develop further north. The Great Mosque at Córdoba and
the minarets of Toledo have more in common with the buildings of medieval Cairo
and Baghdad than anything influenced by western Christian styles. Much classical
learning, too, not least several works of Aristotle which had been lost in continen-
tal Europe but had survived in the Arab world as a result of the Islamic conquests,
made its way back to the West through Muslim Spain.
Umayyad rule in al-Andalus would continue until 1031. This remarkable
continuity was hard-won, however, and there were times during the ninth and
Power 69
tenth centuries when the Umayyad state came under severe pressure. How far
the Umayyads consistently controlled the regions beyond Córdoba and its hin-
terlands is not always clear. Under emir Abd al-Rahman II (812–52), it seems the
dynasty succeeded in asserting its authority over all the main centres of power in al-
Andalus, including Zaragoza, Toledo and Valencia. But this authority proved dif-
ficult to sustain, and the four decades either side of 900 were particularly troubled
ones. Whilst the position of the Umayyads as emirs was not directly challenged,
their power dissipated as more and more local lords established effective independ-
ence of their rule. It was Abd al-Rahman III (912–61) who prevented the further
fragmentation of Umayyad power, first by fighting back against his local challengers
and then by asserting his own authority at their expense. He created a new army
which contained a large number of white slaves, mostly Slavs captured in wars on
the frontiers of the Ottonian Empire and brought south by slave-traders, and his
approach was aggressively militaristic from the start. By the 930s he controlled all
al-Andalus except the far north-east, and in 929 he proclaimed himself caliph as al-
Nasir (‘the Victorious’). The Caliphate he established would reach the peak of its
influence and prosperity under al-Mansur, its chief minister from 978 until 1002.
Al-Mansur effectively sidelined Hisham II, the caliph he nominally served, and
won great victories against the Christians in 985 when his armies sacked Barcelona
and in 997 when Santiago de Compostela suffered the same fate.
Al-Mansur’s military campaigns had to be funded, of course. By the late tenth
century, al-Andalus already had a well-organised fiscal system, and the evidence
suggests that tax revenue increased considerably during the tenth century as well-
rewarded royal officials bore down heavily on reluctant taxpayers. Internal stability
and outward expansion did not long outlast al-Mansur, however, and, following
the death of his son and successor al-Muzaffar in 1008, more than two decades
of civil war pulled al-Andalus apart and destroyed the Caliphate. This was in part
al-Mansur’s fault: whilst he dominated the Umayyad military and governmental
machines, the caliph himself was effectively a prisoner, confined in his palace in
Córdoba. Respect for the dynasty had gone, and once the dominant figure of al-
Mansur had left the scene, other ambitious men saw an opportunity to assert their
own autonomy. Córdoba itself was sacked in 1013 and its undisputed status as the
chief city of al-Andalus was lost; by 1031, effective control of Muslim Spain had
fallen to 30 or so small kingdoms known as Taifas (from tā’ifa, the Arabic word for
‘faction’). In the end, the collapse of Umayyad power was sudden and dramatic:
despite all the centralising efforts of the emirs and caliphs, provincial feeling and
local separatism eventually prevailed in al-Andalus. The ultimate beneficiaries of
these developments would be the Christian rulers of northern Iberia.
...
Several Christian polities emerged in the northern third of Iberia during the ninth
and tenth centuries. The county of Portugal in the west, the county of Castile
and the kingdom of Navarre in the east, the latter covering Pamplona and the
western Pyrenees, all began to develop during this period. But the dominant politi-
cal force in Christian Iberia until the early eleventh century was the kingdom of
Asturias-León. Its origins are obscure, but by the reign of Alfonso II (791–842),
this Christian enclave had been established around its centre at Oviedo. Significant
territorial expansion took place under Alfonso III (866–910), and the kingdom
soon extended as far south as the River Duero, the de facto boundary between
Christian Spain and Muslim al-Andalus for the next hundred years. Alfonso’s son
and successor, Ordono II (910–25), moved south to make León his royal city, but
he was unable to carry on with the kind of expansion his father had managed to
achieve. Alfonso III had been able to increase his power because of civil wars in
al-Andalus which bedevilled the reign of the emir Abd Allah (888–912), but the
Muslim resurgence under al-Nasir soon brought these developments to a halt and
threatened to reverse them. Having said that, the self-proclaimed caliph was unable
to push the Christians back northwards. When al-Nasir attempted to invade León,
King Ramiro II (930–51) even defeated him in battle at Simancas in 939. It fell
to al-Mansur to threaten the destruction of Christian Iberia: in 981 he attacked
and defeated Ramiro III of León (966–84), also at Simancas, and he forced Ram-
iro’s cousin and successor Vermudo II (984–99) to pay tribute. When Vermudo
attempted to wrest free of his control, al-Mansur took and sacked León itself in
988. Meanwhile he had captured and burned Barcelona in 985, while later, in 987,
he marched to Santiago de Compostela, devastated the city, carried off the bells of
its great church and installed them in the mosque at Córdoba.
When Vermudo II died in 999, he left the kingdom of León in a parlous condi-
tion. His son Alfonso V (999–1028) was no more than five years old, and his wife,
Elvira, stepped in to act as his regent. Alfonso survived to maturity despite facing
several revolts as he grew up, and in 1017 he began the rebuilding and repopulation
of the city of León. When he died in 1028, however, further chaos ensued. His
only son, Vermudo III (1027–37) was barely a teenager, and when arrangements
were made to marry his sister to the Count of Castile, the latter was murdered by a
group of Leónese nobles. The count’s heir was his sister, who was married to King
Sancho III the Great of Navarre (1004–35). Sancho proceeded to take control of
Castile, and he invaded León in 1033. These were not his only successes, either: he
extended his rule north into Gascony and secured the submission of the Count of
Barcelona. Sancho’s unexpected death in 1035 only brought a temporary respite for
the Leónese, moreover, as his son and successor, Fernando, invaded the kingdom
again in 1037 and defeated and killed Vermudo III at the battle of Tamaron. Fer-
nando I (1037–65) became the first ruler of the united kingdom of León-Castile.
So by the start of the eleventh century, Muslim Iberia was bordered to the north
by a string of established Christian principalities. They were poor economically,
and compared with al-Andalus, their systems of government and administration
were basic and unsophisticated. Rulers issued charters, ran courts and held assem-
blies, but they did not mint coins before the mid-eleventh century, they did not
issue laws until the twelfth and these principalities were not centralised states: per-
haps even more than their contemporaries in tenth-century West and East Francia,
Power 71
Spanish kings could not dominate their elites and had to negotiate with and rely on
them. With the exception of Navarre in the last years of Sancho the Great’s reign,
moreover, they had barely expanded their territories since 900 and had only just
managed to recover what had been lost during the campaigns of al-Mansur in the
980s and 990s. Nonetheless, these Christian kingdoms were still strong enough that
the Muslims to the south could not remove them from the political scene. Even
conflict between them had unexpectedly positive outcomes. A major shift in the
northern balance of power had come about by the 1030s as the dominance of the
kingdom of León had been brought to an end by the rise of the much smaller king-
dom of Navarre. However, this also led to the foundation of the new, expanded
kingdom of León-Castile, and, after al-Andalus began to disintegrate in the first
third of the eleventh century, this reinvigorated Christian power would take the
military initiative once more.
...
Charlemagne had campaigned in northern Italy in the 770s and subjugated large
parts of what had then been the kingdom of the Lombards. The area he conquered
became known as the kingdom of Italy, but by the end of the ninth century, control
over this region had slipped out of Carolingian hands and was contested by differ-
ent aristocratic families from both within and beyond the kingdom. Being king of
Italy remained significant however, not least because Charlemagne’ conquests had
enshrined the principle that the right to claim the imperial title followed from pos-
session of the Italian crown. Nevertheless, despite this inherent prestige, in practice
the king’s authority beyond his royal heartland was weak. With its royal centre
at Pavia, the kingdom only ever encompassed that part of the Italian peninsula
stretching from the Alps in the north to a frontier with the lands of the pope in
the south. There was little by way of coherent political systems and structures, and
power within the kingdom was heavily regionalised. It consisted of several duchies
or marches: Ivrea and Turin in the north-west, Friuli in the north-east, Tuscany in
the centre and Spoleto in the south. But even within these areas, local aristocracies
(secular and ecclesiastical) based in and around individual towns and cities, but also
in the countryside, enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. Parts of modern northern
Italy also remained outside the kingdom. Most notable amongst these was the city
of Venice, which was essentially autonomous by the tenth century. Its geographi-
cal and historical links were with the Byzantine Empire rather than the western
one, and its wealth was originally based on its participation in the slave trade: Slav
prisoners from Charlemagne’s wars were transported to Venice and shipped from
there into mostly Arab servitude. In addition, the city was developing its role as an
entrepôt for the limited but growing trade in luxury goods moving from East to
West – jewels, silks, gold and holy relics amongst other things. By the eleventh cen-
tury, Venetian maritime power dominated the Adriatic, and the city had become
the main port through which western contact with the eastern Mediterranean and
the worlds of Byzantium and Islam was maintained.
In the 35 years or so following the overthrow and death of the emperor Charles
the Fat in 887–8, several men competed with each other for the kingship of Italy.
Berengar Marquis of Friuli was the most durable of these, and after making him-
self king in 888, he survived until 924. In that time, however, he had to see off
challenges from the house of Spoleto: Guy of Spoleto (d.894), and then his son
Lambert (d.898) also claimed the throne during the 890s, and both were crowned
emperor. Then in the early 900s, Berengar responded to the claim of his cousin
King Louis of Provence by having him blinded. Between 905 and 922, Berengar’s
power was uncontested, and he had been crowned emperor himself by 915, but
in 923, factions opposed to him invited King Rudolf II of Burgundy to invade
the kingdom. He defeated Berengar in battle and subsequently had him killed.
Rudolf may have thought he would now take the kingdom, but the Italian nobil-
ity instead turned to another outsider Hugh, Count of Arles in the kingdom of
Provence. Hugh was a forceful and energetic ruler whose attempts to strengthen
royal authority were based on installing his relatives and followers in control of
the duchies, marches and other political posts whenever he could: he made his
brother and his illegitimate son successive marquises of Tuscany, for example. This
approach allowed Hugh to rule for more than 20 years (926–47), but it also created
enemies, even amongst those he had favoured. The man he appointed as margrave
of Ivrea, Berengar (the grandson of the late King Berengar), fled to Germany in
the early 940s, probably after allegations of disloyalty if not actual treachery. When
he returned in 945, he joined with other critics of Hugh, and the latter himself
fled back to Provence where he died in 947. Hugh was succeeded as king by his
son Lothar, but he was unable to prevent the dismantling of the political network
his father had created. The kingdom had thus become more fragmented than ever
when Lothar died in 950. His successor was Berengar of Ivrea.
From this point onwards, the politics of the kingdom of Italy became entwined
with the ambitions of the East Frankish Ottonian kings. Otto I, Otto II, Otto III
and Henry II were all eventually crowned emperor in Rome, but they all appre-
ciated that, before they could take the imperial title, they had to be crowned
king of Italy. Their campaigns in Italy between the early 950s and the mid-1020s
are described in an earlier section, but for all the drama and importance of such
events, it is worth remembering that, for most of these 70 or so years, the kings
of Italy were absentee ones. This gave local aristocrats, bishops and urban elites
more time and space to become politically and economically self-sufficient, and
the king-emperors had little choice but to try and manage these developments
from a distance and through their allies in Italy. By and large, they concentrated on
maintaining the status quo, and they favoured those local families and those bish-
ops who had the secular muscle to assist them in this: to be sure, there were local
disturbances and revolts, and for a short time at the end of this period, there was
even a rival king. But the threat of an imperial army arriving at some point mostly
kept these rebels and rivals in check. As a result, whilst power across the kingdom
arguably became even more regionalised during this period, no truly meaningful
threat to Ottonian hegemony emerged.
Power 73
Otto I was preoccupied with East Frankish affairs and the threat of the Magyars
for most of the 950s, and after his first expedition to Italy in 951–2, pressure to
return home compelled him to leave Berengar II in place as king. Only after Otto
came back to Italy in the 960s at the request of an anti-Berengar group of Italian
nobles did he depose him, and it was not until after 966 that Otto’s authority in the
kingdom was fully accepted. Otto II’s defeat by a Muslim army at Cap Cotrone in
southern Italy in 982 did not significantly undermine the stability in the north that
had characterised the 970s, and the minority of Otto III was managed effectively in
Italy by his grandmother Adelaide and her supporters. After the minority ended in
994, Otto took a keen personal interest in Rome and its affairs, not always success-
fully and with some brutality, but his successor Henry II gave far less direct atten-
tion to Italy and spent a total of only 19 months there during his reign of 22 years.
He appreciated the importance of securing the Italian and imperial crowns, but
beyond that his focus was almost entirely on East Frankish business. This reorienta-
tion came at a price for Ottonian rule in Italy. During the last years of the tenth
century, a certain Arduin had emerged as margrave of Ivrea. When Otto III died
in 1002, Arduin had himself crowned king of Italy. Henry II then took the crown
during his expedition to Italy in 1004–5, but Arduin was not defeated, and over the
next decade, while Henry remained in Germany, Arduin retained important allies.
Henry returned to Italy in 1014 and was crowned emperor in Rome, but he soon
went back to Germany once again, thus giving Arduin another opportunity to
assert himself. Only Arduin’s death in 1015 ended the challenge he presented. His
properties and those of his supporters were redistributed amongst the families and
bishops who had remained loyal to Henry, and one of Henry’s final significant acts
was to return to Italy in 1021–2 and, alongside Pope Benedict VIII, preside over
a church council in Pavia. Arguably, however, such a set piece demonstration of
authority only masked the longer-term processes that, for much of the tenth cen-
tury and into the eleventh, had seen local noble families, towns, cities and bishops
become the real arbiters of political power in the kingdom of Italy.
...
A lack of source material makes the history of Muslim Sicily before the eleventh
century impossible to reconstruct in depth or great detail. It seems clear, however,
that by about 900, the largest island in the Mediterranean was a well-populated and
well-connected part of the wider Muslim world, with an economy based on the
profits of piracy and raids on the Italian coast. The Muslim conquest of Byzantine-
controlled Sicily had been a prolonged affair and had taken most of the ninth
century. Palermo was captured as early as 831, but it was not until 902 that the last
Christian outpost of Taormina fell to Muslim troops. Muslims were still only a small
minority on Sicily, moreover, and the Christian presence on the island remained
strong after this. Nevertheless, Muslim domination would last for the next two
centuries, during which time conversions to Islam steadily increased. By the early
eleventh century, probably about half the population of Sicily was Muslim.
Muslim Sicily was ruled by emirs based in Palermo. However, the situation in
reality was more complex than this. The island had been conquered by troops loyal
to the Sunni Aghlabid dynasty from Tunisia, but in the early 900s, the Aghlabids
were overthrown by the Fatimids, who were Shi‘ites, and in 916 the Fatimids’
Berber troops invaded the island, destroyed the walls of Palermo and took control.
Relations between the new Fatimid rulers and the Sicilian Muslims they conquered
remained strained, and a full-scale rebellion against Fatimid rule erupted in 937–9;
it was only put down eventually with brutal force and at great cost. Even then, it
was another decade before stability was properly restored under the emir al-Hasan,
whose family (the Kalbids) would go on to rule Sicily for the next century.
Attacks from the Muslims of Sicily on the southern Italian mainland continued
throughout this period. The greatest triumph in this context was the victory of the
emir Abu’l-Qasim over the emperor Otto II during the latter’s invasion of Calabria
at Cap Cotrone in 982. Raids continued after this but became more infrequent
and eventually petered out, and by the early 1000s, a more stable and sophisticated
economy had begun to emerge based on grain production, citrus fruit, cotton, sugar
cane and other crops. International trade thus gradually took the place of piracy
as the mainstay of Sicilian wealth during the tenth century, and the island, ideally
situated on the merchants’ routes to and from the Near East and Asia, became a
hub of commerce for ships travelling from east to west and back again. Vessels from
Egypt and other parts of North Africa with their shipments of flax and other goods
would unload at the port of Mazara del Vallo on the western edge of Sicily. The
cargoes would then be put on other ships and transported eastwards, whilst silk,
high-quality leather goods and other textiles were carried back to Egypt. This pros-
perity was further enhanced by a period of relative political stability on the island
either side of 1000, and only in the second decade of the eleventh century did
internal conflict break out again. Revolt within the army and from locals unhappy
at taxation levels led to power struggles between warring factions at the top of
political society, and serious challenges to Kalbid control soon multiplied. Just as
in al-Andalus at the same time, infighting within the ruling elite of Muslim Sicily
would only benefit their Christian neighbours in Byzantine-controlled southern
Italy and, ultimately, a group of ambitious opportunists from Normandy who had
just started making names for themselves across the Straits of Messina.
...
Southern Italy in the tenth century was politically fragmented. Sicily was Muslim-
controlled, whilst on the mainland the regions of Apulia and Calabria were gov-
erned at a distance from Constantinople and on the ground by Greek officials.
Further north, the rulers of the three so-called Lombard principalities (Salerno,
Capua and Benevento) claimed descent from Germanic tribesmen who had
invaded Italy in the sixth century. Overlapping with these political divisions were
the religious ones: two types of Christianity (Latin and Greek) and Islam. Tensions
and strains were inevitable: in their different languages, the non-Greek (mostly
Power 75
Lombard) population in Apulia and Calabria resented Greek rule, whilst the Greek
Christians in Sicily lived warily alongside, but always subject to, their Muslim lords.
Having said this, and although they continued to fight and compete with each
other, the different political structures in southern Italy held each other in a state of
delicate equilibrium, which made the tenth century relatively peaceful. Even the
revival of interest in the region by the German kings from the 960s caused only
occasional, albeit significant, disturbance to the balance of power. So this is why
the events of the eleventh century in southern Italy and Sicily were so important.
The arrival of the Normans (in contrast to what happened in England after 1066)
did not lead to a sudden traumatic upheaval. But in its own more gradual and
drawn-out way, the Norman conquest of this region was certainly transforma-
tive. It led to the expulsion of the Byzantine and Muslim authorities, and whilst
in 1000 the region was the meeting-point of three different, competing religions
and cultures, by 1100 it was unquestionably part of the Latin West. New political
structures developed to manage this radical change, and in the twelfth century the
whole region became a brand new Christian kingdom, one which would last for
more than 700 years.
Norman knights began to arrive in southern Italy in the 20 years either side
of 1000. Contemporary accounts of precisely when and why they came differ.
According to one tradition reported by the monk Amatus of Montecassino in
the 1080s, a group of about 40 Norman pilgrims was returning home from a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem ‘before 1000’. When they arrived at Salerno, they were
recruited to help repel an Arab attack on the besieged city. Another quite different
account, written in the 1090s by William of Apulia (nothing is known about him
except his name), also described the Normans as pilgrims, but they were visiting
the shrine of St Michael the Archangel at Monte Gargano when they met a man
called Melus, who persuaded them to join the revolt he was planning to launch
against the Byzantine rulers of Apulia. Having then gone all the way home to
gather more troops, the Normans returned to Italy and joined forces with Melus in
1017. A third description says something different again: the monk Ralph Glaber
was writing in Burgundy in the 1030s and 1040s, and he described how a group of
political exiles from Normandy, led by a certain Rodulf, travelled to Rome where
they were persuaded by Pope Benedict VIII (1012–24) to take part in an attack on
the Byzantines in Apulia. Wherever the reality lies between these differing reports
(and they may all contain elements of truth), it seems clear that the first Normans
had arrived in southern Italy by the early 1000s (probably in quite small numbers –
no more than a few hundred) and that they were employed as mercenaries by a
number of different authorities.
The Apulian revolt of 1017–18, in which Normans certainly took part, was
soon crushed by the Greeks. After the defeat of the rebels, the surviving Normans
were scattered (some even joined up to fight with the Byzantines at this point),
and the 1020s and 1030s saw a strong reassertion of Byzantine rule in Apulia and
Calabria. Pope Benedict VIII was keen to assert Latin control over the church in
those regions, however, so he travelled to Germany where he persuaded Emperor
Henry II to come to Italy to try and keep the Byzantines at bay. For his part, Henry
wanted to have his lordship over the Lombard principalities acknowledged, and
when he arrived in 1022, he deposed the Prince of Capua but then stalled before
the fortress of Troia where a three-month siege was finally called off in the summer
heat and with malaria spreading through the imperial ranks. Some of those defend-
ing Troia against Henry had been Normans, and for the rest of the decade they
continued to fight for whoever was prepared to pay them. An important moment,
however, came in 1030, when the Normans were rewarded by one of their patrons
with their first piece of territory, the town of Aversa. The Normans now had a
landed base and, under their leader Rainulf, they could start to think about becom-
ing more than just soldiers for hire.
Frontier Europe: Christians and Pagans

in the North and East
Just as new polities began to emerge in northern Iberia during the tenth century,
others did so at the same time in Scandinavia and eastern Europe. The new rul-
ers on the northern and eastern extremities of Western Europe began the tenth
century as pagans and ended it as Christians. Christianisation was not a uniform
process, and largely because distances were so large, terrain so challenging and
communications so difficult, it was slower in Denmark, Norway and Sweden than
it was in Poland, Hungary and Bohemia. But the reasons rulers had for adopting
the new religion were common to all: to appease more powerful neighbours (most
notably in Germany) who were already long Christianised, to legitimise and spread
authority internally, and to make a bid for acceptance as mainstream European
powers. Some of these new states, notably Denmark, Poland and Hungary, were
particularly precocious, whilst others such as Bohemia and Sweden struggled to
cultivate any kind of identity or autonomy. Nevertheless, despite the differences
between them, these new states added considerably to the size of Latin Chris-
tendom. At the start of the tenth century, heathen viking raiders were menacing
Western Europe, whilst fierce nomadic pagans from the east were threatening to
overrun the centre. In due course, however, they were all absorbed into the domi-
nant Christian culture of the lands they had attacked. And in time those Christian
norms and practices, along with the political systems that went with them, would
be exported to their homelands and imposed there.
At the start of the tenth century, the medieval Scandinavian kingdoms of Den-
mark, Norway and Sweden did not exist. By the end of the twelfth, however,
albeit to varying degrees, they did. Indeed, in many respects (in the use of writing
in government, for example, and the development of an institutionalised Church)
they are comparable with the polities developing in the rest of Western Europe at
the same time. In these 300 years, therefore, the frontiers of Latin Christendom
were extended further, this time in the north, and more new national identi-
ties were formed. A familiar word of caution is needed at the start of this dis-
cussion, however. Historians studying Scandinavia during this period are reliant
Power 77
largely on narrative accounts that were written much later than the events they
describe. The most famous and influential of these, Gesta Danorum (‘The Deeds
of the Danes’), a Latin history of Denmark by the German cleric Saxo Gram-
maticus, and Heimskringla (‘The History of the Norwegian Kings’), in Old Norse
by the Icelandic chieftain Snorri Sturluson, were both compiled in the thirteenth
century. Both look back to this period as a formative one in the histories of their
regions, although the stories they tell do not always fit comfortably with some of
the other evidence (non-Scandinavian narratives or archaeological remains) that
survives. Another particularly important work, Adam of Bremen’s History of the
Archbishops of Hamburg, was written earlier, in about 1070, but it is an unsympa-
thetic and intolerant account of Scandinavia designed to support the claims of the
archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen to ecclesiastical authority over the region. The
only contemporary indigenous writing which survives from before then is in the
form of runic inscriptions on stone monuments, and these raise as many questions
as they answer. Archaeology is therefore crucial, but discoveries are open to a wide
range of different interpretations, and they rarely touch upon mainstream political
events. The story of Scandinavia in the tenth century, therefore, is impossible to
reconstruct in full, and much remains conjectural. What seems clear, however, is
that Danish dominance over the region grew considerably as this period went on.
The three nascent kingdoms of course had their differences, but they had things
in common as well, not least a shared language, known as Old Nordic, albeit with
variations in dialect. Above all, however, they shared a closeness to the sea and a
dependence on it. Maritime trade, internal within Scandinavia and overseas out of
the Baltic as far as Russia, Byzantium and Muslim Spain, was crucial to the pros-
perity of this region. But this was also what in both popular parlance and academic
writing is often referred to as ‘The Viking Age’ (here the phrase is used to refer to
the period between about 750 and about 1100), and the process of state forma-
tion in Scandinavia coincided with the raids, settlements and voyages of discovery
which originated there. There were similar social conventions, too. In nineteenth-
century Scandinavian historiography, the idea that early medieval society there
consisted mainly of free peasant landowners living in an egalitarian idyll, an idyll
which was destroyed in the later Middle Ages by the growth of centralised royal
power and the emergence of a landholding aristocracy, took strong hold. Inevitably,
more recent research has cast doubt on this analysis. Scandinavian society through-
out this period, it seems, was always highly stratified. At the top was the king, who
gained power either by force or through election from within one or two leading
families. Surrounded by his military and domestic retinues, he was entitled to be
entertained and take hospitality as he travelled around the country and, although
the form and extent of this right differed somewhat between Denmark, Norway
and Sweden, he could also raise the leding, a naval force manned by local peas-
ants. To differing degrees within the different countries once again, contributions
towards the entertaining of the royal entourage would be commuted into more
general taxation in later periods, and the popular levy would eventually be replaced
by more specialised military service paid for by such taxes.
The king was both a military and religious leader, except in Sweden where the
pre-Christian kings seem to have been primarily cultic figures. Whether through
violence or by pleasing the pagan gods, however, the king’s primary job within
his kingdom was to keep things stable and safe enough for trade to develop. He
had to keep his own followers satisfied too, of course, and this meant regular raid-
ing and plundering abroad. Too much precision should not be attached to this
description, however. The sources provide only a very dim and distant view of how
Scandinavian politics played out in reality before the coming of Christianity. And
despite the importance of kings, ultimate power was probably not in the hands of
individuals ruling well-defined territories. Rather it was competed for locally, and
sometimes shared, by chieftains with their own bands of military followers. The
lack of centralised control left local communities to regulate their own affairs, and
typically they did this through regular assemblies (things) which dealt with a range
of political, economic and legal issues as well as being important social gatherings.
In due course, these assemblies would prove to be useful vehicles for the spread of
royal power. Having said that, even as the Scandinavian kings grew stronger, local
customs and practices always remained the cornerstone of legal systems across the
region. The slaves who cleared the land, farmed the fields and built the fortifica-
tions were not entitled to take part in things. Women, meanwhile, were well-
respected and could supervise their husbands’ property in their absence. They also
played an important role in pre-Christian religious practice – many rune stones
were dedicated by women.
Sweden is named after the Svear people of eastern Sweden, and the kingdom
of Sweden, when it eventually emerged, was formed by the unification of the
Svear and the Götar who occupied the plains of central southern Sweden. This
did not happen until the twelfth century, however, and the idea of Sweden as a
single nation or people was very slow to emerge. Until then, the Svear enforced
their dominance by extracting tribute, mainly in the form of furs, from the people
living round the gulfs of Bothnia and Finland, and even from north Russia. There
is no reliable information about the early Svear kings between the middle of the
ninth century and the end of the tenth, but it seems unlikely that they exercised
any meaningful power much beyond their power base at Uppsala. Two things seem
clear, however: first, Christianity was only just beginning to gain a foothold in
Sweden by 1000, and second, Danish influence over what would become Sweden
appears to have been considerable. In 992 or 993, Erik, king of the Svear, sup-
ported by the Polish ruler Boleslav Chrobry, whose sister he had married, attacked
Denmark. Erik was defeated and killed, and King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark
took Erik’s widow as his wife. Sweyn was soon acknowledged as overlord by Erik’s
son and successor Olof (d.1022), who was later known as Skötkonung (Tributary
King). Olof later fought alongside Sweyn against King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway
in 999. Olof is more famous, however, as the first Christian king of Sweden. He
certainly appears to have been baptised and was probably followed in this by some
of his leading men. More will have converted later in the eleventh century, but
even so pre-Christian beliefs remained deeply rooted in Sweden. Cultic centres,
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the best-known of which was at Uppsala, continued to be very powerful (Adam of

Bremen claimed that human sacrifices still took place there in his own day), and
the progress of the new religion would be slow.
Norway takes its name from the Norvegur (‘North Way’), the sheltered sea route
down its Atlantic coastline. The Norwegian population was largely confined to
this coastal strip and settled in or close to the hundreds of fjords which characterise
this region and their hinterlands where farming was possible. Most communica-
tion between isolated farming communities was by sea. Meanwhile, inland and to
the north were largely forest, and there the nomadic Sami people predominated.
A primarily western orientation perhaps accounts in part for the likelihood that the
first viking raids on England came from Norway. Certainly, it was adventurers from
Norway who eventually took control of the Northern and Western Isles of Britain,
the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland. Accounts written much later identify
Harald Fairhair (d.932) as the effective founder of the Norwegian kingdom. It is
almost impossible to regard these as historically accurate, however, and descrip-
tions of Harald steadily creating a unified kingdom by subduing one chieftain after
another obscure the fact that in reality he probably ruled directly over only part
of western Norway and, at best, exercised some kind of overlordship beyond this.
Harald’s son Eric Bloodaxe (d.954) is best-known for his exploits in England, and
very little is known about his activities in Norway. However, it seems clear that Eric
was forced to concentrate on England after having been expelled from Norway by
his younger brother Hakon the Good in about 948. Hakon secured the submission
of the powerful earl (jarl) of Lade, Sigurd, and thus controlled large parts of Nor-
way directly or otherwise. He was also a Christian. There is evidence that he had
been brought up at the court of King Aethelstan in England, and Snorri Sturluson
later claimed that he brought Christianity back with him to Norway. The immedi-
ate impact of this is hard to assess, however, and the religion probably made little
progress in Norway during his reign. Competition for the position of king also
continued. Hakon the Good was eventually killed in 960 by his nephew Harald
Greycloak (Eric Bloodaxe’s son), who was backed by King Harald Bluetooth of
Denmark. The ambitions of Harald Greycloak then had to be reined in by the
Danish king, who gave his backing to the new Earl of Lade, Hakon, whose father,
Sigurd, Harald Greycloak had killed. Earl Hakon defeated Harald Greycloak at sea
and became the most powerful chieftain in Norway as a result. He accepted Harald
Bluetooth’s overlordship, however, and Norway remained subject to Denmark for
the rest of this period.
The name ‘Denmark’ is first recorded (in Old English) in the description given
to the king of Wessex, Alfred the Great, of a journey undertaken by a Norwegian
chieftain, Ottar, in the late ninth century. It occurs again on two great rune stones
at Jelling in south Jutland which memorialise King Harald Bluetooth, his father
Gorm the Old (d.c.958) and his mother Thyra. Precisely what ‘Denmark’ meant in
this context is unclear, but it was certainly the first of the Scandinavian countries
to emerge as a unified kingdom during the tenth century, by which time it prob-
ably already dominated much of Scandinavia. Danish geography helped a kingdom
develop more quickly there than in Norway and Sweden: with a larger population
contained within a much smaller area, power was easier to exercise and resources
(Denmark had the most arable land in Scandinavia) easier to extract. The kingdom
eventually comprised, in addition to its modern area, the now Swedish provinces
of Skåne, Halland and Blekinge. Its southern frontier lay at the foot of the Jutland
peninsula in what is now Schleswig-Holstein. This boundary was secured by the
construction between about 730 and 960 of the Danevirke, a vast rampart which
stretches for more than 19 miles. Designed to keep out Frankish raiders, it prob-
ably controlled more generally the movement of people in and out of Danish ter-
ritory. Rather as Offa’s Dyke in England suggests impressive levels of centralised
authority within eighth-century Mercia, so the Danevirke is seen as evidence of
the early Danish kingdom’s capacity to organise and deploy significant resources.
Denmark was overwhelmingly an agrarian society, although towns were beginning
to emerge, most notably to begin with at Ribe and Hedeby. Århus may have been
founded in about 900 on the initiative of the king. If so, it was an early precursor
of urbanisation in medieval Scandinavia, which would be mostly the result of the
development of royal and ecclesiastical administrative centres and the growth of a
landholding aristocracy which kept more surplus produce for sale in local markets.
Danish ‘kings’ are mentioned as early as the sixth century. Gregory of Tours
reported an attack on Gaul by a King Cholchillaich in 515, but precisely what kind
of authority he possessed is unclear. Round about 700, the missionary Willibrord,
bishop of Utrecht, visited ‘the wild tribe of the Danes’, which was ruled by King
Ongendus. Soon after this, construction of the Danevirke began, and by the start
of the ninth century, King Godfred (d.810) was powerful enough to provoke a
response from Charlemagne on the northern tip of the latter’s empire. Very little
is known from textual sources about Danish history over the following century
or so, and it is unclear what role the kings played, if any, in the raids on Europe
which began in earnest during this period. It has been argued that some of the
viking leaders were actually political exiles and that the power of the Danish kings
declined rapidly during the ninth century at the hands of challengers who returned
from their raids with enough plunder to make their own bids for the throne or
force their rivals to share power. The people of Scandinavia cannot have been
unaware of the growing prosperity of other parts of northern Europe during this
period: this may have been what prompted some to board their ships in search of
new sources of wealth.
The mist of later Danish legend finally clears a little from the 930s onwards with
the emergence there of the so-called Jelling dynasty. Jelling is on the Jutland pen-
insula, and Gorm the Old (d.958) ruled from there for about 20 years. He appears
to have been responsible for the raising of the older of the two great runestones
at Jelling which is dedicated to his wife, Thyre. The fact that the second of these
stones, raised by Gorm’s son Harald Bluetooth (d.986), claims that Harald ‘won
for himself all of Denmark’ might imply that Gorm ruled a smaller kingdom, but
this is hard to know. It has been argued that Gorm’s Denmark was divided between
south Danes and north Danes and that his marriage to Thyre was intended to unite
Power 81
the two regions. This may explain the runic reference to Harald winning ‘all of
Denmark’, and it is possible that Harald significantly enlarged the area under his
authority by bringing Sjaelland and Skåne under direct royal rule. He also appears
to have gained control of the lands flanking Oslofjord.
The same stone also records that Harald Bluetooth ‘won’ Norway, too. Once
again, the meaning of this is obscure, although, as has been seen, he was recog-
nized as overlord there by the most powerful Norwegian chieftain, Hakon, Earl
of Lade. The archaeological evidence also strongly supports the idea that Harald
not only restored Danish royal power, but extended it too, perhaps at least so far
as to assert supremacy, if not direct rule, over Norway. Harald built roads and
bridges, crucial for the movement of troops; he refortified the Danevirke as well.
The burial mound he constructed at Jelling, probably to house the remains of his
mother and father, is the largest in Denmark. But most impressive were the circu-
lar fortresses constructed in about 980 at Fyrkat and Aggersborg in east and north
Jutland respectively, and at Trelleborg and Odense on the islands of Sjaelland and
Fyn. They differ greatly in size but all were built on the same geometric pattern:
a circular wall surrounded by a v-shaped ditch, with gates at the four points of the
compass and halls and houses in each quarter. Exactly what function these sites
were designed to perform is open to debate: they might have been aggressive state-
ments of coercive power and expansionary intent (the fortress at Aggersborg peers
threateningly over the Skagerrak towards Norway, for example); perhaps they were
royal strongholds in newly conquered territories or regional administrative centres
where royal authority was more softly cultivated. Whatever their precise purpose,
however, they are suggestive of a regime with the capacity to think strategically on
a wide scale and one with the authority to collect and deploy significant resources –
such projects imply the existence of formalised systems requiring compulsory con-
tributions. It should also be said, however, that archaeological evidence suggests
that the fortresses were only in use for about 10 or 20 years, so their practical
impact may have been limited.
Harald Bluetooth is also usually credited with the conversion of Denmark to
Christianity – the great runestone at Jelling records that he ‘made the Danes Chris-
tian’. However, the Danes must have been familiar with Christianity long before
Harald’s reign, not least from their trading activities, and it seems certain that there
were already Christians living in Denmark, alongside those who continued to wor-
ship the pagan gods, before the 960s. The impact of German Christianity on the
region was particularly important. The German king Henry the Fowler is said
to have defeated the Danes in 934 and forced them to accept baptism. Histori-
ans doubt this, however, and a longer-term force for conversion may have been
missionaries sent from Germany into Scandinavia. The archdiocese of Hamburg
had been created in the 830s with the purpose of evangelising the pagan lands to
the north and east, and in 845, after a Danish attack on Hamburg, the diocese of
Bremen was united with that of Hamburg. From that point on, the north German
view (most clearly expressed by Adam of Bremen in the late eleventh century)
was that the whole of Scandinavia was subject to the ecclesiastical province of
Hamburg-Bremen. It was difficult to turn such a claim into reality, however. The
East Frankish king Otto I established three new Danish sees, at Århus, Ribe and
Schleswig, as missionary centres in the first instance. However, it seems unlikely
that the bishops he appointed ever visited their new dioceses. The Danish kings
persistently resisted German claims to ecclesiastical authority, as they appreci-
ated that submission in this regard implied submission to German power more
generally.
Accounts of Harald Bluetooth’s own conversion differ. Adam of Bremen
described how Harald was forced to convert after being defeated in battle by Otto
I. Adam, of course, was keen to show that Harald’s conversion was effectively a sub-
mission to Otto and therefore an acknowledgement of East Frankish (specifically
Hamburg-Bremen’s) supremacy over Scandinavia. The oldest account by contrast,
written in about 970 by another German chronicler, Widukind of Corvey, claimed
that Harald was convinced about the merits of Christianity by a German mission-
ary called Poppo, who went through a miraculous ordeal by fire to support his
arguments. This story may or may not be true, but the inscription on the Jelling
runestone implies that Harald’s attitude to Christianity was an assertively independ-
ent one. There is no reason to doubt that, on a personal level, it was sincere, but it
was also deeply political. The three new bishoprics which had been set up by Otto
I hinted at a future German annexation of Denmark, and, if nothing else, Harald’s
conversion removed one of the main excuses his much more powerful southern
neighbour might have used for invading. In 965, indeed, by which time Harald had
certainly converted, Otto issued a charter formally relinquishing all imperial rights
over the Danish Church. This did not remove German pressure on Denmark,
however, and Harald felt compelled to attack the Germans more than once, with
varying degrees of success, in the 970s following the death of Otto I and in the 980s
when Otto II was weakened following his defeat in Italy. In 983 Harald’s campaign
in alliance with the pagan Abodrites weakened German power north of the Elbe
and so removed any immediate threat of German invasion.
Whatever his motives might have been, Harald Bluetooth’s decision to convert
and be baptised was hugely important in making Christianity the official Dan-
ish religion and in beginning the process of organising the Danish Church more
formally. Harald was eventually deposed and driven into exile by a rebellion led
by his son and successor Sweyn Forkbeard (c.985–1014). The reasons for the coup
are unknown, although it has been suggested that Sweyn led a group of magnates
unhappy at Harald’s forceful imposition of Christianity. In any event, Harald died
soon after in 987. During his 30-year reign, he had radically transformed the Dan-
ish kingdom and made it more powerful and secure than it had ever been.
Sweyn Forkbeard is best known for his successes in England, and what hap-
pened within Denmark and Scandinavia during his reign is less clear. The Chris-
tianisation of Denmark continued, however, and was well-advanced by the end
of the eleventh century, by which time pagan gods were no longer worshipped
in public, and pagan burial rituals were no longer carried out. What seems clear,
too, is that during the 990s, Sweyn expanded his authority within Scandinavia by
Power 83
subordinating the Svear. As has been seen, after defeating and killing the Swedish
king Erik and marrying his widow, Harald was accepted as overlord by Erik’s son
Olof Skötkonung. By this time, and although he is not named anywhere as having
done so, Sweyn may have carried out his first raid on England in 991 as the leader
of the force that defeated the English at Maldon in Essex and forced them to pay
tribute of £10,000. The attacks on England at this time need to be seen as essen-
tial parts of Sweyn’s domestic strategy: the tributes he received would be crucial
in helping consolidate and extend his power at home and in enabling him to
retain the support of the warriors on whom he relied. He returned to England in
994, this time accompanied by the Norwegian chieftain Olaf Tryggvason. They
failed to take London, but their extensive ravaging in the south-east forced the
English to pay tribute of £16,000. King Aethelred II of England then persuaded
Olaf to abandon his alliance with Sweyn and encouraged him to return to Nor-
way in 995 to challenge Danish overlordship. This agreement also involved Olaf ’s
baptism and an agreement that he would never return to England with hostile
intentions. Aethelred no doubt meant to preoccupy Sweyn within Scandinavia
in the hope that this would keep him away from England. And indeed, Sweyn
did not return to England until he had reasserted his lordship over Norway by
defeating Olaf in battle in 999. Olaf ’s reign had been brief, but during it he had
extended his influence over all of coastal Norway. He was later depicted, too, as
an aggressive, evangelising king who forced Christianity on the Norwegians and
even brought it to Iceland. But the evidence for all of this is thin and, in the case
of Iceland, mythical.
In 1003, King Sweyn began a protracted campaign in England that caused wide-
spread destruction, but in 1005, a severe famine forced him back to Denmark with
his fleet, and he is not known to have returned to England again until 1013. The
timing was probably no accident. Another Danish chieftain, Thorkell the Tall, had
overrun a large part of England between 1009 and 1012 before being paid off by
King Aethelred and agreeing to serve him. It may be that the English king wanted
Thorkell to challenge Sweyn in Scandinavia as Olaf Tryggvason had done, so the
invasion of 1013 might have been intended to pre-empt this. Whether from the
start Sweyn planned to conquer England is less certain, but this is what he did.
Having established his base at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, he soon received the
submission of the whole area north of Watling Street that had been occupied by
viking settlers in the ninth century. He then went south. Oxford and Wallingford
submitted, but when London resisted, Sweyn went to Bath where he received the
submission of the south-west. The English then acknowledged defeat, London sur-
rendered and, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the principal narrative source
for English history during this period, ‘all the nation accepted him as full king’.
Sweyn’s personal triumph was short-lived: he died at Gainsborough on 3 February
1014. But he had managed to conquer England while retaining and extending his
supremacy within Scandinavia – these were remarkable achievements.
...
During the tenth century, three new polities emerged on the eastern edge of West-
ern Europe: Bohemia, Poland and Hungary. All of them, on the initiative of their
leaders, converted to Christianity over the same period and (unlike Russia further
east and the Balkans to the south) were assimilated within the Roman rather than
Byzantine sphere of religious influence. In other words, once established, these
emerging states looked west politically and culturally rather than east and contrib-
uted significantly to that expansion of Latin Christendom characteristic of the cen-
tral Middle Ages. This was by no means a smooth, untroubled process, however,
and there was nothing predetermined about the shape and size of these new politi-
cal entities. Sometimes they worked together, sometimes they fought; internally,
dynastic rivalries and struggles for power could be intense; all were heavily involved
with and influenced by their more powerful neighbours in imperial Germany,
occasionally in opposition, but often in cooperation with them. Also, given that
most of the narrative sources describe events in these regions only in passing and
were written later and by outsiders, it is very difficult accurately to chart the course
of events there and assess what was actually achieved.
Slavic tribes had been established in central Europe since at least the sixth cen-
tury. The history of these developments is obscure to say the least, but by about
900, they were settled across large areas west up to the Elbe and Oder rivers, south
into the Balkans and east into Russia. Those groups referred to collectively by his-
torians as the Western Slavs included the ancestors of, amongst others, the people
eventually known as Poles and Czechs. Hungary, meanwhile, owed its origin to
nomadic Magyar warriors from east of the Black Sea who first began making a vio-
lent impact on Western Europe under their leader Arpad in the late ninth century.
Dozens of Magyar raids on regions as far afield as Italy and southern France are
recorded between the 890s and the 950s. Fast, elusive and devastating though these
mounted archers were, however, they had already ceased to be a serious threat by
the time they were defeated by Otto I at the Lechfeld in 955. Even so, they had
established a solid centre of power by then in the Carpathian Basin, and after 955,
their priority was to consolidate and intensify their control of that region. Arpad’s
great-grandson Geza (972–97) did this with brutal violence, but he also converted
to Christianity in 972. Later his son Vajk was also baptised as Stephen I (997–1038)
and, in 1001, was crowned king with imperial and papal approval. Stephen also
laid the foundations of the Hungarian kings’ economic power by taking control
in the name of the monarchy of the sparsely populated areas that the Magyars had
originally conquered. These lay between and around areas of indigenous tribal
settlement, so Stephen’s actions in creating a large royal demesne did little to upset
these long-established traditional interests.
The first Ottonians had little direct contact with the Magyar rulers of Hungary
(certainly less than they did with Bohemia and Poland), but German influence was
still keenly felt there. Stephen’s marriage to Gisela, the daughter of Duke Henry
of Bavaria, was a turning-point in giving Hungary the distinctly western orienta-
tion it never lost, and when Stephen’s new father-in-law became King Henry II in
1002, he was heavily involved in furthering the conversion of the Hungarians to
Power 85
Christianity and in establishing an organised ecclesiastical structure there. Stephen

is reputed to have established ten bishoprics in his kingdom, but his decision to
accept Christianity in its Latin form was even more fundamental to the kingdom’s
future. Stephen also imported western administrative structures and divided his
realm into more than 40 counties run by royally appointed officials with respon-
sibility for raising troops, supervising law and order and collecting taxes. In 1000,
Hungary was not a united kingdom, and most of its people were pagans. By the
1030s, by contrast, Stephen had unified the kingdom after successfully taking on
the major territorial lords, and he ruled over an increasingly Christianised kingdom
in which strict laws were enacted to enforce adherence to the new religion. He
also introduced the minting of coins to Hungary, and it was during his reign that
the first royal charters and laws were issued. However, the death of his son and heir
Henry in 1031 threw his succession plans into confusion, and chronic dynastic
instability would follow Stephen’s own death in 1038.
During the first half of the tenth century, the Piast dynasty, leaders of the Polani
tribe, united what came to be northern Poland. Further Piast expansion, north into
Pomerania and south into Silesia and the region around Cracow known as Little
Poland, was led by Mieszko I (c.962–92). He was helped in this by the death of
Otto II in 983 and the ensuing minority of Otto III, as well as by the great revolt
of the Elbe Slavs against German authority which began in the same year. But
Mieszko, like the Magyar rulers, wanted to be seen as a legitimate European ruler,
not just an opportunistic barbarian. He was a ‘friend’ of the emperor Otto I, and
in 966, he was baptised and married to Dobrava, the daughter of the Christian
ruler of Bohemia, Boleslav I. Mieszko’s conversion was followed up by mission-
ary bishops, and a new bishopric was established at Poznan from 968. The earliest
surviving reference to Poland is contained in one of Mieszko I’s treaties. However,
the early Polish state reached the height of its short-lived success under Mieszko’s
son, Boleslav Chrobry, ‘the Brave’ or ‘the Great’ (992–1025). Having overlooked
his father’s succession plans and seized the throne from his younger half-brother
(Mieszko’s son from his second marriage), Boleslav began his reign by courting
Otto III. In 1000, Otto made a pilgrimage to Gniezno to visit the tomb of his mar-
tyred friend, Bishop Adalbert of Prague. Gniezno was raised to the rank of an arch-
bishopric with authority over several dioceses, and later Polish tradition holds that
the emperor made Boleslav a king. In fact, Boleslav was not crowned until 1025,
just before he died. Between these two events, the Poles had been involved in a
long and costly series of wars (in 1003–5, 1007–13 and 1015–17) against Otto III’s
successor, Henry II, who was insistent that Boleslav should accept his subordinate
status. But Boleslav had even conquered Bohemia in 1003 and held it for a short
time along with Moravia and Slovakia, and when peace terms were finally agreed
with the emperor in 1018, he was still in possession of more territory than any of
his predecessors. Boleslav had done remarkably well. He ruled a strong, compact
kingdom within which the process of Christianisation was well-advanced, and he
had made himself the dominant force among the Western Slavs. His influence
went even further, too: in 1013 and 1018–19, he campaigned further east and took
control of Kyiv for a time. As they would in Hungary following the death of King
Stephen, however, internal crises and a more aggressive imperial approach would
threaten these achievements.
The dominant Slav tribe in what became Bohemia were the Czechs. Under
their leader Borivoj, the first of the Premyslid dynasty (which was named after the
poor ploughman Premysl, the legendary founder of the Czechs), they controlled
central Bohemia. But it was Boleslav I (929/35–72) who subordinated the whole
Bohemian Plain and Boleslav II (972–99) who unified it. Nevertheless, surrounded
on three sides by imperial territory, Bohemia could hardly avoid political depend-
ence on its German neighbour. Duke Wenceslas I (921–9) became a tribute-paying
vassal of King Henry I in 929, whilst his brother and successor Boleslav I fought
the Germans for years but eventually accepted their overlordship too, as did most
of his successors. Dynastic politics within Bohemia were never straightforward,
either. Wenceslas was murdered by Boleslav and was soon worshipped as a saint. By
this time, the Bohemian rulers were all Christians. Borivoj had probably been the
first to convert in the 890s (although some chieftains might have converted earlier
than this); Boleslav II secured papal approval for the establishment of a bishopric
at Prague in the 970s (importantly, the pope insisted that the liturgical language
used should not be Slavic), and before this Boleslav I’s sister Dobrava had helped
bring Christianity to Poland by marrying Mieszko I. This link with Poland became
particularly important during the reign of Boleslav III (999–1003). He was deposed
and then returned to power with the military assistance of Boleslav Chrobry, but
the Polish leader then blinded his Bohemian counterpart and took power for him-
self in Prague. It was this, or more particularly his refusal to perform homage to
Henry II for Bohemia, which led to the start of Boleslav Chrobry’s long series of
wars against the German king.
The Poles soon had to withdraw from Bohemia, but that did not bring an end
to dynastic conflict there. Henry II installed Boleslav III’s brother Jaromir as ruler,
but he was deposed in turn by another brother, Oldrich. Both Jaromir and Oldrich
were pro-German, however, and it was in part the freedom this gave them that
allowed Oldrich’s son Bretislav to drive the Poles out of Moravia and rule there
himself from about 1030. This was not the end of the matter, however, and the
limits of Bohemian power were made clear again in 1032 after Oldrich ignored
Conrad II’s invitation to attend his court at Merseburg. The angry king sent his son
Henry to punish the disobedient Bohemian; Oldrich was arrested, deposed, sent to
Bavaria and again replaced by Jaromir. However, when Oldrich was pardoned the
next year, he returned to Bohemia and had Jaromir captured, blinded and deposed.
Having seized power again, he drove Bretislav from Moravia. Probably only Old-
rich’s death in 1034 prevented another intervention by the German king.
3
FAITH
The Church in Western Europe,
c.890–c.1020
The Papacy: Too Corrupt to Matter?

Sometime during the year 896–7, Pope Stephen VI convened a synod (church
council) at Rome, as a result of which the rotting corpse of his predecessor Formo-
sus was exhumed, dressed in his papal robes, put on trial, convicted and thrown
into the River Tiber. Formosus had died in April 896, and his ‘crime’ was that
he had become bishop of Rome (pope) whilst he was already a bishop elsewhere.
Canon law, his critics said, forbade such a move from the diocese to which the
bishop was seen to be ‘married’. Stephen VI’s triumph, meanwhile, was fleeting:
within a year, he had himself been imprisoned and killed.
Gruesome and violent events like these have given the tenth-century papacy
a particular image in history books: it was incompetent and ineffective, but also
immoral, corrupt and mired in scandal. Superficially, there is plenty of evidence to
support such a characterisation. Between 885 and 1024, there were 34 popes and
4 anti-popes. A number of these lasted less than a year in office, and more than
one was murdered; several were in their early twenties when they became pope,
and one or two may have been even younger than that. On the other hand, it is
sensible to be cautious about the accuracy of all these outrageous claims, not least
because many come from a single source, Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, who
was a member of Emperor Otto I’s court from the 950s and, as a result, not well-
disposed towards those whom he saw as standing in the way of Otto’s imperial plans
for Italy. What is more, a reasonable number of these popes were worthy, capable
men, and a few were outstanding. It is also possible to discern consistent lines of
papal policy in various fields during this period, even amidst all the local politick-
ing and factionalism which dominated papal affairs. And at the end of this phase of
papal history, effective leadership laid the foundations for a programme of church
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-5
reform which would ultimately make the papacy the most powerful institution in
Western Europe.
Such power would have seemed a distant fantasy at the start of the 900s. To
most western Christians, the bishop of Rome was a remote and irrelevant figure.
The popes themselves rarely if ever left Rome, and they made little attempt to
assert anything that might be described as ‘universal’ authority over the Church.
When, during the 990s, a synod of French bishops declared Archbishop Arnulf of
Reims deposed and replaced him with Gerbert of Aurillac, Pope John XV objected
strongly to what he saw as an assertion of French ecclesiastical autonomy, and even-
tually his successor, Gregory V, managed to have Arnulf reinstalled. Direct papal
intervention like this in the business of distant kingdoms was rare, however, and
the chances of success depended on the circumstances the pope was able to exploit.
More commonly, high-ranking churchmen (archbishops, bishops and abbots) had
little if any direct contact with the popes. Occasionally a new archbishop might
go to Rome to collect his pallium (the woollen stole which symbolised the arch-
bishop’s office and which only the pope could award): Dunstan of Canterbury and
Oskytel of York did so in 960. More often, though, they had it delivered by a papal
representative. There were other forms of contact, however. Letters were sent to
Rome by religious houses and individual clergy on a wide range of matters: they
might ask for the confirmation of certain ecclesiastical privileges, for example, or
the answer to a question about the power of a local bishop over a monastery in his
diocese. From the period 896–1049, 630 papal charters survive, about a quarter
of which are forgeries. The authentic ones, written by papal scribes in response
to queries and requests like this, reveal a functioning, if basic, papal bureaucracy as
well as an enduring respect for papal authority, both of which persisted despite the
bewildering turnover of men who sat on the papal throne itself.
The popes of the tenth century were so restricted in what they could do because
they were themselves dominated by Roman aristocratic families that saw the papal
office as a badge of local status to be fought over. Popes were supposed to be
elected by the clergy and people of Rome, with the consent of the emperor. But
in practice, these ‘elections’ could be manipulated by powerful factions intent on
terrorising and bribing the electorate. This situation was exacerbated in the ninth
century as Carolingian power was weakening at the same time, and so there was
no chance of the popes seeking strong external support (as Leo III had done from
Charlemagne in 800) to protect them from this domestic in-fighting. The endemic
political turbulence of northern Italy, combined with the pressing dual threats of
Byzantine and Muslim power in the south, further hemmed the papacy in and
restricted its room for effective manoeuvre.
As a result of all these pressures, for most of the first half of the tenth century,
Rome was controlled politically by the family of Theophylact (d.920), ‘consul
and senator of Rome’, and also papal treasurer. Pope Sergius III (897, 904–11)
is reported to have had two of his predecessors, Leo V and Christopher, both of
whom had been deposed, murdered in prison. He is also said to have had a child
by Theophylact’s daughter, Marozia. Whether these lurid tales are true or not, it
Faith 89
was certainly during Sergius’s pontificate that Theophylact tightened his grip on
the papacy. This process was continued by his daughter Marozia and his son-in-law,
Alberic, Duke of Spoleto (d.925). When Pope John X, an energetic pope who did
much to organise a coalition of Italian rulers against the Muslims, showed signs
of wanting to assert some kind of independence in the late 920s, he was deposed,
murdered and eventually replaced by the son Marozia had allegedly had with Ser-
gius III, as John XI (931–5/6). Then, in 932, Marozia’s son by Alberic of Spoleto,
also called Alberic, seized and imprisoned his mother and John XI and proceeded
to rule Rome until his death in 954 as ‘Senator’ and ‘prince of the Romans’.
Under princeps Alberic, Rome experienced the most stable and peaceful part of this
period. He was strong enough to refuse Otto I’s demand for imperial coronation
in 951, and in 955, Alberic’s illegitimate teenage son was elected Pope John XII in
accordance with his father’s dying wishes.
John XII, despite the irregularity of his election, his youth and the allegations
of dissolute conduct levelled at him by Liutprand of Cremona, was not a bad pope.
He was a supporter of the monastic reform movements developing in northern
Europe at this time, most notably in West Francia and England, which were based
on the revitalisation of the Rule of St Benedict. Many Roman monasteries adopted
the Benedictine Rule during John’s pontificate. However, John was also a secular
ruler, and when his ancestral duchy of Spoleto was overrun by the king of Lom-
bardy, Berengar II (d.963) in 959, the pope’s decision to ask Otto I for help was a
fateful one. As has been seen already, it resulted in Otto’s imperial coronation in
Rome in February 962, the granting of the Ottonianum to the papacy by Otto,
and then John XII’s own deposition in 963 by the emperor he had crowned and
subsequently defied. Otto I’s six-year residency in Italy from 966–72 then allowed
him to assert direct imperial control over Rome and central Italy, but once he had
returned to Germany and died, this control quickly began to evaporate.
Otto II was preoccupied with internal German opposition until the early 980s
when he finally came to Rome (he died and was buried there in 983), whilst Otto
III’s minority meant that he did not come to Rome until 996. Meanwhile, in the
absence of imperial authority, local aristocratic families in Rome vied with each
other once again for control of the papal throne. By the 970s, the dominant fac-
tion was the Crescentians, and they were determined to hang on to the power and
influence the papacy gave them. Even after Otto III came to Rome in 996 and
appointed his own nominee as Pope Gregory V, the Romans resisted by ejecting
Gregory as soon as Otto had returned to Germany. Otto’s furious and brutal reac-
tion to the appointment of his former tutor as Pope John XVI in 997 was described
earlier, but even this was not enough to suppress the Romans’ desire to govern
themselves. The election of Otto’s adviser Gerbert of Aurillac as Pope Silvester II
in 999 was followed in 1001 by a revolt against imperial rule in Rome which forced
Otto and Silvester to flee the city.
Otto III was interested in the spiritual ‘renewal’ (renovatio) of the western church,
and he intended his relationship with the popes he appointed to be a construc-
tive and fruitful collaboration. These ambitious plans were frustrated before they
could be properly formulated by Otto’s difficulties in holding on to Rome and by

his early death in 1002. After that in Rome, and for the next decade, it was the
all-powerful dictator, the self-styled ‘patrician’ John II Crescentius, who controlled
affairs until his death in 1012. His death, however, heralded the start of the next,
more ambitious and outward-looking, phase of papal history. It coincided with the
death of Pope Sergius IV, a Crescentian appointee, and in the confused aftermath
of these two departures, a different local aristocratic family, the Tusculans, seized
power and installed one of its own members, the son of the Count of Tusculum,
as Pope Benedict VIII. Benedict initially faced a Crescentian challenger, styling
himself Gregory VI, but he used force to crush his supporters, and he also success-
fully called on King Henry II to intervene on his behalf. When Henry came from
Germany to Rome in 1014, Benedict crowned him emperor, and following the
coronation, Henry and Benedict held a synod at Ravenna which, amongst other
things, set the minimum ages for taking holy orders and legislated against simony
(the buying and selling of positions within the church). After Henry returned to
Germany, Benedict spent much of the next six years leading military campaigns
designed to assert his political authority over large parts of central Italy. Having
made an alliance with Pisa and Genoa, he even took part with them in a naval bat-
tle against Arab invaders and liberated Sardinia in 1016.
Henry II was not one to linger long in Italy, as has been seen, but his relation-
ship with Benedict remained productive. In 1020, Benedict visited the emperor in
Germany to discuss the rising threat from the Byzantines of southern Italy who
had just crushed a papally backed revolt involving the new Norman settlers in the
region. Whilst he was there, he conducted the consecration ceremony for Henry’s
new cathedral at Bamberg and received a confirmation of the terms of the Ottoni-
anum from the emperor. For a pope of this period to leave Rome, let alone travel
to a different country, was remarkable, but Benedict set a precedent in this regard
for the more active and outward-looking popes of the later eleventh century, such
as Leo IX and Urban II. Then, when Henry returned to Italy in the early 1020s,
he and Benedict presided over a synod at Pavia in 1022 which attempted to address
the chronic poverty of the church in Italy and the way many of its lands had been
lost over previous generations. One contributor to this problem were the married
priests who sought to keep church property for themselves and pass it on to their
children, and so the synod pronounced that women were to be excluded from
the houses of priests and that married clergy, including bishops, were officially
deposed. The synod’s preoccupation with married priests was a practical one: it
was not so much the moral standing of the clergy that was at stake at Pavia as the
pressing poverty of the church and how that could be reduced; Benedict VIII was
always more concerned about church property than the behaviour of the clergy
(Henry II was probably a more devoutly pious man than the pope). Nevertheless,
this interest in the clergy’s sexual purity would be taken up by reformers later in
the century who would see this and other related issues in a much broader context
and as fundamental to the spiritual wellbeing of all Christians.
Faith 91
Benedict VIII understood the importance of cooperating with the German

crown, and he was an energetic and tenacious pursuer of what he saw as lost papal
rights and powers on the ground in Italy. He also appeared to grasp the signifi-
cance of the early Norman influx into southern Italy and how this might be useful
in holding back Muslim and Byzantine power there. What is more, by the time
Benedict died in 1024, the papacy as an institution was developing steadily and
able to withstand the unpredictable vagaries of individual pontificates. Even if in
practice papal power fluctuated and varied with circumstances, there was devel-
oping support for the notion of papal primacy within the church. How far that
extended was another matter. St Peter was the first bishop, and so Rome was the
pre-eminent bishopric; Christ had given Peter the power to bind and loose. But
whether all this gave the pope practical power over other churches and bishops, or
just made him first among equals, was still a matter of debate.
Much depended on the interpretation of canon law, and this was still an impre-
cise and puzzling business by the 1020s. Canon law, the law of the Church, was
derived from a wide variety of sources, including the Bible, the writings of the
Church Fathers (men like St Augustine and St Jerome), the canons (decisions) of
church councils and the letters of popes (‘decretals’). Canon law in the early elev-
enth century, however, was anything but clear. It consisted of a vast pile of conciliar
and synodal decisions, papal pronouncements and the rest which all counted as law
but were not systematically organised or arranged. Different canons made at differ-
ent times might conflict with one another, and there was no way of deciding which
was to be preferred in a particular set of circumstances. Having said this, some early
attempts were made to bring church law into better order, and two collections of
canon law were highly influential. The so-called Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals were
compiled in the ninth century and contained a mixture of genuine and forged
canons. Their purpose was to bolster the authority of bishops within their sees
by showing that the hierarchical structure of the church went back to its earliest
foundations. Burchard, bishop of Worms, compiled his collection of canon law, the
Decretum, in the early eleventh century – it was probably finished before 1020. It
comprised 1,785 canons in 20 volumes, arranged thematically so that it was easier
to consult, and it purported to be comprehensive. It dealt with issues such as the
basic structure of the church and its courts and how to conduct a synod; it also dealt
with other subjects such as the laws concerning fasts and feasts, consanguinity, mar-
riage and incest. It was not a definitive collection of canons (it would be another
hundred years before such a thing became available), but Burchard’s work was an
important step in that direction.
By 1024, there was as yet no coherent plan for reform of the church and no
suggestion that the papacy would take centre-stage in pursuing such a programme.
Nevertheless, certain principles were already in place (papal primacy, the wrongs
of simony and clerical marriage), even if they needed developing more precisely.
In other parts of the western church, too, as will be seen, not least in the increas-
ing number of reformed monasteries, there was a clear interest in a return to the
idealised purity and simplicity of the apostolic life and in the revival of the idea
that the church was a self-regulating, independent community, not the property
of greedy secular lords. As for the papacy, a sound bureaucracy and an increas-
ingly coherent body of canon law underpinned its institutional strength. Real pow-
ers were significant, too: only the pope could crown an emperor or confirm the
appointment of an archbishop. The growth in papal power over the following
century would be dramatic and rapid, and in 1024, few would have predicted what
was to come. Even so, Benedict VIII had shown that popes could assert themselves
successfully, and he left the papacy well-prepared, both to take on the universal role
it would claim and to challenge the vested interests that would oppose it.
Bishops and Monks: Local Power in Cathedrals

and Cloisters
While the popes remained largely peripheral, often irrelevant, figures for much
of this period, the lead in ecclesiastical affairs across Western Europe was taken
by the bishops. This meant that, in the absence of clear centralised leadership of
the institutional church, things were done differently within and across different
regions. A bishop’s power and priorities depended on his own abilities, the force of
his personality and the political and economic constraints within which he oper-
ated. Nevertheless, despite inevitable regional differences and variations, there were
some common practices and principles which, in theory at least, applied to all
bishops regardless of the particular circumstances in which they found themselves.
Western Christendom had been separated into larger and smaller territorial parts
for several centuries by 900; indeed, some of these were first established under the
Roman Empire and were modelled on Roman administrative units. So regions
were divided into ecclesiastical provinces, each one led by an archbishop: England
was divided into the two provinces of Canterbury and York, for example. Provinces
were in turn subdivided into dioceses or bishoprics, each of which was under the
control of a bishop, who was answerable to the archbishop.
Bishops had various duties. They supervised the activities of those who worked
in their cathedral – the canons who ran the services, wrote the bishop’s letters, kept
the fabric of their great churches in order and administered the episcopal lands.
Some cathedrals were centres of educational provision, too, and the schools they
ran were often highly esteemed. Not only did they train ambitious young men
keen to pursue their own careers in the church or in the service of a lay lord, but
also they produced books, manuscripts and other artefacts. The cathedral canons
lived according to strict rules, similar to the kind observed by monks: they were
celibate and lived communally. However, unlike monks, they were also required
to interact with the world beyond their cathedral. Through them, the bishop was
responsible for ensuring that the laity in his diocese was given proper pastoral care.
To him were reserved the sacramental powers of ordination and confirmation:
these were the foundation of his authority over clergy in his diocese. But parish
provision through local priests was still developing, as will be seen, so cathedral
Faith 93
canons would travel around their dioceses holding services, visiting the sick and
so on. Other officials, archdeacons at the centre and deans in the rural areas, were
probably being appointed by this time in some places to oversee all this work and
deal with local disputes through an emerging system of ecclesiastical courts. These
men (canons, archdeacons and deans) formed the cathedral ‘chapter’, which had
the power to elect the bishop.
It was important that this routine business could carry on in the absence of the
bishop. Bishops were often absent from their cathedral city, visiting parts of their
diocese or attending court where they were expected to serve and advise the local
ruler. The overwhelming majority of bishops came from high-status, even aristo-
cratic, families, and such families naturally expected to be involved at the highest
levels of government. The younger sons of such families made ideal recruits to the
episcopate. Many bishops also owed their position to the backing they had received
from their king, duke or count. Bishops were elected by their cathedral chapter and
consecrated by their fellow bishops. However, secular influence over the Church
and its personnel was extensive. It was normal for a ruler to make his preferred
choice of bishop known to the electors and for them to rubber-stamp his selec-
tion. After all, bishops controlled the extensive lands bequeathed to their churches
over the centuries, and rulers expected their loyalty and service in return. More
than this, however, most bishops were typically much better-educated and more
literate than their counterparts in the secular aristocracy and had important practi-
cal contributions to make to the functioning of government. There are plenty of
examples of individual bishops who were more royal ministers than pious holy men
(although it was possible to be both, of course, as the career of Bishop Aethelwold
of Winchester showed). There is a long-held view in German historiography that
the approach of the Saxon kings towards their bishops was even more systematic
than this. Otto I’s victory over the rebellious dukes of Swabia and Lorraine in 953
marked a turning-point in his reign, the argument goes: he now gave up attempts
to rule his kingdom through unreliable dukes from his own family and unpre-
dictable nobles more broadly, and instead he turned to his bishops who acted as
counterweights to secular aristocratic power. The most conspicuous of these was
Otto’s younger brother Bruno, who was appointed archbishop of Cologne in 953
at the age of 28. Cologne was one of the most important cities in Lorraine – the
most westerly duchy of the East Frankish kingdom which had only recently aban-
doned its allegiance to the West Frankish king. From 953 until 965, Bruno was
responsible for keeping Lorraine securely within his brother’s realm and regularly
had to show his authority by force. Even so, despite Bruno’s prominence, there
is actually no evidence to suggest that in 953 Otto I suddenly ended one kind of
royal government across East Francia and began another. However, it does seem
to have been the case that Otto I and later Henry II extended the role of the royal
chapel, whose clergy hitherto had been responsible mainly for looking after the
king’s relics, performing his religious services and writing his documents so that it
gradually became a kind of royal training school for the next generation of bishops
and abbots. Coached and imbued with the spirit of royal service, the clerics who
emerged from the chapel might be appointed to lead dioceses or monasteries of

their own, thus allowing the regime to establish outposts of loyal influence beyond
the centres where royal power was exercised directly. But not all German bishops
and abbots were graduates of the royal chapel, and it is going too far to say that
Otto I and his successors had a ‘policy’ of using bishops and abbots to neutralise
or sideline the secular nobles or that the ‘Ottonian church system’, as it has been
called, was as thoroughgoing as the traditional theory suggests: there was no blan-
ket prohibition on lay nobles taking part in government, for example; indeed such
an idea was unthinkable. In addition, bishops were not always reliable, and most
of them were nobles themselves whose loyalties might be divided between family
and king. Even so, given the grants of lands, immunity from secular control and
jurisdictional rights that many of these churches received during this period, it
seems clear that the Ottonian and early Salian kings relied increasingly on the great
churches of their kingdom to carry out governmental functions and to provide the
king and his courtiers with hospitality and sustenance as they itinerated around
the kingdom. The churches also had a military role: Otto II and Otto III certainly
depended on troops supplied by their ecclesiastical supporters, and Otto I probably
did as well.
Even the most well-intentioned bishops would have found that the day-to-day
routine of running their dioceses inevitably diluted their focus on spirituality. Bish-
ops were heavily involved in secular politics, whether with the king at the highest
level, or locally. They might also be involved in peace-keeping. Sometimes bishops
came together to hold councils or synods, where religious issues were discussed
and regulations about liturgy and practice were issued. However, these assemblies
were not always entirely concerned with ecclesiastical matters. For example, from
the late tenth century in central and southern France (they began in Aquitaine),
assemblies of bishops and other clergy gathered periodically to proclaim the Peace
of God which prohibited attacks on non-combatants in warfare, and (from the
1020s) the Truce of God which outlawed warfare on holy and other specified
days. These gatherings, which were not replicated outside France it seems, were
designed to highlight the sufferings of local people and the damage done to church
lands by violent, oppressive secular lords and to persuade those lords to take oaths
to put down their weapons and refrain from any more violence for fixed amounts
of time. Such occasions are good evidence of the weakness of strong royal authority
in France at this time, and they suggest much about the particularly turbulent and
volatile nature of daily life in southern France. More importantly in this context,
however, they showed bishops, supported by people of all ranks who appear to have
attended these peace councils in significant numbers, taking the lead in trying to
regulate private warfare and establish social norms. How successful such attempts
were, of course, is quite another matter.
Bishops also played a leading role in expanding the frontiers of Christendom
and the conversion of non-Christians living in newly conquered areas. As part of
their attempt to expand their kingdom eastwards in the years either side of 1000,
new bishoprics were established by the Ottonian kings at Magdeburg (968) and
Faith 95
Bamberg (1007). New dioceses were also created as missionary outposts within
the lands of recently converted neighbouring rulers, for example at Prague in 973
and Gniesen in 999. The second bishop of Prague and first bishop of Gniesen,
Adalbert, was martyred whilst preaching to the pagans around the Baltic in 997
and canonised in 999. And the tenth-century archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen
were fiercely determined to preach the Gospel and spread their authority into
Scandinavia. Archbishop Adaldag (d.988) established dioceses at Ribe, Schleswig
and Århus, and the bishops installed there would have been expected to carry on
the preaching mission.
If bishops and chapters in their cathedrals constituted the principal form of
ecclesiastical power and authority during this period, there were also others. In
England, for example, the bulk of pastoral provision was provided by the minsters.
This word covered a wide range of different kinds of religious establishment, but
they were all places where clergy lived together communally. At one end of the
spectrum, minsters were staffed by priests who attended to the spiritual needs of
the surrounding villages: visiting the sick, performing baptisms and burying the
dead. At the other end, however, were the monasteries. The first ‘monks’ had been
hermits in the deserts of north Africa in the third and fourth centuries. In time,
however, like-minded hermits had started to come together and form communi-
ties in which they dedicated themselves to prayer on behalf of the wider Christian
community and submitted themselves to the authority of an abbot. These commu-
nities developed their own routines and practices; indeed, monks are also known as
regular clergy because they submit themselves to a Rule (regula in Latin), whereas
non-monastic clerics are also known, confusingly, as secular clergy. But by the
tenth century, most western monasteries had adopted the ‘Rule’ for the conduct
of monastic life which had been written by St Benedict of Nursia (d.550) for his
monastery of Monte Cassino and so can be described as ‘Benedictine’.
The Benedictine Rule consists of a Prologue and 73 chapters and sets out a
coherent and detailed plan for the organisation of a monastic community. That
community is a fully communal one which lives in a single building or complex
of buildings under the direction of an abbot who is elected by the monks. Anyone
seeking to join the community had to spend a year as a novice, and if they success-
fully completed this year, they were required to renounce all personal property and
take vows obliging them to observe the rules of the monastic life and to remain
in the monastery until death. The keys to Bernard’s vision of the monastic life
were the concepts of personal poverty, obedience and humility. The Rule stresses
these at the outset and then gives detailed instructions on how and in what way the
monks’ days were to be structured. The monks’ main responsibility was the daily
performance together of the Opus Dei or the eight divine offices (Matins, Lauds,
Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline). In addition, Mass would be
said at least once a day, and there would be more services on feast days. When they
were not praying, the monks were either working manually or studying. Benedict
also described how abbots were to be elected and gave instruction on other practi-
cal matters – the monks were to sleep for eight hours during the winter and for six
in the summer, for example; only the sick could eat meat, and the monks other-
wise were vegetarians. They could drink some wine with their meals, but if their
house was in an area where wine was not produced, the monks were exhorted not
to grumble. The Rule left much unsaid, however, and much of its success derived
from its flexibility in matters of detail.
Simplicity and humility were the very essence of monastic practice, and monks
were revered for living the highest form of Christian life achievable on Earth.
Ordinary people were fallible and weak, and they needed resolute, indomitable
monks to pray for them and keep evil at bay. If kings and their armies were there
to protect the vulnerable from foreign invaders, monks were there to protect the
same people against the devil and his legions of demonic followers. However, there
was criticism of monasteries, too. Many were very rich institutions. Money and
lands were donated to monasteries by lay patrons anxious to be remembered in the
monks’ prayers, and as monastic wealth increased, so did complaints from within
and beyond the cloister walls that monasteries were becoming complacent, worldly,
even corrupt and losing sight of their original purity of purpose. Plenty of monas-
teries only took new recruits from aristocratic families willing to make large dona-
tions for the privilege of having a younger son accepted into the community. Other
monasteries had fallen under the control of lay lords and rulers as the Carolingian
Empire fragmented during the second half of the ninth century, and such men soon
came to regard the monasteries they controlled as a kind of family property.
Complaints about the increasing worldliness of monasteries were nothing new
in the tenth century – the history of monasticism was already marked by periodic
attempts to reform and revive the system. But by this time, Benedictine monaster-
ies were arguably more deeply immersed in secular affairs than ever before, and
paradoxically, it was a layman who attempted to change this. In 909, Duke William
I the Pious of Aquitaine (d.918) founded a new monastery at Cluny in Burgundy.
He aimed to ensure that it was free of any kind of external control (aristocratic or
episcopal) by stipulating that the new monastery was subject only to the authority
of the pope. Weak and remote as papal authority was, this meant that Cluny was
effectively independent. The abbots of Cluny were therefore in a unique position,
and they were able enough to make the most of the freedom they had, theoreti-
cally at least, to perform their proper religious and social roles in the purest fashion.
A modified version of the Benedictine Rule was followed at Cluny, under which
the monks carried out an elaborate series of daily services and lived a strict, abste-
mious life. Apparently incorruptible, the Cluniac model was soon widely admired
and copied, and by the end of the tenth century, Cluny formed the centre of a
network of monasteries which sprawled across much of Western Europe. Each so-
called priory was subject only to the authority of Cluny itself and its abbot, and
free, therefore, of local power.
By the early eleventh century, Cluny was one of the most formidable institu-
tions in Western Christendom and its abbot one of the most influential men. In
West Francia, north-west of Cluny, the abbey of Fleury-sur-Loire (where the relics
of St Benedict himself were kept) was reformed along Cluniac lines in about 930
Faith 97
and in turn became another focal point of reform, whilst Cluniac influence had
extended into Italy, and even to Rome itself, by the end of the tenth century. But
Cluny had not been the only centre of Benedictine revival during the previous
hundred years. Much reforming activity originated in Lorraine. The monastery of
Brogne in the duchy of Brabant, founded in 914, became the centre of attempts
to revive the ideals of the Benedictine life in the diocese of Liège. From there the
reforming impetus spread to Gorze, near Metz, which was reformed in 933, and to
the ancient abbey of St Maximin at Trier, which carried reforming ideas through
the diocese of Cologne and into the Rhineland. Further south in Alsace, the abbey
of Einsiedeln was founded between 929 and 934 and from there the principles of
reform were exported to Bavaria. Later, from the monastery at Niederaltaich on
the Danube, St Gotthard moved north to Hersfeld in 1005, and after he became
bishop of Hildesheim in 1022, he took reform into Saxony.
The course of true reform did not always run smoothly, however, and there
were plenty of vested interests, not least lay patrons and bishops, who had much
to lose from the establishment of these vigorously independent new monasteries.
Monks at older unreformed monasteries might also have felt a threat to their tradi-
tional ways of life. Powerful support was therefore needed to overcome resistance,
and only secular rulers were in practice able to provide this. Robert II (996–1031)
supported the Cluniacs in West Francia, whilst further east Henry II (1002–24)
helped to force reform on the reluctant monasteries of Corvey, Fulda, Prum and
Reichenau. In England, too, royal support was crucial to the success of a peculiarly
Anglo-Saxon brand of monastic reform, albeit one influenced heavily by continen-
tal models. From the 960s attempts were made to revive monastic life in England,
which had been severely damaged by the viking invasions of the previous hun-
dred years or so. Saintly men like Dunstan, Aethelwold and Oswald, all of whom
had come into contact with the European reforming movements earlier in their
lives, secured positions of authority within the English Church (respectively, they
became archbishop of Canterbury, bishop of Winchester and archbishop of York)
which they used to reinvigorate Benedictine observance along distinctively English
lines. Old monasteries (perhaps as many as 30 or 40) were reformed across southern
and midland England, but these reformers also focused their disapproval on several
cathedral chapters where they replaced the secular canons with monks and installed
monks as bishops. These ‘monastic cathedrals’, such as Canterbury, Winchester and
Worcester, would be an almost uniquely English feature of the European ecclesi-
astical landscape for the rest of the Middle Ages. It is worth emphasising, however,
that the reformers would have made significantly less progress in England without
the active support of King Edgar (959–75). Edgar was certainly pious and believed
in the monastic ideals the reformers preached, but he also stood to benefit politi-
cally from the success of the reform programme. The key document of the Eng-
lish reform movement, the Regularis Concordia, owed much to earlier Carolingian
practice and other foreign influences in its aim to establish uniform practices across
the reformed monasteries, but it also required the monks to say prayers for the
English king and queen every day and stipulated that royal consent was needed
for the election of abbots. The Ottonian kings of East Francia already appreciated
how important it was to build and patronise great churches across their kingdom
in order to develop additional bases of royal support, and Edgar saw things in a
similar way. At a time when the kingdom of England was still being constructed,
the reformed monasteries were economically strong and politically powerful: they
were outposts of conspicuous loyalty to the crown, and they served to consolidate
developing notions of political unity.
Priests and People: Popular Practice and Everyday Belief

It is very difficult to know much for sure about the ways in which the ‘ordinary’ peo-
ple of Western Europe practised their religion or expressed their beliefs during this
period. Some of the available sources (the pronouncements of ecclesiastical synods,
for example) are likely to tell us what Christians were supposed to do. But the fact
that rules and regulations were deemed necessary suggests that regularity of obser-
vance was elusive and erratic. Saints’ Lives reveal plenty of popular interaction with
religion, but they are not necessarily very reliable. Such texts were written to dem-
onstrate the miraculous powers and describe the holy lives of their main characters,
not accurately to represent how people routinely went about their religious business.
There cannot be much doubt that there was often a gap in practice between official
theology on the one hand and popular religious practice on the other: for many, a
rudimentary Christian faith was combined with lingering pagan superstitions and a
belief in magic, charms and spells. Matters were further complicated in those regions
where Western Europe met the rest of the world: Latin Christianity was only one of
three religious systems in southern Italy, for example, whilst in northern and eastern
Europe, Christianity was only just beginning to find a footing at all.
Western Christians might acquire knowledge of their religion from a variety of
sources. Their families and communities would provide environments in which
basic stories and ideas could be passed on from generation to generation. However,
the institutional church needed to be involved, too, in order to teach orthodox
belief and prevent the spread of dangerous ideas. Some cathedrals and many mon-
asteries had schools, but these were open only to a select few, usually the sons of
the aristocracy. At other times, canons from the local cathedral chapter and monks
from the local abbey visited towns and villages to hold services and carry out bap-
tisms and burials. These two and the other five sacraments (confirmation, marriage,
holy orders, penance and holy communion) were supposed to guide Christians
through the different stages of their lives, but it is hard to know how widely or suc-
cessfully they were administered at this time.
The sacramental system did not assume its final form until much later in the
Middle Ages, and by the time it did, responsibility for overseeing it rested with local
parish priests. In the tenth century, however, the parish system was only just begin-
ning to take root in Western Europe, and it was by no means fully formed, even
by the mid-eleventh. Parishes might be established in cities or in the countryside.
Faith 99
Some parishes were established by bishops or monasteries keen to extend their

authority over their more remote congregations; often the initiative came from a
local lord who built a church on his lands and installed a priest chosen by him there.
Parish formation therefore tended to be uncoordinated and haphazard in different
parts of Europe and within different kingdoms. Nevertheless, sets of rules issued by
individual bishops suggest that some common assumptions and principles applied.
So where a parish priest was in place, he was considered to be subject to the local
bishop in all ecclesiastical matters, from the performance of the liturgy to the physi-
cal upkeep of his church. Priests were expected to celebrate Mass and carry out
other services so as to regularly administer the sacraments. They were also expected
to set an example of Christian conduct to their parishioners and to instruct them
in the fundamentals of Christian belief. These rules set out the ideal, however, and
often the reality of religious provision must have been very different and patchy
at best. It is impossible to know how many formal church services ordinary men
and women of the tenth century attended in their lifetimes, but it was probably
not many. A secular lord who had built a church on his own lands and appointed
the priest might take a dim view of a local bishop who claimed authority over a
church that he saw as belonging to him and his family, his Eigenkirche. And one
parish priest might take his responsibilities much more seriously than another. The
bishop would have expected his deans to monitor this, but it was surely impossible
to achieve consistently uniform and regular routine.
For most people in the towns and countryside, therefore, it seems likely that
religious practice was as often home-made as it was imposed by an outside author-
ity. Saying prayers at a local shrine enabled Christians to believe that God would
act on their behalf to prevent hunger and bring a good harvest. In southern France
either side of 1000, attendance at a Peace of God rally, where bishops and nobles
acted together to try and keep the peace with the help of the saints whose relics
would be on display to the crowd, would have allowed ordinary people to feel part
of a wider Christian community with common concerns. The call for knights to
stop attacking church property and, by extension, the peasants who lived on it,
would have given the crowd a sense that their lives and livelihoods mattered. It is
unlikely that most of the Aquitanian peasants who gathered in the fields to hear
these calls for peace had ever before seen so many people gathered together in one
place, although on and around holy days communities would also have assembled,
not just to pray and worship, but also to celebrate and relax. Christmas and Easter
were preceded by fasting, but both festivals were followed by feasting, dancing and
games. Worship on the whole remained a public, communal exercise during this
period rather than a private, internalised one.
PART 2
The Eleventh Century,
c.1020–c.1120
4
CONTEXT
Many of the trends and processes identified in Chapter 1 continued to develop

across Western Europe during the eleventh century. One of these was population
growth, and for the first time there is some useful statistical data to go on. The
remarkably detailed information contained in Domesday Book, which contains
the results of the survey into landholding and land use carried out by William the
Conqueror’s government in England in 1086–7, has allowed historians to estimate
that the population of that kingdom at the end of the eleventh century was some-
thing between 1.1 and 2.5 million, with most happy to settle on a figure of about
2 million as a reasonable middle ground. Even here though there is great uncer-
tainty and equivalent sources of information for other regions simply do not exist.
It should be emphasised, too, that whilst it is clear at least that population contin-
ued to increase across Western Europe during this period, albeit at different rates
in different places, this phenomenon itself contributed to regular famines; beyond
that, more generally child mortality remained very high indeed, perhaps as much
as 25–30 per cent in children under two years old.
More settled political conditions were important in this context. The eleventh
century was still violent and turbulent, as subsequent chapters will show, but the
Magyar invasions were over by the second half of the 900s, while the attacks from
Scandinavia which had so destabilised Western Europe for nearly 200 years had run
their course in most places by the early part of the new millennium. This helped to
provide an environment in which changes in the countryside, ultimately the main
drivers of population growth, could proceed. In the past historians have identi-
fied this period as one in which an ‘agricultural revolution’ occurred. According
to this theory, new approaches and techniques were employed to cultivate land
more intensively. More use was made of a new kind of crop rotation, for example:
where earlier systems of rotation had worked on a two-field basis (one field would
be cultivated every year while the other lay fallow and was grazed and fertilised by
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-7
104 The Eleventh Century, c.1020–c.1120
livestock to restore it for the following year), a three-field system was used increas-
ingly on many estates. Three fields were rotated through a three-year cycle (two
being cultivated in any one year as one was kept fallow), which meant that two-
thirds of agricultural land rather than just half remained in use at any one time. The
two cultivated fields could also be planted separately, one with crops harvested in
the autumn (oats, barley, legumes) and the other with crops harvested in the spring
(wheat, barley, rye), thus reducing the dangerous dependence on a single harvest
every year. This encouraged increases in productivity, as did various technological
changes. Notable amongst these was the development of water mills, which freed
up labour to be used elsewhere. There are 5300 mills listed in Domesday Book,
roughly one for every three villages in England, and by the early twelfth century,
most villages in many parts of Europe probably had their own. A new type of col-
lar, which meant that horses, not just oxen, could be used to pull ploughs, was
another innovation. But even more emphasis has been placed on the use of a new
kind of plough – a heavier, wheeled plough with an iron cutting blade that could
dig deeper into the soil and turn it over and that came to replace the more tradi-
tional scratch-plough which only carved a shallow groove in the earth and was less
effective in the heavier soils of northern Europe. All of this led to an increase in
crop yields which in turn contributed to the growth in population. More recently,
however, historians have tended to play down the nature of these changes and their
impact on population growth. Horse collars were not new in this period, while the
scratch-plough continued to be used extensively in southern Europe, where soils
are thinner, and in regions of northern Europe too. At the same time, the use of
the three-field system was probably not as extensive as it was once thought to have
been: few places where the two-field system was already in place appear to have
converted, and two fields remained the norm in southern Europe and parts of the
north. Laying out new fields and establishing new patterns of cultivation in estab-
lished settings would have been difficult in practice, even if those who favoured
the idea had been able to overcome the instinctive conservatism of an uneducated
rural population. And to the extent that there was an increase in crop yields, this
may have had as much to do with milder climates and longer growing seasons as
anything else.
There is no doubt, however, that during the eleventh century and into the
twelfth, more land was brought under increasingly intensive cultivation, and lords
became more adept at extracting agricultural surpluses from the peasant popula-
tions on their lands. Local lords were of course keen to exploit their estates as fully
as possible, so marginal land adjacent or near to established settlements might be
converted first into pasture and then into arable. Large, predominantly servile,
work forces were required for this kind of activity. But from the end of the tenth
century, there were also the beginnings of more significant clearances too as lords
looked to maximise the productivity of their estates’ redundant, unprofitable parts:
forests were felled, marshes were drained and dykes were built to reclaim land from
the sea. More arable land meant that more crops could be grown, and although
increases in productivity should probably not be exaggerated and were modest by
any modern standard, they were enough to encourage other changes. Nucleated
villages, already particularly evident in the tenth century in the fertile lowlands of
England, northern France and Germany, continued slowly to replace small hamlets
and temporary settlements as their inhabitants came together in larger groups. This
was not necessarily a voluntary process of course: the lord who built a watermill
could quickly establish a local monopoly on the grinding of grain and effectively
force peasants to come to him for the services he offered at a price. In time, many
peasants probably came to accept that their best interests lay in migrating into such
villages where they could support each other, even though this would probably
mean a higher degree of subjection to the lord’s authority: the process of encellule-
ment described in Chapter 1 continued.
Much of the rent these peasants paid would still have been in kind rather than in
money, giving the lord more produce than he could consume himself. This allowed
for the sale of such produce at emerging local markets. In ways such as this, the
power of lords over the peasants on their lands continued to increase. The distinc-
tion between free and unfree peasants remained fundamental in some regions, most
notably England, not least in determining how much rent was owed to the lord.
But whereas during the tenth century rent was typically paid in the form of pro-
duce and labour services given to the lord, a tendency to replace such services with
money payments started to grow as the eleventh century went on. In northern
France and England this tendency was less obvious, but in regions such as the Low
Countries and Germany, the lord–peasant relationship would come increasingly
to be based on money rather than legal rights. Meanwhile there were still parts of
Western Europe, Scandinavia and the southern parts of France and Italy, for exam-
ple, where these trends had never taken hold in the first place.
Most villages would have accommodated a few artisans and tradespeople to meet
their fellow villagers’ immediate needs. Wheelwrights, blacksmiths and carpenters
would probably have combined their more skilled employment with work in the
fields, as would village bakers, butchers and brewers. However, rural development
and the continuing increase in population were also the biggest drivers of urban
and commercial growth, both of which accelerated during this period. By the mid-
dle of the eleventh century, most parts of Western Europe were already urbanised
to some extent, although a relatively small proportion of the population (5–10%)
lived in towns, that is settlements where the bulk of the inhabitants made their
living from non-agricultural activities involving specialised crafts and exchange.
Domesday Book, for example, listed 112 boroughs (the contemporary English
word for a town) in England in 1086. Many towns were of ancient, often Roman,
origin, while others were more recent, such as Magdeburg in eastern Germany,
established by Otto I in the 930s. But as the rural economy continued to grow
and produce surpluses, more trading settlements developed. Further impetus was
given to this as castles, abbeys and cathedrals were built and established themselves
as new centres of trade and exchange around which populations gathered. Local
trade and their relationship with the surrounding countryside remained central to
most towns’ prosperity. But larger towns were more and more likely to be involved
in wider trading networks and constituted an increasingly important link between

long-distance and local commerce. Rouen in Normandy controlled the wine trade
of the Seine valley, for example, and there were Rouen wine merchants in London
in the early 1000s. Settlers from Scandinavia had also contributed to urban growth,
with the establishment of major trading centres at Dublin and York. Further south,
a small number of Italian port cities (most notably Pisa, Genoa, Venice) were
becoming more influential participants in Mediterranean trade, but northern mer-
chants also had a vital role to play in bringing finished wool to southern Europe
from the cloth-making centres of the Low Countries. Much of this finished wool
came from England, the principal supplier to the Flemish textile industry.
As commerce developed, so leading townsmen and traders began to claim more
power over how they regulated their own affairs. Such settlements were increas-
ingly identified as ‘communes’. These were particularly evident in northern Italy,
whilst in northern France, the Low Countries and parts of northern Germany, a
significant degree of urban self-government was also in place by the mid-eleventh
century. The origins of the fledgling Italian city-states are obscure, and this region
had an urban history stretching back to classical times; however, their growing
prominence in this period was in part a product of the wider political circum-
stances there. As will be seen, the Ottonian emperors from Germany tried hard to
assert some kind of meaningful authority over northern Italy during the tenth and
eleventh centuries, in particular by securing the appointment of loyalist churchmen
to many of the most important ecclesiastical positions, such as the archbishoprics of
Milan and Ravenna. These powerful clergymen were expected to play a leading role
in the civic as well as the religious government of their archdioceses, but as urban
populations increased and as the potential for commercial profit grew with them,
leading citizens soon realised the economic advantages they could gain by freeing
themselves from royal or episcopal authority and began to organise themselves into
sworn groups or communes which aimed to take control of their towns and their
surrounding hinterlands. This trend towards independence was only accelerated in
the second half of the eleventh century as the quarrel between Emperor Henry IV,
Pope Gregory VII and their successors played itself out across northern Italy and
as the supporters of the reform papacy began to challenge the emperor’s right to
appoint bishops and archbishops. Imperial concessions to urban power were more
common too: in 1081, for example, when Henry IV needed Pisan support in his
struggle against Gregory VII, he agreed to limit his traditional rights in various
ways, not least by agreeing that he would not appoint a new marquess for Tuscany
without the approval of 12 elected representatives from the city. In the 40 years or
so either side of 1100, there is evidence of this kind of organised government (run
by men styled ‘consuls’ appointed by the communes) in numerous north Italian
towns and cities, including Pisa, Milan and Bologna. And by the 1140s, with the
exceptions of Venice and Rome, communes had been established in all the major
cities of central and northern Italy.
One of William I’s first acts after winning the Battle of Hastings was to confirm
the powers and privileges (effectively the independence) of his new kingdom’s
largest and most prosperous city, London. Emperor Henry V did something similar
in Bologna in 1116. These rulers, for all their daunting authority, appreciated the
importance of having the vested commercial and trading interests of these powerful
cities on their side. There was more to this than the greasing of economic wheels,
however. The new walls built or old walls strengthened around many towns and
cities during this period made them potential centres of resistance to royal rule, and
no prudent king could ignore the claims of a city like London which had a popula-
tion of perhaps 20,000 in 1100. Having said that, there were of course degrees of
urban autonomy. It was generally much greater in northern Italy than in England,
for example, where (despite his concessions to London) the king was lord of more
boroughs than anyone else, including virtually all the other major towns. Even so,
within towns and cities across Western Europe during this period, the urge towards
self-regulation was strong. Those involved in individual crafts were starting to
group themselves together, for example. These groups of artisans, many of which
began life as drinking clubs, would eventually develop into ‘guilds’ which set rules
and standards to regulate their own trades. Members bound themselves together
with oaths, promises of mutual support and undertakings to carry out public duties
such as the maintenance of walls and streets and the provision of charity.
It was seen in Chapter 1 that by the early eleventh century a new aristocracy
was starting to dominate large parts of Western Europe. This process was not uni-
form, and there were regions (England, Leon, Castile, Normandy) where royal
or ducal authority remained most effective. However, particularly in those areas
where central authority had fragmented and dissolved following the collapse of
the Carolingian Empire, power typically became more localised as public authority
previously exercised on behalf of a king or duke (powers over taxation and justice,
for example) was appropriated by ambitious and assertive local men. This was by no
means an untroubled process: power was competed for, and the eleventh century
was a period noted for its levels of noble lawlessness. Once secured, moreover, con-
trol had to be protected and enforced, and these new forms of localised power were
represented by two things above all – the castle and the knight. Lords built castles
(typically at this stage these were still fairly rudimentary structures of earth and
wood) to impose their control on an area and its inhabitants. Castles are referred
to increasingly often in sources from the early eleventh century onwards, although
many terms were used to describe them; and even though a greater number of ref-
erences does not necessarily imply a greater number of castles, it does seem certain
that the number of castles in various parts of Europe had increased considerably
by 1100. In Provence, for example, there appear to have been a dozen castles or
so in about 950, but more than a hundred less than a century later; meanwhile the
enfeebled kings of eleventh-century France found the castellans within their own
lands notoriously difficult to overcome. Even the Norman Conquest of England
could be seen on one level as a particularly effective seizure of power by a renegade
nobleman, and the castle was central to its success: there were few if any structures
that could be categorised as castles in England before 1066, but there were hun-
dreds by 1100, all serving to nail down Norman power.
These castles, of course, needed to be defended, and so the lords who built them
employed local men to protect them. Contemporaries had to find ways of describ-
ing these men: chevalier in France, caballero in Spain and Ritter in Germany all had
connotations of riding and horsemanship. But the Latin word regularly used in the
written sources was miles (pl. milites). Over time, this generic term for a warrior
came more and more to mean ‘knight’, that is a specialised warrior on horseback.
These early knights were often of peasant origin and were bound as vassals to their
lords through oaths of homage as tightly and restrictively as his labouring peasants.
Most knights in Germany, for example, were so-called ministeriales, men of unfree
status. Gradually, though, the social status of knights began to rise, and the acts of
submission they performed before their lords began to be seen, not as demeaning,
but as the defining features, not just of a professional group, but of a separate, elite
caste. Knighthood was a growth industry after all. Warfare was endemic across
Europe in the eleventh century, and although much of this warfare was local, new
theatres of conflict were opening up as the process of European expansion gathered
pace. The conquests of England and southern Italy were spearheaded by Norman
knights; at the same time, knights from across Europe took part in the Spanish
Reconquista, and at the turn of the twelfth century, the Crusades gave such fighting
men even more prominence, bred solidarity within the group and encouraged the
cultivation of a knightly esprit de corps. The rewards were potentially enormous.
Knights had opportunities to gain prestige and wealth from their exploits on the
battlefield as well as land and other rewards from their lords, and by the early 1100s,
the concept of knighthood, still embryonic a century earlier, was beginning firmly
to carry with it notions of more privileged status and higher social rank. The
ubiquity of armed conflict also led in turn to advances in military technology and
technique; the couched lance, for example, was depicted being used for the first
time on the Bayeux Tapestry in about 1080. Such developments required increas-
ingly specialised skills which only those with the necessary time and resources
could practise and perfect. Not all knights were noblemen yet, though, and many
were little more than brutal thugs; chivalric ideals about the perfect knight, how
he should fight his battles and conduct his affairs, had not yet developed. However,
they soon would as the belief began to take hold that in a militarised society the
only true warriors were mounted ones with particular skills. Across much of West-
ern Europe, knighthood was fast becoming the prized and exclusive preserve of a
politically and militarily dominant elite.
Historians of this period have identified other ways in which aristocratic fami-
lies set about protecting themselves from the political instability and fragmentation
that surrounded them. One of these was an increased emphasis on paternal lineage
(agnatic structures) at the expense of the wider, more extended and ill-defined clan
or tribe (cognatic structures) as a means of concentrating and solidifying family
identity, while associated with this was the rising prominence of the eldest son as
the chief representative of the next generation. These are very generalised theories,
of course, much debated and contentious. Cognatic family structures were never
the norm in Western Europe, and agnatic ones were not as narrowly organised in
favour of men as the model suggests. They certainly apply more obviously to some
parts of Western Europe than others – the former Carolingian lands once again –
but it does seem to be the case that, at least in some regions, increasing emphasis
was being placed on clearly defined ancestral pedigrees (ones which looked to
exclude younger siblings, cousins and women) centred on particular locations. An
apparent increase in the use of toponymic placenames in Normandy (Montgomery
and Beaumont, for example) has been relied on as evidence of single lines of male
descent within families identifying themselves with what they saw as their principal
lands, usually those where their castle was. In the twelfth century, this emphasis
would be expressed in the production of family genealogies; whether they were
genuine or concocted, these were designed to formalise and validate family lines
and protect the property that family held. And even if that property had originally
been granted to the family by a lord in return for homage, the idea that it was the
family’s rightful and permanent patrimony was also beginning to gain ground. The
role of the eldest son of the family became increasingly important in this context as
a result. In the earlier Middle Ages in parts of Western Europe, ‘family’ had meant
a wide group of relatives, all of whom might have felt able to make claims on, and
thereby break up, the family property. By the start of the twelfth century, however,
more and more eldest sons were inheriting the whole of their family’s patrimony
so that it could be kept entire and intact. Male primogeniture was becoming the
norm across Western Europe.
But while such emergent practices might have strengthened a family’s control
over their lands, they also gave rise to issues which society found hard to address. It
was important for an aristocratic family to produce several sons in case one or two
of them died young, but the succession of the eldest surviving son meant that land
became concentrated in fewer hands, and if more than one son survived, the fate of
the younger ones was now uncertain. Vendettas and feuds within families were not
unusual, even at the highest level: William the Conqueror’s sons competed with
each other for control of England and Normandy for 40 years after their father’s
death. And when quarrels within families were avoided, younger sons who inher-
ited nothing were left with little choice but to try and find their fortunes elsewhere.
This might produce spectacular results: the sons of a minor Norman baron, Tan-
cred de Hauteville, eventually conquered southern Italy and Sicily, and one of them
became the ruler of a principality, Antioch, in the Near East. But their story was
hardly typical: more often, younger sons, or iuvenes as contemporaries called them,
were criticised for their lawless, violent behaviour: uncontrolled and predatory,
they cared little for anything other than plundering the peasantry, stealing from
merchants and fighting each other. This is an exaggerated caricature, of course, and
not all younger sons became unruly highwaymen – many went into the Church,
for example, and plenty found employment with lords who rewarded them with
lands and the chance to establish their own family lines. Most noblemen also relied
on marriage as a way of reinforcing their position in aristocratic society. Some
Normans married English widows after 1066 in order to get hold of the property
they held, for example. Younger brides and grooms may also have had little say in
who their spouse would be – this would be a matter of negotiation between the
families of the couple involved and, on the husband’s side, would depend to a large
extent on the size of the dowry the prospective bride could bring to the union; at
this level of society, marriage was a land transaction after all. However, once a mar-
riage had taken place, the husband was certainly the dominant partner legally and
in total control of his wife’s property.
Women were conventionally seen as physically weaker than men, but also less
intelligent and morally suspect. Even so, as in the tenth century, political, reli-
gious and even military power were not exclusively male preserves. Royal women,
indeed, could influence the course of politics significantly. One of the most impor-
tant political figures in England during the first half of the eleventh century was
Emma of Normandy, the wife first of Aethelred II and then of Cnut. The support
she gave both her husbands at crucial points in their reigns helped them stabilise
their regimes, and she was central to the way the succession disputes that followed
the death of Cnut in 1035 played out. At the same time in France, Emma’s contem-
porary, Constance of Arles, also pursued her own policy when she tried to have her
younger son Robert, rather than her elder son Henry, installed as king following
the death of her husband Robert II in 1031. The dowager empress Agnes had to
manage a particularly difficult minority for her son, Henry IV, who became king
of Germany aged only five in 1056, and at the end of the period covered in this
section, Countess Adelaide of Sicily acted as regent for her young sons in the early
1100s. Queen Urraca of Leon-Castile also held on to her kingdom from 1109 to
1126. Uniquely by this point in Western Europe, Urraca ruled in her own right
despite the attempts of her brutal husband, King Alfonso the Battler of Aragon,
to take power from her. The price of such prominence for women like this was
often a negative characterisation in contemporary sources (and subsequent his-
torical writing) which saw their behaviour as scheming and untrustworthy, even
unnatural. This was not always the case, however. According to one contemporary,
the monk Lampert of Hersfeld, Empress Agnes did well for a time: ‘Although the
State was in danger, she protected it with such skill that the great novelty of the
situation produced no disturbance and no animosity in the State’; only for six
years, however, at which point the young king was abducted by the archbishop of
Cologne who took control of the regency. There was surely less well-documented
female influence, too: when Count Stephen of Blois returned home early from the
First Crusade having fled rather ignominiously from the siege of Antioch, the stern
words of his wife, Adela, the daughter of William the Conqueror, were reportedly
instrumental in pushing him to make an immediate return to the Holy Land in
order to redeem his (and by association her) reputation. Noblewomen like Adela
would have been expected to run the family estates and preserve the family’s inter-
ests in their husbands’ absence, even fighting to defend them if necessary. Accord-
ing to the Anglo-Noman chronicler Orderic Vitalis, Adela ‘honourably governed’
Blois while Stephen was away. More broadly, a married woman’s freedom to act
independently of her husband’s influence remained restricted. Even women like
Emma, Constance, Agnes and Adela would have relied on the advice and guidance
of the men around them (fathers, brothers, priests, confessors) before they acted as
they did. A woman could inherit if there were no male heirs, and when widowed,
an aristocratic woman gained a meaningful degree of autonomous control over her
own resources and might even dispose of the property she had brought into her
marriage and now held on her own account. But even such acts of relative inde-
pendence could still be restricted or manipulated by the demands or wishes of male
heirs and relatives, and time spent as a wealthy widow tended to be short-lived if
a suitor was able to persuade the right group of influential men that the woman in
question should remarry.
In the normal course of things, therefore, a woman’s power and influence were
exercised informally, as wives, mothers and counsellors. Lower down the social
scale, fixed perceptions of gender roles also prevailed: only men ploughed and only
women sewed. Less crudely put, women were expected to raise their children,
cook meals, fetch water and make clothes; but a woman would also be expected to
contribute to the family income. For many women this might mean haymaking,
spinning and combing wool or brewing beer. These were essential contributions,
but overall, particularly in the absence of women’s own testimony, it is impos-
sible to say whether their situation changed during this period. It is possible that
the development of the nuclear family gave individual wives more influence over
their husbands and children than they had been allowed in more extended fami-
lies where one senior woman, the matriarch, would have dominated all the other
women in the group. This is very difficult to substantiate, however, and it is equally
possible that the development of agnatic structures, within which male influence
predominated, meant less influence for women. On balance, however, even if they
were often overlooked by their male contemporaries who wrote about politics and
religion, and even if the surviving evidence is patchy and elusive, it is clear enough
that eleventh-century women could still wield authority and exercise power in
interesting and important ways.
5
POWER
Germany: Royal Authority and Mighty Rebellion

The century between the accession of Conrad II as king in 1024 and the death of
Henry V in 1125 was a turbulent and momentous one in the history of medieval
Germany. In the 1050s, the German kings arguably reached the peak of their
power, whilst by the 1120s that power had been gravely and lastingly undermined.
Much of the responsibility for this decline in royal authority rests with Henry
IV (1056–1106), whose stridency and stubbornness led ultimately to humiliating
defeat at the hands of a wide range of enemies, not least members of his own fam-
ily. At the same time, however, there were wider forces at work which even the
most conciliatory of rulers would have struggled to control and which would have
compromised the integrity of any kingdom. A long, debilitating royal minority that
played into the hands of an increasingly radical reform papacy offered ambitious
German prelates an alternative focus for their loyalty, whilst an increasingly restive
German, particularly Saxon, nobility was relentlessly set on establishing its own
autonomous regional powerbase. When these different constituencies combined
against Henry IV, he struggled, and eventually failed, to contain them. Henry V
inherited what has been called this ‘crisis of medieval Germany’ from his father in
1106, and, whilst he wrestled with it forcefully, even settling the Investiture Dispute
in 1122, he was hemmed in and ultimately dominated by it. As a result, the Ger-
man monarchy ended this period bruised and unsteady, with its future uncertain.
Conrad II (1024–39) was the first ‘Salian’ king of Germany – the origins of the
dynastic name are obscure, but it was in use during the twelfth century. The Salians
were descended from the marriage of Conrad ‘the Red’ (d.955), Duke of Lorraine
under Otto I, and Liutgard, Otto’s daughter. Born in about 990, Conrad II was
Henry II’s closest male relative when the latter died without children in 1024, and
he was elected king by the German princes (although Saxony remained neutral
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-8
Power 113
and Lorraine favoured another candidate). Over the next ten months, Conrad vis-
ited all the major regions of the kingdom and secured their acceptance of his rule.
Following this, in 1026, he assembled an army of thousands of armoured knights
for an expedition into Italy, and by March he had arrived in Milan where he was
crowned king of Italy. The usual coronation location and traditional capital of the
Italian kingdom, Pavia, was in revolt, and Conrad had to besiege the city and sup-
press the opposition before he could proceed to Rome where, on Easter Day 1027,
his imperial coronation by Pope John XIX was a suitably magnificent affair.
Conrad’s accession began a period of reinvigoration for the German monarchy
after its power could be said to have declined somewhat under Henry II. The
Salians’ power base was Franconia, or the ‘Middle Rhine’; their familial lands were
centred around Worms and Speyer. They also had interests in Swabia, Lorraine
and Carinthia. Overall, this was only a moderately impressive collection of fam-
ily lands, but when Conrad inherited the royal estates and also the vast Ottonian
family lands in Saxony and Thuringia, the Salians suddenly became very powerful
indeed. Like the Ottonians, Conrad appreciated that the best chance of exercising
strong kingship lay in constructing a close-meshed net of royal power covering
Franconia, eastern Lorraine and Saxony, all areas rich in Carolingian tradition,
royal lands, troops and great churches ready to dispense hospitality and support, and
close enough to control the opportunities provided on the eastern frontier. Conrad
also took advantage of vacancies within the other duchies when he could: Bavaria
(in 1027) and Swabia (in 1038) fell vacant, and both were given to Conrad’s son
Henry, who was crowned king in 1028.
Conrad employed men from the lower ranks of the aristocracy, or even men with
no aristocratic links at all, as officials on royal business across the kingdom. Known
as ministeriales, these men were wholly dependent on the king and mistrusted and
hated by the magnates among whom they operated and upon whom they spied.
They might administer royal estates, guard royal castles, collect taxes or investigate
lost royal rights. Conrad also took advantage of the wider economic revival of the
eleventh century to grant market and minting rights (for a fee), thus assisting the
growth of towns. Kings could tax all trading that took place, and Conrad benefited
from the expanding river traffic in the Rhineland where his main power lay. The
mines of the Harz Mountains in Saxony, which he now controlled, provided the
silver for a sound currency that stimulated trade further.
Conrad’s reign started in the same way as several of his recent predecessors’ –
with rebellion. Ultimately, however, he overcame the resistance he faced and
strengthened the monarchy. In 1025, Duke Ernst II of Swabia, Conrad’s stepson
from his marriage to Gisela of Swabia, revolted. By 1026, Ernst had submitted,
and owing to the intervention of his mother Gisela, Ernst was allowed to accom-
pany Conrad on his expedition to Italy in 1026. During the expedition another
rebellion broke out, this one led by Conrad of Carinthia and Welf II of Swabia.
The king had named Bishop Bruno of Augsburg regent of Germany while he
marched south to Italy, but when Bruno was defeated by the rebels, Conrad sent
Ernst back to Germany in September 1026 to end the revolt. When Ernst arrived,
however, he joined the opposition and rebelled against Conrad again. Following
Conrad’s return to Germany in 1027, he held court at Augsburg in Swabia and
called upon the rebels to surrender. Ernst rejected the peace officer and appealed
to his Swabian counts to join him in rebellion. According to Wipo of Burgundy,
the counts refused, stating that while they had sworn loyalty to Ernst, they would
not rebel against their emperor. Without the support of the Swabian counts, Ernst,
Conrad of Carinthia and Count Welf submitted to Conrad in September 1027,
ending the rebellion. Conrad stripped Ernst of his ducal title and imprisoned him
in Saxony. Thanks to his mother once again, Ernst was permitted to retain his title
while imprisoned, with Gisela serving as regent over the duchy.
In 1028, after Conrad’s son Henry was crowned king of Germany, Gisela again
intervened on Ernst’s behalf. Conrad pardoned Ernst and released him from prison
in 1028, but Gisela continued as regent in Swabia and Ernst served as duke in
name only. At Easter 1030, Conrad offered to restore Ernst his full powers as Duke
of Swabia if he would crack down on the emperor’s enemies there. Ernst’s refusal
resulted in his final downfall. Conrad stripped his stepson of his title, declared him
a public enemy and had him excommunicated. Ernst was killed in battle a few
months later. The fall of Ernst greatly weakened the independence of Swabia.
Conrad named Ernst’s younger brother Herman as the new duke. Herman was a
minor, so Conrad appointed the bishop of Constance regent. Eight years later in
1038, Herman was dead, and Conrad named his own son Henry as duke, securing
imperial control over the duchy.
Duke Adalbero of Carinthia had been appointed as duke in 1012 by Henry
II and remained loyal to imperial authority, supporting Conrad’s election as king
in 1024. However, Conrad and Adalbero clashed over Hungary. Under Emperor
Henry II, who was the brother-in-law to King Stephen I of Hungary, relations had
been friendly. But after Henry’s death in 1024, Conrad adopted a more aggressive
policy, prompting reprisal raids into imperial territory from Hungary. The raids
particularly affected Adalbero’s duchy of Carinthia, which shared a long, eastern
border with Hungary. In 1035, Conrad summoned Adalbero to court to answer a
charge of treason for his actions regarding Hungary. In the presence of the German
dukes, Conrad demanded that Adalbero be stripped of all his titles and lands. The
dukes hesitated and demanded that Conrad’s son Henry join the assembly before a
decision was made. Henry refused to depose Adalbero, citing an earlier agreement
with Adalbero to be his ally in negotiating a settlement between him and his father.
Conrad successfully resorted to exhortations, pleas and threats to convince Henry
to support Adalbero’s deposition. He then ordered Adalbero to be removed as duke
and sentenced him and his son to exile. After attacking Conrad’s allies in Carinthia,
Adalbero fled to his mother’s estates in Bavaria where he remained until his death
in 1039. The duchy of Carinthia remained unoccupied until February 1035 when
Conrad named his cousin Conrad the Younger as the new duke. With this appoint-
ment, the three southern German duchies of Swabia, Bavaria, and Carinthia were
all under the control of Conrad through his family members – his stepson Herman
in Swabia, his son Henry in Bavaria, and his cousin Conrad in Carinthia.
Power 115
Another impressive acquisition by Conrad II was the kingdom of Burgundy.

King Rudolf III of Burgundy had no sons, and Emperor Henry II had forced
Rudolf (his uncle) to name him as his successor in 1016. When Henry died in
1024, Rudolf was still alive and Conrad II, as Henry II’s successor, claimed to have
inherited Henry II’s rights. Rudolf disputed this, and Count Odo II of Blois, who
had his own family ties to Rudolf, also claimed a right in the succession. In 1027,
a settlement was reached that allowed Conrad to succeed to the Burgundian throne
on Rudolf ’s death under the same conditions as Henry II. In return, Rudolf was
allowed to retain independent rule over his kingdom. Rudolf died in Septem-
ber 1032 while Conrad was campaigning in Poland. Having forced Mieszko II
to surrender there, Conrad marched with his army to Burgundy in the winter
of 1032–3. Count Odo II of Blois, who still had eyes on the Burgundian throne,
had already invaded the kingdom, but on 2 February 1033, Conrad was crowned
king of Burgundy. Initially, Conrad made little headway against Odo, but after
two campaigns in summer 1033 and summer 1034, Conrad defeated him, and
on 1 August 1034, Conrad officially incorporated Burgundy into the empire. As
emperor (since 1027) he now ruled three kingdoms: Germany, Italy and Burgundy.
But although Burgundy was now definitively under imperial control, the kingdom
was allowed significant autonomy. Conrad rarely intervened in its affairs following
his coronation, returning only in 1038 to name his son Henry as the kingdom’s
new ruler. The chief importance of the annexation of Burgundy was to augment
the prestige and dignity of the emperor himself. However, control of Burgundy
did benefit the empire in other ways. With Burgundy secured, the western Alpine
passes in Italy came under imperial control, allowing the emperor to secure his hold
over Italy by blocking foreign invasions.
Like his predecessors, Conrad saw the German Church as an essential tool for
the exercise and spread of royal power. But, unlike his son, he was no religious
reformer. His appointments to church offices were political and he intervened at
will in ecclesiastical affairs whenever it suited him to do so. The papacy was at one
of its periodic low points and was held in low esteem by more high-minded clergy.
This did not prevent Conrad being crowned emperor by the less than reputable
John XIX in 1027, but he never visited Rome again. Perhaps the most remark-
able and instructive episode of the reign in this context was Conrad’s dispute with
Archbishop Aribert of Milan. In the late 1030s, the emperor took the side of
Aribert’s lay opponents in a dispute about the lands of the archbishopric and sum-
moned Aribert to explain himself at Pavia in 1037. When Aribert refused to sur-
render any of his church’s estates, Conrad threw him into prison. The archbishop
managed to escape and fled to Milan, but he was besieged there by Conrad and
declared deposed. Three bishops who supported Aribert were sent into exile, and
a compliant Pope Benedict IX declared the archbishop excommunicated. Such
high-handed behaviour makes Henry IV’s efforts to install his own candidate as
archbishop of Milan in the 1070s seem restrained by comparison.
By the time he died in 1039, following his second expedition to Italy in 1038,
Conrad II had vigorously restored royal power within and beyond the borders of
Germany. The death of King Boleslav Chrobry of Poland in 1025 had given Con-
rad the opportunity to recover a generation of losses on his eastern frontier. By
1034 (when Boleslav’s son and successor Mieszko II died), albeit not without dif-
ficulty, Conrad had reimposed German overlordship and tribute payment over the
Poles and, after a successful campaign led by his 16-year-old heir Henry in 1033,
over the Bohemians too. Following this success, Henry married Gunnhild, the
daughter of Cnut, king of England and Denmark. This alliance was designed to
secure Conrad’s northern frontier, although the death of Cnut in 1035 put this out-
come in doubt. This plan may not have come off, but most of Conrad II’s policies
did work. In 1039, his kingdom was stable and secure on all its frontiers, and it is
possible to argue that the high watermark of Otto I’s imperial rule had been at least
regained, and perhaps surpassed.
Henry III (1039–56) continued many of his father’s policies and maintained his
level of authority. However, he differed from Conrad II and was much more like
Otto III in firmly embracing the religious ideals latent within notions of medieval
imperial rulership. Like Otto, he indulged in ritualistic acts of piety and humility
and was a consistent patron of the reform movement. At the Synod of Constance
in 1043, he made a moving address to his subjects, asking them to keep his peace.
At the same time, he pronounced the pardon of his enemies, and a second general
pardon followed later in the reign. In 1044, during an official ceremony of public
penance aimed to encourage victory in a forthcoming campaign against the Hun-
garians, Henry publicly abased and prostrated himself before a relic of the True
Cross. For reasons like these, and because of his domination over the papacy, which
the Synod of Sutri in 1046 implied, his reign has been seen as the apotheosis of
medieval sacral rulership.
Henry III, no doubt for political as well as religious reasons, embraced the
contemporary movement for reform within the church. Also by continuing the
Ottonian tradition, he built up the power of churches at the local level by granting
them lands and jurisdictional powers. His second marriage, to Agnes of Poitou, the
daughter of Duke William V of Aquitaine, together with his rule over the kingdom
of Burgundy, brought him into close contact with the reforming circle centred
on Cluny. Henry renounced simony (at no small financial cost to the monarchy’s
finances), although he appointed and invested bishops more or less at will in the
Ottonian fashion. He used this power to install many worthy reformers in key
positions, and he summoned synods to further the work of reform and presided
over them in the manner of his Carolingian predecessors. In 1046, he organised
the removal of three candidates all claiming to be the rightful pope and appointed
a German, Clement II. The pope who crowned Henry emperor (which Clem-
ent did in 1046) had to be wholly untainted by the stain of simony. Thereafter he
continued to appoint reforming popes, most notably Leo IX (1049–54). With all of
them he worked in tandem to improve the church, and he shared with all moder-
ate reformers the ideal of pope and emperor reforming the church in partnership.
In the east, Henry also continued his father’s successful work. The aims of Bra-
tislav, king in Bohemia, to create a national church together with an enlarged and
Power 117
self-contained Czech kingdom free from German overlordship, were destroyed,

and his feudal subordination to Henry was reaffirmed and tightened in 1041. In
Hungary, Henry presided over the recovery of lost territories with the frontier
once again stretching up to the River Leitha. After the death in battle of the Hun-
garian king Samuel in 1044, Henry replaced him with a client who took the name
of Peter and accepted full feudal dependence on him, including the obligation
to pay tribute. Frankish and Bavarian colonisation of Styria and Carinthia (now
eastern Austria) was successfully encouraged, and these lands were more fully inte-
grated into the German empire.
Henry III shared with his son Henry IV a very exalted view of the significance
of his office and of the power attached to it. His reign is notable, however, for
rumblings of rebellion in Lorraine, in southern Germany and above all in Saxony.
In Saxony, he (and Conrad II before him) helped to sow the seeds of rebellion that
Henry IV would reap. Like his father and son, Henry III had a ‘Saxon policy’. This
was designed to increase Salian power in Saxony through more direct intervention,
more visits, recovering lost lands and rights and acquiring more land to form larger,
consolidated blocks of royal power. One particularly important area was the Harz
mountains, where there were important silver and iron mines. Henry founded a
royal palace at Goslar in this region. He also exploited rifts and jealousies within
the Saxon aristocracy in order to extend his authority. A key ally was Archbishop
Adalbert of Bremen, whose expansion into Prussia was supported and encouraged
by Henry and eventually (c.1060) involved the creation of two new bishoprics, at
Mecklenburg and Ratzeburg. Adalbert’s power in the northern march areas was
quasi-ducal and ruffled the feathers of his rivals, chiefly the Billung family.
The Saxon aristocracy had grave misgivings about these policies and the inten-
tions behind them. In 1047, there was an attempt by members of the Billung
clan to assassinate Henry, probably to avenge the suspicious death of Thietmar
Billung, Duke of the Saxon March and Archbishop Adalbert’s chief rival, in a
judicial duel organised at Henry’s court. In 1047, Henry also faced a widespread
revolt in L
orraine. It was triggered by his decision to reject the claims of Duke
Godfrey of Upper Lorraine to inherit the lands and title (Duke of Lower Lor-
raine) of his childless brother. Godfrey was joined in his revolt by Count Baldwin
V of Flanders and Count Eustace II of Boulogne, who both wanted to throw off
Henry’s overlordship. The revolt failed, and in 1049, Godfrey was imprisoned. By
1054, however, he was free and able to marry Beatrice, the heiress to the march
of Tuscany. Her vast estates gave Beatrice great power and influence in northern
and central Italy, and the marriage threatened Henry’s strategic interests there.
Finally, in 1052, Henry faced a revolt by Duke Conrad of Bavaria, who was
deposed and replaced. In 1055, Conrad rebelled again with his relative, Duke
Welf III of Carinthia, but both then died. The ‘Welf ’ family were long-term rivals
of the Salians in southern Germany, and Henry had installed Conrad and Welf as
dukes in 1042 and 1047, respectively, in an attempt to neutralise this hostility. This
strategy failed, and continued opposition from this quarter would prove ruinous
for Henry IV.
When Henry III died in October 1056, not yet 40, he was at the height of
his power. However, the character, style and ambitions of Salian rule had gener-
ated tensions and incipient unrest. Henry’s premature death and the succession of
his five-year-old son Henry IV (who had been elected and consecrated co-king in
1053 and 1054, respectively) began a royal minority which left space for the emer-
gence of a more radical reform papacy and which in Germany was critically harmful
to the fortunes of the Salian dynasty and to the power and reputation of the monar-
chy. From 1056 until 1062, the young king’s mother, the dowager empress Agnes,
was in charge of the government of Germany as regent. To secure her position and
her son’s inheritance, Agnes filled the vacant duchies of Swabia, Bavaria and Carin-
thia with men whose support she thought she needed – Rudolf of Rheinfelden,
Otto of Northeim and Berthold of Zähringen, respectively – while the duchy
of Saxony came into the hands of the Billung family. She has subsequently been
criticised for wasting royal resources and for creating over-mighty subjects who ulti-
mately used their new resources to rebel against the monarchy. On the other hand,
it was perfectly conventional for new regimes to distribute patronage in this way:
Agnes was only doing what previous emperors had done at the starts of their reigns.
Agnes evidently alienated other important figures at the same time, however. In
1062, Archbishop Anno of Cologne staged a coup, seized the young king and forced
Agnes to retire to Rome. By 1063, Anno had himself been made to share power
with his rival, Bishop Adalbert of Bremen, and both men used their influence
over the young king to gain lands and rights from the crown for themselves and
their churches, relatives and supporters. One way or another, therefore, Henry IV’s
minority witnessed a substantial alienation of royal lands and rights. The upshot of
all this was a significant dilution of direct royal influence across the German duchies.
As far as the papacy was concerned, Henry’s minority also gave the reformers in
Rome, men like Cardinal Humbert, Peter Damian and Hildebrand, the chance to
press on with their policies. In 1057, Frederick of Lorraine became Pope Stephen
IX. He had been brought to Rome by Leo IX and become abbot of the prestigious
monastery of Monte Cassino. His election was carried out without prior consulta-
tion with the German court – the first time this had happened since 1045. Then,
in 1059, Pope Nicholas II published his momentous election decree which limited
the rights the German king could exercise in papal elections. Also in 1059, the
papal-German axis was subverted further by a new papal-Norman one when Pope
Nicholas recognised the Normans’ rights to most of southern Italy and enfeoffed
Robert Guiscard with Calabria, Apulia and Sicily.
Henry IV was declared of age in 1065 and by 1068 was ruling personally. He
was determined to recover and extend the rights and powers lost during his minor-
ity, both in Germany and Italy. In doing so, he angered and alienated many sections
of opinion within his kingdom, particularly the princes and bishops of Saxony,
and he antagonised reforming elements within the church, especially in Milan,
where Henry’s attempt to assert himself led to a fiercely disputed archiepiscopal
election in 1073 and the excommunication by the pope of Henry’s advisers. Back
in Germany, Saxony was crucial to the power of the German king, as it contained
Power 119
the immensely lucrative silver mines of the Harz mountains. Henry’s approach
there was deliberately aggressive: he built a network of castles which guarded the
approaches to the silver mines and to his palace of Goslar, where he had probably
been born. The strongest of these was Harzburg. The castles were built using local
Saxon labour, but they were garrisoned by outsiders, particularly men of middling
(not noble) rank from Swabia. These ministeriales were rewarded for their service to
Henry with the marriages of high-ranking Saxon heiresses, and they brought with
them their own families and followers hungry for new lands. These tactics inevi-
tably angered the established nobility, but Henry was in no mood to be concilia-
tory. He took Otto of Northeim prisoner in 1071, claiming that he had plotted to
overthrow and kill the king. And after the death of Duke Ordulf of Saxony, Henry
kept Magnus, Ordulf ’s son, prisoner as well.
An uprising began against Henry’s rule in east Saxony as early as summer 1073.
Led by the bishops of Halberstadt and Magdeburg, Hermann Billung (the son of
Duke Ordulf) and Otto of Northeim (recently released from captivity), the rebels’
main demands were for the destruction of Henry’s new castles in the Harz area
and the restoration of lands unjustly confiscated from the Saxon nobility by the
king (the nobles would decide which lands these were). They also demanded that
Henry should forsake his ‘low-born’ advisers and seek the advice of his Saxon fideles
and that Henry should treat his wife (Bertha of Turin, whom he had married in
1066) better. The rebels were justifiably concerned that Henry’s castle-building
programme concealed a scheme, not just for the recovery of lost royal rights, but
for the extension of royal control over areas where the Saxon nobles had previ-
ously held sway. In fact, Henry was not doing anything particularly new; many of
his methods, such as the use of ministeriales and the ‘inheritance’ of heirless Saxon
lands by the king, had been used by his immediate predecessors. But Henry was
headstrong, uncompromising and unwilling to negotiate with his critics. Accord-
ing to the contemporary chronicler Lambert of Hersfeld, ‘he would rather die than
accept defeat’. Timing was key, too. Henry’s policies were implemented after a
period when royal control over the German nobility had been lax, so the reasser-
tion of royal rights after 1068 came as an unwelcome shock to those affected by it.
The rebels forced Henry to agree to pull down his castles in February 1074;
however, the violence of some of the rebels’ supporters turned opinion in Henry’s
favour, and he soon had them on the run. In June 1075, he defeated them in battle
near Homburg on the river Unstrut and obliged the leaders to acknowledge his
son Conrad as his heir later in the year. But although the most serious part of the
revolt was over by 1075, it continued in some form or other until 1089, and it only
subsided then because Henry never went near Saxony after that date. And in the
end, the revolt was ultimately successful. From the early 1100s, Saxony was under
the control of an independent duke, Lothar of Supplinburg, and the duchy slipped
from the control of the Salian kings. Thus, the Saxon revolt is traditionally seen as
having dealt a near mortal blow to the institution of German kingship.
The Saxon revolt was played out against the backdrop of Henry IV’s tumultuous
quarrel with the reform papacy. The years 1073–7 were dominated by the initially
good and then rapidly worsening relationship between Henry IV and Gregory VII.
The apparent resolution of that dispute at Canossa in January 1077 did not bring
an end to Henry’s problems in Germany, however. Those implacable opponents of
Henry in southern Germany (the Dukes of Bavaria, Swabia and Carinthia, and the
bishops of Mainz, Salzburg and Magdeburg amongst others) who were unhappy
with what happened at Canossa proceeded to elect a rival king at Forchheim in
March 1077, Duke Rudolf of Swabia, and from 1077–80, the two sides were at war
again. Rudolf ’s army defeated Henry’s near Flarchheim on the river Unstrut on 27
January 1080, but Rudolf himself had his hand cut off during the fighting and died
of his wounds before the end of the year; another anti-king, Hermann of Salm, was
elected in 1081, but he never enjoyed the same level of support as Rudolf, and his
activities were largely confined within a small area of eastern Saxony. His support
dwindled further after Henry’s successes in Italy, and he died in 1088. Meanwhile,
Gregory VII declared Henry excommunicated and deposed for the second time;
in return, Gregory was ‘deposed’ by a synod of German and mainly north Italian
bishops at Brixen in June 1080, and an imperial anti-pope Clement III was elected.
Henry IV spent the three and a half years after 1080 campaigning in Italy. He
entered Rome in March 1084, and on Easter Monday 1084, he was crowned
emperor by Clement III. Urban II, the next pope but one after Gregory VII,
was unable to re-enter Rome until 1093. Henry’s position within Germany had
strengthened during the 1080s, and support for his opponents had shrunk. In 1087,
Henry had his son Conrad, then 13, crowned king of Germany to secure the succes-
sion. New threats to Henry emerged at the end of the 1080s, however, when a fresh
coalition of south German dukes (Berthold of Rheinfelden, Berthold of Zähringen
and Welf IV of Bavaria) was formed against him. The threat was compounded when
Urban II arranged a marriage between Welf IV’s son (also called Welf), who was
17, and Countess Matilda of Tuscany, who was 43. She was the reform papacy’s
staunchest supporter, and her vast estates and resources stretching across much of
the north of Italy made her the most powerful secular ruler on the peninsula. Her
marriage to young Welf established a link between two of Henry’s most powerful
adversaries. He came to Italy in 1090 to fight this coalition, but after some success
between 1090 and 1092, he did not do well; the marriage between Welf and Mat-
ilda did not last, but Conrad defected to the papal side in 1093. He thus became the
new anti-king, submitted to Urban II in April 1095 and married Maximilla, daugh-
ter of one of the pope’s most important Norman vassals, Count Roger I of Sicily.
Henry’s second wife, the empress Eupraxia-Adelaide, also defected to the papal side
in 1094 amid scandalous rumours about her husband’s sexual proclivities.
Henry was forced to operate within a small area in north-east Italy until 1097,
his way home to Germany blocked by Matilda of Tuscany and Welf VII. Welf only
allowed Henry to return in 1097 because he had recovered the duchy of Bavaria,
which Henry had deprived him of in 1077. From 1097–8, Henry settled his differ-
ences with the Welfs and with the Zähringer. In fact, he was strong enough again
by 1098 formally to depose his son Conrad and to replace him as king of Ger-
many with his second son, Henry V. Relations with the papacy did not improve,
Power 121
however. Pope Paschal II renewed Henry’s excommunication in 1102, and the

last two years of his life were dominated by rebellion on the part of Henry V. The
latter captured his father at the end of 1105 and forced him to abdicate. However,
the older Henry escaped and war continued. Only Henry IV’s death at the begin-
ning of 1106 brought the struggle for the throne to an end. There was eventually
a reconciliation of sorts between father and son. Henry IV had declared his wish
to be buried in the cathedral at Speyer alongside his Salian ancestors, but burial in
consecrated ground was not given to those who died whilst excommunicated, and
Henry V had to negotiate hard with the pope before permission was given to carry
out his father’s wishes. In 1111, Henry IV was finally buried at Speyer by the son
who had deposed him.
Henry IV’s reign was one of the most extraordinary in any country during the
Middle Ages, and it was made up of the most dramatic series of events: the Saxon
Revolt, the conflict with the papacy, excommunications, depositions, the revolts of
his sons and more. In the middle of all this was Henry himself, who polarised opin-
ion amongst his contemporaries as much as he has amongst modern historians. In
his obituary of Henry IV, the anonymous author of the so-called Bamberg Chroni-
cle, which was dedicated to Henry V, claimed that ‘no one in our time seemed
more fitted for the office of emperor, by birth, intelligence, courage and boldness
and also by stature and bodily grace’. The monk Lampert of Hersfeld, however,
took it upon himself to voice the views of Henry’s critics: ‘They considered how
loathsome, how contemptible, how endangered by internal strife and how bloody
he had made the kingdom that he received from his ancestors in a most peaceful
condition, abounding in everything that was good’. It is easy to see Henry IV as
pig-headed and stubborn, unable to compromise and convinced of his own right-
ness. But he was a sophisticated politician. He outmanoeuvred the German princes
in 1076–7 and strung Gregory VII along between 1077 and 1080. His victory over
Gregory, indeed, was eventually complete and crushing. He was unable to recon-
cile himself with the papacy, however, because he would not abandon his pope,
Clement III. Because Clement had crowned him emperor, Henry did not think he
could desert him without casting doubt on the legitimacy of his own imperial title.
This meant that those opposed to Henry IV always had a hook on which to hang
their criticisms, and when his sons Conrad and Henry rebelled in 1093 and 1105,
respectively, there were plenty willing to support them. Reconciliation might have
been possible after Clement’s III’s death in 1100, but Henry’s refusal to compromise
on the idea of lay investiture prevented this. He saw the maintenance of his right
to invest bishops as essential to the integrity of his royal and imperial office, and the
solution to this particular problem was not found until 1122.
Henry V was the fourth and last of the Salian kings of Germany. In Janu-
ary 1099 (aged about 12 or 13), he was crowned king of Germany at Aachen in
place of his older rebel brother, Conrad (d.1101), who had been excluded from the
succession by Henry IV in 1098. Henry took an oath to take no part in the govern-
ment of the kingdom during his father’s lifetime, but Henry IV’s excommunication
was renewed by Paschal II in 1102, and, either in frustration at his exclusion from
power or from a belief that the quarrel with the papacy needed to be brought to
an end, Henry broke with his father and rebelled in 1105. He received a dispensa-
tion from his earlier oath from Pope Paschal, and some of the princes did homage
to him at Mainz in 1106. Civil war seemed inevitable when Henry IV died in
August 1106, aged 56.
Much of Henry V’s reign was dominated by the seemingly interminable strug-
gle over lay investiture, which is described elsewhere. But that topic should not be
considered apart from the king’s domestic preoccupations, which themselves had
a significant impact on the way the investiture contest progressed. In 1106, the
Saxon duke Magnus Billung died without heirs, and Henry appointed Lothar of
Supplinburg, the relatively lowly son of a Saxon count, as his successor. Lothar had
supported Henry in his struggle against Henry IV, but he soon rebelled against his
erstwhile patron in an effort to restrict the latter’s influence in Saxony and build
up his own lordship. Lothar was joined in revolt by the archbishops of Mainz and
Cologne. The former, Adalbert, had been Henry V’s friend and chancellor, but
they had fallen out after his appointment to the archbishopric and, after several
years of varying fortunes on both sides, during which the archbishop of Mainz
was captured and imprisoned by the king, Duke Lothar inflicted a heavy defeat
on the royal army at Welfenholz on the river Saale on 11 February 1115. Henry’s
wider prospects improved following the death of Matilda of Tuscany in 1115. After
resolutely opposing Henry IV in support of the reform papacy, the childless Mat-
ilda had decided to make Henry V her heir, presumably in an attempt to keep
her enormous landholdings together. The royal expedition to Italy in 1116 was
intended to secure this inheritance, and it interrupted the rebellion in Germany.
But it was resumed in 1118 and lasted until 1121. Henry had never lost the support
of the Dukes of Swabia and Bavaria, and with their help, a settlement was negoti-
ated between the king and his opponents in 1121 which led to the resolution of
the investiture dispute a year later. Lothar and Adalbert were never truly reconciled
with the king, however, and they ultimately won their argument when they acted
together after Henry’s death to frustrate the late king’s own succession plans and
engineer the selection of Lothar as the next king.
Another potential achievement in the end also came to nothing. Henry V was
married in 1114 to Matilda, the daughter of King Henry I of England. When the
English king’s only legitimate son was drowned at sea in 1120, Matilda became his
heir, and a union between the kingdoms of England and Germany looked possible.
In 1124, Henry even mustered an army to invade France in support of his father-
in-law. Had the plan been successful, the two kings had agreed that Henry V would
take control of Lorraine. However, King Louis VI of France managed to generate
a widespread patriotic response to the threat of German invasion, and Henry was
forced to pull back and think again. The king then fell ill and died, childless, on 23
May 1125. After 50 years of chaotic upheaval, the prospects for his dynasty, and for
the German monarchy more generally, were anything but clear.
Power 123
France: Petty Kings and Potent Princes

Society and culture in France changed dramatically during the eleventh century.
The economy grew, urbanisation accelerated, old forms of religious life developed
whilst new ones were created and the foundations were laid for the explosion in
intellectual circles which would take place with the founding of the first universi-
ties in the 1100s. One part of French life remained largely untouched by these
changes, however – the monarchy. It started the period weak and was not much
stronger by the end of it. Only with the reign of Louis VI (1108–37) did the French
kings really begin to have a sustained impact on their entire kingdom.
When King Robert II died in 1031, his hold over the kingdom of France was
limited and shaky. The royal principality, the only part of the kingdom directly
ruled by the king, remained small. Focused around Paris, Orléans and Sens, it
was surrounded by more formidable principalities controlled by men who, whilst
technically vassals of the king, in practice overshadowed him. The king’s short-
age of landed resources meant that he had nothing to offer these leading subjects.
With a king unable to dispense patronage, they had little reason to pay him much
attention or attend his court; and if they were able largely to ignore the king, there
was little possibility of him bringing them to heel in other ways. He would have
needed far more plentiful funds to take them on by force. Meanwhile, within
all the principalities, lesser but independently minded lords in castles, cathedrals,
monasteries and towns protected their own rights and competed to acquire more.
Eleventh-century France was anything but a united or stable kingdom, and this
situation did not change very much during the reign of Henry I (1031–60), Robert
II’s eventual successor.
Henry had not been brought up as his father’s heir. His elder brother Hugh
had been crowned in 1017 and confirmed as Robert II’s successor. However, Hugh
had died in 1025 – he was thrown off his horse and fractured his skull after a pig had
got loose in the street and frightened his mount – and King Robert had installed
Henry as his replacement. This was a contentious choice, however, and the early
part of Henry’s reign was taken up with civil war as his mother, Constance, tried
to protect her own position and secure the throne for her preferred younger son,
Robert. Constance was not just working quietly behind the scenes either, and after
nearly 30 years at the heart of Capetian power, she was still determined to be pub-
licly and prominently involved in high politics. This time she adopted the role of
kingmaker in favour of one of her sons, just as her English contemporaries Emma
and Aelfgifu of Northampton would attempt to do for their sons a few years later.
Constance took control of several towns on Robert’s behalf and forced Henry to
seek temporary asylum and military help from Duke Robert of Normandy. Count
Fulk of Anjou (d.1040) and perhaps Count Baldwin IV of Flanders (d.1037) also
intervened in the conflict on Henry’s side, and eventually Constance was forced
to surrender only after Henry had besieged her in two different towns. Even then
she managed to secure a major concession from Henry, and presumably guarantees
about her own position too, when Robert was given the duchy of Burgundy as
compensation for not becoming king. This territorial concession was a big loss for
Henry I (as was the French Vexin which Henry may have promised to the Duke
of Normandy as the price of his support), but it was probably a necessary price to
pay for retaining power.
After this and until the mid-1040s, Henry was preoccupied by an ongoing con-
flict with the rulers of Blois, who had their own claims to the duchy of Burgundy.
Odo II of Blois died in 1037, but his quarrel with the king was taken up by his
heirs Stephen and Theobald. Henry won out again, but this time he was grateful
to Count Geoffrey Martel of Anjou (1040–60) who attacked Blois in 1044. Count
Geoffrey was becoming too powerful, however. From 1044–7, Henry was allied
with Count Baldwin V of Flanders (d.1067) and Duke William of Normandy
against him. Henry even came to William’s rescue at Val-ès-Dunes in 1047 when
the young duke was faced with a serious internal rebellion. This helped William
stay in power, and over the next four years, king and duke fought together against
the Count of Anjou. By early 1050s, however, the young duke had defeated his
rivals and established himself firmly in control of Normandy, and the king may
have come to see William as the main threat to the balance of power in his king-
dom. There were wider dimensions to this as well: William married the daughter
of the Count of Flanders in the early 1050s and had a burgeoning relationship with
his kinsman King Edward of England, which may have involved discussions about
the English royal succession. Henry probably thought he could not afford to ignore
the duke’s emergence as a figure of international standing. So in 1052, Henry
abandoned his alliance with Normandy and made a new one with Geoffrey Mar-
tel, who already appreciated how great a danger William was. In 1054, Henry and
Geoffrey invaded Normandy, but their allies were defeated at Mortemer by Duke
William. Another attempt to undermine William also ended in military defeat, this
time at Varaville in 1058, and when both King Henry and Count Geoffrey died in
1060, the field was left clear for the final triumph of William of Normandy.
It is right to say that Henry I did little to increase or develop royal power during
his reign. If anything, in parts of his kingdom, particularly south of the Loire, such
royal influence as did exist was probably reduced. Even so, Henry had contained
Blois and had been reasonably successful in managing, even exploiting, the rivalry
between the rulers of Anjou and Normandy, who were always more concerned
about each other’s plans and powers than the king’s. He had navigated the trou-
bled waters of dynastic rivalry at the start of his reign, and, basic though such
an achievement was, he was able to pass his kingdom on intact to his son Philip
(1060–1108). What is more, the Capetians’ grip on the throne was strong enough
for them to withstand Philip’s minority. The new king’s unusual Greek name had
probably been introduced to the royal family by his mother Anna, the daughter
of Grand Prince Jaroslav I of Kyiv (1019–54) – Jaroslav had given all his daughters
Greek names, perhaps because they lent his family a degree of glamorous dignity.
Philip was no more than eight when his father died, so from 1060–7 the kingdom
was ruled by a regent, Count Baldwin V of Flanders. He was Philip’s uncle (mar-
ried to a sister of Henry I). Baldwin was also the father-in-law of Duke William of
Power 125
Normandy. William conquered England in 1066, and when King Philip’s minority
ended, he, like his father, tried to block any further Norman expansion. In the
1070s, he allied with Robert the Frisian, the new Count of Flanders, he overran
the French Vexin in 1075–6 and he supported Duke William’s eldest son, Robert
Curthose, in his disputes with his father. But in the end the victory of the English
king Henry I (William the Conqueror’s youngest son) over his elder brother Rob-
ert Curthose at Tinchebrai in 1106 restored the dominant position which had been
held over both Normandy and England by Henry’s father. There was progress in
and around the royal principality, however. Philip added to it when he acquired the
Gâtinais from the Count of Anjou in 1069 (a reward for staying out of the count’s
business), Corbie from the Count of Flanders in 1071 (probably another gift, this
time for helping the count), the Vexin in 1077 when the count there became a
monk, and Bourges in about 1100, which Philip purchased from the viscount who
was going on crusade. More broadly, too, Philip’s son Louis began the long and
difficult task of subduing, either by concessions or force, the castellans who persis-
tently defied the king’s authority within the royal demesne.
King Philip eventually became best-known for his controversial private life. He
grew enormously overweight and (allegedly) deeply indolent. He had been active
enough in 1092, however, to carry off and marry Bertrada de Montfort, the wife
of Count Fulk IV of Anjou (ironically, given that Philip himself grew too heavy to
ride a horse, he reportedly complained that his first wife, Bertha, the stepdaugh-
ter of the Count of Flanders, was too fat). Both Philip’s and Bertrada’s previous
partners were still alive when they married, and in 1094, the king was excommu-
nicated by a papal legate. In the following year, at the Council of Clermont, the
excommunication was reissued by Pope Urban II. Then in 1097 the entire king-
dom was placed under sentence of papal interdict, and eventually, in 1104, Philip
agreed to separate from Bertrada. This proved difficult, however, and they were still
living together when he died in 1108. Interestingly, most French bishops continued
to support the king throughout these scandalous events. This showed an enduring
respect for the monarchy as well as the limitations (at that point) of papal power.
When Louis VI succeeded to the throne in 1108 at the age of 26, he had
already been de facto ruler for the last few years as his father Philip I, increasingly
corpulent and inactive, had played little part in affairs. The same could not be said
of Louis’s stepmother, Bertrada, however, who, according to the Anglo-Norman
chronicler Orderic Vitalis, had so wanted one of her own sons by King Philip to
succeed him that she had poisoned Louis, only for the dying prince’s life to be
saved, not by royal physicians, but by ‘a shaggy doctor [who] came from Barbary’.
He ‘had lived for many years among the heathen and had learned the deep secrets
of medicine in their complexity’. Louis recovered (although ‘he remained pale for
the rest of his life’) and had begun to rein in the power of the castellans within the
royal principality before 1108. Contemporary accounts of his reign suggest that
bringing these men to heel was one of Louis’s most significant achievements. Men
like Thomas de Marle and Hugh du Puiset were tough opponents. According to
the contemporary writer Abbot Guibert of Nogent, ‘So unheard of in our times
was [Thomas’s] cruelty that men who are considered cruel seem more humane in
killing cattle than he in killing men’. But eventually, after a decade of relentless
warfare, Louis had done enough to gain the upper hand and extend his power at
their expense. Other recalcitrant barons were also forced to submit to the king, do
homage and accept his lordship and his authority over their castles. Some of them
even became officers of the royal household, which suggests a growing respect
across the royal principality for the king’s position, as do the witness lists to royal
charters which show castellans attending the royal court more frequently. And with
the royal demesne increasingly pacified, it could be more effectively and more prof-
itably exploited, either in person by the king as he travelled around his lands or by
his officials (prévôts) in their assigned areas. The king enjoyed a range of rights over
the forests, manors and towns of his principality and made money from tolls on
trade, the holding of markets and the minting of coins. He was also entitled to fixed
portions of the produce of some of his vassals, he could demand labour services in
some cases and money rents were not unknown. The Ile de France also became
a major wine producer in the first half of the twelfth century, and other resources
were exploited, too: land clearances were encouraged, settlement rights were sold,
jurisdiction over the forests was exploited and privileges were bought by towns. It
has been estimated that, by the 1170s, income from the royal demesne amounted
to something in the region of 60,000 livres parisis. If this figure is accurate, it means
that the Capetian heartland was at least on a par financially with the surrounding
principalities. This was not all Louis VI’s work, but he made a significant contribu-
tion to the monarchy’s increasing wealth.
Louis’s other main preoccupation was the challenge posed by the Duke of
Normandy, who was also, after 1106, the king of England, Henry I. Here, despite
considerable efforts, he was less successful. He fought an inconclusive war against
Henry from 1109–13, and when fighting resumed a few years later, Louis was
defeated at the Battle of Brémule in 1119 and forced to accept Henry I’s son Wil-
liam as heir to Normandy. Louis had wanted another William, William ‘Clito’, to
succeed to Normandy. William Clito was the son of Robert Curthose, Henry I’s
elder brother, but after the murder of the Count of Flanders, Charles the Good, in
1127, it looked as if Louis would be able to install Clito as his successor. This tri-
umph never materialised, however, as Clito died in 1128. Louis lost control of the
succession and was forced to recognise the other claimant, Thierry of Alsace, as the
new count. Even so, Louis was still able to make up ground on Henry I before
the end his reign. Henry was never able to solve the problems caused by the death
of his only legitimate son in 1120. He tried to have his daughter Matilda accepted
as his heir and married her to Geoffrey of Anjou, the son of Count Fulk V, in
an effort to strengthen her position. Even though they went along with it while
Henry was alive, however, the English and Norman barons were never happy with
this plan, and when Henry died in 1135, his nephew Stephen of Blois seized the
throne, and civil war soon followed. As the kingdom of England began to collapse,
so King Louis was able to achieve a huge diplomatic coup when his son and heir,
also called Louis, married Eleanor, the daughter of Duke William X of Aquitaine
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and heiress to the duchy. This opened up the enticing prospect of Louis VI’s grand-
son inheriting vast lands in southern France and adding them to the royal demesne.
Such a development would have transformed the power of the French monarchy.
Henry I, Philip I and Louis VI ruled their territories in similar, traditional ways.
They travelled constantly around their principality in the company of their house-
holds. Various officials were appointed to supervise domestic business: the most
important were the seneschal, who was in overall charge; the butler (responsible
for food and drink); the constable (the royal army); the chamberlain (finances); and
the chancellor (royal documents and the chapel). Philip I had introduced officials
across the principality, the prévôts, who supervised justice and collected royal rev-
enues, and they were in more regular and frequent contact with the royal court
by the start of the twelfth century. The royal bureaucracy also grew during this
period: there are just under six surviving royal charters per year for the reign of
Philip I, but 14 per year for Louis VI’s. Increasingly, too, they were written in the
royal chancery and not by beneficiaries, which allowed for greater uniformity and
consistency of language and approach. Charters were also being granted across
wider geographical areas than before, that is outside the royal principality in areas
like Berry, Auvergne and Toulouse. Historians have detected a tendency, starting
under Philip I but picking up pace under Louis VI, to prefer men of lower social
status as officials. This may have been an attempt to reinforce the idea that posi-
tions were the king’s to give out and not hereditary, and the royal charter witness
lists seem to support the idea that the great nobles were in attendance on the king
less frequently as the period went on. Such an approach gave no guarantee that
things would run smoothly, however. Louis VI’s administration was dominated
by the Garlande family for the first 20 years of the reign. Two Garlande brothers,
Anselm and William, became Louis’s seneschal, whilst a third, Stephen, after first
serving as royal chancellor, succeeded his brothers as the chief official of the king’s
household in 1120. King Louis was devoted to Stephen, but the latter was worldly
and unpopular with many who resented his pre-eminence. Personal rivalries and
jealousies almost certainly lay behind Stephen’s spectacular fall from royal favour
in 1127–8 when he became embroiled in a rebellion backed by Theobald of Blois
and Henry I of England. Stephen lost the seneschalcy to the king’s cousin, Count
Ralph of Vermandois, and although he was reinstated as chancellor in 1132, his
dominance of royal affairs had been broken.
The Capetian kings continued to rely on the church to support and legitimise
their rule. They were all consecrated at Reims, and they persisted in claiming the
right to appoint bishops in dioceses both within and outside the royal principality.
The ancient pedigree of the French rulers as the successors of Charlemagne and
Clovis set them apart from other more recently established dynasties and gave them
a charisma that other kings lacked. This was the Capetians’ trump card and com-
pensated for at least some of their relative political weakness. However, there is an
extent to which the French monarchy lost some of its perceived mystical qualities
during this period. This was partly a result of the personal scandals some of them
were associated with, and Philip I was said to have lost the healing powers of his
predecessors. But it was also a result of more general developments. Henry and
Philip in particular showed little if any interest in church reform, and it was left
to Prince Louis to negotiate an end to the investiture contest in France in 1107.
Having said this, from the 1120s onwards, an increasingly powerful ideology of
kingship began to develop within France which highlighted the special qualities
and status of the French kings. The chief propagandist was Suger, the abbot of the
monastery of St Denis from 1122. About ten miles north of Paris, St Denis was the
necropolis of the Frankish kings and the repository of the crown and royal insignia.
Suger had known Louis VI since he was a boy and was the king’s chief minister in
the last decade of Louis’s reign and until his own death in 1151. For Suger, whose
biography of Louis VI still forms the main narrative account of the reign, the king
was the pious and holy defender of the Church and the scourge of local tyrants.
But the way Suger identified the monarchy with St Denis (both the abbey and
particularly the saint) and constructed an ideology of kingship around this connec-
tion added significantly to this conventional portrayal. In 1124, Emperor Henry V
entered French territory intending to attack Reims with an army and the diplo-
matic backing of his father-in-law, the English king Henry I. The emperor targeted
Reims, according to Suger, because he had been condemned at the council held
there by Pope Calixtus II in 1119. More pressing for King Louis, however, was the
symbolic importance of the city as the coronation site of the French kings. So at
this critical moment, Louis VI visited St Denis and prayed. He then carried the
saint’s banner at the head of an army which, in Suger’s account, intimidated Henry
V into retreat. Not only that, but the royal army included contingents led by the
Duke of Burgundy and the counts of Blois and Flanders, whilst the counts of Brit-
tany and Anjou as well as the Duke of Aquitaine were only prevented from joining
because they could not gather their forces and move quickly enough. According
to Suger, the events of 1124 constituted a national French triumph over a Roman
emperor and an English king, the likes of which no French monarch had achieved
since Charlemagne. From this point the idea developed that the king had a unique
personal relationship with St Denis himself, and the saint was increasingly seen as
the patron and protector of both the king and his people. In reality, the threat posed
by Henry V was probably not as great as Suger wanted his audience to believe.
Even so, in response to the emperor’s invasion, King Louis had successfully sum-
moned to his aid most of the great princes of his kingdom. This was an impressively
unified response and that it was spearheaded by the king supports the view that, by
the end of Louis VI’s reign, the Capetian monarchy was finally making its presence
felt across the kingdom of France.
The great French princes could not ignore their kings anymore. Henry I, Philip
I and Louis VI were all closely involved with some of them at times, even if often
as allies or rivals rather than lords. Nonetheless, the major principalities continued
to be effectively autonomous political entities during the eleventh and early twelfth
centuries. Some of them, most notably Normandy, Flanders and Anjou, became
powerful players on the international stage. The most successful of the princes were
the dukes of Normandy. Duke William II became King William I of England in
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1066, and his son Henry I reunited the two territories in 1106. Others prospered,
too: buoyed by enormous commercial success at the centre of a developing wool
trade, the counts of Flanders were able to pursue their own independent policies,
while the counts of Anjou had become so prestigious by the 1120s that one of
them, Fulk V, handed over power to his son and became the king of Jerusalem.
In all three of these principalities, the rulers exercised relatively direct centralised
control over their lay and ecclesiastical subjects – probably more than the king was
able to exert within his own lands. But even in these regions, princely power could
quickly be undermined. Following the death without children of Count Geoffrey
Martel of Anjou in 1060, his two nephews squabbled over the succession, and the
situation did not begin to stabilise until the 1080s; in Normandy, after William the
Conqueror died in 1087, his eldest son, Robert Curthose, succeeded him as duke
only to preside over a dramatic descent into violent anarchy; and as late as the 1120s
the brutal and sacrilegious murder of Count Charles the Good of Flanders in 1127
(he was hacked to death as he said his prayers in church) revealed serious political
tensions across the ruling élite of the county. Meanwhile any kind of rigorously
systematic princely power was much less in evidence south of the River Loire. The
Dukes of Aquitaine spent much of this period suppressing resistance from castellans
within their duchy and keeping acquisitive neighbours such as the counts of Anjou
at bay on their frontiers. In the County of Toulouse, the success of Count Ray-
mond IV (d.1105) in uniting Toulouse, Gothia and Provence did not long outlast
his departure on the First Crusade in 1096, after which the Dukes of Aquitaine
began to harass his successors.
Controlling their own lands, disciplining their own vassals and fighting off
greedy neighbours: such things kept all the princes of France busy during this
period. So it would be unwise to highlight the considerable achievements of great
leaders like Geoffrey Martel of Anjou or William II of Normandy without also
emphasising the fact that they faced exactly the same kinds of problems as the king
did within his own principality. It was these problems, indeed, which gave the
kings at least some room for manoeuvre, as they allied first with one prince and
then another in an effort to survive in a rapidly shifting political landscape. To be
sure, the time when a dominant king could routinely rise above all this to settle
disputes, keep the peace and defend his kingdom had not yet come when Louis VI
died in 1137. Even so, whilst it is probably fair to argue that even by then the Cape-
tian kings were still no more powerful than their leading subjects, both the practical
and ideological foundations of their future supremacy had been reinforced.
Britain and Ireland: Conquest and Survival

The eleventh century was a traumatic one for the peoples of Britain and Ireland.
This was mainly because of what happened in the rich and institutionally pre-
cocious kingdom of England, which was conquered twice by foreign invaders
between 1014 and 1066. Both of these conquests, the first by the rulers of Den-
mark and the second by the rulers of Normandy, had profound consequences
for the English, although the effects of the Norman Conquest went deeper and
proved to be permanent. Importantly, though, the invasion of 1066 had an impact
beyond southern Britain. It altered the balance of power in France, but it also had
significant implications for Scotland and Wales, and only Ireland remained rela-
tively untouched by it. For the first time in centuries, the peoples of Britain, which
had never been part of the Carolingian Empire, started to look across the English
Channel rather than the North Sea for their political, economic and cultural direc-
tion. To their own differing extents, England, Scotland and Wales were finally
joining the Western European mainstream.
The history of England between about 1020 and 1120 is usually told as a story
of how the ground was prepared for the shock of 1066 and of how William the
Conqueror and his Norman followers then imposed themselves on the English. It
is worth remembering, however, that neither William’s invasion nor his eventual
triumph as king of England were inevitable. When King Cnut died in 1035, there
was no reason to believe that his dynasty would last only seven more years, and
when he was eventually succeeded by Edward the Confessor in 1042, the future of
the restored Old English line of kings must have looked promising. The Battle of
Hastings could have gone either way; the changes experienced by the English peo-
ple after 1066 were neither preconceived nor predictable. Bold, brutal and brilliant
though the Conqueror and his sons were, they improvised their way to one of the
greatest military and political achievements of the Middle Ages.
After Edmund Ironside’s death in 1016, Cnut succeeded him as ruler of the
whole English kingdom. His reign would last nearly 20 years and was important
in many ways. However, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to give a full descrip-
tion of it. Narrative sources are thin, partisan or both; very few of Cnut’s charters
survive, whilst his coins and law codes, which testify to the continuing strength of
England’s administrative structures, are in the end forms of propaganda. It seems
clear enough, however, that the new king was decisive at the start of his reign.
First, he divided the kingdom into four: he would rule Wessex directly himself, but
control of East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia was delegated away. Potential rival
claimants to the throne were also dealt with: Cnut exiled King Edmund’s brother,
Eadwig, for example, and he was later murdered. But perhaps the most significant
event early in the new reign was Cnut’s marriage to Aethelred II’s widow, Emma,
in 1017. The marriage reconstituted the Anglo–Norman alliance so valued by
Aethelred. It would also have been designed to produce sons and thereby neutralise
the claims to the throne of Emma’s sons by Aethelred, Edward and Alfred, who
were in exile at the court of their Norman relatives. Forced marriage (if forced
it was) was a metaphor for conquest, but over and above this, Emma embodied
continuity: marrying his predecessor’s wife gave Cnut legitimacy as well as access
to Emma’s practical experience as an English queen who understood the perils and
priorities of ruling the kingdom. As the evidence of her witnessing charters and
bestowing patronage shows, she exercised significant political power during Cnut’s
reign, and there is no reason to doubt that she was a huge influence on the king
himself. Back at the start of the reign, however, Cnut still needed to secure his
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position in other ways. In 1018 an enormous tribute of £72,000 was paid to him.
This was the single heaviest levy imposed on the English people to that date, and
Cnut probably used much of it to pay off his troops and send most of them back
to Denmark. This was followed by a meeting at Oxford at which, according to
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘the Danes and the English reached an agreement’. It is
not clear what the terms of this agreement were, but it is reasonable to think that,
following the tribute payment, this meeting finally set the seal on Cnut’s seizure
of power.
In 1019, Cnut left England for Denmark, where he had become king following
the death (probably in the same year or shortly before) of his brother Harald. From
now on he had to try and rule not just a kingdom, but an empire which spanned
the North Sea. He was back in England during the early 1020s and regularly there-
after, but events in Denmark and Norway soon came to preoccupy him as much
as, if not more than, those in England. He was frequently in Scandinavia (in 1019,
1022–3, 1025–6, 1027, 1028–9) and not just to keep a weather eye on affairs there.
He came under increasing pressure from his neighbours in Norway and Sweden as
the decade went on, and he may well have been defeated by them (the outcome
was at best inconclusive) at the so-called Battle of the Holy River in 1026. These
events are obscure, but the point is that, for the first time, England was being ruled
by an absentee king, and this was bound to have an effect on the way the kingdom
was governed. It was during Cnut’s reign, for example, that the title of ealdorman
was replaced by that of earl, and several men with this title rose to prominence in
the 1020s and 1030s: Godwine had become Earl of Wessex at the latest by 1023,
whilst Leofric (by 1032) and Siward (by 1033) were witnessing royal charters as earls
of Mercia and Northumbria, respectively. More widely, how far the Old English
aristocracy was replaced by Cnut’s followers is far from clear. It has been suggested
that the upheaval which afflicted the upper levels of political and landed society
either side of Cnut’s accession was considerable, and that not only were individuals
removed from the scene, but they and their families also suffered widespread loss
of estates and offices. On the other side, by contrast, the view has been that the
changes, whilst significant, were not transformative. For one thing, landholders
with Scandinavian names had been settled in the north and east of England for
several generations by Cnut’s reign, so it is impossible accurately to tell how many
of them were newcomers after 1016. Either way, new Scandinavian landowners
were probably never more than a minority within the established population, and
it seems clear that there was no replacement of native landholders by foreigners of
the kind that took place after 1066. Cnut, unlike William the Conqueror, preferred
to reward his followers with English money rather than English land.
Not all of Cnut’s absences were in Scandinavia. He campaigned in Scotland at
least once if not twice during his reign, but most spectacularly, in 1027 he made a
pilgrimage to Rome where he attended the coronation of the emperor Conrad II
(1027–39). Germany, where Conrad had been king since 1024, had a border with
Denmark, and Cnut’s daughter with Queen Emma, Gunnhild, was betrothed to
Conrad’s son, Henry, in 1035 and married him in 1036. So, pious reasons aside,
Cnut’s journey to Rome was intended to get Conrad’s support for his struggles
against the kings of Norway and Sweden, and perhaps against the Duke of Nor-
mandy, too, who may have begun agitating on behalf of the athelings Edward and
Alfred by this time.
In 1028, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Cnut sailed to Norway with
50 ships ‘and drove King Olaf from the land, and made good his claim to all that
land’. Olaf Haraldsson had ruled Norway since about 1016 and was a constant
thorn in Cnut’s side during the following decade or so, but once he was out of
the way (he was killed by his own people in Norway in 1030, perhaps at the semi-
mythical battle of Stiklestad), Cnut left Norway under the control of one of his
trusted lieutenants, Hakon, and returned to England. But Hakon died soon after
this and was in turn replaced as regent in Norway by Cnut’s first consort, Aelfgifu
of Northampton, and her son by Cnut, Swein. Cnut may also have decided by this
time to put his eldest son by Queen Emma, Harthacnut, in charge of Denmark.
Cnut was clearly eager to have his Scandinavian lands ruled directly by members of
his family, but these arrangements remained fragile. In 1034, the unpopular Swein
and Aelfgifu were forced out of Norway, and the ten-year-old Magnus, son of
St Olaf, was installed as king. Denmark under Harthacnut would soon come under
pressure from the Norwegians, too, and within a few years of his death in 1035,
Cnut’s Scandinavian empire had disintegrated.
Much the same happened in England over the next few years. When Cnut died,
and like King Edgar in 975, he left sons by different partners. With the support of
their respective partisans, they had to settle the issue of the succession themselves.
Queen Emma, backed by Earl Godwine of Wessex, spearheaded the campaign to
have Harthacnut, her son by Cnut, installed as king. Facing her was Aelfgifu of
Northampton, backed by the Earl of Mercia, who pressed the claims of her son,
Harold ‘Harefoot’. Soon, mainly because Harthacnut could not leave Denmark but
also because Aelfgifu lobbied the right men on her son’s behalf, Harold gained the
upper hand in the power struggle. As a result, in order to maintain her family’s grip
on power, Emma was forced to turn to Edward and Alfred, those sons of Aethelred
she had left sidelined in Normandy when she had married Cnut. In response to her
request, both men launched their own attacks on England in 1036, only for both
to fail – Edward returned quickly to Normandy, Alfred died after being captured
and tortured and Emma fled to Flanders. Over the next few years she made more
plans, and by the time Harold died in 1040, she had prepared an invasion force with
Harthacnut who had seen to his problems in Denmark and joined his mother. To
dissuade them from attacking England, envoys were sent to Harthacnut with an
offer of the throne, and he returned alongside his mother, vindicated and trium-
phant. Harthacnut’s short reign, however, was troubled. The violent and extortion-
ate attitude he displayed towards his new subjects quickly made him unpopular,
and many who had agreed to send for him soon regretted what they had done.
So much so that, in 1041, they invited Edward, Aethelred’s eldest son, to return
to England once again. When he arrived, he was installed as Harthacnut’s heir. It
seems unlikely that Harthacnut and Emma would have agreed to any of this, but
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they were isolated and had little choice. Edward’s status as the heir of the old royal
dynasty, stretching back to Alfred the Great and beyond, gave him the legitimacy
Harthacnut lacked, and when the latter died suddenly in 1042, there was no doubt
about who the next king would be. One of the first things Edward did after taking
the throne was deprive his mother of her treasures and her lands. This suggests how
strongly Edward felt about the way Emma had treated, or mistreated, him over the
past 25 years; but breaking the power of one of the most influential figures from the
previous Danish regime was also a necessary political move.
Critics of Edward have seen him as a weak and passive cipher. Dominated and
manipulated by his leading subjects, his indecisiveness paved the way for the events
of 1066. A more positive view, however, sees Edward as a canny and able politician
who managed largely successfully to navigate a way through the choppy waters
of his reign and to secure peace for his kingdom; he cannot be blamed for what
happened after his death when his own plans for the succession were disregarded.
Edward’s reign is conveniently divisible into two parts, although neither is easy
to interpret. Until 1053, he had to manage the influence of his most formidable
nobleman, Earl Godwine of Wessex, whose family became steadily more powerful
as the reign went on. Several of Godwine’s sons, including Harold, were made earls
during this phase of the reign, and Edward even married Edith, Godwine’s daugh-
ter. The other English earls were either unable or unwilling to try and clip God-
wine’s political wings, and meanwhile the family was acquiring lands and followers
across much of southern England. When Edward eventually fell out with Godwine
in 1051 and tried to free himself from the earl’s influence, he briefly succeeded
in forcing the family out of the kingdom, but the earl and his sons returned with
force in 1052, and when Godwine died in 1053, he was probably more dominant
than ever. The second part of the reign began after Godwine’s death when his place
as Earl of Wessex was taken by his son, Harold. Harold’s relationship with King
Edward (his brother-in-law) seems to have been more stable than Godwine’s had
been, perhaps because the king more or less withdrew himself from the political
scene and left the government of his kingdom largely in the hands of Harold and
his family. Harold retained his father’s place as the leading English earl, and God-
wineson power was increased further when Harold’s brother, Tostig, became Earl
of Northumbria in 1055. Yet more of his brothers had soon received their own
earldoms, and by the mid-1060s, with their support and having proved himself in
war with a brilliant campaign against the Welsh in 1063, Harold was well-placed to
succeed Edward as king, whether Edward wanted him to or not.
This possibility arose because Edward had no children of his own. Those who
later supported Edward’s canonisation (he was made a saint in 1161) claimed that
he had chosen to live a celibate life, although this seems unlikely given the over-
riding importance contemporaries attached to the production of a royal heir. But
whatever the reasons for it, the king’s childlessness was a serious issue. By the time
he died at the start of 1066, Edward may have named his brother-in-law Harold
as his successor, although this is far from certain. There were others with more
distinguished claims to the throne, most obviously Edgar atheling, the grandson of
King Edward’s half brother, Edmund Ironside: Edward may have favoured Edgar
as his successor from the late 1050s, and he certainly had the Old English royal
blood that Earl Harold lacked. But Harold’s most potent rival was Duke William
II of Normandy. William subsequently claimed that Edward had selected him as
his heir as far back as the early 1050s and that this promise had been confirmed in
1064 or 1065 by none other than Earl Harold himself when the latter had visited
Normandy. Edward’s mother Emma was a Norman, of course, and so William
was his kinsman (albeit a remote one given that William was illegitimate). More
pertinently, Edward had been brought up as an exile from England at the Nor-
man court, and he had offered William the throne, the Normans alleged, as an
expression of gratitude for the help and support they had given him during those
difficult years.
So when Harold became king in January 1066, he must have known that he
would face a challenge. When it came, however, it was not initially from Duke
William. The king of Norway, Harald Hardrada, also had a claim to the Eng-
lish throne derived from an arrangement said to have been made in the 1040s
between Harthacnut and King Magnus of Norway. It was thin stuff, but Hardrada
was supported by King Harold’s aggrieved brother Tostig, who had been ejected
from his earldom of Northumbria in 1065, perhaps with Harold’s connivance. In
September 1066, this coalition defeated an English army and took control of York.
In response, Harold marched quickly to Yorkshire where he defeated and killed
both Hardrada and Tostig at Stamford Bridge on the 25th, only to learn a few days
later that William of Normandy had landed in Sussex on the 28th. Harold moved
south immediately; perhaps too quickly, critics later suggested. He may not have
had a full complement of rested troops behind him, and he may have been lured
into a trap William set for him. William may also have been a better battlefield
commander than Harold, and the Normans seem to have had more varied military
options at their disposal (infantry, archers and cavalry) than the English (just infan-
try). Nevertheless, when the two armies clashed at Hastings on 14 October 1066,
the battle lasted from about nine in the morning until dusk. It was hard-fought and
the outcome was uncertain, probably until Harold himself was killed late in the day.
Things would have been very different had Harold survived the battle, but his death
was decisive, and over the next two months or so, William systematically imposed
his authority on south-eastern England. English resistance failed to materialise,
mainly because there was no viable candidate to challenge William (those who
tried to rally around Edgar atheling soon gave up), and on Christmas Day 1066, the
Norman duke was crowned king of England in the abbey Edward the Confessor
had built at Westminster.
After becoming king, the evidence suggests that William I tried to conciliate the
surviving members of the English elite. Whether William was ever serious about
this, however, is less clear, and soon enough he faced rebellion. Throughout the
period 1067–9, Edgar atheling, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria and others
attempted, if not to overthrow William, then to force him into making concessions.
However, the king was under pressure from his own followers who expected lands
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and rewards in return for their support, and when the English rebels were joined
by foreign adventurers keen to take advantage of England’s insecurity, William lost
his patience. The most threatening of these foreign interlopers was King Swein
Estrithson of Denmark whose fleet landed in northern England in 1069 and who
for a time appeared ready to conquer the whole kingdom. The castles William
built and the devastating campaigns he launched in northern England in the win-
ter of 1069–70 (‘The Harrying of the North’) were a direct response to such
interventions and made it clear that the new king would not tolerate resistance.
In 1071, the major English rebels either submitted or were killed, whilst William’s
expedition to Scotland in 1072 (reminiscent of Aethelstan’s in 934), where he
took Malcolm III’s submission and his promise not to assist William’s enemies, set
the seal on the first phase of conquest – it was still incomplete, but it was going
to be permanent. Other revolts against Norman rule in England followed dur-
ing William’s reign, but none seriously threatened the new regime, and from the
mid-1070s onwards, William was able to spend most of his time in Normandy
defending his frontiers there and leaving the government of England in the hands
of various relatives and friends.
William’s long absences did not make the new government of England any less
intense. By the mid-1080s, the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy had been almost entirely
replaced by a new French one, and the lands of the defeated English had been
redistributed to William’s friends and followers. The speed and thoroughness of
these processes is evident from Domesday Book, compiled in the late 1080s, which
records the details of who held land in England in 1066 and 1086. The survey
which produced these results was not comprehensive (it did not cover London,
Winchester or much of northern England, whilst the returns for the eastern coun-
ties were never put into a finalised form). Nevertheless, it was still awesomely wide-
ranging and meticulous for its time, and it contains more than enough evidence to
show how firmly in control of most of England the Normans were by the time of
William I’s death in 1087. Northern England was still relatively untouched by the
Norman Conquest, but the main challenge to stability by this point would come
not from the pacified and demoralised English and their foreign allies, but from
within William’s own family. He had wanted his eldest son, Robert, to succeed
him in Normandy and his second, William II Rufus (1087–1100), to become king
of England, but neither brother was satisfied with only half of their father’s legacy,
and so throughout the early 1090s, they fought and schemed against each other
to overturn the Conqueror’s plan. Rufus was kept busy in England dealing with
a revolt by Robert’s supporters in 1088. Then, in 1091 and 1093, Malcolm III of
Scotland invaded England, and although his death removed a source of ongoing
disruption, the resulting political chaos in Scotland meant that the English remained
involved with the succession there. Nevertheless, buoyed by English funds, Rufus
was still able to attack Robert in Normandy twice, in 1091 and 1094. Even so, it
was only when Robert decided to go on crusade in 1096 that the brothers settled
their differences. Rufus agreed to pay Robert 10,000 marks, in return for which
the former took possession of Normandy until the latter’s return from crusade.
In 1098, Rufus extended his control into Maine, and by 1099, he may even have
planned to reprise the deal he had made with Robert in order to acquire Aquitaine
from Duke William IX, who wanted to go on crusade himself.
Rufus’s unexpected death in a hunting accident in 1100 plunged the futures
of England and Normandy into uncertainty once again. He had never married,
uniquely for an adult English king, and he had no children. There are contempo-
rary accounts which depict Rufus’s court as effectively a male brothel where sex
between men was allegedly routine. This does not mean that the king himself was
homosexual, although he may well have been, but his failure to address the ques-
tion of the succession before he died was bound to cause problems. Given that his
elder brother Robert was on his way home from the Holy Land at this point, now a
heroic crusader and, importantly, married, it is hard to believe that there would not
have been some sort of confrontation between him and Rufus had the latter sur-
vived. As it was, however, Robert had to react to the seizure of power in England
by his younger brother, Henry. Henry immediately tried to strengthen his position
in England by issuing a charter which promised to eliminate the alleged abuses of
Rufus’s reign; he married Edith, the sister of the new Scottish king, Edgar, and
he settled his dispute with the Church over the issue of lay investiture. However,
diplomacy could get Henry only so far, and, in the end, his quarrel with Robert
had to be settled by force. In June 1106, their two armies met at Tinchebrai in
Normandy. Henry won a decisive victory, and Robert was imprisoned for life (he
died in 1134).
Having finally got his hands on Normandy, Henry spent much of the rest of his
life defending the duchy, in the Vexin against the French king and in Maine against
the Count of Anjou. There were three periods of extended warfare, in 1109–13,
1116–20 and 1123–4, and Henry managed to keep his opponents at bay. By no
means did everything go his way, however. There were military reverses in 1118
and 1124, but more significant than these was the collapse of Henry’s diplomatic
strategy. In 1119 he persuaded count Fulk V of Anjou to abandon his alliance
with King Louis VI, and this new arrangement was sealed by a marriage between
Henry’s son and heir, William, and Fulk’s daughter, Matilda. Then, when Henry
defeated the French king in battle at Brémule in August 1119, it looked as though
the way through to a permanent settlement in northern France was clear. How-
ever, when Prince William was drowned in the so-called Wreck of the White Ship
in 1120, Henry’s plans were dealt a disastrous blow. The king’s daughter Matilda
was now his only surviving legitimate child, and when her husband, the emperor
Henry V, died in 1125, she was summoned back to England where Henry required
his barons to accept her as his heir. When in 1128 she married Geoffrey, the heir of
count Fulk of Anjou, this was on one level simply a revival of the Angevin alliance
Henry had constructed in 1119. The difference this time, however, was obvious:
the Angevin partner in the marriage was a man, the future Count of Anjou, and
there was no reason to believe that Geoffrey would not want to rule Normandy
and even England, as well as Anjou, once his father-in-law was dead. For the
cross-channel Anglo-Norman aristocracy, the prospect of an Angevin prince and
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his Angevin supporters issuing orders from Rouen and London was alarming to
say the least, and whilst they signed up to Henry’s plan in public, many must have
considered the alternatives. At the same time, Geoffrey and Matilda were keen to
shore up their position in anticipation of Henry I’s death. The old king refused to
give them a role, however, or any castles or lands in Normandy, and so they invaded
the duchy. When Henry died at the end of 1135, therefore, he left an ambiguous,
unstable legacy to his successor, whoever that might be. It would take the best part
of 20 years to solve the problems he had caused.
William the Conqueror may well have thought of himself as the legitimate heir
of Edward the Confessor, and he may have attracted some support for his inva-
sion on that basis. England was such an attractive target, however, because it was
rich and offered William and his supporters enormous rewards. There was English
land, of course, and both the king and his followers were primarily interested in
that as a new source of income. But for William and his successors there was also
geld, the closest thing to a national tax then existing in Western Europe, and an
almost kingdom-wide system of shires and hundreds staffed by a range of royal
officials which facilitated its regular collection. In addition, there was, by con-
temporary standards, a sophisticated system of coin production which the royal
government controlled as a prized monopoly, and a relatively mature bureaucracy
which recorded the king’s grants of land and privileges in the form of charters and
issued his orders in the form of writs. A network of law courts at shire and hun-
dred level, staffed initially by sheriffs (they began to appear for the first time in the
mid-eleventh century), bishops and reeves, and later by semi-professional itinerant
judges as well, all answerable ultimately to the king, only reinforced royal power
and authority even more. Once William had his hands on these systems, indeed,
the conquest of England could only get easier.
Whilst William I was sensible enough to leave much of the pre-conquest gov-
ernmental structures in place, however, some change was inevitable. England was
a kingdom under military occupation, and castles provided the principal way of
holding it down. Dozens of royal and private castles were built in England in
the 70 years after 1066. Starting off as little more than wooden stockades hast-
ily constructed on top of man-made mounds of earth, many of these were later
redeveloped and extended in stone. Other structures, not least a large number of
England’s great cathedrals, were built or rebuilt in the prevailing Romanesque style
after 1066, not just to glorify God, but to remind the English that the Normans
had come to stay. More mundanely, the English king was often absent from his
kingdom, particularly after 1072 in William I’s case, after 1096 in William II’s and
after 1106 in Henry I’s. The Conqueror dealt with this in an ad hoc way by appoint-
ing people close to him to act as regents whilst he was in Normandy, but once
Henry I had reunited the duchy with England, more permanent arrangements
began to take shape. Bishop Roger of Salisbury emerged as Henry’s chief minister
in England during the second decade of the 1100s, and he made the Exchequer the
centre of his power. The Exchequer had probably been in existence in some form
before 1100, but it is only during Henry I’s reign that it can be seen operating for
the first time. Twice a year, those who owed money to the king (principally the
sheriffs who ran the king’s estates, but others too) appeared at Winchester before
Bishop Roger and his associates to have their accounts audited. The payments they
made and the sums they owed or were owed were recorded on long parchment
rolls (pipe rolls). The single example from Henry I’s reign survives from 1130, but
it is enough to reveal how technically adept, professional and meticulous royal
government had become by then. Whether Henry was, as some historians have
claimed, acting as an architect of the early modern English state here and embark-
ing on a process of institutionalisation seems less likely. Sessions of the Exchequer
were conducted to raise money to fight the king’s wars; at the same time, they were
designed to intimidate and discipline (bully) the king’s officials and debtors (a large
number of usually high-ranking people) and to remind the political nation that the
king’s reach extended far beyond the geographical centre of his power. And the
‘new men’ or ‘men raised from the dust’ whom Henry famously retained to carry
out his orders and enforce his authority should not be seen as the vanguard of a
meritocratic bureaucracy. Their loyalty was to the king, not to some abstract notion
of service, and their incentive was the share they received from the profits of royal
lordship. What is not in doubt, however, is the success of Henry’s approach. When
he died he was rich and feared. The contrast with the French kings of this period,
for example, who struggled to exert themselves within their own demesne, never
mind across their entire kingdom, could not have been more stark.
For all the changes within royal government, the most significant transfor-
mation brought about by the Norman Conquest was at the top of elite society.
Almost the entire Old English aristocracy was removed (killed at Hastings or dis-
possessed thereafter) and replaced with a new French (mostly Norman) one: it
has been estimated that there were about 8,000 French landholders in England by
the time of Domesday Book. Some of them, those closest to the king, such as his
half-brothers Odo of Bayeux and Robert of Mortain and his long-term associates
Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances, Roger of Montgomery, William FitzOsbern and
William de Warenne, acquired vast tracts of English land and became enormously
rich. These men, and the 200 or so others who are revealed in Domesday Book as
the kingdom’s major landholders, by 1087 came to be known as the king’s tenants-
in-chief or, more colloquially, his barons. In return for the lands which the king
gave them (or which he allowed them to keep – the circumstances in which lands
were acquired after 1066 were often murky and questionable), they pledged their
allegiance to William, probably in a formal ceremony of homage, and promised to
provide him with a fixed number of knights to fight in the royal army or garrison
royal castles. This relationship based on landholding was at the heart of what has
come to be known as feudalism (from the Latin feodum, which was often used to
refer to the land in question), but there was far more to these arrangements than
land in return for military service. The king retained an extensive range of rights
and powers over the lands he granted away; historians call these ‘feudal incidents’.
So when a tenant-in-chief died, his heir could not succeed before he had paid a fee
(a ‘relief ’) to the king. If the heir was a minor, the king controlled the lands until
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he came of age. The marriages of a tenant-in-chief ’s widow and daughters could

be managed, sold or given away by the royal government. Feudalism therefore gave
the king money and military support, but perhaps more importantly, it gave him
the power to control and manipulate the lands, inheritances and families of his most
powerful subjects.
The new landholding structures introduced into England gave the king an
unprecedented amount of social and political control. A prudent monarch knew
how politically sensitive such matters were. Few things were likely to provoke
baronial anger more than a king who abused his feudal powers; hence Henry I’s
promise in his Coronation Charter of 1100 not to exploit the system as William
II had allegedly done. But kingship was strengthened by the Norman Conquest in
other ways, too. When he became king in 1066, Harold II had combined his family
estates with the royal ones he inherited from Edward the Confessor. William I was
the ultimate beneficiary of this dramatic change, and he developed it further by
keeping under direct royal control many of the estates that came into his possession
through death, rebellion and forfeiture after 1066. This gave him not only extra
income, but a meaningful presence on the ground across his new kingdom. Moreo-
ver, when William redistributed land to his followers, he appears to have taken care
to ensure that, however much land a particular individual acquired, it was rarely
concentrated in a single area. That does not mean that those individuals did not
acquire influence and power within local communities – a landholder with his own
castle and court was still a weighty figure. But William was determined to avoid the
creation of ‘over-mighty’ subjects; so where Edward the Confessor had been chal-
lenged by his earls and had found them hard to manage, after 1066 the earldoms
of Wessex and Mercia were allowed to lapse, whilst Northumbria and East Anglia
were remodelled and reduced in size. The earldoms William did create tended to
be small and compact, based on a single county and designed to protect vulnerable
regions such as the Welsh marches (Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford) and the
Channel coast (Kent). Thereafter, new earldoms were created while others lapsed,
but when Henry I died, there were still only seven, and an earl’s authority rarely
extended beyond a single shire. By then, as a result of the remarkable success of
the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon England was only a dim memory. A hybrid
Anglo-Norman society and culture had developed, and English royal power was
more pervasive and widespread than it had ever been before.
...
The 90 years between the death of King Malcolm II in 1034 and the accession of
King David I in 1124 were fundamentally important ones in the formation of a
single kingdom of Scotland, and they laid the basis for the creation of a single Scot-
tish people in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The kings did not have things all
their own way, however. Even though their kingdom of Alba was well-established
by the second quarter of the 1000s, it was still largely contained between the firths
of Forth and Moray. The main bases of royal power were at Scone and Forteviot,
with religious centres at St Andrews and Dunkeld. A little further south, either
side of the Forth estuary, Dunfermline and Edinburgh were also starting to develop
as royal seats by the start of the eleventh century. To the south-east, indeed, the
kings had managed to assert a kind of dominance over the largely English region
of Lothian (between the Forth and the Tweed), and to the south-west Cumbria
(either side of the Solway Firth from the Clyde to the Lake District) was also
coming under their influence. However, the full incorporation of these areas into
the kingdom was a work in progress which the ambitions of other rulers (most
obviously the Kings of England) could easily ruin. Meanwhile to the far north,
in Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, Norse influence predominated. The eleventh
century would see this region dominated by Thorfinn the Mighty (d.c.1065) from
his base on Orkney. Meanwhile Argyll, Galloway and the Western Isles were all
part of a politically fluid collection of lands spread across the North Sea and Atlan-
tic coasts (it also included the Isle of Man and the northern parts of Ireland and
even Wales), in which the main external power were the kings of Norway not the
kings of Scots. So eleventh-century Scotland was a land of many peoples. How the
kings attempted to extend and consolidate their authority over these groups whilst
dealing with major internal and external challenges to their power is the defining
theme of this period.
Scottish kings lacked the status and prestige of their English counterparts. For
one thing, they were not anointed, although they probably went through some
sort of inauguration ceremony at Scone. The institutions of kingship were also less
developed in Scotland than in England. There is no evidence to show that writing
or the minting of coins were used to spread notions of royal power, for example,
and there was no ‘king’s peace’ covering the whole kingdom. Having said that, the
MacAlpin dynasty was well-established by the early eleventh century (its reputed
founder, Kenneth MacAlpin, had died in 858), and it had reached the height of
its power so far under Malcolm II (1005–34). One continental chronicler, writing
probably in the 1060s or 1070s, referred to him as rex Scotiae, one of the earliest
examples of the use of this term. Malcolm’s reign was unusually long, and he was,
incidentally, the only one of the eight Scottish kings who ruled during the eleventh
century to die a natural death. The kings were also able to develop and exploit their
resources as their lands were divided into administrative units which eventually
became known as ‘thanages’ after the official, the thane, who supervised them. Each
thane was responsible for collecting renders in kind from the settlements within his
thanage. The ready availability of supplies allowed the kings to move around their
estates, and the thanages collectively gave a solid core to the kingdom. The kings
were also able to call on their mormaers. Meaning ‘great steward’ in Gaelic, mor-
maers were roughly the equivalent of the English kings’ ealdormen and, later, earls;
indeed, by the twelfth century, the successors of the mormaers were called earls in
Scotland. Originally, however, mormaers first appeared in the tenth century as the
recently established kingdom of Alba found itself confronted with a serious viking
threat from the north. The term was used in relation to the regional governors of
Fife, Gowrie, Angus, Mearns, Menteith, Strathearn, all close to the heart of the
Power 141
kingdom, whilst further afield there were also mormaers in Atholl, Mar, Buchan
and Moray. The mormaers’ main responsibility was military – to recruit and lead
armies – but this made them powerful in their own right, and many came to see
their office as hereditary. Their independence could threaten royal power as much
as support it. The mormaer of Moray, Macbeth, for example, used his position as a
base from which to seize the Scottish throne in 1040.
Duncan I, Malcolm II’s grandson, was overthrown by Macbeth in 1040, seem-
ingly because he had failed in war. Duncan had led an army into Northumbria
in late 1039 or early 1040 and besieged Durham, but a fierce counter-attack had
forced him to make a humiliating retreat. Shortly afterwards, he was killed by
Macbeth and his men. Macbeth had his own, albeit fairly remote, connections to
the ruling line through his wife (she was a grand-daughter of King Kenneth III,
who ruled from 997 to 1005), but this could not obscure what looked like the end
of the MacAlpin dynasty, and, not surprisingly, Macbeth’s rule was not universally
accepted by Scotland’s ruling elite. He was still able to rule for 14 relatively untrou-
bled years, however, and even made a pilgrimage to Rome in 1050 where his lavish
generosity to the poor caused comment. In the end he was ousted in 1054 by an
English expedition led into Scotland by the Earl of Northumbria, Siward. Siward
appears to have been acting on the instructions of King Edward the Confessor, at
whose court Malcolm, the son of Duncan I, had been given refuge since the death
of his father. The English plan was to replace Macbeth with a friendly, compliant
ally, and eventually, in 1058, Malcolm led an army into Scotland and killed the
fugitive Macbeth and his son. The MacAlpin line was thereby restored in the per-
son of King Malcolm III (1058–93).
Malcolm did not turn out to be the dutiful subordinate the English had intended
him to be. His long reign was dominated by his relationship with the kings of Eng-
land and by his repeated attempts to gain territory at their expense. The upheaval
of the Norman Conquest played into his hands in this regard, although in the end
his ambition led to his downfall. Malcolm launched five major military expedi-
tions into northern England during his reign. He was also a thorn in William I’s
side for other reasons, too: Malcolm’s court was used by English rebels as a refuge
and a hiding-place, for example. Edgar atheling was one of these, and Malcolm
married Edgar’s sister, Margaret, in 1070. Three of the sons of Malcolm and Mar-
garet would become kings of Scotland, and their struggles to gain and then con-
solidate their inheritances dictated the main political narrative in Scotland for the
next 50 years and beyond. However, this marriage had other important long-term
consequences. Edith, the daughter of Malcolm and Margaret, would later marry
Henry I, William the Conqueror’s son, thus temporarily bringing the English and
Scottish ruling houses together. And Queen Margaret used her position at court
to reorientate Scottish kingship away from its traditional Gaelic and Scandinavian
setting so that it could adopt a more anglicised approach. Evidence hints at a more
sophisticated, luxurious, refined court style being adopted after 1070. Moreover,
Margaret’s first four sons with Malcolm (Edward, Edmund, Aethelred and Edgar)
were given recognisably English names, perhaps in an attempt to give them more
chance of succeeding to the English throne if the Norman Conquest faltered. And
in death as well as birth, there was a shift away from Gaelic royal tradition: whereas
the small Hebridean island of Iona had been the main burial place of Scottish kings
until the end of the eleventh century, for the next 130 years or so, most of them
were interred a hundred miles east, at the Benedictine abbey of Dunfermline,
founded by Margaret: eight kings, including Malcolm III and three of his sons
who ruled as kings, as well as Margaret herself, were buried there. But even more
broadly than this, and whether willingly or not, from this point onwards the Scots
rulers were brought more and more under the political, economic and social influ-
ence exerted by the new Norman ruling classes of southern Britain. Historians
must tread carefully here, as the overwhelming bulk of the surviving sources deal
with the relations between England and Scotland, whilst the Scottish kings’ deal-
ings with the far north and west are much less well-documented and understood.
Nonetheless, the impression that the Scots were pulled more and more into Eng-
land’s orbit during this period is hard to ignore.
Before that, however, Malcolm III was nothing but a menace to his southern
neighbour. His expeditions into England in 1061 and 1070 strengthened his grip
on Cumbria south of the Solway Firth (the region that would eventually be divided
between the English shires of Cumberland and Westmorland), and the second cam-
paign probably prompted William I’s punitive march into Scotland in 1072. Mal-
colm gave William hostages (including Duncan, his son by his first marriage) and
performed homage to him, but by 1079, he was raiding into Northumbria once
again, a campaign which resulted in the building by the English of a new castle
on the River Tyne and the foundation of a great north-eastern city. This decisive
extension of Norman power into northern England may explain Malcolm’s rela-
tive inactivity during the 1080s, but he renewed his attacks on England in 1091
and advanced almost as far as Durham. William II’s response was to march into
Cumbria and build a castle at Carlisle, thus removing Malcolm’s influence south
of Solway for good. Rufus’s actions and his subsequent refusal to see Malcolm and
discuss their relationship made it clear to the Scottish king that William saw him as
just another baron who might require a reprimand from time to time, so Malcolm’s
fifth and final attack on England in 1093 was probably his attempt to remind the
English king that he was much more than this. After ravaging and plundering in
Northumbria, however, Malcolm and Edward, his eldest son with Margaret, were
ambushed and killed near Alnwick. On hearing the news, Queen Margaret is said
to have collapsed and died.
Chaos and confusion now engulfed the Scottish kingdom. Ignoring the claims
of Malcolm III’s surviving sons, his brother, Donald Bàn, seized power and expelled
Queen Margaret’s English followers from court. Whether or not this should be
interpreted as an ‘anti-English’ reaction by a hard-core of Gaelic speaking tradi-
tionalists is hard to say. William II, however, like Edward the Confessor before him,
saw an opportunity to have a biddable Scottish king installed with English help.
So Malcolm’s son Duncan, a hostage in England since 1072, was sent north with
an army, overthrew Donald Bàn and became king. Within only a few months,
Power 143
however, Donald Bàn had regathered his supporters, moved against Duncan and
killed him. By the end of 1094, Donald Bàn was king once again, but another
English army travelled north in 1097, forced him off the throne for the second
time and installed Edgar (1097–1107), now Malcolm III’s eldest surviving son with
Margaret, as king. It was clear that King William expected Edgar to rule as a client
of his more powerful English neighbour, not independently. The Scottish crown
had graciously been bestowed on him by the English king, and the balance of
power between the two rulers was clearly shown in 1099 at Westminster when
Edgar carried William’s sword during the latter’s crown-wearing. Edgar’s generos-
ity to the monks of Durham also suggests that he looked south for his friends more
than north. This English expectation of Scottish subordination continued into the
reign of Henry I. Henry’s marriage to Edgar’s sister Edith showed that he needed
Scottish support at the start of his reign, but by the time Edgar was succeeded by his
brother Alexander I (1107–24), King Henry had secured his position: Alexander’s
status was explicitly confirmed by his marriage to an illegitimate daughter of the
English king, a mark of honour to be sure, but a qualified one. Alexander’s younger
brother, David, was also being trained and educated at the English court, and in
1113, he was given an English earldom, Huntingdon, by Henry I. Importantly,
though, David was also granted Cumbria north of the Solway Firth by his brother,
and when he became king himself in 1124, he was able to incorporate these lands
into his kingdom. With David’s accession to the throne, one of the truly formative
periods in medieval Scottish history had begun.
...
The political history of Wales from the 1030s to the 1130s is dominated by two
Welsh kings – Gruffudd ap Llewelyn and Gruffudd ap Cynan – and by one extraor-
dinary event with momentous consequences – the arrival of the Normans. Gruf-
fudd ap Llewelyn’s father, Llewelyn ap Seisyll, had seized control of Gwynedd in
1018, but he died in 1023, and it was not until 1039 that Gruffudd was able to take
over the kingdom himself. Then, and for the next 16 years, he fought repeatedly
against the rulers of Deheubarth. They resisted Gruffudd strongly, but when Gruf-
fudd ap Rhydderch, the ruler of Deheubarth, died in 1055, the southern kingdom
could not produce a strong candidate of its own to replace him, and Gruffudd
stepped into the political vacuum to become, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, ‘king over the whole of Wales’. Over the next eight years, until his death
in 1063, Gruffudd became heavily involved in English affairs. As early as 1039, he
had launched a devastating raid into Mercia, and in 1043, he crossed the River Wye
and did something similar in Gloucestershire. But in 1055, he joined forces with
Aelfgar, the exiled son of Earl Leofric of Mercia, who had raised a fleet in Ireland,
to attack Herefordshire. The Earl of Hereford, Ralph de Mantes, was unable to
respond, Hereford was taken and the town and its cathedral were destroyed by fire.
Both Earl Harold of Wessex and then Bishop Leofgar of Hereford subsequently led
armies against Gruffudd, but they failed to unsettle him, and Leofgar was killed in
battle against Gruffudd in 1056. Gruffudd then swore to be ‘a loyal and faithful
under-king to King Edward’, but his alliance with Mercia was reinforced when the
Welsh ruler married Edith, Aelfgar’s daughter, and by 1058 Gruffudd and Aelfgar,
who had become Earl of Mercia by this point only to be exiled a second time, were
working together again with a Norwegian fleet led by Magnus, the son of King
Harald Hardrada. In 1062–3, however, the net finally closed in on Gruffudd. At
Christmas 1062, Earl Harold made a surprise attack on Gruffudd’s court at Rhud-
dlan, but the prince escaped by sea. However, a campaign and blockade mounted
in the following summer by Harold and his brother Earl Tostig of Northumbria
forced Gruffudd inland, and he was killed in August by some of his erstwhile sup-
porters. His head was brought to Harold and ultimately delivered to Edward the
Confessor. But even though his career ended in defeat and grisly death, Gruffudd
ap Llewelyn’s career had not been based on violence alone. By the 1060s he was
collecting renders from former English manors in Flintshire, and in the south he
had extended royal rule back into Gwent. Welsh royal power had shifted eastwards,
and in the process, English settlements along the Anglo-Welsh frontier had been
devastated and made uninhabitable. For the first time, a Welsh ruler had challenged
the dominant English and forced them on to the defensive.
Earl Harold’s victory in 1063 brought these developments to a decisive end.
Following Gruffudd’s death, Gwynedd and Powys were given to his half-brothers
who ruled as client kings for the English, and in the south the old dynasty of
Deheubarth was restored. Things were bound to change, however, once the Nor-
mans had arrived in England in 1066. The conquest of Wales was not part of
their plans; nonetheless a stable Anglo-Welsh frontier was still required, whilst the
potentially troublesome contacts between Wales, Ireland and Scandinavia needed
to be monitored. By the start of the 1070s, therefore, King William had established
three so-called marcher earldoms along the Welsh border in Cheshire, Shropshire
and Herefordshire. The earls were given extensive powers, and their primary duty
was to protect England from Welsh attacks. At the same time, the earldoms could
be used as bases from which to extend Norman influence further into Wales. Great
castles were built at Chester, Shrewsbury and Chepstow, and by the end of William
I’s reign, substantial inroads had been made by the Normans into north and south
Wales, whilst Earl Roger of Shrewsbury did the same in central Wales from his base
at the castle he named after his home in Normandy, Montgomery. The earls also
brought their own followers with them and gave them parts of the newly conquered
lands. In their turn, these men built their own castles and established their own
reserves of local power. In some parts of Wales, by contrast, private enclaves were
simply carved out by fierce, acquisitive Normans without reference to any higher
power. None of these claims could be made good without strenuous military effort
on the part of the aspiring lord and his followers, but once they had terrified the
local population into submission, the lands were theirs until someone challenged
them. When Gilbert FitzRichard of Clare was given the lordship of Ceredigion by
Henry I in 1110, for example, he led his private army there, built several castles and
then delegated to his vassals the subsequent work of consolidating his preliminary
Power 145
gains. They in turn built their own castles in the areas their lord had granted them.
The king reserved ultimate control to himself, but direct royal interest in Wales was
shown only intermittently. For the most part, the routine, violent work of conquest
and domination was carried out by more lowly men.
Some of these marcher lordships (Brecon, Pembroke and Glamorgan in south
Wales, for example) eventually formed significant power blocs, whilst others
(such as Wigmore and Weobley in Herefordshire) were smaller and more com-
pact. Within them, however, the lords were largely free to conduct their affairs
as they saw fit; there was little if any interference from superior lords or the royal
government. They could wage their own wars and administer their own justice.
This was not a one-sided process, however, and any Norman attempts to move
into Wales would inevitably mean involvement with internal Welsh politics. In
1081, the rulers of Deheubarth and Gwynedd were both killed by their respec-
tive rivals, Rhys ap Tewdwr and Gruffudd ap Cynan, at the battle of Mynydd
Carn. Rhys was allowed to keep his new kingdom by King William, who made
his only trip to Wales in 1081, officially as a pilgrim to pay his respects at the
shrine of St David, but as much to take Rhys’s submission. Gruffudd, meanwhile,
was taken prisoner by Earl Hugh of Chester and kept in captivity for at least
the next 12 years. The resultant power vacuum in Gwynedd was filled by Earl
Hugh’s cousin, Robert. He built one castle at Rhuddlan and others on his sweep
through Gwynedd, and by the end of the 1080s, he was recognised in Domesday
Book as holding the whole of north Wales for an annual payment of £40. And
when Rhys ap Tewdwr was killed in 1093 by Normans advancing into Brecon
and threatening Deheubarth, the unintended Norman conquest of Wales began
to look like a real possibility: ‘then fell the kingdom of the Britons’, a Welsh
chronicler lamented.
In fact, whilst the events of 1093 were a turning-point, it was the Normans
rather than the Welsh who suffered the biggest reverse. In the same year, Gruffudd
ap Cynan, having been released from prison or escaped, killed Robert of Rhuddlan
in a surprise attack on the latter’s castle at Degannwy. This event signalled the start
of a much wider Welsh response to the Normans, and between 1094 and 1098,
revolts broke out in almost every part of Wales. In the north, Gruffudd and his
allies destroyed newly built castles, whilst the Normans in south Wales also suffered
major setbacks. In 1098, Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury made a determined attempt to
recover Gwynedd, but although he forced Gruffudd ap Cynan to retreat tempo-
rarily to Ireland, he was killed in battle by the king of Norway, Magnus Barelegs,
who arrived off the coast of Anglesey. Magnus had already occupied the Shetlands,
the Western Isles and the Isle of Man and extracted an agreement from the king of
Scots, Edgar, that the Western Isles (including Man but perhaps not the islands in
the firth of Clyde) should be subject to Norwegian rule. It is hard to see Magnus’s
excursion to Wales as coincidental. Gruffudd may have invited him to come to
Anglesey to help him recover his position in north Wales. The Norwegian cer-
tainly left as suddenly as he had arrived, and Gruffudd was indeed able to return to
Anglesey, which the Normans allowed him to keep.
The Normans kept hold of most of the lands they had occupied in south Wales.
Castles were built, most impressively at Carmarthen, and new lordships, manors
and villages were established. English peasants were transplanted to farm the lands
and integrate with the native Welsh communities, whilst in Dyfed King Henry
I imported settlers from Flanders who had been displaced by flooding and over-
population. By the 1130s, practically the whole of south Wales was under Nor-
man rule. Matters were more complicated in central Wales. The collapse of the
earldom of Shrewsbury following an unsuccessful revolt against Henry I in 1102
by Earl Robert and his brother Arnulf (the sons of Roger de Montgomery) desta-
bilised the situation there, whilst disputes within the ruling families of Powys and
Cerdigion and competition with the encroaching Normans led to prolonged civil
war between 1109 and 1115. Meanwhile in the north, and following the events of
1098, Norman control in Gwynedd was never fully restored. Indeed, for the next
40 years, it was Gruffudd ap Cynan who steadily and cannily tightened his grip on
the region. His initial success owed much to the long minority in the earldom of
Chester that followed the death of Earl Hugh in 1101 and to the forbearance of
King Henry I, but by 1115, Gruffudd’s power was such that Henry felt it necessary
to lead a major campaign against him, which compelled Gruffudd to submit and
pay a large tribute (the troublesome ruler of Powys did the same). Thereafter Gruf-
fudd was careful not to provoke Henry, but this did not prevent him embarking on
a policy of territorial expansion in the 1120s. His sons were central to this: in 1124,
Cadwallon and Owain were sent into Meirionydd, which they controlled by the
mid-1130s, and in 1125, Cadwallon killed three of his uncles, thereby eliminating
the only powerful dynasty in north-east Wales. By the time Gruffudd died in 1137,
Ceredigion, Rhos, Rhufoniog and Dyffryn Clwyd were all subject to the rulers
of Gwynedd.
Gruffudd ap Cynan’s achievements were considerable. He was involved in
Welsh politics for more than 60 tumultuous years, and this longevity alone was
remarkable. Gruffudd is the subject of the only surviving medieval Welsh secular
biography, and whilst the author’s view of his hero as a new Arthur, ‘king of the
kings of the isle of Britain’, may be overblown, it is a sure sign of how highly Gruf-
fudd’s countrymen esteemed him. Having said that, Gruffudd’s rule over Gwynedd
was always dependant on Henry I’s acquiescence, and he had to act cautiously to
keep his authority intact without antagonising his much more powerful neighbour.
Meanwhile, in the central March and even more so in south Wales, Norman con-
trol was extensive and showed every sign of increasing further. By the time Henry
I died in 1135, Norman domination of Wales was not complete by any means, but
it must have seemed to many that this was only a matter of time.
...
Following the death of Brian Bóruma in 1014, a series of ambitious and able men
competed for the high kingship of Ireland. For some time, however, none was able
to dominate the island to the extent that Brian had. Irish succession practices had
Power 147
something to do with this. There were no fixed rules about who should succeed
a dead king, and the latter’s power could evaporate quickly if it was not seized by
someone able and charismatic enough to command obedience. This might be the
late king’s son, but it could just as easily be his brother, another relative or someone
from outside the ruling family entirely. Whoever controlled sufficient resources
regularly to launch raids, take tribute and reward followers was likely to come out
on top, so power struggles were part and parcel of the Irish political landscape,
where rivalries within dynasties could be just as intense as conflict between them.
The major figure in Irish politics in the middle third of the eleventh century was
Diarmait mac Máel na mBó from Leinster. He controlled Waterford and Wexford
and, from 1052, Dublin as well, which he gave to his son, Murchad. These trading
centres, Dublin in particular, were becoming increasingly prosperous, and their
combined wealth must considerably have increased the ambitions of Diarmait’s
dynasty, the Uí Chenneslaig. In 1061, when Murchad invaded the Isle of Man,
it was clear that Dublin and Man were coming to be regarded as a single political
entity: the ruler of one could reasonably expect to rule the other as well as perhaps
Galloway and the Western Isles of Scotland in a kingdom extending from the Irish
Sea along Britain’s north Atlantic seaboard. Diarmait had wider connections, too:
he gave shelter at Dublin to the exiled Cynan ap Iago who was bidding to become
ruler of Gwynedd in north Wales; his son Gruffud ap Cynan eventually succeeded
where his father had failed (with Irish help), but throughout his career he main-
tained close links with Dublin and retreated there when the situation in Wales
required it. Diarmait also welcomed another exile to his court: Harold Godwine-
son took refuge there after fleeing from England in 1051–2, and after the Battle of
Hastings, Diarmait supplied Harold’s sons with a fleet with which they unsuccess-
fully attempted to invade England.
When Diarmait died in 1072, his place as the most powerful king in Ireland
was taken by Toirdelbach Ua Briain, a grandson of Brian Bóruma, whom Diarmait
had helped to become ruler of Munster in the 1060s. Like Diarmait, Toirdelbach
took care to assert his authority over Dublin and Man, but his son Muirchertach
Ua Briain found it much harder to hold on to them as competition for control of
the Irish Sea region intensified. Godred Crovan emerged from obscurity in the
1070s to establish a new dynasty which eventually ruled for most of the next two
centuries over Man, the Western Isles and much of the north-western seaboard of
Scotland. Later, in 1101 or 1102, no less a figure than the king of Norway, Magnus
Barelegs decided to intervene with the intention, it was claimed, of conquering
Ireland himself. Negotiations rather than battles were the order of the day, how-
ever, and Magnus’s death in 1103, possibly in an Irish ambush, scuppered plans for
a marriage between his son and Muirchertach’s daughter.
Muirchertach still found other ways of developing his wider ambitions. In
1089, he took control of Leinster, and in 1093 and 1094 he expelled the ruling
dynasties from Connacht and Meath, respectively, and installed compliant subject
lords to rule under his authority. At other times, more aspiring Welsh chieftains
were given refuge at Dublin from the new Norman rulers of England, whilst in
1101 Muirchertach agreed to help the Montgomery brothers in their rebellion

against King Henry I. Muirchertach was less successful in asserting his authority
over the north of Ireland, however, and he only ever became what contemporaries
described as ‘king of Ireland with opposition’, not high king. When he apparently
resigned from power in 1118, he was under pressure from Toirdelbach Ua Con-
chobair of Connacht, who invaded and divided up Munster. Nevertheless, by the
time he died in 1119, Muirchertach had become a significant figure in the politics
of Britain as well as Ireland.
Southern Europe: Spanish Kings and Norman

Knights in Iberia and Italy
On the edges of Western Europe at the start of the eleventh century, political life
was uncertain and conflict was common. As has been seen, the German kings’
efforts to increase the size of their kingdom had been met with large-scale resist-
ance from their pagan neighbours during the 980s, which had brought a halt, albeit
not a permanent one, to further movement eastwards. In the following hundred
years or so, western expansionism refocused on the Muslim world further south.
In the Iberian Peninsula, warfare between Christians from the north and Muslims
from the south continued through the eleventh century, whilst the Normans in
southern Italy took more than 50 years to consolidate their conquests. Historians
have been interested for some time in how these ‘frontier societies’ worked, how
the conquering newcomers adapted to the new worlds in which they found them-
selves and how the peoples they conquered adjusted to life under their new rulers.
The conquerors were always in a very small minority, but the impact they had was
out of all proportion to their number.
By the 1030s, the mighty Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba had disintegrated into
several dozen smaller, warring kingdoms. Commonly known as Taifas, for the rest
of the eleventh century and into the twelfth, these petty principalities competed
with each other, merged, divided and combined again in a perpetual struggle for
local and regional supremacy across al-Andalus. Some prospered for a time; cities
like Zaragoza and even Córdoba remained important and powerful. But the most
successful of all the Taifa kingdoms were the ones in Granada established by the
Berber Zirid family and, even more so, the kingdom of Seville. Seville was the
richest and most potent of the Taifa states until the 1040s, and by 1080, it domi-
nated the entire south-west of the Iberian Peninsula. By that time, the number
of Taifa kingdoms had dramatically reduced, however, from more than 30 in the
1030s to only 9.
Further north, Christian Spain in the early eleventh century also consisted of a
patchwork of rival principalities. The fortunes of Leon, Castile, Navarre, Aragon
and Barcelona all rose, fell and sometimes rose again during this period. Initially,
the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba presented the Christian rulers with great
opportunities for expanding their power. However, for several decades after the
1030s, the kings’ main priority appears to have been extracting tribute from the
Power 149
Taifa princes rather than conquering them: the Taifas may have been politically
unstable, but they were rich. Moreover, Taifa rulers looked increasingly to their
Christian neighbours for military help against their fellow Muslims. Tributes or
parias were paid increasingly frequently and on an ever-larger scale as the cen-
tury went on. In the early 1070s, for example, the Muslim ruler of Zaragoza,
al-Muqtadir, agreed to pay King Sancho IV of Navarre (1054–76) 1000 pieces of
gold every month, and in about 1075, the ruler of Granada paid Alfonso VI of
Leon-Castile (1065–1109) a one-off tribute of 30,000 gold pieces. This was a pro-
tection racket, and the penalties for non-payment could be steep. When the ruler
of Seville, al-Mu’tamid, tried to pay Alfonso VI with debased currency in 1082
and Alfonso’s envoy objected, al-Mu’tamid had him crucified. Alfonso’s outraged
response was to raid deep into al-Mu’tamid’s lands and get within sight of the straits
of Gibraltar.
However, the parias system was not completely one-sided. The Christian rulers
vied with each other for access to these tributes, and the Taifa rulers were able to
play them off against each other. It was with the help of Castilian troops, for exam-
ple, that the Muslim ruler of Toledo captured Córdoba in 1075. More broadly, a
king like Ferdinand I (‘the Great’) of Leon-Castile (1035–65) was just as concerned
to achieve supremacy over his Christian neighbours as he was to dominate Muslim
territory. His father, Sancho the Great of Navarre (1004–35), had expanded his
kingdom westwards, in the process taking over the kingdom of Castile and parts
of Leon. When he died in 1035, he divided his territories between his three sons:
Ferdinand inherited Castile and the conquered parts of Leon, whilst his elder and
younger brothers (Garcia and Ramiro) inherited, respectively, Navarre and the
mountain county of Aragon, which became a kingdom for the first time. Then,
in 1037, Ferdinand defeated and killed King Vermudo III of Leon at the Battle
of Tamaron. He took control of the entire Leonese kingdom, and the power-
ful new Christian kingdom of Leon-Castile was born. Later, in 1054, Ferdinand
also defeated and killed his own brother, the king of Navarre, Garcia Sanchez V
(1035–54), and only allowed his successor, Sancho Garces IV (1054–76), to rule
as his vassal.
The shifting allegiances and cross-cultural experiences in eleventh-century Ibe-
ria are summed up in the career of perhaps the most famous of all the individuals
from this period. Legend and fable have come to surround the story of Rodrigo
Diaz, better known as El Cid (‘the Lord’), mainly because of the great poem that
was written about him a century or so after his death, The Song of the Cid. But what
is known for certain about his life is remarkable enough. A minor Castilian noble-
man, a fine soldier and an able diplomat, Rodrigo served the sons of Ferdinand I of
Leon-Castile. However, he was exiled by Alfonso VI in 1081 and found employ-
ment as a mercenary for the Muslim ruler of Zaragoza. He fought against Muslims
and Christians, notably capturing the Count of Barcelona in 1082 and defeating
the king of Aragon in 1084. In 1089, after briefly being reconciled with Alfonso
VI, he was exiled again, and this time took up fighting on his own account. For the
next ten years he campaigned in eastern Spain with his own army, pillaging, taking
tribute and seeing off both Christian and Muslim challengers. He seized control of
Valencia in 1094 and, now prince of his own Taifa state, ruled it until his peace-
ful death in July 1099, coincidentally the same month that the armies of the First
Crusade captured Jerusalem.
The rise of El Cid took place at a critical time in this phase of Iberian history.
When Ferdinand I of Leon-Castile died in 1065, his lands were divided between
his sons. The eldest, Sancho, inherited Castile; the second son, Alfonso, took over
Leon; the third, Garcia, received Galicia. William the Conqueror had a similar
idea about dividing England and Normandy between his two eldest sons in 1087.
Predictably, however, both in William’s case and in Ferdinand’s, the scheme failed,
and the sons were soon at war with each other. In 1071, Sancho forced Alfonso
to flee and take refuge with the Muslim ruler of Toledo. Alfonso soon fought
back, Sancho was assassinated in 1072 and, after swearing that he had nothing to
do with his brother’s mysterious death, Alfonso VI became the undisputed ruler
of Leon-Castile. By 1077, he was calling himself emperor of Spain. Perhaps even
more significantly, however, when Alfonso’s erstwhile Muslim ally in Toledo was
overthrown in 1082, the king decided to take the city for himself and did so in the
face of little serious resistance three years later. The Christian capture of Toledo in
1085 was a turning-point in the history of al-Andalus – over a decade before the
conquests of Antioch and Jerusalem by the armies of the First Crusade, the seizure
of Toledo, capital of the old Visigothic monarchy and seat of the Primate of the
Spanish Church, was Christendom’s most resounding blow yet against Islam. It led
to Christian settlement in the Tagus valley and encouraged Alfonso to look next
at seizing Valencia. Most crucially, however, it also forced the surviving Taifa kings
to seek help from outside Iberia. The Berbers of North Africa, specifically the
Almoravids, were only too happy to come to their aid.
The Almoravids were a religious movement not a tribe, and herein lay one
of their main strengths. Their austere and rigorous brand of Islam had a wide
appeal and cut across tribal divides. This enabled them to recruit enough support
to take over most of modern-day Morocco by the mid-1080s: they began building
a new capital city at Marrakech in 1070, then took Fez in 1075, Tangier in 1078
and Ceuta in 1083. Across the Straits of Gibraltar, the Taifa kings of al-Andalus
regarded the Almoravids as vulgar upstarts, but they could also see how effective
they were as a military force. So, when Toledo fell to Alfonso VI in 1085, and albeit
with a measure of nervous distaste, the Almoravids were asked to intervene. In
July 1086, perhaps 12,000 Almoravid troops under their leader Ibn Tashfin arrived
from North Africa, and in October they crushed the army of Alfonso VI at the
Battle of Sagrajas, near Badajoz. Another Almoravid expedition followed in 1088
(Ibn Tashfin had returned home after Sagrajas), but it was not until 1090 when the
third expeditionary force landed that things really began to change. This time the
Almoravids had come, not to help the Taifa kings, but to replace them. Granada
fell in 1090, Seville and Almeria in 1091 and Badajoz in 1094. The strongest resist-
ance to the Almoravids actually came from El Cid in Valencia, but after his death in
Power 151
1099, the city surrendered. The last Taifa kingdom, Zaragoza, submitted in 1110,
leaving the Almoravids the new lords of a reunited al-Andalus.
The advent of the Almoravids introduced an element of fervent religiosity to
the struggle for al-Andalus. This had been conspicuously lacking until the 1080s
as Christians worked with Muslims just as much, it seemed, as they fought against
each other. Having said that, the Almoravids’ first concern was to take over al-
Andalus from their fellow Muslims, so even in their case, raw politics trumped
any sense of religious fellow-feeling. The situation was also changed by a shift in
the balance of power within the Christian kingdoms at the turn of the eleventh
century. Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile was the dominant force in the peninsula until
1086, but his defeat by the Almoravids at Sagrajas and another at Consuegra in
1097 dealt major blows to his authority. Worst of all, however, was the trounc-
ing he received at Almoravid hands at the Battle of Ucles in 1108. When he died
in 1109, and despite having been married five or six times, Alfonso left no male
heirs, and his kingdom passed to his daughter Urraca. She was undoubtedly able,
but the prospect of female rule, if not inconceivable, would have been problematic
even in stable and peaceful times. The first plan, therefore, reportedly forced on
an unwilling Urraca by the male nobles who advised her, was to find the queen a
powerful husband. An obvious candidate was Alfonso I the Battler, king of Navarre
and Aragon (1104–34), and the prospect of four kingdoms being united by a single
marriage must have been an enticing one for him. However, the marriage was
violent and unhappy, and it lasted only a few years. A decade of dynastic upheaval
followed in Leon-Castile, and only the accession in 1126 of Alfonso VII (Urraca’s
son by her first marriage) started to bring this to an end.
Meanwhile, Alfonso I had assumed the position of leading Christian prince in
Iberia. The Aragonese took Zaragoza in 1118, then Tudela, Tarazona and Cal-
atayud by 1120. In 1125–6, his raid through Almoravid territory in which he
reached the coast at Motril showed that the Muslims were unable to defend their
people against him. The Almoravids rallied somewhat after that, and when Alfonso
was eventually killed whilst campaigning in the Ebro valley in 1134, the Christian–
Muslim frontier was stabilised for the time being. By then, the Christian conquests
had gradually acquired some of the characteristics of a crusade. Pope Urban II had
written to the barons of Languedoc as far back as 1089 urging them to help recover
the city of Tarragona in the north-east of Spain ‘for the remission of your sins’; in
1118, the papacy granted Christian warriors in Spain the same indulgences as those
going to the Holy Land; and in 1123, the First Lateran Council granted similar
privileges to warriors ‘travelling to Jerusalem or Spain’. Thus by the 1120s the
character of the relations between Christians and Muslims in Iberia had changed
significantly, and on both sides it was becoming more hardline and aggressive. This
was due in large part to the arrival of the Almoravids and the way in which the
Christians had reacted to that, but it was also due to the arrival in Iberia from other
parts of Europe of papal envoys, French crusaders, pilgrims to Santiago and oth-
ers with more hostile anti-Muslim attitudes. Monks from Cluny were particularly
prominent in this regard, and many arrived in Iberia during the eleventh century
keen to channel the authority of the reform papacy and impose Latin practices
and orthodoxies on a church that still had roots in its Visigothic past. In 1080 the
Council of Burgos decreed that the Spanish church would adopt the Latin liturgy.
This was followed up by the French Cluniac monk, Bernard de Sédirac, who was
archbishop of Toledo from 1086 until 1124. Amongst the measures implemented
during this period to ‘modernise’ the Spanish Church, in addition to the replace-
ment of its ancient liturgy with an up-to-date Roman one, were the introduction
of French script as opposed to traditional Visigothic writing and the imposition
of western-style canon law. What had begun in the 1030s as a series of local cam-
paigns by the Christian kings designed to extract tribute from their Muslim neigh-
bours had become a century later a full-blown holy war. Iberia was gradually being
integrated into the mainstream of contemporary western religious ideology.
...
In the century following the death of Henry II in 1024, there was a steady decline
of royal influence in the kingdom of Italy and continuing political fragmentation
as political power became increasingly localised. The wider responsibilities and
preoccupations of Conrad II, Henry III, Henry IV and Henry V meant that they
focused on Italy only sporadically; but there were also other forces at play there,
demographic and economic ones but also the emergence of the reform papacy and
the establishment of the Normans as a power in the south of the peninsula, that
arguably were bound to weaken the link between the German and Italian crowns.
The tone of much that was to come was set in Pavia when news of Henry II’s death
was received. The citizens rose up and destroyed the royal palace, and even though
Henry’s successor, Conrad II, restored some kind of order there when he came to
Italy in 1026, the city never again functioned as the royal centre it had been for
centuries.
The kingdom of Italy had no centralised systems of administration, justice or
taxation. Much of its routine administration at the beginning of the eleventh cen-
tury was still in the hands of the largely absentee king’s local representatives. In
many cases, particularly in cities where they already held a prominent position,
these were bishops, although by the start of the twelfth century many urban com-
munities were setting themselves up as self-governing communes within which
episcopal authority counted for less and less. Other parts of the kingdom were
dominated by great families, such as the marquesses of Tuscany; meanwhile, greater
and lesser lords across the kingdom were building castles and fortifications in order
to bolster their local power in stone. All of this meant that it was impossible for
one individual to control the kingdom of Italy. Conrad II was crowned king and
emperor in 1026–7, but thereafter his authority in northern Italy was based on the
personal relationships he was able to establish and sustain with the major secular and
ecclesiastical powers there. Grants and confirmations of estates, privileges, offices
and immunities were used liberally to create and retain loyalty. This approach was a
Power 153
hit and miss one, especially with the king-emperor away in Germany for so much
of the time. So while the marquess of Tuscany, Boniface of Canossa, continued to
support Conrad, the archbishop of Milan, Aribert, rebelled. By the end of Con-
rad’s reign in 1039, despite besieging Milan itself, he had been unable to rein in
the archbishop’s ever-growing power. Conrad’s successor Henry III was able to
reassert some control over the archbishopric of Milan following Aribert’s death in
1045, and he appointed his own candidate to replace him. He also installed a Ger-
man in another vital ecclesiastical post, the archbishopric of Ravenna, a foretaste of
what Henry would do in 1046 when he resolved the three-way power struggle for
control of the papacy. However, other developments were arguably more signifi-
cant. Following the death of Boniface of Canossa in 1052, the crucial relationship
Conrad II had established with the marquesses of Tuscany began to break down.
Boniface’s widow, Adelaide, took over his estates and married Godfrey of Lorraine,
whose disloyalty to Henry in Germany had already led to him being stripped of his
duchy there. Meanwhile in 1053 at Civitate, the latest of Henry’s German popes,
Leo IX, had been defeated in battle by a Norman army, an event which effectively
ensured the Norman conquest of the south. When Henry III died in 1056 and was
succeeded by his six-year-old son Henry IV, the prospects for imperial rule in Italy
looked uncertain to say the least.
During the long reign of Henry IV, there was a wholesale reorientation of major
allegiances in Italy. His minority left the papacy exposed and unprotected, so in
1059 Pope Nicholas II dramatically reversed previous papal policy and made a deal
with the Normans whereby the latter became papal vassals in return for the pope’s
acknowledgement of their titles, conquests and future ambitions. In practice, this
meant that Robert Guiscard and his successors replaced the German kings as the
principal military protectors of the papacy. Their importance in this regard was
shown most brutally in 1085 after Henry had been forced to retreat from Rome
as a Norman army approached. The Normans rescued Gregory VII but destroyed
much of the city in the process. By then, Matilda of Tuscany, the daughter of
Adelaide and Boniface of Canossa, was emerging as the stalwart and unshakeable
centre of opposition to Henry IV. It was at her castle of Canossa in 1077 that Henry
IV made his humiliating submission to Gregory VII. Her marriage in 1089 to Welf,
the son of Duke Welf IV of Bavaria, whom Henry had deposed, was intended to
extend the resistance to Henry into southern Germany. The marriage soon failed
and the plan with it. Nevertheless, Matilda’s enormous collection of lands which
stretched across much of northern Italy and her extensive network of support made
her the most powerful figure in northern Italy during this period. She continued
to block Henry’s route through central Italy towards Rome, and in 1095, she was
instrumental alongside Pope Urban II in persuading Henry’s son Conrad to turn
against his father. It was thanks in no small part to Matilda that Henry was unable
to take advantage of the humiliating defeat he inflicted on Gregory VII in 1084–5
or achieve anything significant in the seven years he spent in Italy during the 1090s.
Given Matilda’s prominence, power and sex, it was inevitable that her actions
provoked strong responses from supporters and critics alike. German bishops who
supported Henry IV complained to Gregory VII of the very grave scandal to the
church of his unnecessarily intimate relations with a foreign woman. Others, by
contrast, were lavish in their praise: the German abbot Ekkehard of Aura called her
‘the wealthiest, most famous woman of our times and most distinguished in vir-
tues’, while another contemporary monastic chronicler, Hugh of Flavigny, said that
at this time only countess Matilda was found among women who scorned
the power of the king, who opposed his cunning and power even with mili-
tary conflict, so was deservedly called ‘virago’, who surpassed even men by
the virtue of her spirit.
It was concern about her lands, however, that probably led to Matilda compromis-
ing with Henry IV’s successor, Henry V, in 1115. Matilda was married three times
but left no children. This meant that, when she died, her vast estates would be
broken up. In 1080, in an early attempt to anticipate this, she had granted all her
allodial lands (those she held free of any superior lordship) to the papacy. However,
she retained the right to dispose of them during her lifetime, and when Henry
V came to Italy in 1111, she bequeathed them to him, along with all her other
lands and castles. Henry was quick to claim his inheritance when Matilda died in
1115, and this along with his subsequent settlement of the investiture controversy
at Worms in 1122 might appear to have paved the way for a reassertion of impe-
rial authority in Italy. Matters were more complicated than this, however. Disputes
with individual bishops and the rise of communal self-rule notwithstanding, the
Italian bishops had been a mainstay of imperial authority since Ottonian times; the
Concordat of Worms significantly reduced the influence the emperor was entitled
to exercise over them. And although Matilda had probably been within her rights
to override her donation to the papacy and make Henry V her heir, the status of
the so-called ‘Matildine lands’ would continue to bedevil papal–imperial relations
for the rest of the twelfth century and beyond.
...
Until the end of the 1030s, Normans played only a minor role in the political and
military affairs of southern Italy. This began to change in the middle of that decade
with the arrival in the region of the first of the sons of Tancred de Hauteville. The
principal narrative accounts of what happened after that, by William of Apulia,
Amatus of Montecassino and Geoffrey Malaterra, were all written later in the elev-
enth century, when Norman success probably seemed predestined and providen-
tial, so an element of caution is required when assessing the reality of that success. It
is also important to remember that the Hauteville family was not the only Norman
clan to establish itself in southern Italy during this period. A different Norman
dynasty seized power in Capua, for example, and there was plenty of resistance
(both from Normans and the indigenous population) to Hauteville rule: southern
Italian politics remained febrile and unsettled until well into the twelfth century.
Power 155
Nevertheless, the achievements of the Hautevilles were remarkable. Hauteville is

in Normandy, near Coutances, and Tancred was a middle-ranking knight. He was
married twice and had 12 sons and several daughters. His three eldest boys by his
first marriage were William, Drogo and Humphrey, all of whom evidently appreci-
ated how limited their prospects at home were. So they travelled to Italy, enlisting
first with the Prince of Capua and then the Prince of Salerno. They were sent by
the latter to take part in the Byzantine invasion of Sicily in 1038, where William de
Hauteville in particular distinguished himself. After reportedly knocking the Emir
of Palermo off his horse, he earned the nickname ‘Iron Arm’.
In 1041, there was a fresh revolt against the Byzantines in Apulia. Normans were
initially employed in Greek ranks, but then leadership of the Normans was taken
by a Milanese called Arduin who turned against his Byzantine employers, launched
an attack on Melfi and attacked Apulia, where he won three battles against the
Greeks in 1041. Most Byzantine troops were still in Sicily; there were still many
disgruntled opponents of Greek rule in Apulia, and this was probably more of a
general revolt in which the Normans took part (as they had in 1017–18) than a
Norman invasion. Indeed, the Normans themselves were still divided and by no
means all of them followed Arduin. Nevertheless, the period 1038–41 marked a
crucial stage in the Norman takeover of southern Italy, and by the end of it, much
of Apulia was in rebel (if not entirely Norman) hands.
In 1042, the Normans in Apulia chose William Iron Arm as their new leader,
but their advance further into the region after that was slow. The Byzantines
retained many towns and strongholds, and there were still divisions among the
Normans themselves. The deaths of William and Rainulf I of Aversa in 1045–6 led
to power struggles and infighting. However, by the late 1040s the speed of Norman
progress had begun to increase a little as they advanced north into Benevento and
south into Calabria. When Emperor Henry III came to Italy in 1047, he formally
invested Rainulf II (the nephew of Rainulf I) and Drogo with their lands and titles.
Now with Norman power and influence growing more rapidly, more important
newcomers arrived in southern Italy. Richard, the nephew of Rainulf I of Aversa,
and Robert de Hauteville, the half-brother of William Iron Arm and Drogo, were
there by the end of 1047. Perhaps Drogo was not particularly thrilled to welcome
Robert as he immediately sent him to Calabria. Forced to live the life of a bandit,
Robert raided and plundered the countryside around his bleak hilltop headquar-
ters. In the process he acquired a reputation for brutality and unscrupulousness and
the nickname Guiscard (meaning ‘the cunning’ or ‘the weasel’). Meanwhile Rich-
ard was initially seen as a rival by Rainulf II of Aversa, but after the latter’s death in
1048, he manoeuvred himself into the position of regent for Rainulf ’s son, Her-
man. Herman was soon heard of no more, and Richard was in charge.
By the start of the 1050s, the Normans were coming to be seen as a problem by
many of the established powers in southern Italy. They were hated by local popu-
lations for their seemingly habitual violence and banditry, and Pope Leo IX was
particularly concerned by recent Norman attacks on the Principality of Benevento,
which had sworn allegiance to him in 1051. In an effort to stifle the Norman
threat, Leo reached out for military help to Constantinople and to Henry III as
well. In 1053, a large Italian army under Leo’s personal command, which also
contained numbers of crack Swabian troops, set out to rendezvous with their Byz-
antine allies before taking on the Normans. But the papal army was intercepted by
a Norman one under the command of Humphrey de Hauteville, Drogo’s brother
and successor. At Civitate on 17 June 1053, Leo’s army was crushed, and the pope
himself was taken prisoner.
The triumph of 1053 gave the Normans a free hand to extend their rule further
into southern Italy. Between 1055 and 1060, there were substantial conquests,
particularly by Robert Guiscard, who was now assisted in Calabria by his young-
est brother Roger who had recently arrived from France. Guiscard became leader
of the south Italian Normans after the death of Humphrey de Hauteville in 1057,
whilst Richard of Aversa also seized Capua in 1058 and became prince there. It
was clear that the Normans were fast becoming a permanent feature in the politi-
cal landscape of southern Italy and that the traditional powers there would have to
find a way of accommodating them. The papacy was the first to acknowledge the
new political and military reality. In 1058, following the death of Pope Stephen
IX, two popes were elected by different factions. The supporters of one of these,
Nicholas II, asked Richard of Capua for protection, the price of which was papal
validation of Norman power. Having recognised Richard’s powers and position, in
August 1059, Nicholas II then held a council at Melfi where he invested Robert
Guiscard as Duke of Apulia and Calabria ‘and in future . . . of Sicily’. Both Richard
and Robert still had plenty of work to do to make their titles a reality, but papal
recognition was a decisive step in the Norman rise to power in southern Italy.
By 1059 most of southern Italy was in Norman hands, but Bari and parts of
Apulia were still loyal to the Byzantines, and Richard of Capua was not comfort-
ably in command of his whole principality until 1065. Progress was still laborious
at least in part because, for much of the 1060s, Robert Guiscard was preoccupied
with events elsewhere (the Norman invasion of Sicily began in 1061) and with
internal resistance: in 1067–8 there was a revolt against him by other Normans to
deal with. However, the fall of Bari to the Normans in 1071 after a siege that lasted
nearly three years meant that the whole of Byzantine Apulia was finally under Nor-
man control. Further west, Amalfi was taken in 1073 and in 1076; when Guiscard
took Salerno, it became his main power base, and he ruled his territories from there
for the rest of his career. Behind the headline narrative, Guiscard probably relied
heavily on the advice and experience of his wife, the Lombard princess Sichelgaita,
who was well-placed to advise him on how to approach the local elites he aspired
to rule. How he actually ruled in practice is harder to say, but given his preoccupa-
tion with military matters, it seems unlikely that Robert had much time to develop
new governmental structures or institutions. Urban communities in southern Italy,
it seems, retained their autonomy and their ways of life. As the Normans found in
England after 1066, pragmatism dictated continuity wherever possible.
The next phase of the Norman takeover of southern Italy, the conquest of
Sicily, began in 1061 but was not completed until 30 years later. It was mainly
Power 157
the work of Robert Guiscard’s youngest brother, Roger; Guiscard, indeed, never
went to Sicily after 1072. The Normans had Sicily in their sights well before 1061
(the Treaty of Melfi with the pope in 1059 had explicitly anticipated the island’s
takeover), and developments on the island played into their hands at the right
time. The internal political unity of Sicily was breaking down in the first half of
the eleventh century. The ruling Zirid dynasty, based in North Africa, was unable
to stop the rival emirs on the island competing with each other and one of them,
Ibn Timnah, whose sister was being held captive by another (her own husband),
asked fatefully for Norman help. They captured Messina almost immediately after
the invasion began, but then progress was painfully gradual. Only rarely could the
Normans put a large number of troops into the field. Perhaps 1000 knights and
1000 infantry took part in the initial invasion, but thereafter, usually no more than
a few hundred troops were available to Roger at any one time. The local assistance
so valuable in 1061 soon dried up too (Ibn Timnah was assassinated in 1062), sup-
plies (particularly fresh horses) were hard to obtain and the Sicilian resistance to the
Normans was reinforced with help from North Africa. The Norman victories at
Cerami in 1063 and at Misilmeri in 1068 were significant but not decisive, whilst
in 1064 the first attempt to capture Palermo, Sicily’s largest town, failed because
Roger did not have enough men to sustain a siege and assault the city or enough
naval power for a blockade. Only after Bari had been taken in 1071 could Guiscard
return to Sicily with a bigger fleet. The ensuing blockade of Palermo lasted five
months, and the city was finally captured in January 1072. Following the capture of
Palermo, Guiscard kept control of the city as well as half of Messina whilst Roger
performed homage to him for the rest of the island. Even at this stage, however,
the Normans were still only in control of about half of Sicily. The general shortage
of men meant that military progress continued to be difficult, Sicilian geography
made many fortresses impossible to storm and Count Roger (as he was now styl-
ing himself) was regularly needed on the mainland to help his brother. A final big
push in the second half of 1080s ultimately completed the takeover, however, and
the last Muslim stronghold on the island, the town of Noto, surrendered in 1091.
Once he was in complete control of Sicily, Roger kept much of the island in
his own hands, but he distributed land to a large number of his sons and other
relatives. He also began to restructure the Sicilian church and established new bish-
oprics before and after 1091. New monasteries were built; some were Latin, but
most were Greek. His comprehensive authority over the church on the island was
confirmed in 1098 when Urban II conceded to Roger and his heirs that he would
not appoint papal legates to Sicily without the Count’s consent, that Roger might
oversee the Sicilian churches instead of a legate when he felt this was appropri-
ate and that the Count had the right to veto the attendance of Sicilian bishops at
papal councils. This privilege may only have rubber-stamped powers that Roger
was already using, but it was official recognition of his legitimacy as a ruler and an
acknowledgement of how entrenched his control had become.
Most Christians on the island were Greek, of course, perhaps 5 per cent of
the population were Jews, whilst Muslims were still in a majority overall. The
Normans themselves may have numbered only in the hundreds. Sensibly, therefore,
Roger relied on indigenous officials and established practices to run his govern-
ment. There are signs of assimilation, too, and Normans were intermarrying with
the local population before the end of the eleventh century. Meanwhile, Roger’s
attempts to attract Latin Christians as settlers took effect only gradually, and Sicily’s
new Norman lords formed an even smaller minority there, perhaps only 1 per cent
of the population, than they did on the mainland. Roger was also quite pragmatic
about how far he should attempt to extend his power. When merchants from
Genoa and Pisa tried to persuade him to join in their attacks on the strategically
important city of Mahdia on the North African coast, he was crudely dismissive.
‘Roger lifted his thigh, made a great fart’ and pointed out how much he had to
lose: ‘commerce in foodstuffs will pass into their hands from those of the Sicilians,
and I shall lose to them what I make each year on grain sales’. Below the very high-
est political levels, therefore, social and economic changes on Sicily as a result of the
Norman conquest were still only limited when Roger died in 1101. Nevertheless,
his achievements as the youngest son of his unremarkable father’s second marriage
had been extraordinary. He deservedly came to be known as Roger ‘the Great’.
The Norman conquest of Sicily may have taken so long in part because the
Norman conquerors themselves were unable, or at times unwilling, to devote all of
their time to it. In the last five years of his life, for example, Robert Guiscard was
mainly concerned with his extraordinary plan to attack, perhaps even to conquer,
the Byzantine Empire. The 1070s had been a terrible decade for the Byzantines.
Defeat by the Seljuq Turks at Manzikert in 1071 and the Turks’ subsequent takeo-
ver of most of Asia Minor deprived the empire of much of its tax base and a key
reservoir of troops. This inevitably led to political instability, and in 1074, desper-
ate for any kind of powerful support, Emperor Michael VII negotiated a marriage
between his son and Guiscard’s daughter. The marriage never took place, and
Michael was overthrown in a military coup in 1078; by then, Guiscard was clearly
thinking about intervening in Byzantium himself. He was able to use the treatment
of his still unmarried daughter as an excuse (she had been in Constantinople since
1076), as well as the appearance at his court of a man (no doubt an imposter, but
useful nevertheless), who claimed to be the deposed emperor Michael and asked
for Guiscard’s help to regain his throne. Quite what Robert’s ultimate intentions
were is unclear. He may have contemplated seizing the whole empire for himself
(this is what the Byzantine princess, Anna Comnena, thought); more likely he
planned to carve out a principality for his eldest son, Bohemond, who had been
overlooked as Robert’s heir in Italy in favour of his younger half-brother (the eld-
est son of Guiscard’s second marriage), Roger Borsa. Either way, Guiscard seized
Corfu in May 1081 and began a siege of Dyrrhachion (Durrës in modern Albania)
in June. The new Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, initially struggled to
cope with the Norman attack, but he was a highly able soldier and a very sharp
politician, and in the end, he was able to take advantage of Guiscard’s return to
Italy in 1082 where the latter was needed to support Pope Gregory VII against
Emperor Henry IV and to deal with yet another revolt by his nephews in Apulia.
Power 159
Bohemond was left on the Adriatic coast and campaigned against Alexius for the
next 18 months. He made little headway, however, and returned to Italy himself
at the end of 1083. By the time Guiscard relaunched his campaign late in 1084,
following his violent rescue of Pope Gregory VII from Rome earlier in the year,
Alexius I was established in power and ready to resist. But it was bad weather and
illness in Guiscard’s army which eventually led to the end of the invasion. Guiscard
himself fell ill and died in July 1085, compelling Roger Borsa to rush home to fight
for his inheritance against Bohemond, who was already in southern Italy. Accord-
ing to the epitaph on his tomb at the abbey of Venosa, about halfway between
Salerno and Bari, Guiscard had taken on and defeated two emperors (Henry IV
and Alexius I), and whilst there is a degree of hyperbole in this, by the time he died
he had certainly left rural Normandy a long way behind and become a figure of
international importance.
After Guiscard’s death, his successors in Apulia and Calabria found it increas-
ingly difficult to generate the same kind of authority he had enjoyed. His son
Roger Borsa was perhaps not as ineffectual as some contemporaries alleged, but he
encountered several problems that he found impossible to solve. First, Guiscard’s
position in Apulia had never been completely secure anyway. He had faced plenty
of challenges, particularly from his nephews (the sons of his elder half-brothers),
who felt they had been denied their rightful inheritances and positions of power,
and his successes depended significantly on his own enormous force of personality.
Second, Guiscard and his successor never enjoyed the advantage Roger the Great
had on Sicily when he took over relatively well-established and stable systems of
government, taxation and administration. And third, Roger Borsa faced a major
challenge from his elder half-brother Bohemond. In 1088–90, Roger was forced
to make a series of territorial concessions to Bohemond in southern and central
Apulia, including Taranto and Bari. Bohemond’s departure on the First Crusade
in 1096 eased the pressure on Roger, but by then most of the important lords of
the region were also wresting themselves free of ducal control. Roger continued
to rule Salerno and much of inland Apulia, but the rest of Apulia became essen-
tially independent. Meanwhile, Roger only maintained any degree of control in
Calabria with the help of his uncle Roger the Great who exacted lordship over
Palermo and Guiscard’s half share of Messina from Roger Borsa as the price of his
assistance. And there was a similar process of fragmentation in Capua after the death
of Jordan I in 1090. The city of Capua revolted in 1091, and although it was even-
tually recovered, later princes only effectively controlled the southern part of the
principality around the city, whilst landholders in more peripheral regions became
ever more autonomous.
So up to the second half of the 1080s, southern Italy was divided into three
principal spheres of influence (Capua, Apulia-Calabria and Sicily), each controlled
by a relatively powerful local ruler whose strenuitas (energy, dynamism, determina-
tion – a distinctively Norman quality according to Norman writers of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries) was a major reason for their success. In fact, whilst their
bravery and their invincible cavalry might well account for some of the Normans’
achievements, their use of sea power was probably more important. The use of
ships to transport horses was crucial as early as 1061, when 13 vessels carrying
mounts for 270 knights arrived at Messina. And at various sieges, fleets were used:
at Bari, for example, ships were chained across the harbour to blockade it, and the
last Byzantine relief force was defeated with 9 of its 20 vessels captured and one
sunk. From the mid-1080s onwards, however (apart from Sicily itself), Norman
control of southern Italy became much patchier. The decline of central author-
ity on the mainland accelerated further after the deaths of both Roger Borsa and
Bohemond in 1111. Roger left a teenage son, Bohemond an even younger one.
On Sicily, meanwhile, Roger the Great was succeeded in 1101 by his son Simon.
But he died in 1105, and his younger brother Roger II stepped into his shoes.
Both Simon and Roger II succeeded as children, and the kinds of problems typi-
cally associated with regencies could easily have arisen. However, their mother,
Adelaide, was able to maintain effective control of government, and once Roger
II took over in 1112, he was firmly in command. By then, much of southern Italy
was as divided, if not more so, than it had been in 1000. It would be Roger II’s
achievement over the next 20 years to unify the whole region and turn it into one
of the most successful kingdoms of the Middle Ages.
Frontier Europe: Life on the Edge in the North and East

The problems with sources that frustrate the historian of tenth-century Scandinavia
continue with studies of the eleventh. The main narrative accounts were of course
compiled closer to the events they describe, but with their political agendas (Adam
of Bremen) and literary aims (Snorri Sturluson), they are still hard to rely on with
confidence. And whatever they say, enormous gaps in knowledge remain unfilled.
Indeed, it is all but impossible to know what was happening in Sweden during
this period. This was a period, however, during which Denmark and Norway
competed for supremacy within Scandinavia and when Christianity continued to
spread across the region.
At the start of the eleventh century, the rulers of Denmark dominated Scan-
dinavia. The Danish kingdom had been the first to emerge in the region during
the tenth century, in large part thanks to the success of King Harald Bluetooth
(d.c.986) in imposing Christianity on the Danes and extending his territory. Dan-
ish supremacy was threatened in the first half of the eleventh century, however.
Following the death of King Sweyn Forkbeard in England in 1014, his elder son
Harald II (1014–18) succeeded him as king in Denmark, whilst his younger son
Cnut managed, after two years of hard fighting, to take firm hold of England and
become king there. Even so, Sweyn’s death caused great instability in Scandinavia
and seriously threatened the hegemony over the region that he had established.
A Norwegian chieftain, Olaf II Haraldsson (1015–29), would be venerated as
St Olaf after his death, but before that he had fought in England and accumu-
lated significant riches there, returned to Norway and filled the power vacuum
by defeating his rivals in battle and declaring himself king. At the same time, the
Power 161
ruler of Sweden, Olof Skötkonung, took the opportunity to wrestle free of Danish
overlordship: he asked for a bishop from Germany to set up a see in Sweden, and
one of his daughters married Olaf II.
It is not clear what kind of authority Harald II exercised over Denmark, but
he died in 1018, and the chances of reasserting Danish lordship over Norway and
Sweden must then have appeared slim. Cnut was determined to restore it, however,
and he returned from England (with English money and English ships) to succeed
his brother, and from then his time was divided between his two kingdoms. Cnut
also called himself ‘king of part of the Swedes’ in a letter he wrote to the English
people in 1027. It is hard to say precisely what he meant by this, but it may be
that he had secured the allegiance of some Swedish chieftains and was planning to
do more of the same. He was writing in the aftermath of events in 1026, when
Cnut had faced Olaf II and the new Swedish king Anund Jacob (c.1022–c.1050),
who had succeeded Olof Skötkonung, at the Battle of the Holy River. Nothing
is certain about this battle – sources differ even about who won, and in the years
that followed it was Olaf ’s evident unpopularity within Norway (and more English
money) which enabled Cnut to persuade enough Norwegian magnates to desert
Olaf and accept Cnut as king. Olaf was not finished, however: he returned from
exile in Russia in 1029 only to be defeated and killed in the Battle of Stiklestad,
near Trondheim. This should have left the way clear for Cnut to consolidate his
authority over Norway, but his decision to impose his son Sweyn and the latter’s
mother, the Englishwoman Aelfgifu of Northampton, as his regents in Norway
backfired. Sweyn and Aelfgifu were strongly disliked it seems, and when Cnut died
in 1035, they were driven out of Norway and replaced by Olaf II’s son Magnus the
Good (1035–47), who had been waiting in Russia to be recalled.
Neither Cnut’s Scandinavian empire nor his dynasty’s position in England sur-
vived the early deaths of his sons Harold Harefoot in 1040 and Harthacnut in 1042.
Denmark’s more general supremacy over Scandinavia was also undermined once
again. Harthacnut had been unable to leave Denmark in 1035 to pursue his claim
to the English throne for fear of a Norwegian invasion, and by the second half of
the 1040s, Magnus of Norway does appear to have asserted some sort of authority
over Denmark – he may even have been acknowledged as king there. This aggres-
sive Norwegian policy towards the Danes was carried on after Magnus’s death in
1047 by his uncle and successor, Harald III Hardrada (‘Stern Ruler’) (1046–66).
Harald was the half-brother of Olaf II Haraldson and fought with him in a losing
cause at Stiklestad in 1029. Following this setback, Harald embarked on a remark-
able series of adventures, eventually returning to Norway in the mid-1040s after
15 years of mercenary service, first to the ruler of Kyivan Rus and then to the
Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, and forcing Magnus to share power with
him for the last year or two of the latter’s life. But their main adversary was Cnut’s
nephew, Sweyn II Estrithson (1047–76). Sweyn had tussled with Magnus of Nor-
way for supremacy over Denmark after Harthacnut’s death in 1042, and he was
expelled from the kingdom by his Norwegian rival just before the latter died in
1047. Sweyn was able to return after Magnus’s death, however, and was accepted
as king in Denmark, but he had to fight repeatedly against Harald Hardrada until
1064 when the two kings made peace. From that point on, Hardrada turned his
attention to England where he was killed trying to conquer the kingdom in 1066.
Harald was not just concerned with foreign conquest, however. His reign was very
significant in the development of the still incomplete Norwegian kingdom. The
inland areas to the east, particularly Tröndelag, were more firmly annexed to the
rest of the kingdom, and by the end of the eleventh century, his successors con-
trolled the whole coastline from Lofoten in the north to the estuary of Göta Ålv
in the south.
Hardrada may appear in retrospect to be the last great viking raider. For all his
violent brutality, however, he was still a Christian, and it was during his reign (or
shortly after it ended) that the first Norwegian episcopal sees were established, at
Oslo and at Nidaros (Trondheim). Olaf II, Hardrada’s half-brother, was buried at
Trondheim, and the church there quickly became the centre of Olaf ’s cult. He had
certainly done much to Christianise the north-western parts of Norway, and in 1024
he held an assembly which set out regulations for the Norwegian church. That he
appears to have imposed Christianity violently in the more obstinately pagan parts
of his kingdom did not prevent him being venerated as a saint after his death. The
legends surrounding him became central to the development of Norway’s sense of
national identity, and he is still Norway’s patron saint today. Pagan Denmark was
also a distant memory by the middle of the eleventh century. The construction of
a stone cathedral at Roskilde had begun in Cnut’s reign, and the division of Den-
mark into eight dioceses had been completed during Sweyn Estrithson’s (1047–74).
Eventually, in 1103–4, the kingdom was recognised by the pope as an autonomous
ecclesiastical province under the archbishop of Lund. This was a blow to the long-
nurtured ambitions of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen to claim ecclesiastical
authority over Scandinavia, although in 1053 Pope Leo IX had explicitly named
Norway, Iceland and Greenland as being within the H amburg-Bremen’s jurisdic-
tion. Such authority remained difficult to exercise in practice, however, particularly
when the kings of Norway were determined to resist it.
With an increasingly literate clergy to support the monarchy and stress the
importance of obedience to the king as well as wider international norms, more
formalised church organisations contributed further to the consolidation of coher-
ent kingdoms in Denmark and Norway. And even in Sweden Christianity was
making progress, albeit much more slowly than in the rest of Scandinavia. A see was
set up at Skara in Västergötland in about 1070, and at Uppsala, Scandinavia’s most
renowned pre-Christian religious centre, pagan rituals had finally been abandoned
by the 1080s. There were also other ways in which western norms were filtering
into Scandinavian society. Coins copied from English models were issued by Cnut
in Denmark and by Olof Skötkonung in Sweden, although a thoroughly system-
atic approach to the coinage was still some way off. Succession practices were
also starting to become more consistent. In both Norway and Denmark, the idea
that the king had to be a member of the royal family was accepted by the end of
the eleventh century. Accordingly, the dynasty Harald Hardrada established ruled
Power 163
Norway for nearly a century, whilst Sweyn Estrithson’s descendants ruled Denmark
for generations, too.
This does not mean that succession in either kingdom was smooth or untrou-
bled, however, and in Norway it remained conventional for the sons of the last king
to rule jointly, perhaps based in different royal centres. Hardrada’s sons, Olaf III and
Magnus II, did this until the latter’s death in 1069, at which point Olaf became sole
ruler and, in part perhaps because many Norwegian magnates had been killed in
England in 1066, he ruled peacefully (he was known as Olaf Kyrre ‘the Peaceful’)
until he died in 1093. Then power was shared uneasily for a short time between
Olaf ’s son Magnus Barelegs and his cousin Hakon (the son of Olaf III). Once
Hakon had died in 1095, however, Magnus ruled alone and was able to carry out
a series of campaigns either side of 1100 designed to enforce Norwegian author-
ity over the northern and western edges of Britain. On his first outing in 1098–9,
he occupied the Shetlands, the Western Isles and the Isle of Man and extracted an
agreement from the king of Scots, Edgar, that the Western Isles (including Man but
perhaps not the islands in the firth of Clyde) should be subject to Norwegian rule.
Magnus also sailed to Wales later in this expedition. He may have been approached
by Gruffudd ap Cynan, the ruler of Gwynedd who had been driven to Ireland by
the Norman earls of Shrewsbury and Chester. With six ships Magnus landed on
Anglesey, and in a skirmish with the Normans, he shot Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury
dead with an arrow through his eye. Magnus returned to the Irish Sea in 1101 or
1102 intending, Irish sources claimed, to conquer Ireland himself. If such a plan
existed, however, it was never implemented. Magnus negotiated with the leading
Irish king, Muirchertach Ua Briain, and arranged a marriage between their respec-
tive son and daughter. When Magnus was reportedly caught and killed in an Irish
ambush in 1103, however, his adventurous reign came to an anticlimactic end.
Three kings, all sons of Magnus, ruled jointly in Norway for the next 12 years.
One of these, Olaf, died in 1115 when he was only 17, while a second, Eystein,
died in 1123. The surviving member of the triumvirate, Sigurd I, became famous
as the first European king to go on crusade (he is known as ‘the Crusader’). He led
an expedition to Outremer in 1107 and took part in the capture of Sidon in 1110.
Precisely what happened in Norway itself during this period is harder to say. King
Eystein’s reputation for productive, peaceful rule was constructed later, although
there is no sign that Norway suffered from any internal upheavals or external
threats while he was king. Eystein appears to have been a builder of churches and
ports, and he is credited with the further development of Bergen as a commercial
centre. According to the Icelandic historian and politician Snorri Sturluson in the
thirteenth century, the royal palace he built there was the most imposing wooden
building ever raised in Norway.
Remarkably, after his death in 1074, Sweyn Estrithson was succeeded as king
of Denmark by five of his sons in turn. There was no tradition of primogeniture,
however, and the choice of which brother should become king was made by the
kingdom’s leading men and confirmed in public assemblies. Different assemblies
might disagree, however, meaning that the potential for succession disputes was
built into the system. Sweyn’s five sons, despite some tense moments, managed
to avoid serious conflict, but his grandsons, the sons of Eric I (1095–1103) and
Niels (1103–34), would fight a civil war which lasted over 20 years. The most
well-known of Sweyn’s sons was Cnut IV (1080–6). He did not rule for long, but
he planned an invasion of England which, although it never happened, may have
been instrumental in persuading William the Conqueror to launch the Domesday
survey. Evidently Cnut IV had planned to perpetuate what was by then a Danish
royal tradition of attacking England: Sweyn Forkbeard and his son Cnut had great
success there, of course, while Sweyn Estrithson had threatened to wreck William
I’s conquest of England when his fleet arrived there in 1069–70. Cnut IV was also
a pious and generous patron of the Church, and this, together with the scandal-
ous manner of his death (he was murdered in church) and reports of miracles at
his tomb, led to him being canonised in the early 1100s. He was the first Dane to
become a saint. It was Cnut’s brother Eric I who travelled to Rome to convince
Pope Paschal II of Cnut’s sanctity, and Eric himself died while travelling to Jerusa-
lem on crusade.
...
All the states established during the tenth century on the eastern frontier of Latin
Christendom continued to develop during the eleventh. Bohemia, Poland and
Hungary had many things in common during this period: internally the rulers had
significant powers and extensive authority over their subjects, western-style forms
of government and administration were increasingly evident and the institutions
and practices of Latin Christianity became ever more pervasive. All, too, were
eyed suspiciously by the rulers of Germany who were concerned about the rise of
powerful states to the east. But it was Poland and particularly Hungary that took
significant strides towards autonomy and independence whilst Bohemia remained
firmly under the influence of the German emperors. Duke Bretislav I of Bohemia
(1034–55) tried especially hard to shake off German overlordship and assert some
degree of autonomy. He defeated Henry III in battle in 1040, but this was a tem-
porary reverse for the German king, and Henry refused to allow Bretislav to give
up paying tribute. In due course Bretislav was forced to humble himself barefoot in
front of Henry, and in return he was allowed to retain Moravia which he had con-
quered during the previous reign. It was under Duke Bretislav that Bohemia was
permanently connected to Moravia under a single ruler, with Moravia recognising
the supremacy of Prague. He also invaded Poland at the end of the 1030s, took
the relics of St Adalbert from Gniezno and annexed Silesia for a time. Poland and
Bohemia would continue intermittently to fight over Silesia for the next hundred
years. Bretislav also tried to keep his distance from western influence by allow-
ing the monastery he founded at Sazava near Prague to use Slavic as its liturgical
language. But unlike him, most Bohemian rulers accepted the need to maintain
good relations with their German neighbours. Spytihnev I (1055–61) expelled
the Slavic monks from Sazava and was granted a royal title for his lifetime by the
Power 165
German king, and in 1086 Henry IV rewarded Duke Vlatislav II in the same way,
naming him king of both Bohemia and Poland. He had no authority over the lat-
ter, of course, and his extended title was designed as a German snub to the ruler of
Poland, Bolelsav II, who had accepted a royal title from Henry IV’s great adversary,
Pope Gregory VII. But although the Bohemian rulers always remained emphati-
cally vassals of the German emperor, they were supreme within their duchy. The
landed nobility remained too weak to set limits on their rulers’ authority, and
external powers did not interfere with the administration of justice or provide an
outlet for the airing of Bohemian grievances.
Before he died in 1025, Boleslav Chrobry, the recently crowned king of Poland,
nominated his second son, Mieszko, to succeed him. Mieszko II (1025–34) inher-
ited a vast territory, which in addition to Greater Poland in the north, Little Poland
in the south, Silesia and Pomerania, also included Lusatia and parts of Ruthenia.
Mieszko, however, soon found himself challenged by his resentful brothers and by
the new emperor, Conrad II, whom Mieszko had not supported following the
death of the childless Henry II in 1024. Other neighbouring rulers (of Bohemia,
Hungary and Kyivan Rus) were quick to try and exploit his difficulties. Two Pol-
ish attacks on Saxony in 1028 and 1031 came either side of an imperial campaign
in Poland, and the upshot of all the instability was a loss of lands, including Lusa-
tia. Mieszko had to flee his kingdom at one point in the early 1030s, and when
he returned he did so very much under the emperor’s control. Conrad divided
Poland between Mieszko, his surviving brother Otto and another kinsman, but
after Otto was murdered, Mieszko regained overall control for a short time before
he was assassinated in 1034. Thereafter, the course of political events in Poland is
obscure. Silesia was recovered from Bohemia in 1050 by Kazimierz I (1034–58),
Mieszco II’s son, who took on the task of reconstructing the territory and the
disrupted ecclesiastical organisation of the Polish state. Relations with imperial
Germany and internecine competition within the royal family continued to affect
the stability of the regime, however. Kazimierz’s son Boleslav II Szczodry, ‘the
Munificent’ or ‘the Bold’, supported the Saxon rebels against Henry IV, fought
another long war against Bohemia over Silesia and intervened actively in the strug-
gle over the Hungarian throne, in which he backed the candidates not favoured
by the emperor. Such an attitude won Boleslav the support of Pope Gregory VII,
and it was with papal approval that Boleslav was crowned king of Poland in 1076.
No Polish ruler would receive a royal title for more than 200 years after this. At the
same time, however, Boleslav’s approach was bound to provoke critics within his
kingdom. One of these was the bishop of Cracow, in whose trial and execution the
king was deeply implicated. This only caused more tension, and in 1079 a rebel-
lion broke out which forced Boleslav to flee the country. He died in exile, and his
brother, Wladyslas I Herman, took power.
Family quarrels soon resurfaced. As a result of a bloody contest for power dur-
ing the 1090s, Poland was divided in three between Wladyslas and two of his
sons by different marriages, Zbigniew and Boleslav III Krzywousty, ‘Wrymouth’.
And not surprisingly, after Wladyslas died in 1102, the conflict between the two
sons resumed. Once again other powers took an interest, but the support given to
Zbigniew by Henry V (the emperor invaded Poland on his behalf in 1109) could
not prevent Boleslav gaining the upper hand and having his brother killed. Freed
from family entanglements, Boleslav was quick to focus on regaining lost territory,
particularly in the north, and by the early 1120s he had regained control of western
Pomerania and restarted the process of Christianisation which had stalled there
a century before. Boleslav also managed to resist the attempts of the archbishop
of Magdeburg to assert ecclesiastical authority over Poland, an important victory
for a ruler who planned to have exclusive control over his territories. There was
a setback – in 1135 Boleslav had to accept Lothar III’s demand that Pomerania be
treated as a fief of the empire rather than as a piece of sovereign Polish territory.
Nevertheless, despite this clear display of imperial supremacy, Boleslav’s conquest
of Pomerania was not reversed during his reign: he had held Poland together and
increased its size. What is more, in an effort to avoid the kind of violence which
had dominated the opening years of his own reign, he had developed a detailed
succession plan designed to keep the peace after his death between his five sons.
Perhaps predictably, however, it did not work, and political fragmentation soon
bedevilled the Polish state.
The story of Hungary in this period is similar in many ways to that of Poland:
succession disputes, family quarrels and an aggressive German neighbour all made
for a disordered and disturbed century between the death of Stephen I in 1038 and
that of his namesake Stephen II in 1131. Dynastic instability, indeed, became the
norm in Hungarian politics: including Stephen I, there were ten kings between
1038 and 1131, and several of them reigned for less than four years. The situa-
tion was particularly fraught immediately after Stephen I’s death. He left no sons
and, having overlooked his nearest male relative because he was still a pagan, had
adopted his nephew Peter Orseolo and named him as his successor. But Peter was
deposed in 1041, restored by the German emperor in 1044 and then deposed once
more and blinded in 1046 as other claimants to the throne entered the fray. One
of these (the son of Stephen’s cousin) became King Andrew I (1046–60), and he
was eventually succeeded by his son Solomon (1063–74). Inevitably, other powers
became involved in these family battles. Both Peter Orseolo and Solomon made
their bids for the throne with imperial help: Henry III sent armies into Hungary
in 1042, 1043 and 1044, whilst Henry IV did the same in the early 1060s to help
Solomon overthrow his uncle Bela I (1060–3). Both Peter and Solomon had to
accept imperial overlordship, but this threat to Hungarian autonomy was not sus-
tained: Henry IV’s problems with the Saxon rebels and Pope Gregory VII prob-
ably account for this. Nevertheless, the internal combat continued. Solomon was
overthrown and imprisoned by Bela I’s sons, and Ladislas I (1077–95) set out to
compensate for his lack of legitimacy by extending the kingdom’s territory. He did
this successfully in northern Croatia in the early 1090s (although Croatia retained
a considerable degree of autonomy), but he needed to side with Henry IV and
the anti-pope Clement III to have his acquisition recognised. Ladislas’s successor
Colman (1095–1116), once he had seen the armies of the First Crusade through
Power 167
his territories, continued with this expansionist approach, concentrating on the

cities of the Dalmatian coast and styling himself ‘king of Hungary, Croatia and Dal-
matia’. This brought him into conflict with the Byzantine Empire and Venice, both
of whom cherished their maritime influence in the Adriatic. Venice, Byzantium
and Hungary would continue to compete with each other over Dalmatia and the
Balkans for the rest of the twelfth century.
This list of squabbling Hungarian kings and covetous German emperors should
not obscure the facts that the Hungarian kingdom itself grew increasingly solid
during this period and that individual Hungarian rulers retained a remarkable
amount of centralised power over their subjects. Their own lands were far more
extensive than anyone else’s in Hungary, and this made them rich. Their counts
wielded administrative and judicial power in their counties, and all able-bodied
men were required to perform military service whether they were landholders or
not. Stephen I had been the real founder of this state, but it was arguably the very
extent of Magyar settlement which allowed the kingdom to retain its integrity, sur-
vive repeated political upheavals and keep the German empire at arm’s length after
his reign. Even in the 1030s, pagan beliefs must still have been prevalent, but within
a century of Stephen’s death, Hungary was a strong, wealthy Christian kingdom,
one which would provide a stable foundation for even greater success in the future.
6
FAITH
c.1020–c.1120
The Papacy: Revival and Reform

Benedict VIII (d.1024) had shown how it was possible for a pope to pursue policies
and strategies which had an impact beyond Rome. His relationship with Emperor
Henry II had been constructive and mutually beneficial. As a result, by the time
Benedict died, wider respect for the papacy was reviving, and the pope had started
to become once again a figure of international stature. Benedict was succeeded as
pope by his brother, who took the name John XIX. John was a layman and had to
be ordained as priest and then made a bishop before he could take office (all in the
course of a single day!), and he was reputed to have paid a huge bribe to become
pope. Despite this inauspicious start to his pontificate, however, and although his
relationship with Emperor Conrad II (whom he crowned at Rome in 1027) was
not as good as his brother’s had been with Henry II, John was able to strengthen his
own position and keep the papacy on an even keel.
The hundred years or so following the death of John XIX in 1032 would see a
dramatic and profound increase in the power and prestige of the papacy. Initially,
however, this would have looked very unlikely as, in the short-term, the institution
was plunged into scandal once again. John was succeeded by his nephew, Benedict
IX. Benedict was the son of Alberic III, the head of the Tusculan family which
was in charge of Rome. According to some sources he was only 12, but it is more
likely that he was in his twenties. Like his predecessor, Benedict was a layman
before being hurried on to the papal throne, but it was his reputedly violent and
scandalous private life which produced outrage and opposition. In 1044, a popular
uprising in Rome, prompted in part at least by disgust at the pope’s loose living,
forced him to flee the city. Taking advantage of the resultant power vacuum, the
Crescentian family succeeded in getting their local bishop, John of Sabina, installed
as Pope Silvester III. Benedict, meanwhile, who had never been formally deposed,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-9
Faith 169
excommunicated Silvester and within a few months had expelled him from Rome.
His second period as pope, however, lasted less than two months. Perhaps because
he knew how unpopular he was (and also in return for an enormous sum of money,
it was alleged), Benedict abdicated in favour of his godfather John Gratian, who
was then elected and took the name Gregory VI. Thus by 1046, three different
men (Benedict IX, Silvester III and Gregory VI), all still alive, had been appointed
pope in some form or other. It was quite unclear who the rightful pope was, and
the papacy was in chaos.
Why was this important? Popes claimed to be the successors of St Peter, who
was believed to have been the first bishop of Rome. Peter had also been the leader
of Jesus’s apostles, ‘the rock’ on which the church of all believers was built; by
extension, the papacy argued that the pope was the leader of all Christians. A prop-
erly ordered Christian society, therefore, had a pope with ‘universal’ authority at
its head. Most Christians in eleventh-century Europe were probably not troubled
by these nice points of doctrine and papal history, but there was a growing number
of intellectuals within the church who were prepared to argue that, without the
papacy to take a strong moralising lead, standards of pastoral care and spiritual provi-
sion would rapidly decline across Latin Christendom. If congregations were served
by immoral, incompetent and poorly educated priests, millions of souls would be
denied access to Heaven. There was ultimately even a danger that ordinary people
would take spiritual matters into their own hands, and there was real anxiety about
a return to paganism. One man who appreciated these dangers was King Henry III
of Germany. Henry was pious and devout and determined to improve the moral
character of the clergy. Two issues were seen as particularly pressing. First, clergy-
men were supposed to be celibate, but in practice many, perhaps most, priests were
married or lived openly with their partners and families. Marriage meant lust and
sexual intercourse, which could only distract priests from their purer purposes. But
this was a practical issue as well as a moral one. Priests might seek to pass on their
churches to their sons and turn them into family, rather than church, property.
Second, many clergymen (or their families) had paid for their positions in some
way. The buying and selling of ecclesiastical office amounted to the sin of simony.
In moral terms, simony entangled clergymen in worldly affairs and exposed them
to accusations of greed and corruption. Clerical marriage and simony, therefore,
degraded the clergy, polluted the church and imperilled the salvation of millions.
Both abuses needed to be eradicated.
Henry III also had another reason for becoming personally involved in the papa-
cy’s affairs. He wanted to be crowned emperor by a legitimate pope, not by one of
the disreputable figures competing for the papal throne in 1046. So, in the autumn
of that year, Henry travelled to Italy, determined to reform the church and receive
the imperial crown from untarnished hands. He summoned the three rival popes
to appear before a synod which he held at Sutri near Rome in December. Silvester
and Benedict were duly deposed, whilst Benedict, who had failed to appear at
Sutri, was formally deposed at a second synod held in Rome before the end of the
year. Henry now appointed Bishop Suidger of Bamberg as pope with the name
Clement II. On Clement’s sudden death after a reign of less than eight months,
Benedict was restored after extensive bribery, but he was thrown out of Rome
once again in July 1048 and replaced by another German bishop, Poppo of Brixen,
who became Damasus II. Pope Damasus only lived for a few weeks, however, and
was in turn replaced early in 1049 by the third of Henry III’s German appointees,
Bishop Bruno of Toul. He took the name Leo IX, and, although he was pope for
little more than five years, he changed the course of papal history.
Leo’s approach was radical from the start. At his first synod (at Rome in
April 1049) he deposed several bishops guilty of simony. He held other reforming
synods at Rome in subsequent years (1050, 1051 and 1053), but he also travelled
beyond Rome and even into other parts of Europe to spread his views about the
wrongs of simony and clerical marriage. In the end Leo spent less than a third of
his pontificate in Rome itself. Perhaps the most famous of these synods was the one
Leo held at Reims in 1049. As well as using the opportunity to publish a forceful
re-statement of the pope’s universal authority over the church, all the bishops who
attended the synod were required to swear that they had not obtained their posi-
tions through simony; needless to say, divine help ensured that lying was impossible,
and several bishops were deposed. Leo also tried to ensure that his principles and
beliefs became the orthodox ones within the papal court itself by recruiting a group
of driven, like-minded reformers to administer papal business, men like Hildebrand
(later Pope Gregory VII), Peter Damian (later cardinal bishop of Ostia) and Hum-
bert of Moyenmoutier (later cardinal bishop of Silva Candida), who became Leo’s
closest adviser. Not everything Leo did was a success, though. He misjudged the
threat posed by the Normans of southern Italy and was defeated by them in battle
and imprisoned in 1053, and his efforts to heal the doctrinal rift with the orthodox
church in Byzantium ended disastrously with recriminations and schism when his
legates excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople in his own church in
1054. Leo himself died a broken man in Norman captivity. Nevertheless, in only a
few years he had made the papacy into a vigorously assertive reforming institution,
and he had made it once more an active presence across Western Europe.
Continuing reform was not guaranteed, however, and much depended on
whether the campaigners Leo had brought to Rome could keep control of the
levers of papal power. So far, they had been content to work with and alongside
Henry III and to accept, with varying degrees of reluctance, the amount of influ-
ence he continued to exert over the papacy and its programmes. However, things
began to change from the mid-1050s. The next pope after Leo IX, Victor II, was
also a German nominee, but he died in 1057, a year after Henry III himself. Ger-
man input into papal appointments immediately disappeared as Henry’s son was
only a young boy, and his advisers had other problems to deal with. This gave the
reformers space to make their own plans. In 1059 at Melfi, Pope Nicholas II put
papal policy into reverse and made allies of the same Normans who had defeated
Leo IX only six years earlier. In return for their military support, Nicholas recog-
nised the Norman conquests in southern Italy and confirmed Richard of Aversa
as Prince of Capua and Robert Guiscard as Duke of Apulia and Calabria, with the
Faith 171
express expectation that, in due course, he would conquer Sicily as well. More
importantly still, also in 1059, he issued a new decree on the conduct of papal elec-
tions which reserved electoral powers to the seven cardinal-bishops. These were
the highest-ranking of the cardinals (at this time the cardinals were all based in
Rome, ran the papal administration and acted, in effect, as the parish priests of the
city); they would choose the new pope and have their choice ratified by the other
cardinals and by the clergy and people of Rome. There was a vague mention in the
decree about obtaining imperial approval of the election, but this was presented as
a courtesy more than a requirement.
The decree of 1059 removed papal elections from the control of the emperor and
took them out of the meddling hands of noble Roman families. For these reasons
alone it was momentous. But it also marked the start of a new, much more radical
phase of the reform movement. The focus on abuses like simony and clerical mar-
riage remained, but from now on there was an increased emphasis on eliminating any
kind of secular involvement or interference in the affairs of the church. In 1058, Car-
dinal Humbert of Silva Candida had launched an attack on lay control of ecclesiastical
offices in his Three Books Against the Simoniacs, where he argued that secular rulers
who controlled episcopal elections and practised lay investiture (where bishops were
ceremonially given the symbols of their office, the ring and staff, by the local prince,
just as Henry III had bestowed them on Leo IX as recently as 1054) were subverting
the rightful order of things by acting as if ecclesiastical authority was derived from sec-
ular. In fact, Humbert argued, things were the other way around, and priestly power
was superior to, and should be entirely free of, lay influence. Given that, for centu-
ries, rulers had chosen and invested bishops as a matter of course and local lords had
regarded the churches within their lands as their personal property, Humbert’s ideas,
if implemented, would have involved nothing less than a revolution in how society
operated. Inevitably, they would be resisted by vested interests with much to lose.
The first significant conflict arose over the archbishopric of Milan. In 1072 a
new archbishop was needed, and the young emperor Henry IV (now in personal
control of his kingdom after his minority had come to an end) selected his own
candidate and got the Lombard bishops to consecrate him. Milan, as the chief city
of northern Italy, had close links with the German kings, who saw this region as
part of their wider imperial territories. For the Milanese clergy, too, simony and
clerical marriage were part of their everyday ecclesiastical routine. Radical reform-
ing elements within the city of Milan itself, however, known as the Patarenes
(‘rag-pickers’), challenged these entrenched views and, with the backing of Pope
Alexander II, chose their own archbishop and had him elected. King Henry ini-
tially stood by his nominee, and so Alexander excommunicated five royal counsel-
lors for simony at his last synod, but soon after Alexander died in 1073, Henry IV
was compelled to back down as he sought papal support against a serious rebel-
lion he faced in Saxony. Nevertheless, settling the particular arguments over Milan
could not keep hidden the bigger issues they raised about the nature of the proper
relationship between secular and ecclesiastical power. These would take centre
stage during the next pontificate, that of Gregory VII (1073–85).
Gregory was the name taken by Hildebrand, who by 1073 had been at the heart
of the reform movement in Rome for more than 20 years. As pope, however, he
was able to give full voice to his most strident and controversial opinions, and so
loud and dominant was that voice that the whole reform period has often been
referred to by historians as ‘Gregorian’, even though it began well before 1073 and
lasted for generations after 1085. In a series of synods from 1075, Gregory issued
repeated condemnations of simony and clerical marriage. His views were more
extreme than this, however, even at this early stage of his pontificate. In a docu-
ment known as the Dictatus Papae, which was included in the official register of
Gregory’s correspondence, he offered to legitimise rebellion against secular rulers:
popes could depose emperors, he claimed, and they could absolve the subjects of
unjust men from their oaths of obedience. But under Gregory, it was lay investi-
ture which became the totemic issue on the reform agenda. In 1078 he issued a
decree condemning the practice and declared that any appointments which had
been made in this way were invalid. By then, however, matters were already spiral-
ling out of control. Henry IV had dealt with his Saxon rebels by 1075, and in 1076
he had denounced Gregory’s arguments about lay investiture, called him a ‘false
monk’ and claimed that the pope had overreached himself and lost his authority.
Gregory responded by excommunicating Henry and declaring him deposed. In
the short term this forced Henry, who feared his enemies in Germany would use
the excommunication against him, to back down once again, and in the winter of
1076–7, the German king travelled to the castle of Canossa, the stronghold of Mat-
ilda of Tuscany. Her vast estates and networks of support made her the most pow-
erful secular ruler in northern Italy, and she would prove to be the most steadfast
supporter of the reform papacy for the next 40 years. Barefoot and dressed in the
poor, rough clothes of a penitent sinner, meanwhile, Henry IV stood outside the
walls of her castle in January 1077 for three days before Gregory finally accepted his
humiliating submission. Gregory appeared to have triumphed, but by submitting
to the pope, Henry had bought himself valuable time and undermined his oppo-
nents back home. They elected their own king, the Duke of Swabia, and in 1080
Gregory decided to support him and excommunicated Henry once again. Things
were different this time, however. Henry had consolidated his position within Ger-
many and, after appointing his own pope (Clement III), he felt strong enough to
come to Italy with an army in 1081. In the end, in 1084, he took control of Rome
and was crowned emperor by Clement. Only the long-overdue and enormously
destructive arrival in Rome of the pope’s Norman allies, led by Robert Guiscard,
forced Henry to retreat and allowed Pope Gregory to escape. He died at Salerno,
still under Norman protection, only a year later, a bitter and angry man. The epi-
taph on his tomb in Salerno Cathedral famously reads: ‘I have loved justice and
hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile’.
By 1085, Henry IV had reimposed imperial control over the papacy, Gregory
VII had died a failure and the cause of ecclesiastical reform which he had advocated
for so long appeared doomed. However, Gregory’s pontificate had enormous long-
term significance, and many of the ideas he had promoted not only survived, they
Faith 173
eventually prevailed. The papacy’s claim to universal authority over all Christians
was ultimately accepted (although only in Latin, not Greek, Christendom, and
even though conflict with lay rulers continued in the west throughout the twelfth
century); the papacy came to be acknowledged as the governmental and legal mas-
ter of the church in practice as well as in theory, and as the active head of a strict
ecclesiastical hierarchy; and, slowly, the separation of clergy and laity became more
pronounced and obvious. Simony and clerical marriage did not disappear, but such
practices were increasingly viewed as wicked rather than as harmless aspects of eve-
ryday ecclesiastical life. And whilst secular rulers continued to exercise enormous
influence over their churches, they did so on a clearly formulated theoretical foun-
dation which both reformers and their critics were able to accept.
These outcomes were slow to develop, however, and in May 1085, when
Gregory VII died, the reform papacy was at its lowest ebb. It took a year before
Gregory’s followers elected his successor, Victor III, but he lived for less than two
years after this, and it was left to the next reforming pope to salvage what he could
from the wreckage Gregory VII had left behind. Odo, cardinal bishop of Ostia
and former Prior of Cluny, took the name Urban II. A loyal disciple of Gregory
VII and his reforming ideals, Urban was more realistic and flexible than his former
master, and he had the political and diplomatic skills which Gregory had lacked.
These qualities enabled Urban to recover his position in central Italy, regain much
of the support which Gregory had alienated, exploit the difficulties Henry IV
faced in the 1090s and neutralise the threat from the anti-pope Clement III. In
1089, Urban arranged a marriage between Matilda of Tuscany, still unflinching in
her support for the cause of reform, and Welf, the son of Welf IV of Bavaria who
had been deposed as duke by Henry IV. The plan was to stretch Matilda’s zone
of influence across northern Italy into southern Germany and make it impossible
for the emperor to either enter Italy or leave once he was there. And even though
Matilda’s marriage to Welf did not last long, this strategy worked after a fashion.
After Henry’s own son Conrad rebelled against him in 1093 and the Lombard cit-
ies abandoned him too, the emperor found himself trapped in Verona for the next
four years. This gave Urban his chance, and he had re-entered and secured control
of Rome by 1095. Urban had been busy reconstructing the reform programme
before this, however. He had already held reforming synods at Benevento (1091),
Troia (1093) and Piacenza (March 1095). Here, Gregory VII’s reforming legisla-
tion was reissued (although no mention was made of lay investiture), and major
questions of international politics were discussed, including the excommunication
of the French king Philip I. Urban then became the first pope to enter France
since Leo IX held his council at Reims in 1049. At the Council of Clermont in
November 1095, which was attended by 13 archbishops, 82 bishops and innumer-
able abbots, a comprehensive body of reforming legislation was issued: lay own-
ership of churches was condemned, lay investiture was prohibited as well as the
performance of homage by bishops and abbots to lay rulers. Such measures signifi-
cantly extended the scope of Gregory VII’s original decree against lay investiture,
although the council of Clermont is most famous for Urban’s proclamation of the
First Crusade in response to a request for western military aid against the Seljuq
Turks by the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus. Urban’s summons to the
Christians of the west to free Jerusalem from Muslim control was the most explicit
and effective assertion to date of the pope’s universal power, a power which cut
across national and regional frontiers and which positioned the pope decisively as
the leader of all Christians.
Urban II died on 15 July 1099, just days after the crusaders he had inspired
captured Jerusalem. He left a much stronger reform papacy behind him, not least
because of the expansion and centralisation of papal government that he oversaw.
The papal chancery (its writing-office) was reorganised; documents were stand-
ardised in terms of their format and dating. Papal finances were overhauled by the
Cluniac monk, Peter, and the cardinals acquired new importance as Urban’s chief
advisers after they had been neglected by Gregory VII. The arguments over lay
investiture, however, remained unresolved and would continue to fester for another
20 years. Henry IV died, still excommunicated, in 1106; his son and successor,
Henry V, continued to practise investiture, and Pope Paschal II (1099–1118) con-
tinued to prohibit it. This stand-off lasted until 1110–11 when Henry came to Italy
with one of the biggest armies ever raised by a German king to receive imperial
coronation. King and pope agreed that Henry would renounce all claims to inves-
titure in the course of his coronation and restore the papal lands in Italy to their
fullest extent. In return, the pope would order the German bishops and abbots to
return the regalia (royal lands and rights granted to the Church by the king and
his predecessors) to Henry under threat of excommunication. Had this plan been
put into effect, there would have been a massive increase in royal power within
Germany, and aristocratic bishops and abbots would have lost much of their influ-
ence. So not surprisingly, when the plan was made public on the day designated for
Henry V’s coronation (12 February 1111), the protest was so vociferous and aggres-
sive that the coronation had to be abandoned. Henry forced his way out through
the tumultuous crowds, taking the pope with him as his prisoner. Eventually, in
April, a new agreement was made. The pope had little choice but to concede the
right of investiture with ring and staff to the German king throughout the empire,
provided that the election had taken place without simony. Henry in turn agreed
to release the pope. The imperial coronation finally took place on 13 April 1111.
Historians have traditionally seen the events of 1111 as part of an attempt by
Paschal II to enforce poverty on the church and require it to live on tithes and
offerings only. Whether Paschal actually intended this, however, is unclear. In fact,
he probably never planned to give up all the possessions of the church, and the
ones he was thinking of were probably only those for which proof of the original
grant still existed. Nevertheless, Pope Paschal came in for serious criticism from the
Gregorian reformers as a result of his eventual surrender to Henry V; some even
called him a heretic. But there was no unity in the papal ranks over how Henry V
should be dealt with, and the pope himself refused to go back on the agreement
he had made. For his part, Henry received far more than he originally wanted,
but pressures within Germany soon brought him back to the negotiating table. In
Faith 175
February 1115, his forces were defeated in battle by the army of duke Lothar of
Saxony, and the victorious opposition demanded a settlement with Rome. Henry
was not powerless, however. Matilda of Tuscany, the erstwhile nemesis of Henry
IV in northern Italy, had died childless in 1115 and left her enormous estates and
vast resources to him. Presumably in her view this was the best way of keeping her
landholdings together. Henry came to Italy in 1116 to claim the inheritance, but
he was also determined to outmanoeuvre his remaining critics in other ways. Fol-
lowing the death of Paschal II in January 1118, he set up his own pope, Gregory
VIII. His opponents also chose their own candidate, however (Gelasius II), and
when he quickly died, they replaced him with Calixtus II, a determined opponent
of the emperor and of lay investiture. Meanwhile Gregory VIII gained little sup-
port, and negotiations finally began between the two sides. A deal was eventually
struck at Worms in September 1122. In the so-called Concordat of Worms, the
emperor agreed to surrender ‘all investiture by ring and staff’ and granted the free
election of bishops according to canon law in all parts of the empire. However, all
elections within Germany (although not elsewhere in the empire, in the kingdoms
of Burgundy and Italy) were to take place in Henry’s presence, and the candidate
would receive the regalia from him in the symbolic form of a sceptre, do homage
and then be consecrated by an archbishop. This agreement was similar to ones
already made in France (in 1104) and in England (in 1107), and it left the emperor
with a considerable amount of practical influence over the appointment of bishops
within Germany. Indeed, there was opposition to the compromise amongst the
ranks of the more hard-line supporters of papal reform, and it was widely thought
that Calixtus had conceded too much to the emperor. In 1123, however, albeit in
the face of loud criticism, the Concordat was ratified at the First Lateran Council.
The agreement of 1122 was certainly a limited achievement as far as the supporters
of reform were concerned. Nevertheless, even though all it did was abolish the cer-
emony of investiture with ring and staff, it was a milestone on the road to a better-
ordered church. Ecclesiastical purity would only become a realistic goal when lay
investiture was abolished; now that had happened, the struggle to establish a church
free from all external controls and led by the pope could continue.
The New Monasticism

Historians used to give the abbey of Cluny pride of place as the fons et origo of the
papal reform movement of the eleventh century. Partly this was because the period
of reform coincided with the years of Cluny’s greatest fame and influence. There
was also a mistaken belief that Hildebrand (later Pope Gregory VII) had been a
monk at Cluny. He was a monk, however, as were all of the great reforming popes,
including Urban II (himself a former Prior of Cluny), and there is no doubt that
monastic principles played a large part in stimulating the clamour for reform and
that Cluny, as the most important monastery in Europe, played an important role.
For one thing, Cluny and all of its dependent priories were dedicated to saints
Peter and Paul, and this did much to keep the papacy at the forefront of people’s
thoughts. For another, Cluny’s overriding operating principle, as expressed in its

foundation charter, was one of freedom from secular control. Then in 1024, Pope
John XIX confirmed that Cluniac monasteries were also exempt from the over-
sight of their local bishop and subject only to papal supervision. These two ideas
(independence from lay authority and the acknowledgement of papal supremacy)
would clearly appeal to the reformers in Rome. It was a short if bold step from
the idea of the ‘freedom’ of Cluny to the idea of the ‘freedom’ of the papacy from
the control of German rulers. An even bigger but quite logical step was towards the
‘freedom’ of the Church more widely.
There were other centres of monastic reform, too, apart from Cluny, which
contributed in no small way to later developments. As has been seen, one of the
most important amongst these was the monastery of Gorze in Upper Lorraine,
originally founded in the eighth century but refounded in about 930. The monks
of Gorze during the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries were responsible for the
reform of approximately 160 monasteries, mostly in Germany. What is more, many
of these reforms were instituted by the kings of Germany themselves. Otto I and
his successors were thus patrons of reformed monasticism; Henry III, in promoting
the reform of the church more generally, was on one level simply building on this
earlier foundation, and it is no coincidence that many of the men Leo IX brought
with him to Rome were from Lorraine.
Despite, or rather because of, its success, Cluny’s dominant place in the monas-
tic landscape would be challenged in the twelfth century. In 1095, when the mon-
astery was at the height of its influence, Urban II returned to Cluny to consecrate
the high altar of the new church which was being constructed there, the largest
building in Latin Christendom. Critics of the Cluniac model were starting to voice
their opinions, however. Cluny’s popularity was a double-edged sword. It became
richer and richer as more people gave donations in return for prayers, and more
and more additions were being made to the daily round of services performed in
the monastery, thus diluting the simplicity of the original Benedictine ideal. Cluny
was not alone amongst eleventh-century monasteries in its elaborate rituals, osten-
tatious wealth and worldly involvements, but such developments led many to seek
the path to salvation elsewhere.
Alternatives to Cluniac monasticism had already begun to appear in the eleventh
century. Some desired to withdraw from the world and return to the ideals and
practices of the primitive church: solitude, poverty and simplicity were once again
fashionable. Thus, new orders of hermits began to appear in the eleventh century;
perhaps the most famous hermit of them all was Peter Damian. However, the most
successful attempt to institutionalise the eremitical life was made by the Carthusi-
ans, an order founded by Bruno of Cologne at the end of the eleventh century, and
which took its name from its chief monastery at La Grande Chartreuse in the Alps.
A Carthusian monk pursued a solitary life within a community, living, sleeping
and eating in the solitude of his own cell. The cells were grouped together around
a central covered cloister, and the monks met together for mass on Sunday and for
Vespers and the night office on other days. They celebrated the rest of the daily
Faith 177
offices alone in their own cells. The Carthusian system was designed to facilitate
contemplation by the individual monk, like the desert hermit in his cave.
Others sought a return to a stricter and more literal interpretation of St Ben-
edict’s original Rule. One such man was Robert, abbot of a house of hermits at
Molesme in Burgundy. Molesme had been established specifically as a place where
the Benedictine Rule would be implemented to the letter, but by 1098, some of
the monks there were unhappy with what they perceived as the creeping erosion
of their original plan, and in that year about 20 of them, led by Robert, left and
established a new house at Cîteaux in Burgundy. Robert eventually had to return
to Molesme, but Cîteaux soon began to attract more than able replacements, such
as the Englishman Stephen Harding, who became abbot in 1109, and a young
man, Bernard of Fontaine, who joined the monastery in 1112 and established a
new so-called daughter house of Cîteaux at Clairvaux in 1115. The Cistercians
(named after Cîteaux), with Bernard of Clairvaux at their head, would become far
and away the most successful of the new monastic orders of the twelfth century.
Bernard was a Cistercian monk for 41 years, and by the time of his death in 1153,
there were 343 Cistercian abbeys in Europe; 68 of them were daughter houses of
his own at Clairvaux.
Like the new hermits, the Cistercians sought a more ascetic life, and they
‘returned to the desert’ in their own way by establishing many of their houses in
remote and uncultivated locations, where they could be solitary and self-sufficient.
The monasteries founded at Rievaulx and Fountains in Yorkshire during the 1130s
are classic examples of this. The monks lived fully communally (unlike the Carthu-
sians), and they insisted on a strict return to the Rule of St Benedict. There was
a drive towards uniformity across the Cistercian family, too. Just as every Cluniac
house was dedicated to saints Peter and Paul, so every Cistercian monastery was
dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Common themes dictated the principles of Cister-
cian architecture, too. Their churches were usually cruciform in shape with a square
east end, whilst inside they were simple and undecorated – elaborate painting and
carving were frowned upon. And there was a shared austerity to their lifestyle: food
was basic (black bread and stewed vegetables were the staple fare); heating, even in
winter, was limited; and talking was allowed only if essential.
Three other things (in addition to their distinctive habits of undyed wool –
Cistercians were ‘white monks’, whereas other Benedictines were ‘black monks’)
further set the Cistercians apart from other new orders and movements: the person-
ality of their leader, the sophistication of their organisation and their accessibility
to all levels of society. Although the abbot of Citeaux was the nominal head of the
Cistercian order, Bernard of Clairvaux was its most prominent and forceful spokes-
man. He was a mystic, a great preacher and a letter-writer of tireless energy. His
reputation for sanctity was spotless, and he believed passionately in the renuncia-
tion of the secular world in favour of the benefits of monastic life. He was a fierce
critic of the condition of contemporary Cluniac monasticism: ‘How do they keep
the [Benedictine] Rule who wear furs’, he raged, ‘who feed the healthy on meat
and meat-fats, who allow three or four dishes daily with their bread, who do not
perform the manual labour the Rule commands?’ For Bernard, the only life which
offered a sure path to salvation was lived in the cloister, but that cloister had to be a
disciplined place, separate from the world. It is ironic, therefore, that Bernard spent
much of his own life out of monastic seclusion travelling and preaching. Despite
chronic illness and acute physical infirmity, he became a figure of international
standing, a living saint in the minds of many and someone to whose moral influ-
ence and spiritual power both popes and kings deferred.
It is worth saying that the principal accounts of the origins of the Cistercian
order, long accepted as definitive, are now thought to have been written at least a
generation after the events they recall, and that the early institutional developments
they describe probably took place over a longer period of time. Be that as it may,
the Cistercians ultimately created an international order which followed strict rules
intended to bind all their monasteries together. The fundamental text setting out
the constitution of the Cistercian order is the so-called Carta Caritatis (‘Charter of
Charity’), originally written probably by the Englishman Stephen Harding at the
start of the twelfth century. Unlike the monarchical Cluniac system, the Cister-
cians saw themselves more as a family of monasteries held together by love and
discipline. The system was based on two concepts: affiliation and General Chapters.
Every Cistercian monastery, apart from Cîteaux itself, was affiliated to the mon-
astery whose monks had founded it; the founding monastery was known as the
‘mother house’. It was the duty of every mother house to oversee the conduct of
its own daughter foundations, and the abbot of the mother house was obliged to
make a visitation of each of his daughter houses at least once a year. The abbot’s job
was to make sure that the Rule and the statutes of the General Chapter were being
observed. Cîteaux itself was at first deemed to be above the need for correction, but
in due course it was also made subject to annual visitation by the abbots of its four
daughter houses, La Ferté, Pontigny, Clairvaux and Morimond. Every year, a Gen-
eral Chapter of the order was held at Cîteaux. The abbot of every Cistercian house
was obliged to attend. The General Chapter was a distinctively Cistercian innova-
tion and constituted the supreme authority within the order where all matters of
policy and practice were discussed and decided upon. Abbots or their representa-
tives from all over Europe attended every September, making the Cistercian order
into a truly international institution – a twelfth-century multinational corporation.
Cistercian monasteries were social experiments as well. The order was keen to
restore to manual work the importance which St Benedict had given it in his Rule.
They were pioneering farmers, especially of sheep, and they were determined to
live by the labours of their own hands. They still had to pray, however, and there
were simply not enough hours in the day to enable the monks to till the land, tend
their flocks and perform the divine offices. Other hands were needed, and so it
was decided early on that the order would recruit lay brothers or conversi. Typi-
cally, such men entered a religious house as adults rather than children. They were
usually illiterate. They took monastic vows and wore a habit; as such they were
certainly members of the community, but they were set apart from the choir monks
in certain important ways. They lived in a different part of the monastic complex,
Faith 179
and whilst they attended the daily offices, they could not sing them; their chief
responsibility was manual work, as ploughmen, carpenters, shepherds or masons.
Such recruits were known in other orders, too, but the Cistercians were particularly
successful in attracting them; often there were more lay brothers in a Cistercian
monastery than choir monks. Not all conversi were peasants, but most were, and
the Cistercians therefore gave a whole new social group – the illiterate laity – the
chance to enter and actively participate in a religious community.
Whilst highly influential, however, the Cistercians did not offer the only form
of revived monasticism during this period. The Carthusians have already been
mentioned, and the Military Orders established at this time in the Holy Land
added further variety to the available forms of religious life. But back in Europe,
outside the monastic cloister and away from the contemplative lives led there by
monks, groups of secular canons also started to feel the need for a more rigorous
approach to their religious duties. The Augustinian or Austin canons followed a
rule which was believed originally to have been written by St Augustine himself.
This belief was probably erroneous; nevertheless, increasing numbers of so-called
regular canons (canons who followed a rule) were adopting this system by the end
of the eleventh century. They were required to live communally like monks and
live strict, disciplined lives. However, they were also left free to carry on perform-
ing their duties in towns and villages, where they held services, administered the
sacraments and tended to the sick. A more austere offshoot of the Augustinian
order was founded by Norbert of Xanten (d.1134), who established a community
of regular canons at Prémontré near Laon in the early 1120s. The Premonstraten-
sians (also known as the White Canons) received papal approval in 1126, and their
houses soon began to spread.
These new orders quickly became attractive to lay patrons. In England, one
of the first Augustinian houses, Holy Trinity, Aldgate, was supported generously
by Henry I’s queen, Matilda (d.1118). Women were also active participants in
the new orders themselves. Many of the early recruits to the Premonstratensian
order were women, evidently attracted by the charismatic preaching of Norbert of
Xanten, who provided dedicated accommodation for them at Prémontré. Another
monastic pioneer, Robert of Arbrissel, set up a community of nuns ruled by an
abbess at Fontevraud in Anjou. By the mid-1100s, there were 15 Cluniac houses
for women, and in England in 1131, Gilbert of Sempringham (d.1189) founded
a religious community for women in Lincolnshire. Bernard of Clairvaux rejected
the notion of Cistercian nunneries, but he supported the English Gilbertines and
helped with the development of their rule. This decidedly unsystematic approach
towards women keen to adopt a religious life reflected the ambivalence felt about
them by their male counterparts. Where nunneries were established next to or near
a men’s monastery, the fear was that the women would distract the men and provoke
sinful behaviour. Women were also thought to be too weak and fragile to perform
manual labour, so they had to be provided for, and this was expensive. In addi-
tion, women could not administer the sacraments, and so their pastoral care had
to be provided by men from outside their communities: the nuns at Fontevraud,
for example, were served by male priests. Even so, such narrow prejudices did not
prevent some remarkable cloistered women from proving themselves to be at least
the intellectual and spiritual equals of the men who feared them: Heloise (d.1164),
Christina of Markyate (d.c.1155) and Hildegard of Bingen (d.1179) were all in this
category.
By the 1120s, multiple new forms of religious life had been established across
Western Europe, and monasticism had been reinvigorated on both a spiritual and
an institutional level. No longer did a pious young man or woman seeking to get
close to God face a stark choice between life as a hermit or life in an aristocratic
monastery or nunnery. No longer, indeed, was the contemplative life the exclusive
preserve of the children of the rich and powerful. The heyday of the new monas-
tic orders was still to come, however: they would grow enormously and prosper
hugely over the rest of the twelfth century. With such success, of course, came
exposure to precisely the same kind of criticism which had prompted the establish-
ment of the new monastic orders in the first place, and even more radical rejections
of convention in the attempt to live the highest form of Christian life.
Popular Piety and Shades of Belief

The basic structure and institutions of the church, which were described earlier,
remained in place during the eleventh century. Latin Christendom was divided
into ecclesiastical provinces and dioceses, whilst the cathedrals, monasteries and
minsters scattered across the landscape formed fixed, imposing reminders of the
church’s power and wealth. Most people in Western Europe, however, probably
had limited experience of actually visiting a church, although at Easter in particular
special efforts may have been made to hear mass. The parish system was still devel-
oping and far from complete, whilst the great churches and monastic complexes
were not accessible to ordinary Christians unless they had a chapel which laypeople
were permitted to attend. There were churches in most towns, but regular attend-
ance at their services was almost certainly the exception rather than the rule.
Religious provision for the laity was inevitably patchy and intermittent. Even
if there was a church with a priest nearby, he may have learnt everything about
his duties from his father, the previous priest. Therefore, priests were not usually
very well-educated, and the instruction they could give to their congregations was
bound to be rudimentary at best. Cathedral canons and priests from the minsters
(and later in the period, regular canons) would have carried out pastoral duties,
but there cannot have been anything regular or systematic about this. Many babies
would have been baptised by members of their own family, or perhaps by the mid-
wives who delivered them: high rates of infant mortality dictated that everyone had
the right to baptise someone if necessary. The taking of communion by the laity
was rare; marriage was not celebrated in church and did not yet require a religious
ceremony to be valid; confession was typically kept for the death bed.
Having said all this, there is no reason to doubt that the overwhelming majority
of Western European people during the eleventh century lived their lives within an
Faith 181
explicitly Christian framework of belief and took for granted the basic principles
they had learnt: God had created the world, the Devil had brought evil into it, and
Christ had saved it by sacrificing himself on the cross. Meanwhile, a strong aware-
ness of sin and its consequences pervaded ordinary life. An individual’s chances of
salvation depended on how purely and devoutly they lived their lives – God would
judge everyone in the end, and the general wisdom was that this would happen
sooner rather than later. Nevertheless, the first half of the eleventh century saw
challenges to these fundamental principles. Some of these involved members of
the laity trying to adopt their own kind of monastic lifestyle, and various reports
survive (some more reliable than others) of groups in different parts of Western
Europe coming together, often inspired by a charismatic leader, to live communally
and espouse celibacy and vegetarianism. A few cases were more threatening than
this, however. In 1022, a group of canons from the Holy Cross in Orléans were
tried for heresy. They are reported to have denied that Christ had a human mother
and that the resurrection took place; they also rejected the efficacy of baptism,
communion and praying to the saints. Such cases are important in suggesting that
some local communities, perhaps feeling starved of effective conventional religious
provision, were prepared to try and find their own solutions, even if this meant
defying established beliefs and flouting established practices. However, such cases
were reported precisely because they were out of the ordinary, and it is notable that
little if any evidence of organised religious dissent survives from the second half
of the eleventh century, the period during which the papal reform movement was
attempting to assert a new degree of centralised control over the way clergymen
performed their duties and ordinary Christians lived their lives.
Getting direct access to God was an intimidating challenge for the pious, and
they needed help. This typically came from the saints – holy men and women who
had lived exemplary lives, showed their closeness to God through the performance
of miracles and, in some cases, died as martyrs in defence of their religious beliefs.
After death, saints were thought to retain their power to perform miracles and
intercede with God on behalf of those who prayed to them and asked for their
assistance. It is often hard to know how these remote and sometimes semi-mythical
figures acquired their sanctity, and in time the church would assert its own author-
ity over how saints were awarded this status. For the time being, popular acclaim
over a long period seems to have been enough to establish saintly credentials. What
added lustre to a saint’s reputation and standing were the relics associated with him
or her – physical remnants of their lives on Earth, whether these were bones, locks
of hair or fingernails, or clothes and other objects which had reputedly belonged to
the saint. Relics of the saints were seen as providing a bridge between the mundane
and the heavenly, not as museum pieces but as live transmitters of enormous spir-
itual power. Pilgrims travelled from far and wide to touch the tomb of St Martin
(d.397) at Tours, for example, and the churches which housed the relics were only
too happy to encourage these beliefs. Pilgrims brought in money, and as more pil-
grims visited, so the churches became not just wealthier, but more prestigious too,
thus attracting more pilgrims. So keen were churches to have important relics of
their own that some resorted to cunning means to acquire them. In 886, a monk
from the abbey of Sainte-Foy (Saint Faith) at Conques in southern France, who
had posed for over a decade as a loyal member of another community in order to
get close enough to the relics of Saint Faith which were then housed there, stole
them and brought them back to Conques. There was no question of any dishon-
esty, however: it was taken for granted that the saint would have made her displeas-
ure known if she had disapproved of the move.
By far the most revered and valued relics were those associated with Jesus and
the Virgin Mary. Both are ‘universal’ saints with a general appeal to all Christians
rather than local ones associated with a particular area or others linked to a specific
illness or trade. Jesus and his mother had ascended whole and intact into Heaven,
however, so there were no physical relics to venerate (although some churches
have claimed to possess Jesus’s milk teeth or the foreskin from his circumcision).
As a result, pieces of their clothing or objects associated with their lives as revealed
in the Gospels were deeply revered: fragments of the True Cross or nails from
the crucifixion in Jesus’s case, for example. But it was during the second half of
the eleventh century that the cult of the Virgin Mary began seriously to grow.
The cult would not develop fully until the twelfth century, but already before this
churches and monasteries were being dedicated to her, and festivals throughout
the Christian year, particularly Candlemas on 2 February which commemorated
the purification of the Virgin six weeks after the birth of Jesus, were starting to be
associated with different important moments in her life. She was worshipped as the
vessel which had brought Jesus into the world and as the person who had given
Christ his humanity. She was also seen as the perfect woman who could reverse the
damage done by Eve (spelt backwards, ‘Eva’ in Latin is ‘Ave’, the first word of the
Hail Mary – medieval Christians noticed such things!). More than anything else,
though, just as she had mediated the gulf between Heaven and Earth when she gave
birth to the Son of God, the Virgin came to be seen as the ultimate saintly interces-
sor who provided a direct channel to the divine through prayer.
There were people who would cover considerable distances on pilgrimage to
pray at a saint’s shrine in a cathedral or monastery and venerate the relics associ-
ated with them. Pilgrimage was in itself a long-established penitential activity, of
course: the more difficult and challenging the journey, the more meritorious it
was. Shrines such as those dedicated to St Martin at Tours, or to St Michael the
Archangel at Monte Gargano in southern Italy, were well-known and much-visited
destinations. Indeed, according to some reports, it was as a result of their devo-
tional visit to Monte Gargano in the early 1000s that warriors from Normandy
first acquired their interest in the region. When they arrived at Monte Gargano,
however, it is quite possible that these Norman warriors were on their way back
home from the ultimate Christian pilgrimage site – Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the
centre of the Christian world and, as a holy location, in a category of its own.
The entire city was one gigantic holy relic: it was the site of Christ’s Passion and
Resurrection, and its very streets, along which pilgrims could walk as they visited
the multiplicity of holy places, had soaked up his blood. The Church of the Holy
Faith 183
Sepulchre, built on the site of Christ’s burial and resurrection, was the most sacred
site in Christianity. Even the most basic education would have brought Jerusalem
to the attention of ordinary Christians: if they had never travelled there, the city
was familiar to them from the scriptures. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was not new,
although it had been disrupted after the Muslim takeover of the city in the seventh
century and continued to prove difficult after that because of the instability across
Europe caused by the viking and later Magyar invasions. However, the popular-
ity of pilgrimage to Jerusalem increased either side of 1000 in part because it had
recently become safer to travel there. Hungary had become a Christianised king-
dom under Stephen I (d.1038), and the Byzantines had extended their power in
the Balkans and Asia Minor. As a result, travelling to Jerusalem by land, which was
cheaper than going by sea, became possible for more people. Writing in about
1033, the Burgundian monk and chronicler Ralph Glaber described how an ‘innu-
merable multitude from all over the world began to flock to the Saviour’s sepulchre
in Jerusalem’. Ralph also claimed that these excited crowds were made up of men
and women from all ranks of society, and he may have heard of the pilgrimage to
Jerusalem led in 1026–7 by Richard, the abbot of Saint-Vannes near Verdun in
France, which reputedly involved more than 700 people. Other evidence gives
glimpses of pilgrimages taken by the rich and powerful: William the Conqueror’s
father, Duke Robert I of Normandy, died on his return from a pilgrimage to the
Holy Land in 1035, whilst Count Fulk Nerra of Anjou (d.1040) visited Jerusalem
at least three, perhaps four, times. And there are examples of much larger groups
travelling together to Jerusalem. Most famously, in 1064–5, a group of Germans
(between 7,000 and 12,000 people according to different chroniclers) set out for
the Holy City. These large numbers are hard to accept at face value, but it is evi-
dently the case that this expedition was, by contemporary standards, an enormous
one. And, of course, its very size caused problems. The pilgrims had to be fed and
kept safe from ambushes along the way, and by no means all of those who began
the journey can have finished it in the way they hoped.
Pilgrimage was gruelling and dangerous. That was the point: like other forms
of penance, it was designed to make the remorseful sinner suffer so that he or she
could identify to some extent with the agonies experienced by Christ. Its growing
popularity in the eleventh century, however, suggests much about contemporary
modes of spiritual expression. Monks, the spiritual elite, lived an internalised, con-
templative spiritual life devoted to prayer, but plenty of ordinary people evidently
felt the need to display their devotion in more ostentatious, physical ways, and pil-
grimage was something they could attempt, however difficult it turned out to be. It
is certainly no coincidence that, when he launched the First Crusade at Clermont
in 1095, Urban II is reported in at least one version of his speech to have dwelt on
the plight of pilgrims visiting the Holy City. They were forced to pay heavy tolls,
taxes and bribes to get into churches, and they were mistreated by locals trying to
get money off them any way they could. Urban (or Guibert of Nogent, who wrote
this version of the pope’s speech some years after it was made) probably exaggerated
the scale and nature of the problems faced by pilgrims. However, if this was the
case, the rhetorical means justified the end, and the point about the importance of
Jerusalem was clear enough:
If you consider that you ought to take great pains to make a pilgrimage to the
graves of the apostles (in Rome) or to the shrines of any other saints, what
expense of spirit can you refuse in order to rescue, and make a pilgrimage to,
the cross, the blood, the Sepulchre?
The overwhelming response to Urban’s speech was as clear an expression of

contemporary lay piety as it is possible to imagine. Of course, not every crusader
left Europe in 1095–6 for exclusively, or even predominantly, religious reasons. But
the consensus amongst modern historians is that Urban’s offer of a remission of all
penance for those who completed the journey or died in the attempt was a decisive
motivator for many, and probably most, of those who set out for the Holy Land.
The charters left behind by some laymen who took part in the crusade also support
this interpretation. Charters were primarily legal documents which made provision
for an individual’s lands and family during the crusade and in the event that he did
not return. But they might also give an insight into someone’s reasons for going
on crusade, and piety was at the heart of these. Thus, in 1096 the knight Achard
of Montmerle described himself in his charter as ‘excited by the same intention as
this great and enormous upheaval of the Christian people wanting to go to fight
for God against the pagans and the Saracens’. Crusaders were typically described
in other charters as leaving home ‘for the remission of our sins’ or ‘fired by divine
zeal and love of Christianity’. There is almost certainly a degree of overstatement
in documents such as these – most of them were written by monks who would
naturally have wanted to emphasise the spiritual drive of those going on crusade.
Even so, the sheer amount of evidence like this makes it likely that monastic scribes
were reflecting to some degree the genuine feelings of those whose documents
they wrote.
The success of the First Crusade had unintended consequences as far as lay piety
was concerned. Renewed contact between East and West opened up the possibility
of unorthodox beliefs finding their way back into Western Europe. And indeed, the
early twelfth century saw the re-emergence there of the kind of lay religious activ-
ism which had last been seen a hundred years before. A preacher called Tanchelm,
for example, attracted followers to his base in Antwerp round about 1112. Before
he was killed in 1115, his programme had developed to the extent that he rejected
the church hierarchy and its sacraments as useless. At about the same time, another
charismatic wanderer, Peter, made his mark in Provence. He argued that infant
baptism was pointless, denied that good works could be performed on behalf of the
dead and encouraged his followers to destroy churches. He was burnt to death by a
local crowd in 1138. Such episodes were still out of the ordinary, and their impact
did not long survive the deaths of the zealous leaders who inspired them. Having
said that, they hint at a degree of dissatisfaction with the church’s routine religious
provision and a yearning on the part of at least some laypeople for more intense
Faith 185
forms of Christianity in which they could play an active role. This kind of spiritual
restlessness would continue through the twelfth century, and in time it would take
new, much more threatening, forms.
Hatred of non-Christians was another manifestation of lay Christian piety which
was intensified by the start of the Crusades. The only parts of Western Europe
where there was regular contact between Islam and Christianity were southern
Italy and northern Spain. Major military campaigns in these regions predated the
start of the First Crusade by some decades and were largely self-contained, so more
widespread knowledge of the Muslim world across the rest of Europe was hazy and
indistinct. Once the Crusades began, though, Muslims became the new ‘heathens’
who, like the Magyars and the vikings before them, were seen to pose an existen-
tial threat to Christian life everywhere. There were also enemies of Christ closer
to home, however. There had been Jewish communities in Western Europe since
Roman times, and throughout the subsequent centuries, the Jews had remained
the only tolerated religious minority in Latin Christendom. They were tolerated
for a number of reasons. The presence of Jews in their midst gave Christians a vis-
ible reminder of Christ’s Passion (Jews were widely thought to have been respon-
sible for Christ’s death). In addition, the official view of the church was that the
Jews were in error about God’s plan for the world: they refused to accept that
Jesus was the Son of God and that the Second Coming was at hand. However, the
Apocalypse would not take place, it was believed, until the Jews had acknowledged
their mistakes and converted to Christianity. This had to happen peacefully, not by
force, and so patience was required: Jews were objectionable (their language, food,
customs and religious practice all set them apart from the rest of society, and they
were deliberately, proudly exclusive), but they had to be tolerated.
Jews were disliked simply because they were different, but also because of the
work many of them did. In the eleventh century, Jews were not linked with mon-
eylending to the extent that they would be in later generations, and they pursued
a variety of occupations. But living in towns as all of them did, they still tended
to be associated with business and commerce. Many, although by no means most,
Jews were involved in pawnbroking and other forms of exchange. This could be
useful: there were no Jewish communities in Anglo-Saxon England, for example,
but one had been established in London by 1100. These Jewish pioneers may
have been brought to London from Rouen by William the Conqueror in order
to establish firmer trading links between his two chief cities. But such activity also
exposed Jews to charges of greed and made them vulnerable to covetous, jealous,
poorer Christians. When the First Crusade began in 1095–6, the Holy Land must
have seemed to some a long way off, especially when the people who had actually
killed Jesus were living on the Christian doorstep. For those who did plan to make
the pilgrimage, moreover, the cost of crusading must have been a pressing concern,
and the Jews offered both a source of valuable funds and an easy target. Neither
the secular nor the ecclesiastical authorities called for or approved of attacks on
Jews (quite the opposite, in fact), but amongst the poorly educated, credulous
laity, theological niceties counted for little. The combination of religious hatred
and a pressing need for money was explosive and easily whipped up. In 1096 there
were vicious attacks on Jewish communities in the Rhineland, at Speyer, Mainz,
Cologne and Trier. Entire populations were wiped out, and many Jews chose to kill
each other rather than wait for Christians to massacre them. Even in the turmoil
of slaughter, however, there was enough method in the killers’ madness to ensure
that they helped themselves to the Jews’ stored treasure before they moved on.
Henceforth, assaults like this on the Jews of Western Europe would mark the start
of every twelfth-century crusade.
The First Crusade and Its Aftermath: Beginner’s Luck?

In November 1095, Pope Urban II held an ecclesiastical council at Clermont in
southern France. It has already been seen how important this council was in the
history of the reform papacy: clerical abuses were condemned, and the practice of
lay investiture was denounced more strongly than ever before. But the most dra-
matic and famous events of the council took place at the end. On 27 November,
the clergy attending the council, along with crowds of locals, gathered in a field to
hear Pope Urban give a sermon. In it he called on the knights of Western Europe to
march to the Holy Land in order to free Christians there from the tyranny of Mus-
lim rule and to liberate Jerusalem, the location of the Holy Sepulchre (Christ’s
burial place, the holiest site in Christianity), from Islamic control. As soon as the
sermon was over, a bishop, Adhémar of Le Puy, stepped forward and vowed to
undertake the expedition. He was followed by others equally keen to ‘take the
cross’, and as the volunteers pressed forward, they did so to enthusiastic shouts of
‘God wills it!’ from the surrounding crowds. This stage-managed, carefully chore-
ographed piece of open-air theatre set in train a series of events which would cul-
minate in the capture of Jerusalem by the armies of the First Crusade in July 1099.
The First Crusade was a momentous episode in the history of medieval Europe.
In the short-term, it enabled the reform papacy under Urban II to gain a decisive
advantage over its opponents in the contest over investiture; in the medium term it
led to the establishment of a series of crusader states in the Holy Land and the fur-
ther expansion of the frontiers of Latin Christendom; in the long-term it resulted
in a crusading ‘movement’, whose concerns dominated and dictated much of the
course of western politics for the next 200 years. It is worth remembering from
the outset, however, just how unlikely the success of the First Crusade actually
was. It was launched opportunistically by a pope desperate to strengthen his own
political position; it quickly turned into a sprawling and volatile mass movement
of people with no centralised organisation and little obvious chance of victory;
during the crusade, military disaster threatened to overwhelm it more than once,
whilst the persistent divisions within its leadership would usually have doomed
such an expedition to failure. To say that the crusaders’ capture of Jerusalem in
July 1099 was a victory against the odds is, therefore, an enormous understate-
ment: on any objective analysis, considering the immense obstacles they had to
overcome, the crusaders should never have got close to the Holy City. The reasons
Faith 187
for the crusade’s success need close analysis, as do the motivations of those who
left behind everything they knew to undertake the greatest adventure of their
lives. First, though, it is important to consider the reasons why it was launched in
the first place.
It is impossible to know when Urban II first had the idea of launching a mili-
tary expedition to the Holy Land. He was certainly not the first pope to sanction
the use of violence. Only recently, the Christian campaigns in Muslim Spain had
received the backing of the church, and of course Leo IX had led his own army
against the Normans in 1053. Nor was the idea of papally backed warfare in the
East a complete novelty: in 1074, Pope Gregory VII had tried but failed to raise
an army to help the Byzantines. Both Urban and Gregory were moved to act, at
least in part, by news they received from Constantinople. The second half of the
eleventh century was a particularly difficult time for the eastern emperors, and the
1070s were especially challenging. By then the Byzantines had all but lost their
foothold in southern Italy to the Normans, but they faced even greater challenges
closer to the heart of the empire, in Asia Minor from the Seljuq Turks. The Turks
were nomadic warriors from central Asia who had migrated into the near East ear-
lier in the tenth century and converted to Sunni Islam. The Turks acknowledged
the authority of the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, but soon enough they had become
the de facto rulers of his empire. In 1065 they took Armenia from the Byzantines,
and in 1071 they wrested control of Jerusalem from the hands of the Shi‘ite Fatimid
caliphs based in Cairo. In between these two events, earlier in 1071 at Manzikert,
the Turks had annihilated a Byzantine army under the command of the emperor
himself, whom they captured, and by 1080 they had taken over Asia Minor and
were threatening Constantinople. It was news of the catastrophe at Manzikert that
prompted Gregory VII to make his call for a western military response, but it was
more than 20 years before his vision became a reality. By 1095, the situation in Asia
Minor had stabilised somewhat as had the politics of the Byzantine Empire. The
general Alexius Comnenus had been emperor since 1081, and he may even have
been thinking of fighting back against the Turks by the mid-1090s. Whether he
planned to bolster his defences or enhance his attacking options, however, Alexius
sent envoys to the west to request military help, and they arrived at the council
Urban II was holding at Piacenza in northern Italy in March 1095.
It is hard to think that Urban II would have made his speech at Clermont later
in 1095 had he not received Alexius’s appeal for help earlier in the year. In that
sense, therefore, the arrival of the Byzantine emissaries was a vital stimulus behind
the launch of the crusade. But it is also clear that helping the Byzantines was only
one of several reasons (and not the most important) why Urban acted as he did.
There is no original text or official record of the speech Urban gave at Clermont.
The versions of it which do survive were composed several years later, and all of
them, more importantly, were written in the knowledge that the First Crusade had
been a success. They may, therefore, give a misleading impression of how coher-
ent and wide-ranging the pope’s plans were. There are also significant differences
between the accounts of Urban’s speech. Nevertheless, despite these problems, the
texts have enough in common to suggest that several major themes underpinned
Urban’s call to arms. One of these was the need to help Christians in the East
suffering at the hands of their barbarous Muslim conquerors: ‘a foreign race, a
race absolutely alien to God . . . has invaded the lands of those Christians’, Urban
is reported to have said, and he spared no lurid detail in describing the horrors
inflicted by the Turks on those they controlled. Another, more specific, theme was
the need ‘to consider those who go on pilgrimage and travel across the Mediter-
ranean’. These honest, devout Christians were being attacked and exploited by
the greedy and unscrupulous. A third preoccupation in Urban’s speech was for the
spiritual welfare of the western military classes: they spent too much time fighting
and killing each other, the pope asserted, therefore dooming themselves to a life
of sin and putting their chances of eternal salvation at risk. The expedition to the
Holy Land now gave them a chance to channel their martial impulses into a more
meritorious kind of violence:
you devour and fight one another, make war and even kill one another as
you exchange blows. Stop these hatreds among yourselves, silence the quar-
rels, still the wars and let all dissensions be settled. Take the road to the Holy
Sepulchre, rescue that land from a dreadful race and rule over it yourselves.
This was ‘holy warfare’ and ‘a new way of attaining salvation’.

The idea that killing Muslims was a form of penance (equivalent to prayer and
fasting) was perhaps the most radical part of Urban’s message in 1095. But it was
probably not the main focus of his speech. Central to his arguments was the plight
of Jerusalem itself.
May you be especially moved by the Holy Sepulchre of our Lord and Sav-
iour, which is in the hands of unclean races, and by the Holy Places, which
are now treated dishonourably and are polluted irreverently by their unclean
practices. . . . This royal city, placed at the centre of the world is now held
captive by her enemies. . . . So she asks and prays to be liberated and calls
upon you increasingly to come to her aid.
Urban made the plight of Jerusalem sound urgent and desperate, and there is no
reason to doubt how sincere he was in wanting it back in Christian hands. How-
ever, Jerusalem had been under Muslim control since the mid-seventh century, and
there is no clear evidence to suggest that things had become worse there since the
Seljuq takeover of the city in the early 1070s. Urban was cleverly using what he
knew about the popularity of pilgrimage to provoke a response, and he was exploit-
ing popular notions of the mystical significance of the Holy City to generate out-
rage. And he was doing all of this for his own political reasons. None of these were
mentioned in his speech, of course, but it is impossible to understand the launch of
the First Crusade without placing it firmly within the wider context of the papal
reform movement and Urban’s ongoing struggle against Emperor Henry IV.
Faith 189
By the end of 1095, Henry IV was cut off and trapped in northern Italy, and
the council of Clermont gave Urban II an ideal opportunity to restate his claims to
authority over all Christians. Urban envisaged an army of western knights recruited
from across Latin Christendom liberating the Holy Land. Crucially, however, they
would do so as a force acting on the authority of the reform papacy. Their success
would be clear proof that God was on Urban’s side in his quarrel with the emperor
and decisive evidence that the reform papacy’s power (as it had always claimed)
truly did extend across frontiers and throughout kingdoms. Moreover, if the expe-
dition led to the rescue of Greek Christians under Muslim occupation, that would
go a long way towards showing that the papacy’s influence extended beyond West-
ern Europe, and it might eventually lead to the healing of the theological rift
between Rome and Constantinople, which had begun in 1054 when papal legates
had excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople. If this happened, the pope
really would be able to present himself as the ‘universal’ leader of all Christians.
This was an ambitious and risky strategy, and it could easily go wrong. There can
be little doubt, however, that by skilfully and shrewdly tapping into the spiritual
needs and preoccupations of his audience in 1095, Urban’s primary aim was to
strengthen and consolidate his own position.
Following his Clermont speech, Urban II spent the next ten months writing
letters, travelling around northern France and preaching in an effort to spread news
of the crusade and recruit participants. Other preachers, authorised by the pope,
did the same thing, and as the weeks went by, thousands of people came forward
at organised public gatherings to take their crusading vows, receive a pilgrim’s staff
and wallet and place themselves, their families and their lands under the protection
of the church. The response to Urban’s summons was evidently huge, much larger
in fact than he had planned. His aim had been to recruit a corps of elite knights
(numbering perhaps a few thousand), and in some versions of his Clermont speech,
other ranks of society were explicitly discouraged from joining the expedition. In
the event, however, something between 60,000 and 100,000 people set out from
Western Europe during 1096, and probably only 10 per cent of these were knights.
Young and old, rich and poor, male and female, able and infirm – all were inspired
by Urban’s message (or what they thought he had said) and willing to devote the
rest of their lives to executing his instructions.
It is difficult to generalise about why all these people responded so enthusiasti-
cally to Urban’s message. Every individual participant had his or her own reasons
for going on the expedition. For many of the poorer people who took part, accus-
tomed as they were to hard, grinding, short lives with little respite, the opportunity
to discover a new world (and, they must have hoped, a better one) would have
been hard to resist. Higher up the social scale, the crusade may have been a family
undertaking. Miles of Bray, for example, was accompanied on the expedition by
his son, three of his nephews, his brother-in-law and two of the latter’s sons. Other
families had a tradition of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, of which the crusade
was just the latest manifestation. At a similar social level, the servants and vassals
of powerful nobles who took the cross would have been expected to accompany
their lords whether they wanted to or not. Meanwhile, participants from all social
ranks would have seen the crusade as a chance to acquire riches and fame: lands
and treasure would be the fruits of victory, whilst prestige and glory would be the
reward for those who fought bravely and heroically.
But, as discussed earlier, it was almost certainly sincere piety and genuine reli-
gious feeling that motivated most people to go on crusade. The charters some of
them left behind when they went support this view, as do the reports of how the
crusaders found the strength to persist and drive themselves on even at the lowest
points of the expedition when everything seemed lost. What is more, most of those
who survived to see the end of the crusade returned home almost immediately,
strongly suggesting that completing their pilgrimage was their most important pri-
ority. The laity in eleventh-century Western Europe was left in no doubt by their
priests and preachers that they were sinful and that, unless they repented in a mean-
ingful way, their eternal lives would be spent in the agonising flames of Hell. Pil-
grimage, of course, was one form of penance. Urban was careful to characterise the
expedition he proposed as a penitential act (he never uttered the word ‘crusade’ –
indeed, it was not widely used until the thirteenth century), and it should not be
surprising if the offer of a remission of all penance for those who took part on the
crusade seemed attractive to so many. But this was no conventional pilgrimage – it
was an armed one. In some ways, Urban was building on Christian tradition. Over
the centuries the Church had developed the view that violence was justified if it
was authorised by a competent body, if the ends sought were worthy ones and
if the intentions of those carrying out the violent acts were selfless. The crusade
could just about be fitted into this category of justifiable ‘holy war’, although such
conflicts were usually expected to be defensive, not aggressive. Nevertheless, there
is a clear sense in the way the crusade was described by contemporaries that Urban’s
idea was seen as novel and even shocking, like nothing ever expressed before. After
generations of being told that fighting and killing were sinful and would lead to
an eternity in Hell, members of Europe’s warrior class, at whom Urban’s message
was principally aimed, were all at once told that they could save their own souls
and rescue Christianity itself by giving free rein to their martial instincts. With one
speech, Urban had turned a fundamental moral dilemma into a compelling moral
imperative.
Whether all the people who left on crusade had a completely accurate under-
standing of Urban’s offer is unclear. The concept of the forgiveness of all sins for
those who went on crusade only gradually became official doctrine. But this is also
rather beside the point. Simply and sincerely enough, most probably thought they
would be saved if they went to Jerusalem and helped to liberate it. It is also mislead-
ing to make a clear distinction between crusaders’ secular and religious motivations
and to regard the two as incompatible. Urban II had said, in the only surviving
official pronouncement from the council of Clermont, that the spiritual rewards
of going on the crusade were available to those who went ‘for devotion alone, not
to gain honour or money’. But it was widely understood that God would provide
earthly rewards to those who committed themselves devoutly to the expedition, so
Faith 191
if a crusader prospered, that was because God approved of what he was doing. To
put it crudely, material success was proof of piety.
There was no single crusading army. Different armed contingents set out from
different parts of Western Europe from the late summer of 1096. They were led
by powerful noblemen who had taken it upon themselves to respond to Urban’s
call: Raymond de St Gilles, Count of Toulouse; Robert II, Count of Flanders;
Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine; Robert, Duke of Normandy
(the son of William the Conqueror); Stephen, Count of Blois (Duke Robert’s
cousin); and Bohemond of Taranto (the son of Robert Guiscard) were the prin-
cipal leaders. Before the main armies departed, however, in spring 1096 an ear-
lier wave of pilgrims had left France under the leadership of the charismatic
preacher known as Peter the Hermit and his associate Walter Sansavoir (‘the
Penniless’). Another group had left from the Rhineland under count Emicho of
Leiningen, and it was at the hands of these travellers that the Jewish communities
in the Rhineland were put to the sword. These armies (which constituted what
has become known as The People’s Crusade) were once thought to have been
made up entirely of peasants. In fact, there were knights in the ranks, but overall
the participants were ill-equipped, poorly disciplined and disorganised. Many
died or deserted along the way, but plenty did get to Constantinople where
emperor Alexius, horrified by the sight of this unruly horde, acted quickly to
have them carried across the Bosphorus into Asia Minor. In September 1096,
they were all but wiped out by the Turks. Only a few crusaders, including Peter
the Hermit himself, survived.
As the People’s Crusade was meeting its grisly end at the hands of the Turks,
the main armies of the crusade were setting out from France, Germany and Italy.
By April 1097, they had all arrived at Constantinople. The leaders were probably
surprised to find that Emperor Alexius was not planning to assume command
of the expedition and certainly discomfited when he insisted on extracting oaths
of obedience and loyalty from them as the effective price of the ships, supplies
and intelligence which only he could provide. During the course of the crusade,
the relationship between the westerners and the Byzantines would deteriorate and
eventually collapse. Despite the awkwardness of the events at Constantinople, how-
ever, cooperation continued for the time being. Alexius assigned one of his gener-
als, Taticius, to escort the crusaders into and through Asia Minor, and when the
crusaders scored their first military victory by taking the city of Nicaea from its
Turkish garrison in June 1097, they did so with significant Byzantine help in the
form of boats carried overland from Constantinople.
After Nicaea, the crusaders began their long, slow and arduous march across
Asia Minor. They won a triumphant, backs to the wall victory over the Turks at
Dorylaeum at the start of July 1097, after which parts of the crusading army, led by
Tancred (Bohemond’s nephew) and Baldwin of Boulogne (Godfrey of Lorraine’s
brother), headed into Christian Armenia. The plan seems to have been for Tancred
and Baldwin to remove the Muslim occupiers from this region and create a safe
corridor along the northern coast of the Mediterranean which later expeditions
would be able to use. Baldwin headed even further east, however, to the ancient
Christian city of Edessa. He had been invited there by its ruler, Thoros, who
wanted help against his local rivals. Soon enough, though, Thoros was dead, and
Baldwin had taken control. Edessa thus became the first crusader state.
Meanwhile, by October 1097, the rest of the pilgrim army had arrived at the
great city of Antioch. Events here would prove to be the defining ones of the
entire crusade. Antioch was besieged for eight months, and during the winter of
1097–8, the crusaders experienced enormous hardship – many died or left the
expedition. When they finally did break into the city at the start of June 1098,
they were immediately besieged themselves by a Muslim army under the com-
mand of Kerbogah, the ruler of Mosul, which had come to relieve the city. The
westerners’ plight was dire. Their own siege of the city meant that there was no
food inside, and for two weeks their suffering intensified. It seemed only a matter
of time before they would have to surrender, be slaughtered or die of starvation.
Miraculously, however, on 14 June 1098, the Holy Lance (the spear which had
pierced Christ’s side on the cross) was found buried under the floor of St Peter’s
cathedral. Morale immediately revived, and on 28 June, the crusaders burst out
of the city gates, and Kerbogah’s army fled. This, at least, is how contemporary
western accounts describe the siege and battle of Antioch: the crusaders had been
put to the ultimate test, and they had come through thanks to their faith and their
belief that God would help them. In reality, of course, the discovery of the Holy
Lance was probably a setup, and there are even reports (from the Muslim side)
that the besieged and beleaguered crusaders offered to surrender in return for safe
passage out of Antioch, but that Kerbogah turned their request down. The final
battle, therefore, may have resulted from desperation as much as it did from a zeal-
ous belief in heavenly support. Nonetheless, however it had been achieved, this
most unlikely of victories was clear proof to the crusaders that they had God on
their side and that their cause was just. Surely nothing could stop them getting to
Jerusalem now.
After recuperating and arguing about what they should do next, the crusaders’
journey south from Antioch finally began in November 1098. More disagreements
and disputes between the leaders took up the next few months and slowed pro-
gress down, but on 7 June 1099, after travelling for the best part of three years, the
armies of the First Crusade finally arrived outside the walls of Jerusalem. The city
was occupied by forces from Fatimid Egypt (they had retaken it from the Turks in
1098), but the sight of the Holy City seems to have reinvigorated the crusaders, and
after only six weeks, on 15 July 1099, some of Godfrey de Bouillon’s men man-
aged to clamber onto the ramparts and enter the city. After opening the gates, the
crusaders poured into Jerusalem and carnage ensued. An enormous, indiscriminate
slaughter of the people of Jerusalem was carried out. Muslims, Jews and Christians,
men and women, young and old, were all targets as the crusaders’ frustrations and
stresses boiled over in what was almost a celebration of (in their view) sanctified
violence and plunder. One eye witness was Raymond of Aguilers, a Provençal
Faith 193
cleric who became Raymond of Toulouse’s chaplain during the crusade. Accord-
ing to him,
Some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others pierced by arrows

plunged from towers, and yet others, tortured for a long time, were burned
to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses
and streets, and indeed there was a running to and fro of men and knights
over the corpses.
Only a few lines later, however, Raymond also described how the crusaders
behaved immediately after their savage victory: ‘With the fall of the city, it was
rewarding to see the worship of the pilgrims at the Holy Sepulchre, the clapping of
hands, the rejoicing and singing of a new song to the Lord’. Appalling carnage and
intense spirituality: the combination of these two things defined the First Crusade.
Three weeks after the capture of Jerusalem, the crusaders defeated an Egyptian
relief army at Ascalon. With this victory, the First Crusade properly came to an end.
Probably no more than 10,000 of those who had set out from Western Europe in
1096 had made it to Jerusalem. Despite the deaths and the suffering along the way,
however, and even though (contrary to Urban II’s intentions) western relations with
the Byzantine Empire actually worsened during the crusade, it had realised its prin-
cipal objective and recovered the Holy City for Christianity. So whatever it failed
to achieve, contemporaries were in no doubt that the crusade had been a colossal
triumph. How had it succeeded? As the crusade had gone on, and as familiarity with
the landscape, conditions and enemy had increased, its armies had become battle-
hardened and ruthless. Those crusaders who eventually attacked Jerusalem had gone
through the worst of times, but they were an experienced, skilled and disciplined
force. They were also well-led. Although there were disputes between the crusade’s
leaders throughout the expedition, they usually came together in combat when
it mattered, at Dorylaeum, Antioch and Jerusalem, for example. And there were
extraordinary acts of individual bravery from the leaders, too: Bohemond held the
Turks at bay under enormous pressure before the arrival of reinforcements at Dory-
laeum, whilst Robert of Normandy led a cavalry charge at Ascalon that scattered
the much larger Egyptian army. The crusaders could not have succeeded as they
did without external help, however. The Byzantines provided essential assistance
at Nicaea, supplied the crusaders at Antioch from their offshore base on Cyprus
and were probably a vital source of intelligence for the duration of the crusade. In
June 1099, Genoese traders arrived at Jaffa as the crusaders prepared to make their
final assault on Jerusalem. They dismantled their own ships and carried the wood to
Jerusalem where it was used to construct the siege machinery used to attack the walls
of the Holy City. It is hard to think that the intervention of the Genoese was purely
coincidental (contemporaries, of course, saw it as a miracle), and moments like this
hint at an entire network of contacts and communications, not revealed in the sur-
viving sources, which the crusaders built and utilised as their journey lengthened.
But whilst military strength, inspirational leadership and external help all con-
tributed significantly to the success of the First Crusade, it is hard to see how it
would have succeeded had the Muslim world it encountered not been divided
and distracted by its own internal problems. Islam had been divided for centuries
into Shi‘ite and Sunni branches, as a result of an unresolved dispute about who
the rightful successors to the Prophet Muhammed were. By the eleventh century,
the Sunni Abbasid caliphs ruled their empire from Baghdad, whilst the Shi‘ite
Fatimid caliphs ran theirs from Cairo. Needless to say, they were not allies. From
the 1090s, however, the situation in Muslim Syria became decidedly more unsta-
ble. The death of the Seljuq sultan Malik Shah in 1092 provoked a power struggle
between his kinsmen, and they were soon far more occupied with fighting over his
empire in Syria, Iran, Iraq and beyond to pay much attention to the arrival of the
crusaders. The Turks’ easy annihilation of the People’s Crusade probably also gave
them a false sense of superiority and led them to under-estimate the threat posed
by the more professional armies which followed. As Seljuq power fragmented,
moreover, individuals who had been appointed to rule over individual towns and
cities began to set themselves up as independent rulers. Cities like Mosul, Aleppo
and Damascus were all governed by different warlords who were more interested in
getting the better of each other than fighting the crusaders. Smaller towns had their
own leaders, too, many of whom were determined to extend their power further.
Only at Antioch in 1098 did one leader, Kerbogah of Mosul, manage to put some
kind of coalition together. Muslim sources, however, describe how the divisions
within the coalition’s ranks and the different leaders’ suspicions of each other were
the main reason for Muslim defeat. By the later 1090s, the Seljuk empire had
become an enormous war zone fought over by rival generals, and the armies of
the First Crusade were just one more force amongst many. Even if the nature and
scale of the threat posed by the crusade had been properly understood in Antioch,
Damascus and Jerusalem (and the signs are that it was not), the kind of coordinated,
organised response that would almost certainly have destroyed it was impossible to
engineer. The first crusaders could not have encountered their Muslim adversaries
at a more favourable time.
The divided state of the Muslim world did not make Christian victory inevi-
table, however. The armies faced by the crusaders were still formidable, and one
nearly won the day at Dorylaeum. Had Kerbogah’s army reached Antioch before
the crusaders entered the city, moreover, it is hard to see how the Christians could
have survived. Luck played its part in their success on this and other occasions,
although contemporaries thought more in terms of timely divine intervention than
blind good fortune. And indeed, this attitude probably does more to explain the
success of the First Crusade than anything else: ultimately, fierce religious zeal on
the crusaders’ part motivated and spurred them on in the face of the overwhelm-
ing challenges they faced. For all the recurring acrimony within crusader ranks, all
could agree that Jerusalem, the holiest city on Earth, was their objective. This focus
on a shared spiritual goal was crucial. The discovery of the Holy Lance at Antioch
in June 1098, whether contrived or not, was proof to many that God had not
Faith 195
abandoned his faithful followers. Then, in the decisive battle with Kerbogah, saints,
angels and the ghosts of the dead were seen fighting on the crusaders’ side. The great
barefoot procession around the walls of Jerusalem which the crusaders made prior
to their final assault on the city in July 1099 was a reminder that they saw them-
selves first and foremost as pilgrims. The sources are filled with accounts of smaller
expressions and demonstrations of piety and devotion and never tire of highlight-
ing the religious fervour which drove the crusaders on. It is possible, of course,
that the chroniclers, many of them clergymen, sought with hindsight to impose a
degree of religiosity on the crusade which it did not in reality have. But the sheer
weight of such evidence makes this doubtful. The crusaders’ shared sufferings and
victories were not just earthly triumphs: crudely but sincerely, they believed that
they were carrying out divine orders and executing a divine plan. No subsequent
crusade enjoyed the success of the first. Muslim disunity, Byzantine assistance and
military skill all explain this to a degree. But it was Christian solidarity which, in
the end, led to victory.
The ferocious aggression of the First Crusade, which culminated in the capture
of Jerusalem in 1099, was followed on the part of the victorious survivors by prag-
matic adaptation and assimilation. Three entire principalities and one kingdom
(collectively known to historians as the ‘crusader states’, the Latin East or O
utremer –
the land beyond the sea) were constructed more or less from scratch along the east-
ern coast of the Mediterranean in the early twelfth century. They were modelled
on the political systems the Franks knew from Western Europe, and as a result,
French-speaking aristocracies came to rule over a mixture of Christians (Latin,
Greek and more), Muslims (Sunni and Shi‘ite), Jews and a range of other religious
and ethnic groups. Some modern commentators have seen in Outremer, and in
other frontier areas where Latin Christians took control during this period, an
early form of western colonialism. Most recently, by contrast, the continued use
of the term crusader states has also been criticised by some as perpetuating a nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century colonialist view of these polities which saw
them primarily as extensions of those in Western Europe. However, as far as the
Latin East is concerned, the region developed few if any of the institutional ties to
the West which characterised later colonial expansion, and the states founded there
were effectively autonomous and independent. Nor was their financial exploitation
designed to benefit a dominant, controlling homeland. Money, or rather the lack
of it, was a constant problem for the rulers of Outremer, but what they raised they
spent on themselves. So whilst the Latin East can usefully be considered in the con-
text of wider European expansion during this period, this should not be pushed too
far. The crusader states were a unique political, social and economic experiment
which, over time, developed their own identities and outlooks. Back in Europe,
meanwhile, their creation and growth meant that, for the foreseeable future, the
practice of crusading would continue, and ideas about crusading would evolve.
The biggest and most important of the crusader states was the Kingdom of Jeru-
salem. However, the first crusader state, the County of Edessa, had been established
by Baldwin of Boulogne even before the capture of the Holy City. It had quickly
proved its strategic usefulness when the arrival of Kerbogah’s army at Antioch in
June 1098 had been delayed for three weeks as it tried unsuccessfully to besiege
Edessa. The creation of the Principality of Antioch began early, too, and was ini-
tially the work of Bohemond of Taranto, who stayed behind in the city and set
himself up as ruler there after the great victory over Kerbogah. When Bohemond
was captured and imprisoned by the Turks in 1100, however, his nephew Tancred
took charge in Antioch and should be considered the real founder of the princi-
pality. Count Raymond of Toulouse was instrumental in the founding of the last
crusader state, the County of Tripoli, but his task was unfinished when he died in
1105, and it was not until 1109 that the city of Tripoli was captured and the first
Count of Tripoli, Raymond’s eldest son, Bertrand, was installed.
It is easy to overlook the challenges faced by the rulers of Outremer at the start
of the twelfth century and to underestimate just how remarkable the establish-
ment of the four Latin principalities was. It is worth remembering, too, that the
construction of new states was never part of the original crusading plan. In 1100,
the Franks (the collective name used in some of the most prominent narrative
accounts for those westerners who participated in the First Crusade and settled in
the East) controlled very little territory. The cities of Edessa and Antioch were in
Christian hands as well as their hinterlands, but they were cut off from each other
by their Muslim neighbours and hundreds of miles from the fledgling Kingdom of
Jerusalem, which consisted of not much more than the Holy City itself, the ter-
ritory around Galilee and the port of Jaffa. A lack of manpower was also a serious
issue in Outremer and would remain a chronic problem as long as the crusader
states existed. Most of those who took part in the final stages of the First Crusade
had returned home after completing their pilgrimage, and by early 1100, there
may have been as few as 300 knights and 2,000 infantry left to defend Jerusalem.
What is more, there was the question of funds, and ways would have to be found
to make the crusader states financially viable. Encouraging trade would be essential,
and so the focus during the first decade of the 1100s, at least in the Kingdom of
Jerusalem, was on aggressive, assertive military action designed to acquire control
of the ports along the Mediterranean coast. Acre was captured in 1104, and by
1110, most of the coastline from Acre to Jaffa was in Christian hands. Foreign help
proved vital here, and it was provided by fleets from the great Italian trading cities.
In the summer of 1100, 26 galleys and 4 supply ships set out from Genoa carrying
about 3,000 men. They sacked the port of Caesarea in May 1101. Genoese ships
also blockaded Acre from the sea in 1104, whilst Venetian ones played a vital role in
the capture of Tyre in 1124. In return for their service, the Italians received trading
privileges from the kings of Jerusalem and their own trading areas within the cities
they had helped capture. Individual rewards were just as precious, however. After
taking Caesarea, each Genoese sailor was given two pounds of pepper, and the fleet
returned home with perhaps its greatest prize, a green bowl, thought to be made of
emerald and reputedly used at the Last Supper. Of course, the Genoese had already
provided essential help at several points during the First Crusade, and such assis-
tance had a long history. Pisan ships had accompanied the army of Otto I in 962 as
Faith 197
it marched south into Calabria, and a model for the crusader states’ arrangements
with the north-Italian cities was established in 1082 when the emperor Alexius
I issued a Golden Bull giving the merchants of Venice the right to trade tax-free in
any part of the Byzantine Empire.
One reason the Kingdom of Jerusalem was so successful in the early twelfth
century was leadership. The first ruler was Godfrey de Bouillon, who took the
grand title of Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, but he died in July 1100, and his
younger brother Baldwin of Boulogne (until then the ruler of Edessa) became King
Baldwin I of Jerusalem. Baldwin was an astute politician and a dynamic military
commander. In the early years of his reign he had to fight several large-scale battles
against Egyptian armies, but he ended his reign (he died in 1118) whilst returning
from his own campaign in Egypt. Not only did he conquer much of the Medi-
terranean coastline, moreover, he also began the construction of castles (another
western import) to protect vulnerable parts of his kingdom. The great fortress at
Montreal, which he began building in 1115, was designed to give the king of Jeru-
salem control of the region east of the River Jordan and the Red Sea. Baldwin’s
successor, his cousin who became Baldwin II, was equally concerned to continue
his kingdom’s growth. He led at least 19 military campaigns during his reign, and
although not everything he did was a success (he was captured in 1123 and was
still in prison when his armies captured Tyre in 1124, whilst his failure to capture
Aleppo in 1125 had significant consequences), by the time he died in 1131, he
and his predecessor had between them built a kingdom and made it a force to be
reckoned with.
Able though they were, however, Baldwin I and Baldwin II were helped by
the context within which they worked. The success of the First Crusade shocked
and demoralised the Muslim world. It remained hopelessly divided and unable to
formulate a coherent response to what had happened. One Muslim commentator,
Al-Sulami, remarked in the early 1100s how the Franks
looked down from Syria on disunited kingdoms, hearts in disagreement,

linked with secret resentments. . . . They continued assiduously in the holy
war against the Muslims, while the Muslims did not trouble about them or
join forces to fight them, leaving to each other the encounter until they [the
Franks] made themselves rulers of lands beyond their utmost hopes.
Writing in 1105, when the crusader states were still only forming, this sounds
almost prophetic. Al-Sulami made even greater claims, however. Already, he said,
the Franks had taken Sicily and conquered much of southern Spain. Their arrival in
the East was only the latest manifestation of their much bigger plan to take on the
whole of the Muslim world. Whether Al-Sulami was right to see the development
of Outremer as part of a wider, deliberate western attempt to subdue Islam is open
to question, but he was certainly correct to emphasise how hamstrung the Muslim
response to the new situation in the East was as a result of rivalries and suspicions
between different Islamic rulers and warlords. Having said that, they could still
present a significant threat. Baldwin I struggled to repel a series of Egyptian armies

in the early 1100s, whilst Baldwin II’s failure to capture Aleppo in 1125 ultimately
allowed the warlord Zengi, already the ruler of Mosul, to take over that city in
1128. Zengi would prove to be the first in a series of Muslim leaders who between
them reunited the Muslim world and put the Franks back on the defensive.
The single biggest setback to early Latin progress in Outremer came in Anti-
och. By 1119, the ruler of Antioch was Roger of Salerno (his uncle, Tancred, had
died in 1112). Roger was defeated and killed in that year by a Turkish army at the
so-called Battle of the Field of Blood; the victorious Turks overran much of the
principality following their victory, and Baldwin II was required to travel north
from Jerusalem to salvage the situation. Many of Antioch’s most testing problems,
however, arose not from its dealing with its Muslim neighbours, but from its rela-
tionship with the Byzantine Empire. The emperors in Constantinople regarded
Antioch as part of their empire and had expected it to be returned to their control
after it was taken in 1098. For their part, first Bohemond and then Tancred aspired
to rule their principality as independently and as free from external interference as
possible. After Bohemond was released from Muslim captivity in 1103, indeed, he
travelled back to Europe to find backing for a new crusade against the Byzantines
in the Balkans. The campaign would have been a re-run of the one he had unsuc-
cessfully launched alongside his father Robert Guiscard in the 1080s. Bohemond
was welcomed in the west as a returning hero, he received papal backing for his
plans and even married the daughter of King Philip I of France, Constance, in
1106. In the event, however, Bohemond’s second attack on the Byzantines was
even more of a failure than the first had been a quarter of a century before, and
in 1108, he was forced to submit to the humiliating Treaty of Devol in which
he agreed to hold Antioch as a fief of the Byzantine Empire. Bohemond never
returned to his principality (he died in Italy in 1111), and it was his nephew Tan-
cred who worked and fought hardest to make Antioch into a viable political unit,
whilst all the time continuing to reject Byzantine claims to overlordship. Even so,
the principality remained vulnerable at moments of crisis. Major military defeat (as
in 1119) and recurring issues surrounding the succession meant that the kings of
Jerusalem were forced to travel north repeatedly during this period to stabilise the
situation in the principality. Between 1110 and 1137, the rulers of Jerusalem were
also regents of Antioch for no less than 13 years.
Over the course of the twelfth century, military activity went hand in hand
with the development of political structures. By the end of the 1120s, these were
still being refined, and each of the four crusader states evolved a little differently.
Nevertheless, the outlines of these structures were clear, as was the debt which they
owed to the western polities they were based on. In the Kingdom of Jerusalem,
the king kept personal control of the Holy City itself and major centres such as
Acre and Tyre. Beyond the royal lands, the kingdom was divided into a number
of separate lordships, such as Caesarea, Jaffa, Sidon and Galilee. Each was placed
under the control of a man appointed by the king, a tenant-in-chief. Formal rela-
tions between the king, his tenants-in-chief and leading ecclesiastical figures in
Faith 199
the kingdom, along with matters of taxation and other important areas of policy,
were managed in the High Court (Haute Cour). Many lords also received regular
payments from the king (historians call these money fiefs) which were designed to
insure them against the ever-present threat of losing their lands. Within the lord-
ships, the lords had considerable freedom to administer justice and attend to affairs
as they saw fit, but as the king’s tenants-in-chief, they also had to provide him with
military service in the form of knights for the royal army. An incomplete list of
these obligations dating from the mid-1180s gives a total of 675 knights owed to
the king by his vassals. In addition, the Church and the urban populations of towns
such as Acre and Caesarea had an obligation to provide the royal army with just
under 5,200 sergeants (foot soldiers). Much more important than its role in provid-
ing troops for the king, however, was the Church’s responsibility for establishing
and spreading Latin Christianity throughout Outremer. After the First Crusade, the
Franks installed western clerics as patriarchs of Jerusalem and Antioch and created
a network of Latin archbishoprics and bishoprics in the region. The archbishoprics
of Caesarea, Nazareth, Tyre and Petra belonged to the patriarchate of Jerusalem, as
did the bishoprics of Ramleh-Lydda, Bethlehem, Sebastea, Tiberias, Beirut, Acre,
Sidon, Banyas and St Abraham (Hebron).
Even with reasonably robust political and ecclesiastical mechanisms in place,
however, power across Outremer remained fragile and was easily undermined. This
was especially the case when one ruler died and another had to be appointed. In
the first decades of the eleventh century, succession crises were common in Outre-
mer, and the Frankish elites had to be both realistic and innovative about how they
were resolved. In 1098, Bishop Adhémar of Le Puy died following the crusaders’
victory at Antioch, and Urban II sent Archbishop Daimbert of Pisa to replace him
as papal legate. Daimbert wanted more than this, however. He had himself installed
as patriarch of Jerusalem at Christmas 1099, and when Duke Godfrey of Lorraine
died in July 1100, he aimed to take control of the entire fledgling Kingdom of
Jerusalem. In the end, Duke Godfrey’s followers were forced to call on his brother,
Count Baldwin of Edessa, to intervene, and Baldwin effectively forced his way on
to the throne. Then, for all his successes as king, Baldwin I left a difficult situation
behind when he died in 1118. He had married Countess of Adelaide of Sicily
(the widow of Count Roger I and the mother of Roger II) in 1113 but had been
forced to repudiate her in 1117 under pressure from the Church as his first wife
was still alive. Neither marriage produced a son, moreover, and in 1118, Baldwin’s
nearest male relative was his brother, Count Eustace of Boulogne. But Eustace was
in France, leaving the way clear for the late king’s cousin, Baldwin of Edessa, to
become Baldwin II of Jerusalem. Baldwin’s succession was justified on the basis that
speed and clarity of action were essential for the security of the kingdom, and it was
too dangerous to wait for the elderly Count Eustace to travel all the way to Jerusa-
lem. Nonetheless, elements within the kingdom’s ruling class disapproved of what
had happened, and in 1123, they went so far as to offer the throne to the Count of
Flanders, Charles the Good. Charles refused, and Baldwin II reigned until 1131.
But he left only daughters when he died, and the idea of a woman ruling as queen
in her own right, even in the unique circumstances of Outremer, was problematic.
Baldwin and his advisers had seen this issue coming, and in 1129 his eldest daugh-
ter, Melisende, had married Count Fulk V of Anjou. It was hoped that Fulk would
be the strong, prestigious figure needed to maintain stability in the kingdom, so he
handed over his French county to his son Geoffrey and travelled to Jerusalem to
become Melisende’s husband and the future king. However, according to at least
one report, Baldwin II changed his plans on his deathbed. Fulk would no longer
be his sole heir, but one member of a triumvirate (the other two were Melisende
and their infant son, Baldwin) which would rule the kingdom. The nature of Fulk’s
royal authority was open to question from the start, then, as was its extent relative
to that of his wife: were they equals or not? But there were other issues as well. He
was resented by some within the established aristocracy as a newcomer whose own
followers were sucking up resources and monopolising royal patronage. This was
the main reason behind the revolt against Fulk which was led by Count Hugh of
Jaffa in 1134. The revolt failed to remove Fulk and was suppressed, but after it Fulk
had to rein in his personal ambitions and rule alongside his wife.
It was not just in the Kingdom of Jerusalem where succession problems dic-
tated the course of politics. Bohemond’s imprisonment and subsequent absences
in France and Italy placed power in Antioch in the hands of his nephew, Tancred.
Like Bohemond, Tancred married a daughter of King Philip I of France, Cecile,
but they had no children, and he was succeeded as ruler of Antioch by his cousin,
Roger of Salerno. Roger was married to a sister of Baldwin II, but, killed in 1119
at the Battle of the Field of Blood, he also died childless. All this time, however, the
heir in waiting to the principality was Bohemond’s young son, also called Bohe-
mond, who had been born in 1107 or 1108. After 1111 when his father died, both
Tancred and Roger were officially Bohemond II’s regents. But the young prince
was still too young to take control in 1119, and he stayed in France until 1126,
during which time Baldwin II acted as regent of Antioch. When Bohemond II
finally arrived in the principality in 1126, he proved to be an energetic ruler, but
he was killed in battle in 1130. Bohemond had married one of Baldwin II’s daugh-
ters, Alice, but their only child when he died was a two-year-old girl, Constance.
A fight for control over the young girl was bound to follow.
As well as building political and ecclesiastical systems and dealing with succes-
sion crises, the Franks also had to construct ways of co-existing with the indigenous
peoples of the lands they now ruled. There was no realistic possibility of removing
by force those who were already there in 1100. The Franks were quite capable of
massacring large numbers of innocent people (they did so at Caesarea in 1101 and
Beirut in 1110 as well as at Jerusalem in 1099), but it must quickly have become
clear that such an approach was unsustainable and counterproductive. For one
thing, the Franks were always in a minority, and that alone made them vulnerable
to local uprisings and rebellions if internal affairs were poorly handled. Beyond this,
they needed experienced and skilled locals to keep tilling the soil and producing
crops. Following his capture of Sidon in 1110, Baldwin I allowed the local Muslim
farmers to keep their property ‘because of their usefulness in cultivating the land’,
Faith 201
according to Fulcher of Chartres, a priest who had taken part in the First Crusade.
Furthermore, the prosperity of these new principalities depended on maintaining
the trading links and networks established over centuries across Syria, Iraq, North
Africa and Byzantium by the Muslims, Jews and Christians of the region; if urban
centres were to develop along the coast and inland and produce the taxes which
the rulers so badly needed, the Franks would need local cooperation to make them
viable. As a result, although Muslims and Jews were placed at the bottom of the
legal ladder, below Greek Christians and, at the top, Latin ones, they were allowed
to practise their faiths in return for the payment of a poll tax and, probably, the sur-
render of a proportion of their crops to the ruling authorities. After a turbulent first
few years, therefore, relations between rulers and ruled in the Latin East were typi-
cally peaceful, which may be the reason why some Frankish settlers were prepared
to settle in the Syrian countryside rather than stay within the walls of their castles
and towns. In 1120, for example, the canons of the church of the Holy Sepulchre
established a settlement just north of Jerusalem at Magna Mahumeria. The settlers,
mostly volunteers from southern France along with a few Spaniards and Italians,
were encouraged by generous offers of lands and housing plots, in return for which
they gave a proportion of their crops to the canons. By the mid-1150s the village
had a population of 450, and by 1187 it had risen to about 700.
Cultural and economic contacts, as well as political, military and religious ones,
between the Frankish settlers and the established communities in Outremer were
frequent and necessary. How far this led to assimilation between the different
groups is harder to say, but intermarriage certainly took place; westerners and their
descendants learned parts if not all of a range of new languages, and clothing styles
were adapted. Fulcher of Chartres, who died in 1127, famously claimed that a dis-
tinctively Frankish identity was formed under these conditions:
We who were Occidentals [westerners] have become Orientals. He who

was a Roman or a Frank has, in this land, been made into a Galilean or a
Palestinian. We have already forgotten the places of our birth; already these
are unknown to many of us or not mentioned any more.
He may have been exaggerating the extent of the changes he described, of course,
and there is plenty of evidence to show that the Franks retained strong memories
of the lands they came from.
Western help remained essential for the ongoing survival of the crusader states
where a lack of manpower remained the most serious and persistent problem faced
by the Franks. Traders, merchants and pilgrims came and went, and the number of
permanent western settlers remained small. And whilst the latter were important as
farmers and artisans, their military capabilities were limited. An appeal to the west
for fresh troops was made in 1101, and those who made it to Outremer provided
vital help in battles at Ramla and Jaffa in 1102. But this was as far as their involve-
ment went, and a lack of military options continued to dog the crusader states. In
1127, Hugh de Payns travelled to Western Europe on the orders of Baldwin II in an
effort to recruit new troops, and the marriage arranged between Fulk of Anjou and
Melisende in 1128 was designed at least in part to bring an army, not just a royal
bridegroom, to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. These were piecemeal responses to an
ongoing, chronic problem, however. One unplanned and partial solution was the
creation of the so-called Military Orders. Hugh de Payns, the man who travelled to
Europe in 1127 to enlist men and raise money, was by then the Master of the Tem-
plars. A French knight, he and a small group of like-minded laymen had founded
their organisation in 1119 to protect pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem. They soon
attracted influential support: Baldwin II gave them their headquarters in Jerusalem’s
Temple complex (this is where the Templars got their name from), and Bernard of
Clairvaux saw something new and different in them. They wanted to live celibate,
communal lives like monks, but their equivalent of monastic manual work and
study was fighting. Bernard wrote an entire polemic, De laude novae militae (‘In
Praise of the New Knighthood’) in support of the Templars, he designed a Rule
for them based on the Rule of St Augustine, and he was instrumental in securing
official church approval for the Templars as a new religious order at the Council of
Troyes in 1129. Like the Templars, the Hospitallers (members of the Order of the
Hospital of St John of Jerusalem) also became warrior monks. They had originally
been established as far back as the 1080s, in buildings next to the Holy Sepulchre,
to care for sick pilgrims in the Holy City. Members lived a communal life and took
monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience; in 1113 they were recognised
by the pope as an independent religious order, and eventually they adopted their
own Rule. From the 1130s, however, they became increasingly involved in military
affairs and the defence of the crusader states.
By the late 1120s, the Templars and Hospitallers were still developing. Their
numbers were small, and only in subsequent decades would the orders come to
underpin the defences of Outremer and grow into what was, in effect, a stand-
ing army for the Latin East. On one level, the creation of the military orders
can be fitted into the wider context described earlier which saw the creation of
multiple new religious orders in the early twelfth century. However, the idea of
fighting monks was radical and quite new. Shorn of worldly cares and ambitions,
the theory went, they would have none of the failings of ordinary, vainglorious,
greedy knights. Their intentions would be pure, and their motivation, conditioned
by their faith, would be selfless. The military orders were a direct and distinctive
product of the particular circumstances in Outremer and perhaps the best example
of the kind of improvised experimentation which characterised the early years of
Latin settlement there.
PART 3
The Twelfth Century,
c.1120–c.1220
7
CONTEXT
During the twelfth century across Western Europe, most of the economic and
social trends and developments identified in Chapters 1 and 4 accelerated. Despite
the evidential difficulties which make any figures little more than speculative, it is
clear that population growth continued. There were regional variations, of course:
by about 1200, studies suggest that the population in Iberia had grown about 20 per
cent since the mid-tenth century, whilst the English, Scandinavian and Italian pop-
ulations increased by half during the same period. In parts of France the figure may
have been as high as two-thirds. A warming climate probably played a part here, in
so far as it extended growing seasons and allowed for the production of more crops.
But the climate could be a killer, too: famine (as well as disease) was still a regular
occurrence, and child mortality remained very high. Contemporary sources liked
to mention natural disasters and destructively bad weather and did so frequently: in
1196, for example, according to the rather matter-of-fact declaration by the English
chronicler William of Newburgh, ‘in many places the mass of the poor perished
through hunger’. ‘Ordinary’ life expectancy, once the perils of infancy had been
negotiated, was probably in the forties, although there are plenty of examples of
people (overwhelmingly high-status ones) who lived longer than that.
Whatever the causes of demographic growth (the problems associated with
arguments about the so-called Agricultural Revolution of this period were dis-
cussed in Chapter 4), as population increased it continued to seek out new places to
live and work. Locally this meant clearing woodland (‘assarting’), draining marshes
and reclaiming land from the sea so that more arable farming could take place. On
a larger scale, however, this was a period when great expanses of already fertile
territory were brought under western Christian control for the first time. In Ibe-
ria, for example, Christian settlement of previously Muslim-controlled territories
followed in the wake of military conquest. But this was most famously the case
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-11
206 The Twelfth Century, c.1120–c.1220
on the eastern frontiers of the German kingdom. Some historians have referred
to this process of expansion as the Drang nach Osten (‘the drive to the east’) or the
Ostsiedlung (‘the settlement eastwards’), and it had first begun to happen in the
second half of the 900s, only to be brought to an abrupt halt by the great Slav
uprising of the early 980s. However, military conquests of Slav-controlled regions
during the twelfth century by German lords like Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony
and Albert the Bear, the first Margrave of Brandenburg, were consolidated first by
brutal depopulation and then resettlement by people incentivised to migrate to
the new Latin Christian outposts being established in lands east of the River Elbe.
People from Flanders were in particular demand because of the expertise they had
acquired in draining their own low-lying homeland during the tenth and eleventh
centuries. Further impetus towards expansion in these regions was provided by the
Crusades, which gave a religious gloss to this process when they were extended
into northern Europe in the middle third of the twelfth century. Within a few
decades of this, areas such as Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia and Estonia were
being incorporated into Latin Christendom and settled by migrants from the west.
Another major feature of this period was continuing urbanisation in the wake
of population growth and movement. This process was already well underway by
1100, but as well as established towns developing further from this point, many new
ones were founded – Munich, for example, by Henry the Lion in 1157. Urbanisa-
tion was prevalent and concentrated in some parts of Western Europe more than in
others: northern Italy, for example, and northern Europe either side of the English
Channel across to the Rhine. Domesday Book listed 112 English ‘boroughs’ at the
end of the 1080s, and it has been calculated that more than 125 planned towns
were established in England between the Norman Conquest and the 1220s. But
across Western Europe the number of towns with populations of more than 5,000
increased significantly by 1200, and towns with populations of more than 20,000
were spread across the continent from York to Palermo. Some were much bigger
than this as well: it is thought that London at least doubled in size from 20,000
to more than 40,000 during this period, whilst it has been estimated that in 1200
Venice and Milan had populations of about 80,000 and 90,000, respectively. And as
urban populations grew, so the towns themselves expanded: the walls of Florence
begun in 1184 encompassed 200 acres, but new ones built a hundred years later
enclosed more than 1,500; meanwhile the walls of Cologne, which surrounded an
area of about 300 acres in the early 1100s, had been extended to encircle nearly
1,000 by the end of the century.
Local rulers and lords were inevitably keen to control towns within the regions
they governed: they generated wealth through trade and commerce, and their for-
tifications made them desirable. Towns could also be centres of resistance to lordly
interference as well, if the townspeople considered that the local ruler was trying
to meddle too much in their affairs. This might lead to conflict, but prudent rulers
also occasionally had to be more sensitive to urban demands. They often played an
active role in stimulating urban growth, most often by granting a charter (at a price)
to a town which gave it some degree of jurisdictional and financial autonomy. King
Alfonso VII of Castile did this after capturing the Muslim city of Orejo in 1139,
for example, and William Clito, in his short time as Count of Flanders during the
1120s, did something similar for St Omer. Even the mighty Henry the Lion felt
it necessary to negotiate with the leading citizens of Lübeck after seizing control
of the city in 1159; and when in 1200 King John granted the borough of Ipswich
to its burgesses (the inhabitants of an English borough) for a one-off payment
of 100 marks and a fixed annual fee, he exempted them from tolls and, amongst
other concessions, allowed them to elect two town bailiffs and four coroners. The
award of such liberties and rights in turn encouraged the leading citizens of many
towns to develop institutions designed further to facilitate self-government and
establish even tighter internal control, free of a lord’s influence, over a town’s politi-
cal, economic and judicial administration. Communal regimes under the rule of
consuls were already well-established in many northern Italian cities by the end
of the eleventh century, but many more urban centres in other parts of Europe,
particularly in areas of expanding urban prosperity such as Flanders and other parts
of northern France, were also beginning to define themselves and be recognised as
self-regulating communes during this period. The citizens of Laon tried to form
a commune to escape the control of their lord, the local bishop, in 1108. Initially
Bishop Waldric agreed to their demands, but he soon revoked the charter he had
granted. This led to violence, and the bishop himself was amongst those killed.
Eventually, however, the commune of Laon was officially recognised by the French
king in 1128. Communal status was not always granted freely or willingly, there-
fore, and sometimes it had to be fought for. Once obtained, moreover, such status
was jealously guarded, as Frederick Barbarossa found when he attempted, ulti-
mately with only moderate success, to assert imperial control over the communes
of Lombardy. Having said that, not all towns with privileges became communes:
even relatively weak Capetian kings such as Louis VI and Louis VII were usually
cautious about granting full communal rights within their demesne lands, while
consistently dominant royal authority in places such as England and southern Italy
ensured that communes did not develop at all.
As systems of urban self-government evolved, within towns individual trades
and crafts continued to organise themselves more systematically into sworn asso-
ciations (‘confraternities’, historians sometimes call them) and, eventually, guilds.
These organisations emerged to control the operation and membership of a par-
ticular craft or trade, as well as the quality of items produced by the artisans who
belonged to them and the prices they charged. In England, there were weavers’
guilds in London, Oxford, Winchester, Huntingdon and Lincoln as early as the
1130s, and guilds of merchants were common in English towns by the reign of
Henry II. Lords saw the encouragement of guilds as a way of further stimulating
trade. The Parisian merchant corporation of the marchands de l’eau, for example,
had its existing privileges confirmed by Louis VII in 1170; these included the right
to supervise river traffic on the Seine and levy tolls. Guilds were primarily eco-
nomic organisations, and in support of this they had their own officials, powers and
legal identities, but they also eventually fulfilled a range of functions beyond the
purely economic, not least charitable ones. The guilds became central to the way
European towns would function during the rest of the Middle Ages, and in many
places membership of a guild would become a necessary qualification for participa-
tion in town government.
Jewish communities formed another distinctive presence in many urban set-
tings across Western Europe by the start of the twelfth century. Jews were officially
tolerated by the ecclesiastical authorities because they provided Christians with a
visible reminder of Christ’s Passion. More pragmatically, however, they were use-
ful. The Church’s views about lending money at interest (the sin of usury) were
hardening, which meant that Christians could not legitimately participate in this
activity. As a result, increasing numbers of Jews, who were not bound by the same
religious rules, became involved in moneylending during the twelfth century. Even
though the Church condemned the violent persecution and forcible conversion of
Jews, as members of a small, unique and exclusive group within Christian society,
with their own language, culture and religious practices, Jews always remained
vulnerable to harassment and oppression. This was particularly the case in northern
Europe, where Jews had settled only relatively recently. They suffered at the start of
every crusade during this period, for example: Jewish communities in the Rhine-
land were wiped out in the early stages of the First Crusade and attacked again at
the start of the Second; many in England, most notably at York, were destroyed
at the beginning of the Third. And as the twelfth century wore on and hostility
towards the Jews continued to grow, more pernicious myths about them began
to develop, not least the idea (which first appeared in England in the 1140s) that
Jews ritually killed Christian children every Easter in mock commemoration of the
crucifixion. All of this was despite the fact that, in theory, Jews lived and worked
under the protection of their local rulers. This was a one-sided arrangement, how-
ever. Secular rulers regarded the Jews as their own property; they could be taxed at
will and exploited for political purposes. Only two years after he became king of
France in 1180, Philip II expelled all Jews from his own demesne lands. According
to his biographer, Rigord, this was in part a response to the conduct of Jews of
Paris who met every year to ‘slit the throat of one Christian in the hidden under-
ground caverns on Maundy Thursday or during the Holy Week of penitence, as a
kind of sacrifice in contempt of the Christian religion’. Philip II readmitted Jews
to his lands in 1198, but attitudes towards the Jews were hardening. The Church
had always urged Christians not to mix with Jews for fear that they might indulge
in sexual activity with them or be contaminated by their beliefs. At the Fourth
Lateran Council in 1215, therefore, Jews were required for the first time to wear
a distinctive badge on their clothing so that Christians could more easily identify
them and avoid their company.
Towns were places where the bulk of the population made its living from non-
agricultural occupations (tailors and dyers, for example, weavers and fullers, black-
smiths, tanners, tavern keepers, butchers and bakers, prostitutes), so in order to
feed themselves, town-dwellers had further to develop their trading links with the
surrounding countryside. Long-distance trade, too, which had increased in the
eleventh century, flourished during the twelfth. This was in part because the prof-
its they were collecting from agricultural surpluses allowed lords to indulge in the
purchase of goods not immediately available in their local areas. England produced
wool for the Flemish textile industry, for example; parts of France specialised in
wine production, whilst furs, amber and timber came from the lands around the
Baltic. The Norman conquest of Sicily allowed Christians to trade more easily with
Muslim north Africa, and control of trading routes in and out of the Adriatic was
one of King Roger II’s primary concerns. The Crusades were also important here
in opening more trade routes with the eastern Mediterranean and lands beyond
the frontiers of Latin Christendom. The merchant cities of northern Italy, princi-
pally Genoa, Pisa and Venice, were quick to capitalise on this as exporters and as
importers of silks, spices and other luxuries not available in the west. It was also
common for the merchant elites of these cities to allow their fleets to be used in the
establishment of the crusader states in the early twelfth century – their ships were
instrumental in the capture of towns such as Acre and Tyre, for example. In return,
merchants from these Italian cities were given special status and autonomous neigh-
bourhoods of their own within the conquered Muslim towns. And on one level,
the Fourth Crusade can be seen as an attempt by the Venetians to establish their
city as the dominant commercial centre of what eventually became a new Latin
empire in the east.
Long-distance trade was also boosted by the emergence in Western Europe dur-
ing this period of a network of fairs. These were held at specific places at set times
of the year, and merchants from all over Europe could bring their goods there to
trade and exchange. Fairs were not new in the twelfth century; they were taking
place in Lombardy, Flanders and in parts of England and Germany by the late elev-
enth. However, it was in the second half of the 1100s that the six annual fairs held
at four towns in the county of Champagne became major centres of international
trade. Situated conveniently on the main route between Flanders and Italy and
under the protection of the counts of Champagne, these fairs lasted six weeks each
and attracted merchants from all over Europe who quickly appreciated the con-
venience they offered. Another cycle of five annual fairs had also been established
in Flanders by 1200. They were held in turn every two months and each lasted
for 30 days; wool and cloth were the main products bought and sold there. With
markets like this focused on a single location at fixed times, merchants could plan
ahead, move between fairs with a degree of certainty and minimise the expense,
unpredictability and dangers of long-distance trade. Commerce was facilitated, too,
by the increasing use of coined money as a means of exchange, particularly after
the discovery of new sources of silver in Germany, Bohemia, Tuscany and Sardinia
from the 1160s allowed for an increase in the money supply. This was not without
its adverse consequences, however: the period 1180–1220 was one of sustained
price inflation across Europe (bread prices increased threefold, for example), and
whilst the increased availability of silver was not the only cause of inflation (popu-
lation growth and urbanisation meant there was more demand, too), it certainly
played a part.
Striking though the pace and extent of urbanisation were, however, Western
Europe remained overwhelmingly rural during this period, and the vast major-
ity of the population (90% is usually the figure given) continued to live and work
in the countryside. It is hard to generalise because political circumstances, social
conventions and legal structures varied considerably between regions, but for most
peasants during this period, the conditions they experienced and the activities they
performed probably differed little from those experienced and performed by their
ancestors over the previous 200 years. However, the rapid expansion of the amount
of land under cultivation from the late eleventh century onwards and the intensi-
fication of lords’ control over that land meant that, by about 1200, most peasants
outside Scandinavia, the Alps and the Pyrenees probably lived in nucleated villages
under the authority of a lord rather than more isolated independent farmsteads.
There were advantages to this, as peasants could cooperate and pool their experi-
ence and resources in order to farm their lands more productively and feed their
families more reliably. They could gather together periodically in the churchyard or
some other notable village location to discuss their concerns and plan ahead. How-
ever, the village was no idyllic collective or community of equals. Some peasants
were more prosperous and more ‘free’ (in a legal sense) than others. They might
own their own plough and animals and owe less rent and fewer labour services to
their lord. They might even accumulate enough wealth to lend money to their fel-
low villagers or acquire more of the village property for themselves. Other peasant
families would have found it more difficult to feed themselves and meet their obli-
gations, let alone make a living from their lands; they would probably spend much
of their time working on their lord’s own land, his demesne. And below them in
the social scale would have been the migrant labourers and farmhands who had no
land of their own and struggled to survive from day to day on the meagre wages
they might earn. And it should not be forgotten that the village was ultimately
designed to allow the lord to control his peasants more easily in order to extract the
agricultural surplus they produced. They might be required, all in return for a fee,
to grind their grain at his mill, use his press to make wine and bake their bread in
his ovens. They may not have been allowed to get married or take over their family
lands without their lord’s permission (and more payments), and they were probably
subject to his justice, which could also be costly both financially and physically.
Slavery had already begun to disappear in Western Europe during the eleventh cen-
tury, and it finally vanished during the twelfth. But it must have been hard in the
case of many peasants to tell the difference between slavery and what replaced it.
In some parts of Western Europe the hold lords had over at least some of the
peasants on their lands may have tightened even more during this period. In
twelfth-century England, for example, the distinction between free and unfree
peasants hardened and became more distinct as new legal systems were developed
that were only accessible to those of free status. Having said that, it may also have
been the case that elsewhere the ties binding lords and peasants together were
loosened at least slightly as the twelfth century went on. As commercial growth
encouraged the more frequent use of money, lords in some regions allowed their
peasants to pay their rent in cash rather than in kind and even leased out their own
demesnes to more prosperous peasants. This gave the lord quicker access to ready
cash, but it reduced the number of demands a lord could make on peasants’ time
and money; although it could also lead to further hardening of the socio-economic
divides within the peasantry itself. Meanwhile in those lands most recently brought
under Christian control during the twelfth century, most notably in the Iberian
Peninsula and in Germany east of the Elbe, peasant settlers were incentivised rather
than coerced to cut down trees and establish new villages with offers of low rents
and less onerous obligations than they were accustomed to in their homelands.
Labour services appear to have been very rare in the newly settled lands of eastern
Germany, for example, and the degree of freedom the settlers had (in its usual sense
rather than its strictly legal one) appears to have been considerable.
By the end of the eleventh century, heavy cavalry (armoured warriors on big,
strong horses) dominated military operations across Western Europe. Such warriors
had become increasingly respected and feared over the previous two centuries, but,
despite having developed significantly as an autonomous group within society, they
were not yet automatically viewed as having high social status. By the mid-twelfth
century, however, things had changed: the highest form of secular male activity
was fighting on horseback, and this assumption, shared and acted upon alike by
the high aristocracy, the minor nobility, non-nobles and even by the unfree, led
to the consolidation of a landholding military elite which saw itself and was seen
by the rest of society as a politically, economically and socially exclusive caste with
its own rules and ideology. Historians use the term ‘chivalry’ (from the French for
horse, cheval) to refer to the codes of conduct which had developed by this time to
govern the behaviour of this new ruling class, but it should not be forgotten that
what eventually came to be seen as stereotypical chivalric ideals (honour, largesse,
good manners, mercy in battle) were just that, ideals: aristocratic life must have
remained as competitive, cruel and violent as it had always done for a ruling group
that preserved its position by the threat and use of force.
As Chapters 1 and 4 explained, knights came to the fore in parts of Western
Europe following the collapse of centralised Carolingian power in the ninth cen-
tury. Local lords stepped into the political vacuum and recruited and trained troops
of armed horsemen to help them win control of territory and, thereafter, domi-
nate it from the motte-and-bailey castles and other fortifications they constructed.
These developments were particularly obvious in northern France, and by about
1100 they had spread to Germany and England, too. Over the next hundred years,
the military tactics and techniques used in these regions (cavalry, castles and siege
warfare in particular) were exported further still, as part of the Ostsiedlung in east-
ern Europe and the Reconquista in Muslim Spain, into Scotland, Wales, Ireland
and southern Italy by the Normans and into the newly established crusader states.
Early on during this process, in the second half of the tenth century, heavy cavalry-
men had been typically of low social standing – the ministerialis, for example, who
became the most familiar type of knight in Germany, was of unfree status. Having
pledged their homage to their lords and become their ‘vassals’, they served in their
lord’s military retinue in return for somewhere to live, food to eat and a share of the
wealth they plundered; but the ultimate reward was land (a ‘fief ’) which they could
settle on and use to build family dynasties of their own. Historians have used the
Latin word for fief (feodum) as the root of another contentious term never used by
contemporaries, feudalism. But however that term is defined or deployed (and there
are plenty of arguments about such things), this connection between landholding
and military service was certainly fundamental to the way aristocratic society oper-
ated across much of Europe during this period. A knight’s hope that in return for
loyal military service his lord would give him land had hardened into expectation
by the twelfth century, as had, within a few more years, the associated ideas that the
fief constituted the holder’s rightful patrimony, that it should belong permanently
to the knight’s family and that it would be automatically inherited entirely by the
vassal’s eldest son or nearest surviving heir. Primogeniture (inheritance by the first-
born son) emphasised the direct descent of property in the male line and was a way
of keeping a family’s lands together and intact, rather than having them divided
between different members of a more amorphous group of relatives (younger sons,
cousins, women), all of whom might previously have made claims to some part
of the inheritance. It was becoming the norm amongst the aristocracy of Western
Europe by the middle of the twelfth century. Even German ministeriales, technically
servile though they were, were given lands by grateful lords and eventually came to
be regarded as belonging to the lesser nobility.
The military supremacy which the aristocracy enjoyed, combined with its
own efforts to intensify control over its lands and engineer inheritance practices
in its favour, fostered a sense of solidarity and exclusiveness within an increasingly
closed caste at the top of society. Other developments nurtured and consolidated
this trend. By the twelfth century, formal rituals and ceremonies associated with
knighthood were well-established: an aristocratic boy, usually in his late teens,
would be elevated into the ranks of knighthood by having a sword strapped around
his waist by a great lord. The ceremony would probably be followed by feasting
and entertainment in the hall of a castle. The castle continued to be a tool for con-
quest and domination, but it was also a status symbol. Many of the typically quite
small earth and timber structures first built in the eleventh century were rebuilt
and extended in stone during the twelfth. Meanwhile, cavalry techniques could
be practised and refined through hunting. There was nothing new about hunting,
of course, but it probably became an even more prominent part of the aristocratic
lifestyle than ever in the twelfth century, serving to cultivate a more powerful sense
of cohesion within this class: ‘In our days’, bemoaned the contemporary church-
man John of Salisbury in about 1160, ‘the scholarship of the aristocracy consists in
hunting jargon’. And beyond hunting, the enormous popularity of tournaments
did something similar. These first took place in the eleventh century in northern
France, and they were not choreographed jousts between chivalrous men in shin-
ing armour; by the time they had fully evolved in the twelfth century, they took
the form of battles between rival teams, often on quite a large scale. The objective
was to rout the opposing teams and then capture individual opponents so that they
could be ransomed. Some young knights made their fortunes and their reputa-
tions on the tournament circuit, although the Church opposed them on spiritual
and moral grounds, and they were condemned at the Third Lateran Council in
1179. Some political leaders considered them threats to public order: in the 1190s,
Richard I only allowed them to take place under licence in England, at designated
locations and on payment of a fee by every participant. But despite such attempts to
regulate them, tournaments remained one of the defining features of male aristo-
cratic life during this period. They probably even contributed to the early appear-
ance of heraldic signs and symbols in the middle of the twelfth century: in the
confusion of the tournament mêlée, clear and distinctive designs on shields would
help combatants and spectators to tell members of different teams apart.
The twelfth-century aristocracy even developed its own genres of literature.
Mostly written in the vernacular rather than Latin, many of these texts were com-
posed to extol masculine strength and bravery through stirring and inspirational
tales of violent endeavour. Some of these were updated versions of a much earlier
literary form, the chansons de geste (literally ‘songs about deeds’). They tended to
focus on the heroic exploits of a single man and his comrades-in-arms, who on
the one hand were capable of great violence, but on the other were also loyal,
steadfast and self-sacrificing. They extolled the virtues of military brotherhood
for a knightly audience. The most famous and enduring of these was The Song of
Roland (c.1100–20), which recounts the story of how Charlemagne’s rearguard
was defeated by a Muslim army at Roncesvalles in 778. The tale was retold for a
contemporary aristocratic audience, however: the loyal vassal Roland sacrificed
himself for his lord and his comrades, whilst the fact that the defeat was inflicted by
a treacherous heathen army would have struck a chord in the context of the First
Crusade and the Reconquista. A hundred years later Iberia also had its own epic:
from Castile, The Poem of the Cid is an extravagantly idealised version of the life of
the great adventurer Rodrigo Diaz, the conqueror of Muslim Valencia. In reality,
Rodrigo was a ruthless soldier of fortune prepared to fight for Muslims and Chris-
tians alike, but in the highly fictionalised poem, despite all the challenges he faces,
he is never anything less than the perfect epitome of the knightly ideal – brave,
humble and unstintingly loyal. More novel literary forms also emerged during this
period, not least the romance. Marie de France wrote a dozen narrative poems (or
Lais) in Old French for the court of the English king Henry II, claiming that they
were based on true stories from the Breton past. But the most popular romances
of the period were those written about King Arthur and his court. Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which was written in Latin in the 1130s,
purported to be a work of history, not fiction, and it included stories about figures
such as Brutus, the first king of Britain, and King Lear. But it was Geoffrey’s tales
of King Arthur and his court which were most enthusiastically received, adapted
and translated in other parts of Europe. In his Roman de Brut (‘Romance of Bru-
tus’), which dates from the 1150s, the Norman poet Wace was the first to mention
the Round Table. There were German versions, too; the romances of Wolfram
von Eschenbach (Parzival) and Gottfried von Strassburg (Tristan and Isolde) would
continue to inspire European culture long after the Middle Ages. But the most
influential of these Arthurian tales were the ones written in Old French by Chré-
tien de Troyes between about 1160 and 1190. Here tales of Arthur and his knights,
Guinevere and the Holy Grail began to take permanent shape.
Many of the aristocrats for whom these stories were written would have been
illiterate, and so the tales would have been read aloud in communal settings, in the
great hall of a lord’s castle or at a royal court, before they were written down. In
southern France, poets known as troubadours also composed lyrics in their own
language of Occitan; most were professional entertainers but others, like Duke
William IX of Aquitaine (1071–1126), the grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine,
were members of the nobility; Richard I of England wrote poetry and songs, too.
These works and the Arthurian romances went further than the more conven-
tional action-packed stories of male heroism in the chansons de geste, however, and
made much of the complexities and strains of noble life, not least in the way they
depicted the relationships between men and women. The Church of course had
its own strict ideas about sex and marriage, but in these tales of so-called ‘courtly
love’, adultery was common at one extreme as was unrequited male obsession with
unobtainable women at another. Loyalty to a lord was important, but it often took
second place to a man’s love for his lady: Marie de France’s Lais are full of adulterous
love, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Isolde are ruined by their illicit conduct,
while Chrétien de Troyes’s Lancelot, the perfect knight in most ways, is unable to
suppress his love for Guinevere, his lord’s wife, and their passion destroys them both.
The new vernacular literature of the twelfth century set unrealistically high
chivalric standards for the noblemen who heard and read it. It bore little resem-
blance to the pragmatic and often brutal realities of their everyday existence. The
same went for high status women, too, whose lives continued to be contained, or
at least described, within limits set by men. There was nothing in principle to stop
women becoming rulers of kingdoms in their own right. Just as Leon-Castile had a
queen regnant, Urraca, from 1109 until 1126, so Portugal was ruled by a woman,
Teresa, for more than 15 years until she was toppled by her son in 1128. Henry I of
England clearly envisaged his daughter Matilda succeeding him, as did William II
of Sicily when he nominated his aunt Constance as his heir in the 1180s. Queen
Melisende of Jerusalem played a central role in the political life of the crusader
states in the 1140s and 1150s. Even so, the male nobles of Leon-Castile and Portu-
gal may have accepted the prospect of being ruled by Urraca and Teresa at least in
part because both women already had sons who were expected to take over from
their mothers when they were old enough. Perhaps similar thinking lay behind the
English nobility’s oaths of allegiance to the empress Matilda as Henry I’s heir in
1126. She had no sons at that stage, but the expectation, as it was for Melisende
who married Count Fulk of Anjou, was clearly that she would take a power-
ful husband who would direct (control?) her and help her produce male heirs.
Such powerful women were often depicted in contemporary sources as divisive
and disruptive figures, but such narratives were designed by the men who wrote
them to minimise any sense that women could act independently and to reinforce
prevailing notions of power as a masculine monopoly. Empress Matilda was widely

criticised for trying to act like a man in her attempt to take the English throne, and
when she abandoned her claim in the 1140s in favour of Henry, the son she had
produced with Count Geoffrey of Anjou, the assumption prevailed that any form
of female rule would last only as long as it took for a suitable man to come along
and take over.
Other noblewomen also played vital roles in the running of their principali-
ties and managed to hold their own in the male-dominated worlds of politics and
diplomacy. Countess Adelaide of Sicily was regent for her son Roger for more than
a decade until he assumed power in 1112; until her death in 1118, Matilda, the
wife of Henry I of England, acted as her husband’s deputy in England whilst he was
occupied in Normandy; Eleanor of Aquitaine governed her duchy from 1152 to
1154, then again in the name of her son Richard from 1170 until 1173 and finally
after Henry II died in 1189 and until her own death in 1204. There were others
too, less famous than these, who took over from their husbands when they went
on campaign, pilgrimage or crusade or when they were left widowed with children
who were minors. There were even women like Nicola de la Haye who was made
sheriff of Lincolnshire by King John and, in 1217, led the successful defence of
Lincoln Castle against the supporters of Prince Louis of France (the future Louis
VIII) after he had invaded England in the previous year. Such an example is far
from typical, though, and the dominant male wisdom remained that any such dem-
onstrations of female autonomy were temporary expedients at the most.
Regional custom and practice varied, but free women in most parts of Western
Europe could inherit property, although husbands would control it during their
marriage. As widows, however, they regained control of lands they had inherited
and any they had brought into the marriage as their dowry, as well as those (their
‘dower’) which their husbands had left them, which in some places, England for
example, could be as much as a third of their estates. They could sell these lands
or bequeath them to their heirs, thereby shaping the fortunes of the next genera-
tion. Even so, most female influence, both within the nobility and further down
the social scale, was applied informally and domestically, just as it had been for
centuries. Their primary responsibilities remained producing children and running
their household. Not all women chose to conform to this model, of course. Many
chose a religious life instead: young noblewomen who entered convents might
later become influential as abbesses, and there were women from peasant and urban
backgrounds who contributed significantly to the grassroots spiritual movements
which developed in parts of Western Europe from the second half of the twelfth
century – women as well as men could become Cathar perfecti, for example. But
even within a more conventional setting, many aristocratic women carved out roles
for themselves as patrons of the new types of literature described earlier, particularly
troubadour poetry. Some women even composed poetry themselves, and Marie de
France was one of the most important authors of the twelfth century in any form.
The customary medieval view that women were physically and morally weaker
than men went hand in hand with the idea that they were intellectually inferior,
too. However, the lives and careers of women like Heloise (d.1163) and Hildegard
of Bingen (d.1179) show how misconceived this notion was. Heloise’s letters to
her husband, the great teacher and philosopher Peter Abelard (d.1142), reveal the
extent of her scholarship and the sophistication of her thought, whilst Hildegard’s
interpretations of her own mystical visions earned the respect and admiration of
more than one pope and no less a figure than Bernard of Clairvaux. Women, how-
ever, had no access to formal education during this period. Having said that, nei-
ther did most men. Until roughly the middle of the eleventh century, monasteries
and nunneries were the principal centres of teaching and study. The best monastic
schools, like the one at the abbey of Bec in Normandy, were capable of producing
scholars of enormous pedigree: both Lanfranc and Anselm studied and taught there
in the eleventh century and, as well as making their own distinctive contributions
to philosophy and theology, became successively archbishops of Canterbury. How-
ever, the primary focus in these monastic schools was on educating oblates (trainee
monks and nuns) and on giving them what they would need for their lives in the
cloister, namely a good working knowledge of Latin, the Scriptures and the ideas
of the most important Christian thinkers. There had long been schools attached to
some cathedrals as well, and some of them, those at Chartres and Laon, for exam-
ple, had established reputations as centres of learning by about 1100.
It is no coincidence that both Chartres and Laon were also thriving commer-
cial centres, and the rapid urbanisation of this period was a key factor underlying
the development of new educational institutions across Western Europe. Nowhere
was this more apparent than in Paris. During the twelfth century, Paris became
the centre of French royal government and an increasingly prosperous commercial
hub. By 1200 it was very much the capital city of France and the intellectual capi-
tal of north-west Europe. Louis VI and Louis VII built over its semi-rural heart,
the Ile de la Cité, and improved the old cathedral. Then in the early 1160s, the
construction of a new cathedral of Nôtre Dame was begun. Under Philip II there
was further progress after he ordered the city’s streets to be paved and new walls
to be constructed. During his reign, the population of Paris probably doubled to
about 50,000. Perhaps as many as 10 per cent of these new arrivals were aspiring
scholars, keen to find a career in the Church or in the household of a great lord.
They looked for teachers who could instruct them in the basic syllabus, ultimately
derived from Roman practice, which was made up of the seven so-called liberal arts:
the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and music). Many students went no further with their studies than this
(indeed, some never made it this far at all), but more ambitious, single-minded
and well-funded young men could go on to one of the fields of higher study:
theology, law or medicine. In Paris, the ultimate field of instruction and study was
theology, in which men such as Peter Abelard, who taught at the cathedral school
of Nôtre Dame, excelled. As demand for their services increased, however, more
and more teachers in Paris broke free of the control of the cathedral schools and
set up their own teaching establishments to attract paying students. From the sec-
ond half of the twelfth century, these different schools gradually coalesced into a
universitas (university) of masters and scholars, the educational equivalent of a trade

guild. In 1210, Pope Innocent III issued a bull recognising the university as a legal
corporation, and in 1221, faculties of theology, law, arts (essentially logic) and
medicine were formally established. A similar process of educational institution-
alisation was also happening in other parts of Europe, too. By 1200, for example,
there was a fledgling university at Montpellier and another at Bologna, where the
teaching of law (canon and Roman) had been the acknowledged speciality for
some time. Meanwhile, in the early thirteenth century, the schools which had
emerged in Oxford during the 1100s developed into England’s first university, only
for some Oxford scholars to leave in about 1210 and form the nucleus of the sec-
ond, at Cambridge. Dozens more universities with fixed curricula, examinations,
grades and degrees came into existence over the next 200 years. For generations to
come, these institutions only catered for men in religious orders, and most students
(although by no means all) tended to come from relatively prosperous backgrounds
as all the services they received had to be paid for. Nevertheless, the impact of these
developments was profound. In the short term, across Western Europe by 1200,
secular governments as well as higher offices in the Church were staffed by more
and more men trained in these academic environments. This was both a cause and
a consequence of the tendency for administrative structures of all kinds to become
more bureaucratic and document-driven during this period; competent, literate
officials were needed to bring greater professionalism to the task of extracting funds
and enforcing authority. And in the long term, the deep and permanent trans-
formation that the structure of higher education in Western Europe underwent
between about 1150 and 1250 would affect its politics, religion and thought for
centuries to come.
8
POWER
Germany: Staufen, Welf and the Struggle for Imperium

In 1125, Emperor Henry V died childless. Before his death he made clear that
he wanted his nephew, Duke Frederick II of Swabia, to succeed him. However,
there were other potential successors too, such as Margrave Leopold III of Austria
(the emperor’s brother-in-law) and the powerful Duke of Saxony, Lothar of Sup-
plinburg. Lothar had Henry V to thank for making him a duke in 1106, but this
did not prevent Lothar from spending most of Henry’s reign building up his own
power in Saxony and fighting against him, and when control over the succession
process was seized by Archbishop Adalbert of Mainz, another of Henry’s long-
standing critics, the late emperor’s plans for the succession were ruined. Lothar of
Saxony was elected king on 30 August 1125 by a college of 40 other princes, and
he was crowned Lothar III in Aachen about two weeks later.
One of those who elected Lothar in 1125 was the Duke of Bavaria, Henry
the Black. Henry was the father-in-law of Frederick II of Swabia, who had been
Henry V’s preferred candidate to succeed. Lothar had secured the Bavarian duke’s
vote with the promise of a marriage between the latter’s son (Henry the Proud)
and Lothar’s daughter, Gertrude, which took place two years later. As Lothar had
no sons, this marriage gave the dukes of Bavaria the chance of inheriting Saxony
and, perhaps, the kingdom. Other than this, Lothar’s main qualifications for the
kingship were two-fold: he was not Frederick of Swabia (Archbishop Adalbert’s
main criterion), and he was old (over 50). All of this, combined with his lack of a
male heir, meant that Lothar would probably not pass on the kingdom to a son, and
so the princes’ power of election would carry on unimpeded into the next reign.
More ominously, however, these arrangements revived a long-standing rivalry
between two of Germany’s most powerful families, the Welf dukes of Bavaria and
the Staufen dukes of Swabia. Frederick of Swabia, denied the throne Henry V had
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-12
Power 219
promised him, became the implacable enemy of the Welfs, and the rivalry between
these two families would have a significant impact on the course of German politics
for the rest of the twelfth century and beyond.
When Lothar became king, he retained the duchy of Saxony, and so once again,
as it had been under the Ottonians, Saxony became the centre of the kingdom.
Elsewhere in the kingdom, however, things were less stable. Frederick of Swabia,
when asked by Lothar, refused to hand over the crown lands he was holding, claim-
ing that they were part of the family inheritance Henry V had left him. Royal and
family lands were difficult to distinguish by this time, but Frederick was outlawed
by Lothar at Christmas 1125 and war against him followed. The Staufen were too
strong in southern Germany for Lothar to defeat, however, and the war was bogged
down. At the end of 1127, Conrad, Frederick II’s younger brother, was proclaimed
king by the Swabian and Franconian nobles, and from 1128–30, Conrad was in
Italy where he was crowned king of Italy by the archbishop of Milan. But Conrad
did not manage to gain control of the Matildine lands in Tuscany to which he, as
a nephew of Henry V, had hereditary claims. Eventually, in 1135, Conrad resigned
the kingship, and some kind of peace was established between Lothar and the
Staufen brothers. Meanwhile in Bavaria, the Welf duke Henry the Black had died
in 1126, and Henry the Proud had succeeded him.
By this time, matters had been further complicated by a papal schism, this one
following the death of Honorius II in 1130. This had significant implications for
King Lothar who, like his predecessors, was keen to be crowned emperor in Rome.
The majority of cardinals elected Anacletus II, but a powerful minority opted
for Innocent II. Innocent soon received the backing of the kings of France and
England (and, probably crucially, Bernard of Clairvaux), whilst Anacletus’s main
support came from Roger II of Sicily. To secure this, Anacletus declared Sicily,
Apulia and Calabria a kingdom and made Roger II its king in 1130. As for Lothar
III, he sided with Innocent II and came to Italy in 1132–3. But he was unable to
drive Anacletus out of the part of Rome he controlled and had to settle for impe-
rial coronation in the Lateran basilica by Innocent on 4 June 1133. Innocent then
invested Lothar with the Matildine lands for life in return for an acknowledgement
of papal overlordship there and an annual tribute of 100 pounds of silver. Lothar
subsequently (in 1137) invested his son-in-law Henry the Proud with the lands as
Margrave of Tuscany; Henry was to perform homage to the pope in return. These
arrangements were later interpreted by the pope as a sign of imperial subjection to
the papacy, as was Lothar’s earlier symbolic performance of the office of a groom
to the new pope in 1131. In the Lateran Palace, a wall painting was made showing
Lothar receiving imperial coronation from the pope who was sitting on a throne.
The implication of vassalage was clear.
Emperor Lothar’s most long-lasting contribution to Germany came from his
actions in the north and east. Being a Saxon, he gave more attention to the region
than recent emperors. Even before becoming German king, in 1111, he had
given control of Holstein and Stormarn to Adolf I of Schauenburg. In 1123, he
appointed Albert the Bear as Margrave of Lausitz and Conrad of Wettin as Margrave
of Meissen. These appointments demonstrated how powerful Lothar was in the

north, as Henry V had tried and failed to install his own candidates into both posi-
tions. When Albert later expanded into the Nordmark without Lothar’s consent,
the king deprived Albert of Lausitz and gave it to Conrad in 1136, thus uniting
the two marches of Lausitz and Wettin. By then, however, Albert had finally been
granted the Nordmark by Lothar in 1134, having regained royal favour by sup-
porting Lothar’s Italian expedition in 1132–3. Lothar also petitioned the pope to
expand the rights of the archbishoprics of Bremen and Magdeburg, whilst mission-
ary activity, which had stalled during the eleventh century, resumed into the lands of
the Obodrites. Further north, Lothar backed the winner in the family feud which
determined who became king in Denmark, and the new king Eric II was made a
vassal of the emperor in 1135. Successful diplomatic intervention by Lothar to end
the war between Poland, Bohemia and Hungary resulted in the Polish duke Bole-
slaw III’s payment of Pomeranian tribute that was long overdue. In addition, the
Polish duke had to accept Pomerania and Rügen as fiefs of the Empire. The strength
of Lothar’s position on his eastern borders became clear at the last great assembly he
held at Merseburg in Saxony in August 1135. It was attended by Boleslaw in person
as well as the representatives of several other rulers.
Soon after Lothar left Rome in 1133, Roger II drove Innocent II out of the city.
A new Italian campaign would be necessary to deal with Roger’s return, but it only
became possible when, after returning to Germany, Lothar was reconciled with
the Staufen brothers, Frederick and Conrad, as a result of which Conrad aban-
doned his claim to the kingship. The Staufen also agreed to hand over the crown
lands they held, but Frederick II kept his duchy of Swabia. Both Staufen brothers
subsequently took part in Lothar’s second Italian expedition of 1136–7, but they
were overshadowed by Henry the Proud, who campaigned successfully in Tuscany
and advanced as far as Capua and Benevento, whilst Lothar even captured Bari in
summer 1137 along with Melfi and Salerno. Roger II was forced to pull back to
Sicily, but opposition within the German army to continuing the war, combined
with growing tension with Pope Innocent over who had the right to decide what
happened in Apulia, forced Lothar to turn for home. He died on his return journey
in December 1137, and most of what he had achieved in Italy was soon nullified
as Roger II reasserted his control and recovered his losses. When Anacletus II then
died in 1138 and the papal schism came to an end, Innocent excommunicated
King Roger, but his attempt to follow this up with a successful military campaign
against the king ended badly. In a re-run of 1053, the papal army was defeated by
the Normans and the pope was taken prisoner; he was only released after agreeing
to confirm Roger as king of Sicily.
When Lothar III died, the obvious candidate for the throne was the Welf,
Lothar’s son-in-law, Henry the Proud, Duke of Bavaria and Margrave of Tuscany.
Lothar had nominated Henry on his deathbed and given him the imperial regalia.
He had also recently given Henry the duchy of Saxony, making the Welfs without
question the most powerful family in Germany. But fears about Welf dominance
gave many important groups within the kingdom pause for thought, and the pope
Power 221
was also concerned about what an even more powerful German king would mean
for his authority in Italy. Instead of Henry, therefore, the new king would be the
Staufer Conrad. He had been anti-king until 1135, but his own power base in the
duchy of Franconia was small, and so he posed no serious threat to the princes. The
archbishoprics of Mainz and Cologne were both vacant in 1137, and the political
initiative was seized by bishop Adalbero of Trier, a friend of Bernard of Clairvaux
and a firm supporter of Innocent II. Conrad’s elevation was more of a coup than
anything else, but he was quickly ‘elected’ in March 1138 by a small, irregular
assembly of princes (unsurprisingly, there were no Bavarian or Saxon representa-
tives) and consecrated by a papal legate at Aachen.
A frustrated Henry the Proud grudgingly accepted Conrad’s election and handed
over the imperial insignia. But the two men soon clashed when Conrad decided to
tackle the problem of Welf power directly and declared that no prince could hold
two duchies at the same time. Henry refused to do homage or to give up either
Bavaria or Saxony, so he was outlawed by Conrad and formally deprived of both.
Saxony was given to Albert the Bear, Margrave of the Nordmark, and Bavaria to
Conrad’s half-brother, Leopold IV of Austria. After Henry the Proud died in 1139,
Welf resistance in Saxony was continued not by his son Henry the Lion (he was
only ten) but by his grandmother Richenza, Lothar III’s widow. Albert the Bear
was soon driven out. In Bavaria, meanwhile, Welf VI, Henry the Proud’s brother,
took up where Henry had left off. For his part, Conrad tried to force the Welfs out
of their holdings in Swabia. Nothing decisive happened, however, before Richenza
and Leopold IV both died in 1141. In the following year, Conrad accepted Henry
the Lion as Duke of Saxony and Henry Jasomirgott, Leopold IV’s brother, got
Bavaria as well as Austria and married Gertrude, Henry the Lion’s mother. The
settlement collapsed, however, when Gertrude died in 1143. Welf VI demanded
that Bavaria should be handed over to him, and the situation remained unresolved
for the rest of Conrad’s reign.
The wider political picture at this time was complicated by events in Rome,
Norman ambitions and the disastrous Second Crusade. Anti-papal elements seized
control of Rome in 1143, and it became impossible for the popes to reside in
the city. This was more than just traditional factional infighting. A new Senate
on the ancient model was established to rule the city, and out of the confusion
emerged the key figure of Arnold of Brescia. Arnold insisted that the papacy should
lose all its temporal and political power and adopt apostolic poverty. He was in
effective control of this new Roman republic until he was finally overcome and
executed in 1155. Meanwhile, in 1139, Pope Innocent II had excommunicated
Roger II of Sicily, but the pope had then been captured by Roger when he tried
to enforce the sentence militarily. He was forced to rescind the excommunication
and acknowledge Roger as king of Sicily. From that point on the popes were on
the back foot against Roger, and they relied on alliances with other powers, par-
ticularly the German king, to keep him in check and restore their own authority in
Rome. E ugenius III (pope from 1145) went so far as to canonise Emperor Henry
II (d.1025) in order to flatter King Conrad, but Conrad was never able to come to
the pope’s relief. Eugenius III’s attempts to revive papal prestige by launching a new
crusade also fell flat. The pope reacted quickly to the loss of the crusader state of
Edessa in 1144, but the expeditions which eventually left Europe under the separate
commands of the French and German kings, despite their initial size and potential,
only managed an abortive attack on the Muslim city of Damascus in 1148, and they
returned home demoralised and humiliated. Conrad himself was badly wounded
during the crusade, and although he had managed to construct an army from across
his kingdom which contained domestic allies such as Duke Henry Jasomirgott
of Bavaria and adversaries such as Welf VI, the king’s plan to use the crusade to
bolster his position within Germany was hardly the striking success he had hoped
for. In the aftermath of the failure of the crusade, the anti-papal elements in Rome
also sought Conrad’s help and offered him a secular imperial coronation which he
rejected. Conrad also allied at this time with the Byzantine emperor against their
common enemy in Italy, Roger II. Emperor Manuel I Comnenus married Conrad’s
sister-in-law, Bertha. For his part, Roger shrewdly took care to get close to Welf VI
as he was keen to avoid a repetition of Lothar III’s invasion of 1136–7. Soon after
the end of the Second Crusade, therefore, Manuel and Conrad found themselves
lined up against Welf VI, Roger II and Louis VII of France. Welf returned from the
crusade before Conrad in 1149, he was defeated by Henry (Conrad’s son and heir)
in 1150 and peace was made; but from 1151 there was fighting between Henry the
Lion and Albert the Bear (Conrad’s ally) in Saxony.
Conrad III died on 15 February 1152 while preparing an expedition to Italy to
help Eugenius III against Roger II and receive imperial coronation. He was the first
German king since Henry I not to be crowned emperor. His son Henry, who had
been crowned king of Germany in 1147, predeceased him in 1150. Conrad then
overlooked his next son Frederick, who was only seven or eight, and designated
his nephew, Duke Frederick III of Swabia, as his successor. Nicknamed ‘Barbarossa’
because of his red hair and beard, Frederick was unanimously elected king by the
German princes on 4 March 1152 and crowned five days later. Barbarossa’s position
was strong initially. He held a powerful territorial base in his family lands within
Swabia (he had become Duke of Swabia after his father’s death in 1147), and his
kinship connections crossed many divides, not least the one between Staufen and
Welf. Born c.1125, he was the son of the Staufen Duke Frederick II of Swabia and
Judith, sister of the Welf Henry the Proud, Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, and of
Welf VI. This also made Barbarossa the cousin of Henry the Lion. All of this gave
the new king a mediating position between the Staufen and the Welfs and made
him a suitable compromise candidate whom the German princes could accept as
king in the hope that he would bring the enmity between the two great houses
to an end. Barbarossa signalled his desire to bring peace to his kingdom when he
issued his Land Peace (Landfriede), probably in 1152.
One of Barbarossa’s first priorities was to deal with potential opponents within
the ranks of the higher German nobility and to reconcile them to his new regime.
He installed Frederick, the young son whom Conrad III had overlooked for the
kingship, as Duke of Swabia. More important in the short term, however, was his
Power 223
relationship with the Welfs. Conrad III had quarrelled seriously with them; this
had destabilised the kingdom, and the new king was determined to ensure that this
did not happen again. Welf VI was brought on side with grants of extensive lands
in Italy, and Henry the Lion, Welf ’s nephew, had been made Duke of Bavaria (he
was already Duke of Saxony) by 1156. The previous holder of that position, Henry
II Jasomirgott, was compensated by having a new duchy, Austria, created for him
out of some of the Bavarian lands, and granted to him on very favourable terms.
Barbarossa was also sensitive to his position outside Germany. In 1156, he extended
his influence into Burgundy by marrying Beatrice, the heiress to the kingdom, and
in 1157, he received the homage of the Burgundian magnates. This marriage, Bar-
barossa’s second (his first had been annulled in 1153 after four childless years), gave
him control over the Alpine passes into Italy where he was determined not just to
visit but to dominate and control. In 1153, the new king had made an agreement
with Pope Eugenius III at Constance. Barbarossa undertook to make no peace
with the Normans or the Romans without the pope’s consent, to defend the rights
and possessions of the Roman church, and to give the pope support in regaining
them whenever necessary. He also agreed to come to Italy soon to assist the pope
against his Roman and Norman opponents. In return, Eugenius agreed to crown
Barbarossa emperor and give spiritual aid against his opponents.
Barbarossa’s first Italian expedition (1154–5) began in the following year. Its main
purpose, the imperial coronation, was achieved when he was crowned emperor by
the new (and only English) Pope Adrian IV in June 1155. However, the Ger-
man nobles who had accompanied Barbarossa to Italy refused to take part in any
campaign against the new king of Sicily, William I, and the emperor returned to
Germany. This forced Adrian IV to make his own agreement with king William at
Benevento in June 1156, undermining the terms of the Treaty of Constance and
ignoring all imperial claims in southern Italy. Growing tension between emperor
and pope erupted at Besançon in October 1157, when Barbarossa took exception
to the assertion contained in a letter sent by Adrian IV reminding the emperor that
he owed his power to the pope.
The emperor’s second Italian expedition (1158–62) was aimed in the first
instance at bringing the city of Milan firmly under imperial rule. There was a
wider context here. In northern Italy by the early twelfth century, there was no
centralised political structure, and local power was held by a wide range of different
authorities. Uniquely in Western Europe, however, and dominant alongside the
bishops and the established local aristocracy, the largely self-governing towns and
cities of this region, often referred to as communes, wielded an enormous amount
of economic and political power. Their influence and importance had grown sig-
nificantly during the quarrel between Henry IV, Henry V and the papacy, and
any kind of external authority had struggled to take hold. The most formidable of
all the communes by this point was Milan, which dominated its urban rivals and
baulked at any suggestion of imperial control. Between 1156 and 1158, the city
even constructed the Terraggio, a five-kilometre earthen rampart surrounded by a
water-filled ditch, in order to keep the emperor out. Nevertheless, with an army
said to have numbered more than 10,000 knights, Barbarossa was determined to
reassert (in his view) lost imperial authority over the kingdom of Italy, and, through
a combination of bombardment, assaults and a successful attempt to starve the citi-
zens, he forced Milan into submission in September 1158. Then, at the subsequent
Diet of Roncaglia in November, the communes of northern Italy were formally
subjected to rule by imperial officials. The main purpose of the Roncaglia decrees
was to define the extent of imperial authority within Italy. This centred on the
concept of so-called regalia, a collective term which covered a whole series of dif-
ferent jurisdictions and powers. At Roncaglia, regalia were defined as including,
amongst other things, duchies, counties, the right to build roads, coin money and
take tolls. If those claiming such rights could not prove their entitlement to them,
then they were deemed to belong to the emperor and were to be administered by
imperial officials, thus providing him with potentially very significant income and
hugely increased practical power.
Predictably, it was not long before Milan fought back, this time with the support
of other aggrieved communes, particularly Brescia and Piacenza, and of the pope.
The death of Adrian IV in September 1159, however, was followed by a disputed
papal election and a papal schism that would eventually last 18 years. Alexander III,
worried about the creeping extension of imperial influence within Italy, supported
the opponents of the emperor, whilst Victor IV supported Barbarossa. Barbarossa’s
attempt to heal the schism in his favour by summoning a church council to Pavia
in 1160 failed when Alexander III refused to come. The council excommunicated
Alexander, and in return, Alexander excommunicated Victor IV, the emperor and
his advisers. Alexander had been elected by the majority of the cardinals, had wide
support in the rest of Europe and was acknowledged as the rightful pope by the
kings of France and England, amongst others.
Milan was finally defeated in 1162. In fact, the city was razed to the ground and
destroyed, and its inhabitants resettled in villages where they lived as peasants. Bar-
barossa’s plan to capture Alexander III came to nothing, however, when the pope
fled to France, and so the emperor returned to Germany. There his negotiations
with Louis VII of France over the papal schism made little progress, although Louis
toyed for a while with the idea of recognising Victor IV. Victor’s death in 1164,
however, was a severe blow to the emperor, and although a new anti-pope, Paschal
III, was elected, he never received the same support as his predecessor.
Barbarossa soon began his third Italian expedition (1163–4), but he was con-
fronted by a new political situation when he did. The ‘League of Verona’ had been
founded in the early 1160s. Led by Venice, with the participation of the communes
of Verona, Padua and Piacenza and the support of the Byzantine emperor, Manuel,
and King William I of Sicily, the League was a formidable opponent and success-
fully resisted Barbarossa’s attacks in 1163. Barbarossa remained determined to deal
with his Italian problems once and for all, however, and he returned on his fourth
Italian expedition (1166–7) in 1166. Everything went well at the outset. At the end
of July, after a seven-day siege during which Rome burned, the city was captured,
and Paschal III was enthroned in St Peter’s. In August, however, disaster struck
Power 225
as a malaria epidemic swept through Barbarossa’s forces. More than 2,000 of his
knights are said to have died, and among the dead were Duke Frederick of Swabia
and Welf VII, son of Welf VI. Barbarossa’s opponents saw this as divine judgement
for his crimes; it was certainly a turning-point in the reign. Barbarossa was forced
to abandon his plans to advance on Sicily and made his way north with difficulty,
arriving back in Germany in March 1168. At the same time, the League of Verona
was becoming stronger and had expanded by 1167 into the ‘Lombard League’.
The intention of its members (16 cities in all) was to return to self-government and
throw off imperial rule. The emperor was in no position to stop them, and by 1168,
the league had more than 20 members. Within the space of a few months, then,
the imperial position within Italy had been transformed. Apparently dominant in
mid-1167 and set to conquer the whole of the peninsula, Barbarossa’s supremacy
had been almost completely destroyed by early 1168. The foundation in 1168 of
the new commune of Alessandria, named after the now secure Pope Alexander III,
summed up the radical extent of the shift in power which had taken place.
Barbarossa’s position in Germany had weakened as his Italian plans had crum-
bled. Over the next six years, he set about restoring his lost power. He did this in
various ways. Duke Frederick of Swabia, Barbarossa’s cousin, had been a victim of
the malaria epidemic of 1167, and so the emperor ensured that his own three-year-
old son, also called Frederick, succeeded him. He soon died, however, and was
replaced by his even younger brother, Conrad, re-named Frederick. In this way,
Swabia was effectively returned to Barbarossa’s personal control. In 1169, moreo-
ver, Barbarossa secured the election and coronation of his next son, Henry, as his
successor. In doing this, he deliberately overlooked his eldest son, but by keeping
duchy and kingdom in separate hands, the emperor hoped that the German princes
would consent to the continuance of the Staufen royal line.
Meanwhile, Alexander III’s position in Italy had strengthened. The murder of
the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1170 had widened the basis of
his support. Becket’s death had actually eased the tension between England and
the papacy, and the French king Louis VII was still a firm ally of the pope, having
seized the opportunity during the Becket dispute to undermine the position of his
great adversary, Henry II of England. Negotiations to end the papal schism still
dragged on unsuccessfully, however, prompting the start of Barbarossa’s fifth Ital-
ian expedition (1174–8) in 1174. Barbarossa prepared the ground for his return to
Italy when the aging Welf VI agreed to surrender his rights there to the emperor
in return for a money payment. But on entering Italy, and despite being in com-
mand of an 8,000-strong army, Barbarossa was unable to reduce Alessandria after
a six-month siege, and he was forced to make peace with the Lombard League in
April 1175 at Montebello. This peace did not last long, however, as the League’s
wish to include Alexander III in the peace was unacceptable to the emperor. Fight-
ing soon began again, but Barbarossa was unable to secure the assistance of the one
ally whose strength might have tipped the balance in his favour, Henry the Lion,
Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. Henry had not fought in Italy since 1161, and, if he
was to do so again, he wanted Barbarossa to give him the strategically important
imperial city of Goslar and its silver mines. This was too high a price for the
emperor, and the alliance between the two great men, which had held firm for
more than 30 years, was now in jeopardy.
Barbarossa’s forces were thus not as strong as they might have been when they
entered Lombardy in 1176, and they were heavily defeated by the army of the
Lombard League at Legnano, north-west of Milan, in May of that year. Divisions
within the League, however, meant that it was unable to capitalise on its success,
and Barbarossa weakened it further by changing course and making a separate peace
with Alexander III at Anagni in November 1176. Barbarossa agreed to abandon the
anti-pope and recognise Alexander, and, in Italy, agreed to recognise the papacy’s
temporal authority in the papal patrimony and other parts of central Italy. The
pope stipulated that the peace terms were not to come into effect until Barbarossa
had reached another agreement with the Lombard communes. This final stage in
the process was uncomfortable for the pope as his long-standing allies resented the
independent course he had pursued at Anagni, and at Venice in July 1177, Barba-
rossa was able to use the mistrust between communes and pope to refine some of
the terms of the treaty of Anagni in his favour. So, whereas at Anagni Barbarossa
had acceded to the pope’s temporal claims over the so-called Matildine lands in
central Italy, at Venice he was able to hold on to them pending an arbitration as
to their rightful holder. Finally, at Venice, two truces were secured by Barbarossa:
one of six years with the communes and one for 15 years with the king of Sicily.
The last years of Barbarossa’s reign were dominated by his conflict with Henry
the Lion. This had its origins in Henry’s refusal to support Barbarossa in Italy in
1176 but can also be attributed to Barbarossa’s desire to destroy the power of a rival
with quasi-regal authority in parts of Germany and influence across Europe. Henry
had successfully asserted his authority along the Baltic coast during the 1160s, not
least over the increasingly important trading centre at Lübeck, and he was mar-
ried to a daughter of King Henry II of England. But once peace in Italy had been
secured in 1177, the emperor could turn his full attention to dealing with his
over-mighty cousin. Barbarossa used local disputes within Saxony and his position
as the duke’s feudal overlord to summon Henry to answer charges at the imperial
court. When the duke refused to obey the summonses, he was formally deprived
of his two duchies by sentence of the German princes delivered in January 1180.
His lands were delivered to the emperor to dispose of as he saw fit. Saxony was
split up. The new duke was Count Bernard of Anhalt, but he controlled only the
eastern part of the old duchy. The western part meanwhile became the new duchy
of Westphalia under the authority of the archbishop of Cologne. Most of the duchy
of Bavaria was handed over to Otto of Wittelsbach, a long-term supporter of the
emperor, but a separate duchy of Styria was carved out of the old duchy for Otto’s
brother, Ottokar. In 1181, Henry the Lion went into exile in England at the court
of his father-in-law, Henry II. He did not return until 1185.
The dismantling of Saxony and the creation of the new duchies of Westphalia
and Styria, along with the earlier creation of the duchy of Austria, heralded the
beginnings of a new political order in Germany. The kingdom was no longer
Power 227
structured around the old stem duchies, and new families were being promoted.
All of this would have a significant impact on the way Germany developed. In
the short term, however, by the mid-1180s, Barbarossa was at the height of his
power. Unchallenged in Germany, the Lombard communes were in no position
to renew their conflict with him when the expiry of the six-year truce agreed in
1177 loomed. At the same time, the emperor was finally prepared to accept the
reality of communal power. By the Peace of Constance in June 1183, Barbarossa
renounced the Roncaglian decrees and conceded to the members of the Lombard
League a considerable degree of independence. This was a long way from the tri-
umphant imposition of imperial rule that he had set out to achieve in the 1150s.
The emperor retained important rights, however, which were of no little financial
importance. The cities had to pay him an initial lump sum and an annual tribute
of 2,000 marks thereafter. The Italian cities, which also now pledged their fealty to
the emperor, undertook to supply him and his troops on future Italian expeditions.
Barbarossa’s plans for Italy received a further boost in October 1184 when his son
and designated heir Henry VI was engaged to Constance, daughter of Roger II,
aunt of the childless William II and heiress to the kingdom of Sicily.
Henry and Constance were married in 1186. Their union raised the prospect of
a Staufen succeeding to the southern Italian kingdom, and it was bound to cause
concern across Europe, not least at the papal court. The marriage took place in
1186 at Milan during Barbarossa’s sixth Italian expedition (1184–6). After 1183, a
newly reconstructed Milan was the emperor’s main ally in northern Italy, and Bar-
barossa was able to treat the pope much as he liked: the papal lands in central Italy
were occupied, and Rome was seized. Pope Urban III appealed to the opponents
of the emperor within the German church and forced Barbarossa to return home,
but the pope died in 1187, and the attention of Barbarossa and the whole of Europe
was soon taken up with events in the Holy Land. After Saladin’s victory at Hattin in
October 1187 and his subsequent conquest of most of the kingdom of Jerusalem,
Barbarossa took the cross at Mainz in March 1188. He was over 60. Henry the
Lion was forced into exile in England for another three years, and Henry VI was
entrusted with the regency of the German kingdom during his father’s absence.
The crusaders set off for the Holy Land in May 1189 with the emperor at the head
of an army numbering, according to contemporary estimates, 100,000 men. Bar-
barossa’s progress through Byzantine territory was difficult, and he was only able to
secure his fellow emperor’s cooperation after he had threatened to attack Constan-
tinople itself. Barbarossa managed to cross the Taurus mountains but drowned in
the river Salef on 10 June 1190. He was buried in the cathedral at Tyre.
Henry VI was 24 at the time of his father’s death. He had been associated with
his father’s rule since 1186 and had been regent in Germany since Barbarossa’s
departure for the East. He had also been crowned king of Italy in 1186. Young,
therefore, but not lacking in experience or ambition, Henry’s first task was to deal
with Henry the Lion, who had broken his promise to remain in exile during Bar-
barossa’s crusade and returned to Germany in October 1189. The king came to a
peaceful settlement with the Lion in July 1190, his haste to do so in part driven by
events elsewhere. In Sicily, King William II had died childless in November 1189.
Henry’s wife, Constance, was in line to succeed him, and Henry was keen to make
good her claim to the kingdom. This was not going to be easy. There was another
claimant to the Sicilian crown, Tancred of Lecce, an illegitimate grandson of King
Roger II. He had the support of the pope and the Byzantine emperor, neither of
whom wanted to see the union of the kingdoms of Germany and Sicily. Tancred
had also settled a dispute with Richard I of England, who had passed through Sicily
on his way to the Third Crusade.
Henry set off for Sicily in January 1191, and although he and Constance secured
imperial coronation by the new pope, Celestine III (1191–8) in April, he was
unable to advance far south. He was defeated outside the walls of Naples, and to
make matters worse, the son of Henry the Lion, also called Henry, who had been
brought on the campaign as a hostage, escaped and returned to Germany where he
initiated a revolt against the new king which soon became dangerously widespread.
At this point, however, the emperor received unexpected help. On his way home
from the crusade, at the start of 1193, King Richard I of England was captured by
one of Henry’s allies, Duke Leopold of Austria, who handed his captive over to the
emperor. Richard, who was also the brother-in-law of Henry the Lion, was only
released in 1194 after a huge ransom of 150,000 silver marks had been paid, Rich-
ard had received his kingdom back as a fief from the emperor and agreed to pay
him an annual tribute of 5,000 marks. This windfall allowed Henry to relaunch his
Italian plans, and after settling his quarrel with the Welfs by arranging a marriage
between Henry the Lion’s rebellious son and the emperor’s cousin, Henry returned
to Italy in May 1194. Aided by the opportune death of Tancred of Lecce earlier in
the year, he completed his conquest of Sicily by the end of 1194 and on Christmas
Day was crowned king of Sicily in Palermo cathedral.
Henry now turned his attention to two other projects: a new crusade and secur-
ing a change in the imperial constitution which would make succession to the
empire hereditary. Prospects for another crusade looked good. The three-year truce
with Saladin agreed in 1192 had expired, and the latter’s death in 1193 had rein-
troduced political instability into the Muslim world. Henry’s support for a crusade
meant that the pope, despite his reservations about the emperor, was obliged to be
more friendly towards him than he had been hitherto. Meanwhile, Henry’s ambi-
tions for the empire had been brought into focus by the birth of his son in Decem-
ber 1194. He was first named Constantine, but in renaming him Frederick Roger
after his two grandfathers, Henry emphasised his links with the two kingdoms of
Germany and Sicily which he wished to reserve permanently to his own family.
Such fundamental changes obviously impinged upon the German princes’ tradi-
tional rights of election, however, and long negotiations with them and the pope
about the introduction of the hereditary principle eventually made little progress,
despite the apparently wide-ranging concessions Henry was prepared to make to
all sides. Henry was forced to put his plans for a hereditary empire on one side for
the time being and had to settle for the princes’ acceptance in December 1196 of
his son as his heir.
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The last months of Henry’s life were taken up with his brutal suppression of
a revolt in Sicily and with preparing for the crusade. A German army containing
4,000 knights and 12,000 other troops gathered at Bari in the summer of 1197
and reached the Holy Land in the autumn. But just as he was about to leave Sic-
ily and join his fellow crusaders, Henry died in September 1197. Aged only 32, it
is not clear what Henry would have attempted had he lived longer, but he left a
confused situation behind him. His only son, Frederick, was just three years old.
He was taken to Sicily on his father’s death where his resourceful mother, Con-
stance, ensured that he was crowned king with the backing of Pope Innocent III.
In Germany, however, a disputed succession seemed inevitable. Frederick had been
crowned king before his father’s death in 1196, but in 1197–8, he was too young
and too far away to be considered a realistic successor, and two other contenders
for the German crown emerged. Predictably, one was a Staufen and the other was a
Welf. The majority of the German princes supported the Staufen candidate, Philip
of Swabia, Henry VI’s younger brother, but some gave their backing to the Welf,
Otto of Brunswick, a younger son of Henry the Lion and the nephew of King
Richard I of England. Otto was crowned king at Aachen in July 1198 and Philip
at Mainz in September. Both men worked hard to secure papal backing for their
claims, but in 1201, Pope Innocent III gave his support to Otto in return for the
latter’s promise to surrender his rights over the German church and recognise papal
claims in Italy. Otto, unlike Philip, also had no dynastic claim to the kingdom of
Sicily, which suited the pope who was desperate to keep Germany and southern
Italy apart. Even so, Philip of Swabia still retained significant support within Ger-
many, and over the next few years, aided by large financial inducements and the
weakening of Otto’s Angevin ally King John at the hands of Philip II of France,
there were more defections from the Welf side. In early 1205, Philip of Swabia was
re-elected and re-crowned at Aachen, and Innocent III was eventually prepared
to negotiate with him; he may even have offered him imperial coronation. How-
ever, Philip was assassinated in 1208 before any of this came to fruition, and the
political pendulum swung back towards Otto. Staufen supporters were reconciled
to this when Otto and Philip’s eldest daughter were betrothed; Otto was then re-
elected and finally crowned emperor by Innocent III in Rome in October 1209.
The price of imperial coronation had been a renewal on even broader terms of the
promises Otto had made to the pope in 1201. Once crowned, however, Otto’s true
intentions became clear: he did not return to Germany, and despite being excom-
municated by Innocent III (November 1210), by the middle of 1211 he controlled
most of southern Italy.
Otto was finally forced to leave Italy in 1212 on hearing that Frederick, Henry
VI’s son, had left Sicily and found his way to Germany where he planned to make
a bid for the throne. Innocent III had reluctantly been persuaded, mainly by Philip
II of France who was keen to undermine the Welf-Angevin axis, to swallow his
aversion to the union of Germany and Sicily and give his backing to Frederick, so
in 1211, he had freed Otto’s vassals from their oaths of allegiance and Frederick
had secretly been elected king. After he had arrived in Germany, Frederick was
re-elected publicly and crowned in December 1212, and in the so-called Golden
Bull of Eger (July 1213), he undertook to abide by the same concessions Otto had
made in 1201 and 1209. For his part, Otto was determined to resist Frederick,
but his position was destroyed when he was defeated by Philip II at the Battle of
Bouvines in July 1214. A year later, in July 1215, Frederick was crowned once
again, this time at Aachen where he also reburied Charlemagne’s body and swore
to go on crusade, and at the Fourth Lateran Council shortly afterwards, Innocent
III gave him the papal stamp of approval. Frederick remained in Germany for the
next five years, but the lure of Italy in the end proved too strong. In April 1220,
his nine-year-old son Henry was elected king of Germany, in August Frederick left
the kingdom, and in November he was crowned emperor by Pope Honorius III in
Rome. He would not return to Germany for 15 years.
France: A Real Kingdom at Last

Louis VII (1137–80) was born in 1120, the second son of Louis VI and Adelaide
of Maurienne. He became the heir to the throne in 1131 when his elder brother
Philip was killed – Philip was thrown off his horse after it stumbled over a pig in
a Paris street. Louis was quickly anointed and crowned by Pope Innocent II at
Reims. Esteemed by contemporaries for his piety and his love of justice, Louis
dressed and behaved simply; he was gentle and modest. He visited Jerusalem dur-
ing the Second Crusade, made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in the
1150s and travelled to Thomas Becket’s tomb at Canterbury in 1179 to pray for the
recovery of his sick son. One English contemporary, the scholar and churchman
John of Salisbury, called him rex Christianissimus (‘the most Christian king’). Louis
has not fared so well at the hands of modern historians, however, who have tended
to see him as a non-entity: he was weak and unsuccessful, dominated by others,
a poor politician and strategist – he was unglamorous. To be sure, his relationship
with the Angevin kings of England dominated the politics and diplomacy of his
reign, and Louis usually came off second-best. Having said that, it is possible to
view him as a steady consolidator of royal power who paved the way for the even-
tual triumph of his successors.
It had been Louis VI’s great achievement to pacify the royal principality and
make the king the undisputed lord there. Louis VII also inherited a strong posi-
tion in other ways in 1137. A debilitating succession crisis was developing in the
Anglo-Norman realm as King Stephen of England prepared to confront his rival
for the throne, Empress Matilda (the daughter of Stephen’s predecessor Henry I),
and her husband, Count Geoffrey of Anjou; and only a few days before becoming
king, Louis had married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the heiress to the largest principality
in France. However, these advantages had been largely squandered by 1144. Louis
fell out with the papacy in a dispute over who should be appointed archbishop of
Bourges, and an interdict was imposed for a short time on the kingdom by the
pope. And from 1142–4, the king became bogged down in fruitless conflict with
Count Theobald of Blois-Champagne. Theobald had been Count of Blois since
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1102 and Count of Champagne as well from 1125. The two counties were usu-
ally split between different members of the same family, but Theobald got hold
of Chartres when his uncle Henry left for the Holy Land and became a Templar.
Theobald was also the elder brother of King Stephen of England, which added an
extra dimension to a quarrel which developed first within the royal court. Louis
allowed his cousin Count Ralph of Vermandois, who was also the king’s senechal,
to repudiate his wife, who was Theobald’s niece, and to marry Queen Eleanor’s
sister. Theobald appealed to Pope Innocent II who excommunicated Ralph, but
when Louis intervened militarily on Ralph’s side, the king’s main contribution
was the burning down of the town of Vitry in 1143 in which at least 1,500 people
died. Louis achieved nothing by supporting Ralph; indeed, his involvement prob-
ably distracted him from a much more significant event, namely the takeover of
Normandy in 1144 by Count Geoffrey of Anjou. In return for acknowledging
Geoffrey as Duke of Normandy, Louis took possession of the French Vexin, but
this only partly made up for the wider shift in the balance of power brought about
by the Angevin conquest.
The Second Crusade was Louis VII’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover
his lost prestige and atone for his sins, in particular the destruction of Vitry. There
was more to it than this, however. Through the large assemblies he summoned to
prepare for the crusade at Bourges, Vézelay and Étampes between December 1145
and February 1147, Louis could project his authority over his entire kingdom.
Great lords from all parts of the French kingdom, including the counts of Flanders
and Toulouse, attended these gatherings and signed up to what was an explicitly
royal plan. Louis would be the first French monarch to lead a war of conquest out-
side his own kingdom for more than 300 years. Once the crusade was underway,
however, it eventually turned into an embarrassing disappointment outside the
walls of Damascus in 1148. Louis’s relationship with Eleanor, who accompanied
him on the crusade, may also have been put under strain by the experience. The
queen is supposed to have complained that her relationship with Louis was akin to
being married to a monk. To be sure, their two personalities were very different
and perhaps incompatible from the start: the earnest, devout king and the fiery,
high-spirited queen. Rumours also circulated about Eleanor’s inappropriate con-
duct during the crusade – there were even claims that she had an affair with her
uncle Raymond of Poitiers, the Prince of Antioch. The real reason behind their
divorce in 1152 was less sensational, however: by the end of that year, Eleanor had
given Louis two daughters but no son, and he evidently thought that, after 15 years
of failing to produce a male heir, it was time to try a different wife. In purely dynas-
tic terms this made sense, but Louis was wrong-footed when, in May 1152, less
than two months after separating from the French king, Eleanor married Henry of
Anjou, the son of Count Geoffrey and the empress Matilda and 11 years Eleanor’s
junior. By this time, Henry had already inherited the county of Anjou and the
duchy of Normandy from his father, and so this marriage raised the grim prospect
(for Louis) of Anjou, Normandy and Aquitaine all coming under the rule of a
single prince. Reasonably enough, Louis claimed that as the overlord of the duchy
of Aquitaine, he should have been consulted over Eleanor’s remarriage, but Henry
and Eleanor were able to ignore this without fear of serious royal reprisals. Some
historians have argued that Louis should either have stuck with Eleanor or at least
prevented her union with Henry, but the search for a male heir necessitated divorce;
even had Louis known Eleanor’s remarriage was coming, he lacked the power to
stop it or do anything about it once it had happened. The situation only worsened
for Louis in the years that followed. He had supported the claims of Eustace, King
Stephen’s son, to succeed his father in England and Normandy, but Eustace died in
1152. Stephen reluctantly made Henry of Anjou his heir, and Henry became king
of England in 1154. He now ruled a rich and powerfully centralised kingdom of his
own as well as the greater part of the kingdom of France. The balance of power in
Western Europe had altered decisively, and the French king, for all his prestige and
glamour as the heir of Charlemagne and Clovis, could only look on with impotent
frustration as the upstart Henry II, the son of a mere count, became arguably the
mightiest ruler in Latin Christendom. That Henry and Eleanor went on to have
five sons (and three daughters) can only have rubbed more personal salt into Louis’s
political wounds.
Louis married Constance of Castile, the daughter of King Alfonso VII of Cas-
tile, in 1154. Two more daughters were born over the next few years, but still
no sons. Meanwhile, Louis was trying to adjust to the new political landscape on
either side of the English Channel. In 1156, Louis and Henry II made peace, and
in 1158, when Henry claimed the overlordship of Brittany following the death
of his brother the count, Louis did nothing to stop him. There was also a mar-
riage alliance in 1158 when Henry’s eldest son, also called Henry, was betrothed
to Louis’s daughter Margaret. Margaret’s dowry was the Norman Vexin, and the
marriage, when it took place, gave rise to the chance that young Henry (who, like
Margaret, was still only a baby in 1158) would inherit the French kingdom through
marriage. Louis was not completely passive in the face of Henry II’s burgeoning
power, however. In 1159, Henry marched on Toulouse in his new wife’s cause, to
enforce a long-standing claim to the county maintained by the Dukes of Aquitaine.
Louis backed Count Raymond V of Toulouse, however, and actually marched
south himself and occupied the city of Toulouse in order to keep it out of Henry’s
hands. Henry was unwilling to besiege his overlord and retreated, making this the
only time Louis really got in Henry’s way. This was more down to Henry’s scruples
than Louis’s power, however, and the latter could do nothing in 1160 to prevent
the marriage between young Henry (aged five) and princess Margaret (aged three)
actually taking place. With Margaret being brought up at his court and with little
to fear from either Louis or others who might frown at the way he was abusing his
position, Henry II wanted the Norman Vexin sooner rather than later.
Queen Constance died in childbirth in 1160, and within weeks Louis had mar-
ried his third wife, Adela of Champagne. Their son, Philip, was born in 1165, and
with the arrival of a male heir, Louis’s fortunes at last began to improve. In 1169,
Henry II’s sons performed homage to Louis for the lands Henry was planning to
leave them, and in the 1170s, Louis was able to exploit divisions within Henry’s
Power 233
family as well as more of the latter’s problems. In 1170, the murder in his own
cathedral of the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, at the hands of knights
who had travelled from Henry II’s court, discredited Henry, whilst the shelter and
support Louis had given Becket during his exile in France from 1164–70 reflected
well on the French king. Then, in 1173–4, Louis was happy to lend support to
Henry’s challengers, not least Henry’s own insubordinate sons, during the Great
Revolt which spread across the latter’s vast collection of lands. Henry overcame his
opponents on this occasion, but the idea that the French king could use his position
as overlord to intervene in the affairs of his vassals, even when one of those was also
the king of England, would become increasingly potent. This idea was not new
(Louis VI had used it against Henry I of England earlier in the twelfth century),
but it gained more prominence during Louis VII’s reign, and ultimately it would
contribute significantly to the destruction of Angevin power and the triumph of
the French monarchy.
Louis VII had just about managed to contain Angevin power, and given the
situation which confronted him in the second half of the 1150s, this was no small
achievement. But even in the 1170s when Henry II’s problems allowed Louis to
be more proactive, he lacked the resources, and arguably the ability, to overcome
his Angevin adversary militarily, so he used other methods to extend his influence.
The two daughters he had with Eleanor of Aquitaine married the counts of Blois
and Champagne, and Louis’s third wife, Adela, was their sister. The counts of Blois
had a long history of challenging the French kings, but Louis made them into a
useful ally against the Angevins. Count Theobald of Blois even became the royal
senechal. Other marriages were important, too. Louis’s son Philip married Isabelle,
the niece of the Count of Flanders, while his sister Constance married Count
Raymond V of Toulouse in 1162. These connections were reinforced by more fre-
quent performance of homage to the French king. Geoffrey of Anjou did homage
to Louis in 1144; his son Henry did the same in 1151, 1156 and 1169; and Henry’s
sons followed suit in respect of their promised inheritances in 1169. Such ceremo-
nies were of primarily symbolic significance. However, they reminded the princes
involved that they were vassals of the French king. The repetition and refinement
of such an idea by Louis and his successor made acting on it later that much easier.
Within royal government, too, there was a sense of increasing solidity. Until his
death in 1151, Abbot Suger remained an influential figure in the administration,
especially during the Second Crusade when he acted as regent for the absent king.
However, he did not dominate the court, and it seems that the king kept a tight
grip on the reins of government himself. For example, he continued to appoint
relatively lowly figures to important positions (the position of senechal was the
exception here and was held in turn by the counts of Vermandois and Blois), and
he was determined that offices should not become hereditary. He was prepared to
leave important offices vacant for long periods, too, perhaps in an effort to show
that they were his to give out. There was no royal constable between 1160 and
1164, for example, and the post of chancellor remained unfilled for most of the
1170s. The larger number of surviving royal charters for Louis VII’s reign (19 per
year as opposed to 12 under Louis VI and fewer than 4 under Philip I) hints at a
more active and interventionist regime, as does the widening geographical spread
of the beneficiaries, and by 1180, royal coinage was beginning to circulate outside
the royal principality for the first time since the ninth century. Having said this, the
basic structures of government remained much the same as they had under Louis
VI, and the king’s routine was taken up by travelling around his principality accom-
panied by his household. The royal demesne did not expand much under Louis
either, but the number of prévôtés increased from 16 at the start of his reign to 40 by
the end, suggesting a tighter and more intensive degree of royal control. Louis did
travel outside his demesne more often than his predecessors, however. He began
his reign with a splendid procession into Aquitaine, and when he was installed as
duke at Bordeaux, it was the first time a French king had visited the city for more
than 300 years. In 1154–5, he made an equally unprecedented passage through
Toulouse on his way to Santiago, and there were more forceful interventions in
Burgundy in 1166 and 1171 to protect the abbey of Cluny and suppress the sup-
porters of the anti-pope Victor IV. Count Raymond V’s performance of homage
to Louis in 1154 was particularly significant as it helped to prevent a large part of
southern France slipping out of the French king’s orbit altogether and potentially
becoming part of Spain.
The French monarchy was finally becoming influential south of the Loire, and
whilst before 1100 it is difficult to talk convincingly about a kingdom of France
as anything other than a notional entity, by 1180 one certainly existed in a mean-
ingful way. The regnum Francie was not just the royal principality anymore, and
this Latin phrase, which was used by Louis VII and his subjects alike, signified
something wider. And whilst the great French princes ruled well-defined territo-
rial areas and still enjoyed large amounts of autonomy, they all acknowledged that
they were vassals of the French king, whatever passing disagreements they might
have with him. By 1180, it has been argued, there were also early signs of the
development of a distinctively French national identity. Louis VI’s great campaign
of 1124 against Emperor Henry V had set a precedent here, and even the Second
Crusade, a military failure to be sure, may have served another purpose in bringing
lords from all over France together in a common enterprise under their king. As
a result, and despite its outcome in the Holy Land, the crusade arguably strength-
ened royal power within France and contributed to a growingly cohesive sense
of what it meant to be French. So Louis VII and before him Louis VI had done
much to make the French monarchy more of a force to be reckoned with. But
in 1180, the French kings were still overshadowed by their English and German
counterparts, whilst the authority they exercised over their kingdom was still far
from comprehensive and remained as much moral as legally enforceable. It fell to
Philip II (1180–1223) to transform French royal fortunes and make the French king
dominant, not just in his own kingdom, but across Western Europe.
Louis VII had planned to have his son Philip crowned king before his own
death. The date was set for August 1179, but Philip almost never made it. Hav-
ing got lost whilst out hunting, he fell ill and seemed likely to die. In desperation,
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after being prompted by a vision of Thomas Becket, Louis VII travelled to Eng-
land to visit the martyr’s new shrine at Canterbury. The king spent two days there
in prayer for his son; Philip recovered and was crowned at Reims on 1 Novem-
ber 1179. The trip had probably been too much for the 60-year-old king, however.
He suffered a stroke, was paralysed and died in September 1180. Philip II was 15,
and by the time of his father’s death, he had been ruling in person for nearly a year.
He was also recently married. Philip would ultimately marry three times. His first
wife was Isabella, daughter of Count Baldwin V of Hainault and niece of Philip
of Alsace, Count of Flanders, whose idea the marriage had been. Isabella’s dowry
was the important county of Artois, and she gave Philip his son and successor,
Louis, in 1187. The marriage seems to have been a reasonably happy one, although
there was a crisis in 1184 when, in the midst of his quarrel with Philip of Flan-
ders, Philip threatened to divorce Isabella. There was a reconciliation, however,
before Isabella died in 1190. Three years later, Philip married Ingeborg, the sister
of King Cnut VI of Denmark. The reasons behind this marriage are obscure, but
after Philip and Ingeborg met for the first time in August 1193, they were mar-
ried on the same day. Their joint coronation was arranged for the next day, but
during the ceremony the king became pale and agitated and immediately after the
service was over, Philip sent Ingeborg to a convent and announced his intention
to divorce her. Philip’s conduct has defied explanation ever since. He claimed that
he and Ingeborg were too closely related for canonical marriage, but his case was
weak; contemporary suggestions that Ingeborg was a sorceress are even less cred-
ible. Philip was adamant, however. The French clergy granted him his divorce later
in 1193, and in June 1196, Philip married Agnes of Méran, the daughter of Count
Berthold IV of Méran in the Rhineland. She produced a son and a daughter and
died in 1201. But while Philip got his way over Ingeborg within France, further
afield the affair damaged his reputation, especially with the papacy. Popes Celestine
III (1191–8) and Innocent III (1198–1216) refused to accept the validity of Philip’s
divorce from Ingeborg and his marriage to Agnes. Innocent imposed an interdict
on France in 1198, and although it was lifted in 1200, little progress was made in
the dispute before Agnes’s death in 1201. Philip agreed to restore Ingeborg (who
had remained in France in rather miserable confinement since 1193), and the pope
agreed to legitimise the children of Philip and Agnes. Ingeborg was not finally
restored at court until 1213, however, when Philip felt in need of Danish support
for his projected invasion of England.
Philip’s first political confrontation as king was with his wife’s uncle, Philip of
Alsace, Count of Flanders. Count Philip was perhaps the most powerful French
prince in 1180; he had played a dominant role at court in the latter stages of Louis
VII’s reign and had successfully sponsored the marriage between his niece Isabella
and Philip. He would certainly have expected to exercise considerable influence
over the new king. In 1182, Count Philip’s wife, Elizabeth of Vermandois, died.
She was heiress in her own right to Vermandois, the Amiénois and Valois. Her
husband now claimed these lands, but the new king was keen to support the claims
of the dead countess’ sister, Eleanor de Beaumont. For the time being, however,
a settlement was reached. In 1182 it was agreed that the count should keep Ver-
mandois and Valois for life whilst the king took control of the Amiénois. Rela-
tions remained strained nevertheless, and matters came to a head again in 1185
when king defeated count in battle. In the resulting settlement, the king retained
Artois, his wife’s dowry in 1180, and the Amiénois. Eleanor was to keep Valois,
and Vermandois was divided between king and count. Amongst his other gains, the
king received the important town of Amiens and no fewer than 65 castles, and the
count’s share of Vermandois was to come into royal hands on his death.
Thus, in the first few years of his reign, King Philip had successfully exerted his
authority over one of his most powerful princes, added significantly to the French
royal demesne and paved the way for even further gains in due course. He had been
occupied on other matters, too, and had expelled all Jews from the royal demesne
in 1182. Like the English kings, the Capetians considered the Jews in their lands to
be their personal property. In return for royal protection, Jews could be exploited
financially at the will of the king. Given that their chief occupation was money-
lending, they were a welcome source of occasional revenue. However, the Jews
of medieval Europe were also almost universally hated by Christians. There were
religious and moral reasons for this (they were blamed for the death of Christ),
but there were other factors, too. Jews were powerful because they had a financial
grip on the lives of those to whom they lent money, and their ability to enforce
payment was backed up by the support of their protector, the king. Louis VII had
been well known for his benevolent attitude towards the Jews, but his son acted
differently. In a series of measures beginning in 1180 and ending in 1182, Philip
deprived the Jews of their gold, silver and vestments; he then cancelled all debts
owed to Jews by Christians; and, finally, he expelled all Jews from the royal lands
and confiscated their landed property. In the short term this provided the new king
with a significant injection of cash and resources, and it also won him a good deal
of public support and popularity.
The next few years were taken up for Philip by the first in a series of quarrels
with his principal rivals, the Angevins. This relationship was to dominate the rest of
Philip’s reign, and it functioned on more than one level. Henry II, Richard I, John
and Philip II were kings whose authority was divinely sanctioned; therefore, they
were equals. On another level, however, the duchies of Normandy and Aquitaine
and the county of Anjou were fiefs of the French crown. In other words, the rulers
of these territories were the vassals of the French king, and they had to perform
homage to their royal lord for their French lands when they succeeded to them.
More importantly, Philip’s position as feudal lord gave him all sorts of rights and
privileges over his most powerful vassals and the opportunity directly to intervene
in their affairs. Ultimately, the French king could regulate the relations between
the princes and their own vassals, hear complaints about their bad lordship and
default of justice from them and summon them to appear in his court to respond to
such complaints. The constant presence in the background to affairs of the king of
France also provided his vassals’ subjects with an alternative focus of loyalty if they
were dissatisfied with the treatment they were getting from their own lord. Philip
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II, under the guise of the good lord as impartial judge, was happy to step in and play
off one rival against another and to scratch the sore of rebellion when necessary.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the relationships he attempted to cultivate
at different times with the sons of Henry II.
At the start of Philip’s reign, Henry II was a surprisingly helpful ally. In a great
conference at Gisors in June 1180, mutual guarantees of peace were given by the
French and English kings. Philip did not abide by his promises, however, and
he supported Henry’s sons when they rebelled against their father during the
1180s. Then, following the deaths of Henry II’s sons Henry (d.1183) and Geof-
frey (d.1186), the English king had only two legitimate sons left, Duke Richard of
Aquitaine and John, and it was not clear what the old king’s plans were for the suc-
cession. By 1188, Richard was keen to depart on crusade (Saladin had just captured
Jerusalem after his victory at Hattin in July 1187), and he demanded to know what
his father’s intentions were. When Henry refused to tell him, he became increas-
ingly concerned that the king planned to overlook his own claims to the Angevin
lands and make John his principal heir. Richard’s suspicions pushed him into the
arms of Philip II, who was happy to prey upon them and exploit them to his own
advantage. Philip had his own grievances against Henry, too. Since 1161, his sister
Alice had been kept at Henry II’s court as Richard’s intended bride. No marriage
had ever taken place; however, there were rumours that Henry himself had seduced
the princess, and Alice’s treatment was felt as a grave insult by the French king.
After 1186, he made repeated demands that Richard and Alice should be married,
and in 1187, he started to make territorial gains at Henry’s expense in the county
of Berry and in the Auvergne.
Henry, Richard and Philip met in November 1188. When Henry refused to
confirm Richard as his heir, the latter immediately performed homage to Philip
for his continental lands and asked for his aid in winning his rightful inheritance
from his father. Philip and Richard were more than a match for the old, ailing
Henry, and, by the summer of 1189, he had been roundly defeated and forced to
submit to a humiliating peace. Henry recognised Richard as his heir and agreed
to hand over Alice, Philip would keep his conquests and Henry agreed to pay him
20,000 marks. In return, he asked only one thing: to be given a list of those who
had joined the rebellion against him. When he saw the list, he was shocked to see
that the first name on it was John’s. The favourite son, realising that his father was a
spent force, had decided to back the winning side. Henry meanwhile, still spitting
his determination to get revenge on his enemies, was brought to the great castle of
Chinon where he died on 6 July 1189. By then, Philip II had taken on Henry II
and Philip of Flanders and got the better of them both. He had also made territorial
gains at their expense. These were not huge, but they set a precedent for further
expansion, and time was on Philip’s side.
Richard I and Philip II were now firm allies, even friends. In the words of
the English chronicler Roger of Howden, ‘every day they ate at the same table
and from the same dish, and at night had not separate chambers’. They were also
committed to going on crusade, and on hearing the news of Saladin’s victory at
Hattin, both had taken the cross, Richard in November 1187 and Philip in Janu-
ary 1188. After making their preparations, they set out together from Vézelay in
July 1190. During the course of the crusade, however, their relationship deterio-
rated, and there was a series of disagreements culminating on Sicily when Richard
announced that he would not be marrying princess Alice after all. His bride was
to be Berengaria of Navarre, and the marriage was designed to strengthen Rich-
ard’s political connections at the southern extremity of his continental lands. Philip
eventually arrived in the Holy Land before Richard, in April 1191, and he took
charge of the siege of Acre, the recovery of which was crucial if a Latin presence
in the East was to be maintained. Most commentators have attributed the crusad-
ers’ final victory at Acre in July 1191 to Richard’s arrival at the siege in June, but
Philip’s contribution before that date was hardly negligible. Some claimed that he
could have taken Acre had he wished but that he waited for Richard to arrive; at
the very least, when Richard finally did come, he was able to take advantage of the
breaches Philip and his men had already made in the city walls.
Philip travelled back to France immediately after the fall of Acre in 1191. He
has been heavily criticised for this in some quarters, and it is true that he failed to
complete his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and never attempted to retake the Holy City
from Saladin. He may have been unwell, however, and there were rumours that his
son Louis, still in France, was sick. He was almost certainly fed up with Richard,
too, and further cooperation between them would have been very difficult. His
principal reason for returning was domestic and political, however. Count Philip
of Flanders had died at Acre in 1191, and Philip left the Holy Land to secure his
hold over the lands he had acquired or been promised in 1186. He did this success-
fully, and he also made a new agreement with Eleanor de Beaumont whereby she
renounced all her claims to the Amiénois and most of Vermandois. She was to hold
the rest as Philip’s vassal, and it would revert to him or his successors on her death.
Philip was back in Paris by the end of 1191, and he was not slow to use Richard’s
continued absence abroad to sow further dissension in the Angevin ranks. John,
Richard’s brother, had designs on the English throne, which Philip was happy to
encourage, so John was invited to Paris where, it was believed, Philip would offer
to make him lord of all the Angevin lands in France if he would marry the recently
discarded Princess Alice. John was only prevented from sailing to France when his
mother Eleanor of Aquitaine intervened to put a stop to his plans by threatening
the confiscation of John’s English possessions. Richard, meanwhile, informed of
John’s treacherous plans and of his dangerous friendship with King Philip, knew
that he had to return to northern Europe, and in October 1192, he set out from
the Holy Land. On his way home, however, Richard was captured by Leopold,
Duke of Austria, and handed over by him to the German emperor, Henry VI, who
demanded a ransom of 150,000 marks for his return.
Such news must have been music to the ears of Richard’s opponents and espe-
cially Philip and John. By the spring of 1193, war had broken out in three different
parts of the Angevin lands. In Aquitaine, Count Adémar of Angoulême transferred
his allegiance from Richard to Philip, and although he was soon captured, he was
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released in July 1193 and proved a constant thorn in Richard’s flesh thereafter.
Further, at the end of January 1193, John had arrived in Paris and performed hom-
age to Philip for Normandy and all of Richard’s other lands, including even, some
alleged, England. He also promised to put aside his wife, Isabelle, marry Alice and
surrender the vitally important Norman Vexin to Philip. Philip made plans for
an invasion of England. John then returned to England to stir up rebellion. He
claimed the throne and announced that Richard was dead, but he failed to muster
any serious support, and his claims about Richard were not believed. He eventually
agreed to a truce brokered by the new archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter.
As a result Philip’s plan to invade England in 1193 had to be put to one side, but
he was more successful in Normandy where he seized control of the great frontier
castles of Gisors and Neaufles. He now laid siege to the ducal capital at Rouen, and
although he did not manage to take the city, by the summer of 1193, Philip was in
control of most of north-eastern Normandy. In June 1193, Richard finally agreed
to the terms of his release with Emperor Henry, and on hearing this news, Philip
sent John a message: ‘Look to yourself; the devil is loose’. Richard finally became a
free man in February 1194, and he landed in England the following month.
During Richard’s captivity, Philip had captured approximately 30 fortresses
along the Norman frontier, some of great strategic significance. Richard spent the
last years of his life trying successfully to recover these losses, and at Le Vaudreuil
in January 1196, Philip was forced to surrender most of the principal conquests he
had made, including all of those east of the Seine except the Vexin, which he had
held since 1194. Richard was successful, too, in building up a new set of alliances.
Those with the counts of Toulouse (who married Richard’s widowed sister, Joan),
Boulogne and Flanders were particularly important. In 1197 and 1198, Philip’s
campaigns in Flanders and the Vexin made little headway. By 1199, therefore, when
Richard died, he had gone a long way to restoring the position he had inherited in
1189. He had not recovered everything, however. Philip still held places of enor-
mous strategic importance on the Norman border, in particular Gisors which con-
trolled the duchy’s eastern frontier along the river Epte. New fortresses had been
constructed to compensate for this, most notably Chateau Gaillard, but whether
Richard would have gone on completely to recover what had been lost between
1191 and 1194 is open to question. Philip would certainly have had a struggle to
stop him, however, and it is clear that Richard’s unexpected death was another of
those fortuitous events which helped Philip at several key points during his reign.
Philip’s new adversary, King John, was perhaps not the inept monster of legend,
but he bore little comparison with his brother Richard as a soldier, and the dif-
ficulties he had in establishing himself as king played into Philip’s hands. On 25
April 1199, John was installed as Duke of Normandy in Rouen, and on 27 May, he
was crowned king of England at Westminster. Aquitaine was being held for him by
his mother, Queen Eleanor. John’s big problem, however, was that there was a rival
claimant to the Angevin lands, his nephew Arthur (the son of his brother, Count
Geoffrey of Brittany, who had died in 1186). Arthur already had firm control of
Brittany when he was accepted on 18 April 1199 by the barons of Anjou, Maine
and Touraine as their new lord. Unsurprisingly, he had King Philip’s support, too.
Also, on hearing the welcome news of Richard’s death, Philip had invaded Nor-
mandy and Maine. Philip and John met on the Norman frontier in August 1199
but failed to reach agreement on the succession. In September, John headed into
Anjou where the county’s most powerful baron, William des Roches, submitted to
him and abandoned his allegiance to Arthur. At Le Mans on 22 September, Arthur
and his mother, Constance, made peace with John, leaving king Philip isolated
and exposed; he was also under pressure from the pope over his failed marriage to
Ingeborg of Denmark. A peace treaty was formally concluded at Le Goulet on 22
May 1200. John was confirmed as the rightful heir of Richard in all the lands that
his father and brother had held on the continent. John for his part acknowledged
that he held these lands as a vassal of the king of France. He also agreed to pay him
20,000 marks by way of a relief, a tangible sign of subjection to the French king
that neither Henry II nor Richard I had ever been required to accept. Arthur was
acknowledged to hold Brittany as the vassal of the Count of Anjou, John. The set-
tlement also made important modifications to the Norman–French border which
gave more control and influence to the French king, and John had to abandon the
alliances Richard had worked hard to establish with the counts of Flanders and
Boulogne and Emperor Otto IV. More territory was lost, too, by the marriage
which was arranged between Philip’s son, Louis, and John’s niece, Blanche of Cas-
tile. Her dowry was the border region of Berry, which Philip was to hold until the
marriage. In all, it can be argued that Philip II gained most from the treaty: more
land, more money, more influence and a more fully defined lord–vassal relationship
with the English king than ever before.
In August 1200, King John married Isabella, heiress to the county of Angoulême.
He did this, contemporaries said, for love. But Isabella may only have been eight
or nine years old in 1200, and it is much more likely that the marriage made sense
for hard-headed strategic reasons. Isabella’s father, Count Adhemar, along with his
kinsman, the Viscount of Limoges, controlled territory crucial to communications
between Angoulême and Gascony. More widely, Angoulême was a notoriously
turbulent part of Aquitaine in which John was keen to gain a foothold. His mistake
lay in not compensating Hugh de Lusignan, Count of La Marche, to whom Isa-
bella was already betrothed. The Lusignans were the most important family in their
part of Poitou, and when John compounded his insult by harassing the Lusignans
in their lands and by refusing to give them a hearing in his court, they appealed
for justice to John’s overlord, King Philip. Without seeking one, Philip had been
given a legal pretext for intervening in this dispute; he summoned John to appear
in his court, but John refused to appear, and in spring 1202 Philip pronounced sen-
tence against him: John was a disobedient vassal, and all his lands on the continent
would be confiscated. The French king then accepted Arthur’s homage for Poitou,
Anjou, Maine and Touraine; the young prince was also married to Philip’s daugh-
ter, Marie. War was inevitable. Things went badly for Philip’s allies at the start. John
won a striking victory at the Battle of Mirebeau in August 1202 when, amongst
others, Arthur of Brittany was captured. John threw away his advantage, however,
Power 241
when he alienated William des Roches, the powerful Angevin baron whose sup-
port had proved so crucial to John in 1199, and when Arthur disappeared, almost
certainly murdered on John’s orders if not by him personally. During the following
year, John’s position in France crumbled. He had few powerful allies, and the Nor-
man nobles either remained neutral or gave their allegiance to Philip. John returned
to England in December 1203 and left his French lands at Philip’s mercy. He cap-
tured Richard’s great fortress of Chateau Gaillard in March 1204, and in June the
Norman capital, Rouen, opened its gates to him. Normandy, the most valuable
and strategically important part of the English king’s continental empire, was lost.
Meanwhile, in April 1204, Eleanor of Aquitaine had died, and the barons of Poitou
had sided with Philip rather than John. The Angevin Empire had collapsed, and all
that remained of it was a small part of Aquitaine and the Channel Islands. In the
space of five years, the balance of power between England and France, and within
France itself, had been radically transformed.
Until about 1212, Philip’s principal domestic concern was to consolidate his
hold over his new territories. He was able to focus on this as there was now a lull
in his struggle with the Angevins and between 1204 and 1206 Philip took control
of Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Brittany. King John was in no position to prevent
this and was preoccupied with accumulating the resources and international sup-
port required to launch an attempt to regain his lost French lands. He was also dis-
tracted by an ongoing dispute with the papacy over his refusal to accept Innocent
III’s choice as archbishop of Canterbury, and he was excommunicated in 1209.
The Anglo-French conflict also became part of a wider European dispute. In 1197,
Emperor Henry VI had died and a succession dispute had ensued between Philip of
Swabia, Henry’s brother, and Otto of Brunswick, the son of Henry the Lion and,
significantly in this context, John’s nephew. By 1208, Philip of Swabia appeared to
have come out on top, but at that point he was murdered, and Otto’s cause gath-
ered strength. He alienated Pope Innocent III by attacking Italy, however, and by
1212, both he and his main ally, John, had been excommunicated. There was also
by now another claimant to the imperial throne: Frederick II, the son of Henry VI
who had been too young to succeed in 1198.
King Philip developed serious plans in 1213 to take advantage of John’s excom-
municate status and invade England. These plans were wrecked, however, when
his invasion fleet was destroyed by the English whilst at anchor at Damme and
when John submitted to the pope and was absolved from excommunication. Pope
Innocent was now John’s most powerful ally. The English king had also built up a
massive war chest, and he had the support, not just of the pope and Otto IV, but
of the counts of Boulogne, Flanders and Toulouse as well, all of whom were anx-
ious about continued French royal expansion. John appeared to have the initiative
once again and set in motion his plans for invasion. His strategy was a daring one.
Philip would be compelled to divide his forces as John’s allies took on the French
king in northern France, whilst John himself invaded from the south, using his
remaining French lands in Poitou as a bridgehead. When he landed, however, John
faced considerable difficulty in Aquitaine, where he had to face Louis, Philip’s son.
Much more decisively, however, his allies were smashed by Philip himself at the
Battle of Bouvines in July 1214. John’s strategy, long in the planning, was in tat-
ters, and he was forced to return home where opposition, Magna Carta and civil
war awaited him. In France, too, Philip’s victory had significant consequences.
The counts of Boulogne and Flanders were captured and imprisoned. Renaud of
Boulogne’s daughter was married to King Philip’s second son, also called Philip,
who also received his father-in-law’s lands. Philip had thus secured his hold over
the Angevin lands he had taken in 1204; he had added to them as well and con-
firmed his supremacy within France and beyond. His victory at Bouvines was a
decisive moment in the rise of the French monarchy, and it permanently altered the
political shape of Europe. There could have been more, too. In 1215, King John’s
opponents in England offered the English crown to Prince Louis, and he invaded
in 1216. It is not clear what King Philip’s attitude to this enterprise was, but it
came to an unsuccessful end. While John was alive, the outcome remained in the
balance, but he died in 1216 and was succeeded by his son, Henry III. The English
barons rallied around the blameless nine year old, Louis lost the military advantage
after defeats on land at Lincoln and at sea off Dover, and he came to terms with the
English and returned home in 1217.
Philip’s triumph over the Angevins was based on more than just military vic-
tory. As soon as he became king in 1180, he began to reform and improve the way
his government worked. In theory, the royal court had always been the ultimate
source of justice in the French kingdom, but Philip did more than any of his pre-
decessors to turn his notional rights over his vassals into hard reality. He used his
position as their feudal overlord to assert his authority over Arthur of Brittany and
John after 1199, and when the Lusignans appealed to Philip about John’s conduct
in 1202, this was a clear sign that royal authority was being felt in parts of the king-
dom which it had rarely touched for centuries. Moreover, as the amount of land
under direct royal control grew after 1180, an increasing number of royal docu-
ments stressed the king’s rights, and an increasing number of officials pressed and
enforced royal claims to ultimate power. The number of prévôtés went up during
Philip’s reign, as it had during Louis VII’s, but his principal representatives from
1184 when they were introduced were the baillis. These salaried officials had wide-
ranging powers, and like the royal ministeriales in twelfth-century Germany, they
tended to come from relatively lowly backgrounds and owe their loyalty and ser-
vice exclusively to the king. In teams of two or three, they heard judicial pleas from
the inhabitants of the royal demesne every month, and every four months they sent
appeals from their decisions to Paris. The king also required that his revenues from
the domain be brought to Paris on these occasions and officially recorded. It may
be no coincidence that the first surviving set of Capetian royal accounts dates from
1202–3. More land and more effective bureaucracy meant more income for the
royal treasury. It has been estimated that Philip’s revenue from the royal demesne
rose by more than 70 per cent between 1179 and 1203 and that the further addi-
tions to the demesne made between 1204 and 1221 saw a similar increase. These
extra resources were crucial in funding the campaigns against John in 1202–4 and
Power 243
1214, but even expensive wars were paid for with relative ease. When Philip died,
he left a sum equivalent to nearly four times the annual royal income in his will.
Philip also turned Paris into a properly functioning royal capital. More than his
predecessors, he used the city as a fixed base, and from his palace on the Ile de la
Cité, he ruled his kingdom and looked on as the great cathedral of Notre Dame
neared completion. The population of Paris may have doubled to 50,000 during
Philip’s reign, and its infrastructure was also improved: its streets were paved, walls
were built around the city, and a fortress, the Louvre, was constructed just outside
the walls near the river Seine.
Philip II’s last years coincided with the Albigensian Crusade. This was a series
of military campaigns directed against Cathar heretics in southern France. Cathar
clerics preached a simple, pure life and criticised the abuses and corruption which,
they alleged, were rife within the established Church. More than this, however,
they had their own beliefs which were anathema to the religious authorities. They
rejected conventional marriage and baptism and denied the divine presence at
communion; more menacingly still, they rejected the authority of priests. Some
historians have doubts about just how organised and institutionalised the Cathars
were and about the seriousness of the threat they really posed to conventional
norms and practices. Nevertheless, their message was received enthusiastically in
south-western France by both ordinary people and, it seems, elements within the
local nobility. Papally sponsored preaching tours early in the twelfth century did lit-
tle to undermine their success. In 1208, a papal legate was murdered (some thought
with the connivance of no less a figure than the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI),
and a crusade was assembled in 1209 which eventually came under the leadership
of a baron from northern France, Simon de Montfort. Count Raymond did public
penance in 1209 in an attempt to distance himself from the heretics, but the crusade
still went ahead, and there were four years of bloody fighting in southern France
before Montfort’s victory at the Battle of Muret in 1213. The political significance
of the crusade had been heightened during these years by the active involvement
on the side of the southern nobility of Pedro II, king of Aragon, who was overlord
of the county of Provence and claimed suzerainty over various lordships in the Pyr-
enees. He was killed at Muret. Raymond of Toulouse, also among the defeated at
Muret, was disinherited by the pope in 1215, and only a small part of his lands was
left for his son Raymond VII. Simon de Montfort became Count of Toulouse, per-
forming homage to King Philip in 1216. When Simon was killed in 1218, his son
Amaury had difficulties stepping into his shoes, and in 1219, Prince Louis moved to
support him against Raymond VI and VII. He had only limited success in the short
term, and Louis’s real achievements in the south did not come until he was king.
Philip II fell ill in 1222 and died in 1223. By then, and in striking contrast to the
position he had inherited in 1180, the French king was supreme within his own
kingdom and pre-eminent in Europe. When he was called ‘Augustus’ by his con-
temporary biographer Rigord, it was not empty flattery. He had increased the size
of the royal principality and improved the royal administration significantly. Most
famously, he had broken the power of his Angevin rivals. And although Philip had
not been personally involved in his son’s southern campaigns, they are important in
the wider context of his reign. The king had supported Simon de Montfort’s cru-
sade (especially whilst there was a chance of Aragonese influence being extended
into southern France), and he gave his blessing to Louis’s efforts after 1218. With
the death of Pedro II at Muret, moreover, and the subsequent long minority of his
heir James I, Aragonese hopes of dominating southern France were extinguished
for good. Capetian influence was thus brought into southern France by Philip II
in ways it had never been before, and a platform was provided for further advances
under later kings. In 1224, Louis VIII (1223–6) used an army raised to crusade
against the heretics in Languedoc to capture Niort and La Rochelle instead. Poi-
tou was thus incorporated into the royal demesne. Then, in 1226, after taking the
cross, Louis led the largest army ever raised by a Capetian king into Provence.
He besieged and captured Avignon and Carcassonne surrendered. Less than two
months later, however, King Louis became ill and died. He had no time to build
further on the gains he had made; even so, he had succeeded in extending French
royal authority to the Mediterranean. The French monarchy would prosper even
more over the rest of the thirteenth century, but later kings all owed a debt to Philip
II and his son.
Britain and Ireland: Civil Wars and Fights for Supremacy

The Norman Conquest had an enormous impact on the politics of Britain. How-
ever, whilst the Normans were well-established in parts of Wales by the start of the
twelfth century, Scotland remained relatively untouched by events in England and
Ireland completely so. This would change dramatically in the ensuing century and
a quarter, and by the 1230s and to varying extents, Scotland, Wales and Ireland
had all acquired an anglicised, urbanised south and east, and the political centres of
gravity in all three countries had shifted towards England. The Scottish kingdom,
indeed, had been rebuilt on English lines with English personnel; meanwhile the
English king presided over a new Irish colony, and the Welsh princes accepted his
overlordship. This was not a story of total English domination, however. There
were times, during the reigns of Stephen and John, for example, when the rul-
ers of Scotland, Ireland and Wales were able to exploit English problems for their
own benefit and increase their own power and prestige. In Scotland and Wales in
particular, a series of remarkably able rulers constructed strong, distinctive regimes
of their own. There were also large parts of all three countries, in the north and
west of each, which remained under native control and where there was significant
continuity in terms of traditional social structures, cultural practices and language.
So just as the events of 1066 had made England into a land of two peoples, Nor-
man and English, so during the twelfth century something similar happened in
Scotland, Wales and Ireland. There it was the decision whether to accept, resist or
negotiate English superiority that largely dictated the course of events.
After being conquered twice in the eleventh century, the rich and administra-
tively sophisticated kingdom of England collapsed into civil war during the twelfth.
Power 245
For all its institutional substance, English kingship remained (like kingship else-
where in Europe) a personal business: success depended not least on clear, forceful
leadership. Henry I, however, left no such clarity behind at his death in 1135. After
the loss of his only legitimate son in 1120, Henry had designated his daughter,
Matilda, as his heir, but she and her husband, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, were
fighting a war against Henry in Normandy when the king died, and the English
throne was seized by Henry’s nephew (the son of his sister Adela), Count Stephen
of Mortain and Boulogne. Stephen acted boldly and assertively in carrying out
his coup, and soon he had been acknowledged as king by the English barons and
bishops, the pope and the kings of Scotland and France. By 1139, however, his
authority was being challenged from several different directions. The Scots invaded
England twice after 1136, and, despite defeat at the battle of the Standard in 1138,
they soon controlled Carlisle, Cumbria south of the Solway Firth and Northum-
bria. Stephen’s attempt to hold on to Normandy by campaigning there in 1137 had
been a failure, and Geoffrey of Anjou was firmly entrenched in the duchy. Within
England, too, there had been challenges from individual barons which Stephen had
been unable to deal with decisively. After Earl Robert of Gloucester (Henry I’s eld-
est illegitimate son and Matilda’s half-brother) formally renounced his allegiance to
Stephen in 1138, it was only a matter of time before the empress (as Matilda styled
herself – she was the widow of the German emperor Henry V) made her bid for
the throne.
Stephen’s growing anxiety was displayed when he arrested Bishop Roger of
Salisbury, Henry I’s chief minister, and several of his associates at court in June 1139.
Stephen suspected their loyalty, but his actions lost him the support of the ecclesi-
astical hierarchy, including his brother Henry, bishop of Winchester. Three months
later, Matilda landed in England, and civil war began. It was inconclusive at first,
but Stephen’s defeat and capture at the battle of Lincoln in 1141 seemed to leave
Matilda with a clear path to power. However, the ‘Lady of England and Nor-
mandy’, as her supporters now called her, was unable to take advantage. According
to some contemporaries, having entered London to be crowned, Matilda behaved
high-handedly, haughtily and unnaturally like a man towards the leaders of the city.
The support of London, as William I had recognised in 1066–7 and as John would
find in 1215, was crucial to a king’s wider standing, but rather than courting the
Londoners, Matilda allegedly made heavy financial demands and was chased out
of the city as a result. However, the deeply rooted assumptions of the men who
described these events (most of them were monks) meant that, in their view, politi-
cal power was by definition a masculine preserve, and they cannot be relied upon
as objective observers of Matilda’s conduct in London. Female rule was possible if
difficult: it happened in Iberia in the early 1100s (Urraca of Leon-Castile and Teresa
of Portugal), while both Matilda and the whole Angevin clan would have been
aware of what had happened in the kingdom of Jerusalem during the 1130s where
Melisende, Geoffrey of Anjou’s stepmother and Matilda’s mother-in-law, was rul-
ing as at least the equal of her husband, Fulk. Matilda was acutely aware and proud
of her status as an empress, and she may have behaved autocratically at times, but
in England in 1141, Stephen’s influence over the wool trade moving through his
county of Boulogne may have inclined the merchants of London to favour him over
Matilda more than just his maleness. In any event, the empress failed to become
queen, and the power vacuum at the top of English politics remained unfilled.
When Matilda’s chief ally, Robert of Gloucester, was captured by Stephen’s
supporters later in 1141, she had little choice but to release Stephen in return for
Robert’s freedom. The civil war then continued unproductively for the next few
years, and neither side was able to gain a decisive advantage. Stephen prosecuted
his campaigns with great vigour, but despite this, the deaths of some of Matilda’s
most influential supporters (most notably Robert of Gloucester in October 1147)
and the empress’s own departure from England in the spring of 1148, the king
was unable to inflict a final, telling blow. There were several reasons for this. For
example, the civil war opened up innumerable private disputes over lands and
inheritances which forced Stephen and Matilda into a bidding war for unreliable
support: if a baron did not get what he wanted from one claimant to the throne, he
could always look to the other. But it was primarily a question of resources. As the
war dragged on, the main participants became more contained within restricted
areas of authority, and with Stephen stuck in the south-east and Matilda confined
in the south-west, neither side could raise the funds needed to intensify their war
effort. In 1130, Henry I’s cash income had been £23,000. The equivalent figure
in the next surviving pipe roll, which dates from the mid-1150s, barely exceeds
£7,000. Stephen probably had even less than this. How badly affected England
was by the violence is also hard to say. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle later claimed
that ‘there was nothing but disturbance and wickedness and robbery, for forthwith
the powerful men who were traitors rose against him [Stephen]’. On the basis of
comments like this, in the late nineteenth century the civil war of Stephen’s reign
was labelled ‘the Anarchy’, and for most of the twentieth century the label stuck.
The standard view was that Stephen was weak and unable to control his barons. For
their part, they were innately violent and unscrupulous and exploited the absence
of strong central authority to pursue their selfish interests. In fact, the troubles were
intermittent and never involved the whole kingdom to the same extent; indeed,
many parts of England remained untouched by military activity throughout the
reign. Moreover, at no stage did English government simply fall apart. There is no
sign of a royal Exchequer during Stephen’s reign, and as the civil war went on, the
royal monopoly over the coinage collapsed. Even so, the social and political order
remained largely intact in different parts of the kingdom, and the opposing sides in
the conflict fought with clear objectives. Within his limited zone of direct control
in the south-east, Stephen carried out his normal kingly responsibilities, while both
David of Scotland and Robert of Gloucester were praised by contemporaries for
keeping order and maintaining stability within theirs. To be sure, some individual
barons were vicious, but there is also evidence that others acted in concert with
each other to establish local stability, not to prey upon the defenceless. Having
said that, Stephen’s England was a much more violent place than the England
of Henry I and Henry II. In those parts of the country most directly affected by
Power 247
the civil war, the Midlands, Yorkshire and East Anglia in particular, towns were
sacked, armies plundered and many innocent (mostly peasant) lives were ruined.
And although they should not be damned as a class, some barons were indeed thugs
who exploited Stephen’s difficulties to gain land and inflict pain.
Geoffrey of Anjou did little to help his wife in England, but he had conquered
Normandy by the end of 1144. He also allowed his son Henry to visit England
three times during the 1140s, and after the empress’s failure to seize power in 1141,
the Angevin cause became increasingly centred on him. That it survived at all was
in no small part down to Matilda’s determined efforts to keep it alive until Henry
was old enough to take the lead himself. To begin with, however, there was no
guarantee that Henry would do better than his mother in any attempt to take the
throne, but by the time he arrived in England for the fourth time, in 1153, the
situation had been transformed. Henry had been made Duke of Normandy by his
father in 1149 and had become Count of Anjou on Geoffrey’s death in 1151. In
the following year, he had also become Duke of Aquitaine by marrying Eleanor,
Countess of Aquitaine, only six weeks after Eleanor had been divorced by King
Louis VII. All of a sudden, Henry was in control of most of France, and his power
dwarfed Stephen’s. He was as bold as he was fortunate. In January 1153, he landed
in England to resurrect the Angevin claim to the throne. The two sides manoeu-
vred inconclusively for much of the year, but the stuffing was finally knocked out
of the royalist cause when Stephen’s eldest son and intended heir, Eustace, died in
August 1153. This finally ruined the king’s plans for the succession after the Eng-
lish bishops had already refused to confirm Eustace as Stephen’s successor in 1152.
There was now little enthusiasm on the part of Stephen or the English barons to
carry on the struggle. So, by the Treaty of Winchester of November 1153, both
sides agreed to lay down their arms, and Stephen recognised Henry as his heir in
return for lifelong possession of the throne. Henry did not have to wait long to
become king. Stephen died in October 1154, and Henry was consecrated at West-
minster in December.
On Stephen’s death, Henry II controlled much less land within England than
his Norman predecessors had done, he was much poorer than them and his grip
on the Church was looser than theirs had been. Fierce and always frantically active,
Henry would not settle for this. In his view, Stephen’s reign had never happened,
and the benchmark of English royal authority had been set by Henry I: ‘when,
then, peace had been restored after the shipwrecked state of the kingdom’, said the
royal treasurer Richard FitzNigel, ‘the king strove to renew the times of his grand-
father’. Henry’s ambition would have major implications for England, of course,
but also for Scotland, Wales and, eventually, Ireland. Even so, Henry spent more
than half of his reign (21 out of 34 years) on the continent, and it needs to be
emphasised that England was only a part of the much wider collection of lands he
controlled and which historians refer to as ‘The Angevin Empire’. This ultimately
stretched from the border with Scotland to the border with Spain and contained
much of modern France. Amongst the rulers of Europe, only Frederick Barbarossa
had comparable power and prestige.
Henry wasted no time in making his intentions clear. In 1155, he ordered the
surrender of all the royal lands in England which had been given away or otherwise
lost during Stephen’s reign. He also dismissed two-thirds of the sheriffs he had
inherited from Stephen, and he set about destroying those private castles which
had been erected since 1135 without royal permission. In 1157, for example, he
took into his own hands the castles of Stephen’s surviving son, Count William of
Boulogne and those of Earl Hugh Bigod of Norfolk. At around the same time,
the Exchequer resumed its central role in royal government. It may not have shut
down completely under Stephen, but now it was reinvigorated. The early pipe
rolls of Henry II’s reign are short, and the detail they contain is scanty. It probably
took a decade after 1154 before the Exchequer was functioning as effectively as it
had in the 1130s; nevertheless, a start had been made. Henry also took steps to re-
establish the royal monopoly over the coinage. As has been seen, this had been lost
by Stephen, and so in 1158, a new coinage of uniform weight and design, bearing
the king’s image, was issued for the whole kingdom.
Of course, Henry could not supervise all of this business himself. His foreign
commitments meant that he was absent from England for all but 17 months of his
first eight years as king. Loyal and capable deputies were therefore required to gov-
ern England in his absence, even more than they had been by the Norman kings
given the scale of Henry’s overseas responsibilities. In this early part of the reign,
Queen Eleanor was an active regent, but she was often away from England too, and
day-to-day responsibility for the smooth running of the administration rested with
a great aristocrat and a career administrator, Earl Robert of Leicester and Richard
de Lucy. Both of these men had served Stephen well, but this was not a bar to
preferment under Henry II. And although the office was still at a formative stage
in the 1150s and 1160s, they were the first men who can properly be called ‘chief
justiciars’. The Exchequer, over which they both presided, was the centre of their
power, and they had roles in the administration of justice, too.
Justice, however, was something in which Henry II took a deep personal inter-
est. At least this is what historians have argued, given what happened in this area
during Henry’s reign. The reestablishment of royal authority over law and order
after the civil war was certainly one of Henry’s prime ambitions in 1154. He inher-
ited the Anglo-Saxon concept of a national ‘peace’ which it was the king’s duty
to enforce and exclusive jurisdiction over serious criminal cases (‘royal pleas’ or
‘pleas of the crown’). During his reign, these became increasingly the preserve of a
core group of about 20 royally appointed justices who travelled on regular circuits
known as ‘eyres’, shire by shire around the kingdom. Information about criminal
activity was given to the justices by ‘juries of presentment’; made up of 12 men
from each hundred, these were the forerunners of the modern criminal trial jury.
Whilst the travelling justices tightened royal control over criminal matters, how-
ever, more profound changes were made to the systems of civil law during Henry’s
reign, particularly with regard to the possession of land. By the 1180s, a series of
legal actions (so-called ‘petty’ or ‘possessory’ assizes) had been developed. All were
begun with a standard-form royal writ and gave claimants the opportunity to have
Power 249
their cases determined cheaply and quickly. The assizes were devised to deal with
specific situations, but some were more popular than others. A landholder claiming
that he had been deprived of his estates ‘unjustly and without judgement’ could
use the assize of novel disseisin (literally ‘recent dispossession’) to recover possession,
whilst for another who felt he had been denied his lawful inheritance, the assize of
mort d’ancestor (‘death of an ancestor’) could provide appropriate relief. Juries were
empanelled to consider the information gathered during these procedures and give
their verdicts about who the holder of the land should be. These assizes all ran in
standardised, consistent ways, but they did not decide the question of who ulti-
mately had the legal right to the lands. The grand assize, a more complex but still
formulaic procedure in which verdicts were given by juries made up exclusively of
knights, was developed to do this.
These new systems and structures were well-established by 1200. When Magna
Carta in 1215 stipulated that the assizes of novel disseisin and mort d’ancestor should
be heard no less than four times a year by two royal justices sent to each county
for that purpose, it was clear how popular they had become. Similar cases could
now be dealt with in the same regular, predictable way. But whether Henry II truly
deserves his reputation as ‘the founder of the English common law’ is less clear.
For one thing it is hard to know how personally involved in all of this Henry actu-
ally was. Secondly, some of the most important innovations came late in the reign
(the petty assizes only after the mid-1170s, for example), so it is hard to think that
Henry was determined to right the wrongs of Stephen’s reign from the moment
he became king. Third, not everyone had equal access to the reforms. Tenants-in-
chiefs could not use the petty assizes against the king because the latter could not
issue proceedings against himself. Free women could use the assizes, but only once
widowed when there was an action that allowed them to recover their dower lands.
And the unfree gained little from the reforms; indeed, ideas of who was free and
unfree hardened considerably as both a cause and consequence of these innovations
in order to prevent the unfree having access to them. Nevertheless, the achieve-
ments of this period were still enormous. The outlines of a coherent system of
criminal and civil justice administered by the king’s own courts and the king’s own
judges had begun to emerge by the end of the twelfth century, one which applied
national laws and procedures consistently in all parts of England.
Not everything went smoothly, of course, and Henry did face opposition dur-
ing his early years as king. However, he had dealt with this within a couple of
years. By this time, too, Henry had imposed his authority on the new king of Scot-
land, Malcolm IV. When he had come to England in 1149, Henry had promised
Malcolm’s grandfather, David I, that all the land the Scots had gained in 1139 in
Northumbria, Cumberland and Carlisle should belong to Scotland forever. This
of course was when he needed the Scottish king’s support; by 1157, the balance of
political power had been reversed, and Malcolm did as he was instructed. Henry
also obtained the submission of the two most powerful Welsh princes, Owain
Gwynedd in the north (in 1157) and Rhys ap Gruffudd in the south (in 1158). By
1158, the amount of territory subject to the English king’s direct control had
been restored to its pre-1135 levels. So now, sure that England was safe in the
hands of his English deputies, Henry spent most of the next five years in France.
He negotiated a marriage between his eldest son, also called Henry, and one of
Louis VII’s daughters by his second marriage, Margaret. Prince Henry was only
three years old, and Margaret was still a baby, but her dowry was the strategically
vital area of the Norman Vexin on the border with the lands of the French king,
and it was to be handed over when the marriage took place. Meanwhile, Henry
also hoped to further his ambitions in southern France. Eleanor of Aquitaine’s fam-
ily had long-standing claims to the county of Toulouse, and Henry was keen to
make something of them. So in 1159 he marched south, hoping that King Louis
would not come to the aid of Count Raymond of Toulouse, who was married
to Louis’s sister. In this Henry was disappointed, and the resistance of Raymond
and Louis meant that he failed to take Toulouse. A truce was agreed in May 1160,
but Henry had not lost sight of the main prize, Margaret’s dowry in the Vexin.
After 1159, there was a papal schism, and one of the claimants to the papal throne,
Alexander III, was desperate for political support. So the marriage took place with
papal approval at the end of 1160, and the Vexin was handed over. Louis had been
tricked, and the good relationship established between the English and French
kings after 1154 had been permanently undermined.
In 1165, Henry launched an invasion of north Wales that ended in failure as the
weather and the Welsh terrain made progress impossible. He was more successful
in Brittany: in 1166, he deposed the count and betrothed the latter’s daughter to
his seven-year-old son, Geoffrey. Geoffrey would be the new count when he was
old enough; meanwhile Henry would take care of Brittany himself. Such con-
cerns notwithstanding, however, the 1160s were dominated in the popular mind
by Henry’s quarrel with his archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. By 1162,
Henry was firmly established on the throne, and there was a vacancy at Canter-
bury. This was Henry’s chance to make his mark on the church, and his nominee
for the archbishopric was Thomas Becket. Royal chancellor since 1154, Becket
had served the king dutifully and enthusiastically, and Henry had every reason to
think that he would continue to do so after becoming archbishop. But almost as
soon as he had taken up his new post, and to the king’s dismay, Becket resigned
the chancellorship. Overnight it seemed, he was a changed man. Gone was the
high-living, extravagant chancellor who loved finery and display. In his place now
was the ascetic, zealous archbishop who wore a hairshirt beneath his vestments. No
longer the defender of the king’s interests, his priority now was the defence of the
church he led.
Several minor disagreements quickly soured the relationship between the king
and the archbishop. However, the hostility between them crystallised over one
issue: what should happen to members of the clergy who committed crimes, so-
called ‘criminous clerks’? Perhaps as many as one in five of the adult male popu-
lation of England at this time was a member of the clergy. Most were in ‘minor
orders’, below the rank of priest, and many would have lived like ordinary laymen.
Despite this, for Becket and the theorists who argued for the separateness of the
Power 251
clerical caste, it was for the church alone to deal with wrongdoers from within
its own ranks using its own laws and courts. For Henry II, by contrast, one of his
primary duties as king was to keep the peace and punish all criminals, regardless of
their position in society. The punishments inflicted on criminals by lay and church
courts were quite different. A layman found guilty of even a minor offence might
suffer mutilation or even death. For the church courts, however, the most serious
punishment available to them was to strip the offender of his clerical status. The
dispute over criminous clerks, therefore, went to the heart of what the king was
able to do within his kingdom. For Henry, the church’s claim that its personnel
were solely its concern undermined his ability effectively to govern, and it hin-
dered his attempts to restore law and order in England after the chaos of Stephen’s
reign. For the church, its right to apply its own laws and inflict its own punishments
in its own courts was a touchstone of its independence from lay control.
Matters came to a head at a royal council held at Clarendon near Salisbury in
January 1164. Henry demanded that the assembled bishops assent to a list of what
he presented as the traditional customs of the kingdom, those which in his view
had regulated the relationship between the king and the church in the reign of
Henry I. The bishops reluctantly swore in general terms to observe traditional
practices, but the king then insisted on writing these customs down and requiring
the bishops to put their seals on copies of the document, known since as the Con-
stitutions of Clarendon. This was a step too far for most of the bishops. A few of
the constitutions were uncontroversial, but many were not: clause 4, for example,
stated that bishops and archbishops were not permitted to leave the kingdom with-
out royal consent; clause 8 held that no appeal could be made to the pope in an
ecclesiastical case without the king’s permission. Such provisions probably did rep-
resent what had happened under Henry I, but they ignored completely the extent
to which views about the freedom of the church had developed since then. But
most problematic of all was clause 3, which attempted, not very clearly, to deal with
the problem of criminous clerks. The royal view appears to have been that accused
clerks should first be brought to a royal court. If their clerical status was established,
they could then be sent to a church court under the supervision of a royal official. If
then found guilty and punished in the church court, the accused should be handed
back to the royal court where the appropriate secular penalty would be imposed.
This interpretation seriously impinged on the church’s right to supervise its own
personnel, and it exposed clerks accused of crimes to punishment for a single
offence in both royal and church courts. For Becket, it was impossible to accept.
The issue of the Constitutions of Clarendon resolved nothing and only increased
the bitterness on both sides. By the autumn of 1164, the king had decided to get
rid of Becket once and for all, and he summoned him to appear at his court on
a trumped-up charge. Becket failed to appear, and when he finally met the king
at Northampton in October 1164, he was charged with contempt. He then fled
from court and escaped across the Channel. The dispute rumbled on unresolved,
therefore, and Becket spent the six years between 1164 and 1170 in exile in France.
The stalemate was finally broken in June 1170 when Henry II decided to have his
son Henry crowned in order to confirm him as his principal heir and consolidate
his plans for the succession. This was an innovation in England (unlike in France
and Germany where it happened often), but this was not why it caused problems.
Since there was no archbishop of Canterbury to perform the ceremony, the king
relied on the archbishop of York to carry it out. When Becket heard what had hap-
pened, he was outraged at this insult to his own position and at the challenge York’s
actions potentially posed to Canterbury’s cherished prerogatives. After a threat by
Alexander III to punish the king, and some abortive attempts at reconciliation,
Becket finally returned to England in December 1170. He excommunicated the
bishops who had performed the coronation ceremony, prompting several of them
to travel to France to complain to Henry about Becket’s high-handed conduct.
Shortly afterwards the king lost his temper over Becket’s behaviour for the last fatal
time. In a furious outburst, he appeared to invite his followers to take drastic steps
against the archbishop. Four of his knights immediately travelled to England and
hurried to Canterbury where they arrived in the late afternoon of 29 December.
Having tried without success to get Becket to absolve the excommunicated bish-
ops, they cornered him in his cathedral and hacked him to death. Miracles were
soon reported at his tomb, and only just over two years after his murder, in Febru-
ary 1173, Thomas Becket was canonised.
If Henry II had not intended Becket’s murder, he was deeply implicated in it
and eventually had to perform humiliating penance to atone. In July 1174, at the
height of the Great Revolt against him led by his eldest son, the king came to
Canterbury as a barefoot penitent and was publicly scourged outside the cathe-
dral. By this time, in fact, much of the heat generated by the quarrel with Becket
had dissipated. In May 1172, Henry had formally submitted to the pope’s legates
at Avranches. In addition to providing knights to go on crusade and agreeing to
go himself, Henry promised to allow unimpeded appeals to Rome and to abolish
all customs hostile to the church which he had introduced. The Constitutions of
Clarendon were never appealed to again. But although the king had given some
ground, he had not lost very much as a result of the archbishop’s death. After
1172, good relations with the papacy were restored, as was much of the tradi-
tional emphasis on royal control of the church. By 1180, the king was successfully
nominating his men to vacant bishoprics and taking the profits from vacant sees.
Superficially at least, it was almost as if the Becket dispute had never happened, and
on one level the controversy had been so intense only because of the personalities
involved. Both Henry II and Thomas Becket were obstinate and bloody-minded.
However, the dispute arose from more than the stubbornness of former friends.
It also turned on something fundamental in the developing relationship between
church and state in twelfth-century Europe: where did power ultimately lie and to
whom was loyalty ultimately owed?
As the Becket dispute was nearing its violent end, momentous events were also
taking place in Ireland. Henry had already secured papal approval for an English
invasion of Ireland in the 1150s, but any plans he had made were postponed, and
the invasion, when it came, was not a royal one. In 1166, the king of Leinster,
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Diarmait Mac Murchada, was driven out of Ireland by Ruaidri Ua Conchobair,

king of Connacht. He came to England and asked Henry II for help. The king
responded by issuing a general permission for any of his subjects to go to Ireland
and help if they wished. Diarmait was particularly successful in finding recruits
among the English nobility of south Wales, most importantly Richard FitzGil-
bert of Clare (later known as ‘Strongbow’), lord of Chepstow, to whom Diarmait
offered his daughter in marriage and succession to the kingdom of Leinster. In
1169–70, Strongbow and his associates crossed to Ireland and were immedi-
ately successful. Dublin and Waterford were taken, and when Diarmait died in
May 1171, Strongbow had a kingdom at his disposal. News of the invaders’ success
in Ireland had reached the king by this time, however, and he was alarmed by the
prospect of his own subjects setting up kingdoms abroad. So in autumn 1171, he
travelled to Ireland himself to assert his authority. The English magnates (includ-
ing Strongbow) and the native rulers of Ireland submitted to him and accepted
his overlordship. In return, they were allowed to keep much of the land they had
seized, although Henry took care to keep the coastal trading centres of Dublin,
Waterford and Wexford under direct royal control.
Henry spent six months in Ireland, but his biggest problems by the early 1170s
were with his own children. In January 1169, Henry had announced his plans for
the succession. His second son, Richard, would take over the northern part of
his mother’s lands and become Count of Poitou. His third son, Geoffrey, would
eventually become Count of Brittany through his intended marriage to the h eiress
there. His fourth son, John, who had been born in 1167, was at this stage not
allocated any lands, a fact which later earned him the epithet ‘Lackland’. As for his
eldest son, Henry, he would succeed to England, Normandy, Maine and Anjou.
‘The Young King’, as he was known, was therefore crowned in 1170 to mark
out his status as his father’s principal heir. However, Henry II was unwilling to
reinforce the Young King’s position in the short term with a grant of some actual
lands, and the latter’s frustration over the emptiness of his role crystallised in 1173
when a marriage was arranged for his six-year-old brother, John. The young boy
was betrothed to a daughter of the Count of Savoy, and the union was designed
to protect the southern frontiers of Henry’s lands and give the Angevins access to
Italy through the Alpine passes. But the deal also included a grant to John, at his
future father-in-law’s insistence, of the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau
in the heart of Anjou. Nothing came of the marriage plan in the end, but Young
Henry was furious at the grant of the castles to John: they were strategically vital
to the control of Anjou and within the lands he had been granted in 1169. His
father had not even bothered to consult him. All three of Henry’s elder sons joined
a revolt against him, urged on by Louis VII and their mother, Eleanor, from whom
Henry was now estranged. Involved in it as well were the king of Scots; the counts
of Flanders, Boulogne and Blois; the earls of Chester, Norfolk and Leicester; and a
powerful minority within the English baronage. This was the opportunity Henry’s
enemies had been waiting for, and there was military activity in all parts of the
Angevin lands. After the defeat of the rebellious Earl of Leicester in October 1173
and the capture of the king of Scotland in July 1174, however, the rebellion was
effectively over. Henry’s erstwhile opponents were generously forgiven, except for
the captured Scottish king, William ‘the Lion’. In the Treaty of Falaise of Decem-
ber 1174, William surrendered Scotland to Henry, received it back as a fief and did
homage for it. English garrisons were installed in the castles of Edinburgh, Rox-
burgh and Berwick, and an independent Scottish kingdom ceased to exist.
Another family revolt almost erupted in 1182–3, but the death of the Young
King stopped the crisis developing. After his death, Richard assumed his brother’s
place as heir to England, Normandy and Anjou. His father now wanted John to
succeed to Aquitaine, but Richard, having established his authority there in ten
hard years of fighting, would not hand over the duchy. As a result, John was sent
to Ireland. He had been made ‘Lord of Ireland’ by his father in 1177 but had never
visited. Now seemed the right time, but his expedition of 1185 was an embarrass-
ing failure. This did not stop Richard thinking that his father intended to make
John his principal heir, and he grew increasingly frustrated at Henry’s unwillingness
to clarify his plans. Philip II of France was also now old enough to go on the offen-
sive. As the overlord of Brittany, Philip claimed the custody of Geoffrey’s daughters
after the latter’s death in 1186, but Henry denied him. Richard and Philip also
had something in common in the predicament of Philip’s sister, Alice. Richard
had been betrothed to her since 1169, but there were rumours that King Henry
did not want the marriage to take place because he had seduced Alice and wanted
to keep her for himself. Another common bond between Richard and Philip was
their desire to go on crusade. Jerusalem had fallen to Saladin in October 1187,
but Richard did not feel able to leave Europe until his position at home had been
protected. Finally, in November 1188, Richard performed homage to Philip and
Henry spent the last months of his life in a losing conflict with his eldest surviving
son and the French king. Two days before his death, furious but also humbled and
exhausted, Henry met his adversaries and acceded to all their demands. He prom-
ised to do homage to Philip for all his French lands and recognised Richard as his
heir. It was a pathetic end to a glorious reign.
Richard I (1189–99) famously spent only six months of his ten-year reign in
England. His crusading exploits early on and his five-year struggle against Philip
II in France between 1194 and 1199 earned him his contemporary epithet ‘Lion-
heart’, but they have also prompted both contemporaries and modern historians
to label Richard as a negligent king who saw England only as a source of funds
for his vainglorious adventures abroad. More recent assessments have been kinder
to Richard, however. Crusading was the highest duty of a Christian king, and
Richard’s wars in Normandy were necessary to protect England. Anyway, Richard
was not just an English king: he was a European prince whose kingdom, amongst
all his lands, was arguably the most stable and best able to look after itself without
him. These arguments have some merit, but Richard’s financial demands placed
enormous stress on England, and Normandy’s frontiers were still weak when he
died. His legacy was at best an ambiguous one.
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Richard’s frantic search for crusading money dominated the start of his reign.
‘Everything was for sale, counties, sheriffdoms, castles and manors’, the chronicler
Roger of Howden complained, and the king himself reportedly remarked that he
would sell London if he could find a buyer. Certainly, he raised large sums very
quickly, but the arrangements he made for the supervision of his kingdom in his
absence were less successful. He tried to keep his brother John placated by finally
allowing him to marry Isabella, the heiress to the earldom of Gloucester and the
lordship of Glamorgan, whose hand John had been promised by Henry II. At
the centre of this vast lordship was the city of Bristol, but it stretched across the
Severn as far as Cardiff and included estates in Normandy, too. Richard also gave
John control of (and therefore the income from) at least six English counties, and
in Normandy he was recognised as Count of Mortain. But Richard’s generos-
ity (improvident, some would say) did not prevent John from plotting against his
brother throughout his absence abroad, most damagingly with Philip II after the
latter’s own return from crusade in 1191. When Richard was captured outside
Vienna and handed over to the emperor Henry VI on his way back from the Holy
Land, John performed homage to Philip for all his brother’s continental lands,
and the prospect of John actually taking power in England became for a short
time a realistic one. Richard’s release in early 1194, after an enormous ransom of
£100,000 was agreed on, prevented this, and the king was quickly able to bring
his brother into line. In Normandy, however, Philip had made significant inroads,
particularly by recovering the borderlands west of Paris, the so-called ‘Vexin’, and
Richard needed to spend the next five years there recovering the lands he had lost
to the French king. English money was crucial for the building of castles (most
impressively Chateau Gaillard overlooking the Seine at Les Andelys), the payment
of mercenaries and the construction of foreign alliances (with Boulogne, Flanders
and others), and the task of raising the amounts Richard needed fell to his arch-
bishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, who was also the king’s chief justiciar. The
efficient, dutiful Walter was highly successful, and Richard recovered most of Nor-
mandy. But the government’s financial demands had been unrelenting: traditional
sources of income (the royal lands, feudal incidents) were exploited intensively, and
this was on top of the enormous tax imposed to pay Richard’s ransom. According
to one early thirteenth-century writer, the Cistercian abbot Ralph of Coggeshall
in Essex,
No age can remember, no history can record any preceding king, even those
who reigned for a long time, who exacted and received so much money
from his kingdom as that king exacted and amassed in the five years after he
returned from captivity.
What is more, for all Richard’s successes in Normandy, King Philip’s troops were
still occupying crucial castles within the duchy when the English king died unex-
pectedly in 1199. Had he lived, Richard may have gone on to recover these castles
too, but his successor would have to manage the continuing threat posed by Philip
II with a depleted treasury and little of the Lionheart’s military ability.
As with William II before him, there has been modern speculation about
Richard’s sexual orientation. Unlike Rufus, however, Richard did have an ille-
gitimate son, and he did marry, although his relationship with his wife, Berengaria
of Navarre, was based on politics, and they rarely saw each other after the end of
the Third Crusade. One woman upon whom Richard was happy to rely, however,
was his mother, Eleanor. She was heavily involved in the negotiations that led to
Richard’s marriage, and she accompanied Berengaria to Sicily to meet her pro-
spective husband. Later, while Richard remained in the Holy Land, she battled to
keep the peace in England as her younger son John plotted to seize power, holding
councils to rein him in by confiscating his lands and revenues and leading a diplo-
matic offensive to neutralise his alliance with Philip II and secure Richard’s release
from captivity. Eleanor was with Richard when he died, having given her consent
to the arrangements he wanted to put in place for the succession. Her loyalty to
Richard was total, but she was effective, too – resourceful, determined and a female
figure to be reckoned with as the men around her schemed and wrestled for power.
Richard’s successor, his brother John (1199–1216), has one of the worst repu-
tations of any English king. His reign saw the collapse of the Angevin Empire, a
damaging quarrel with the papacy, rebellion, civil war and a French attempt to take
over the kingdom of England that very nearly succeeded. John was an unpleas-
ant, cruel and volatile man, and he certainly made mistakes, but it is easy to forget
that Magna Carta was not inevitable and that if John’s allies had won the Battle of
Bouvines in 1214, and if he had not squandered that victory as he had others, he
might have become the dominant ruler in Europe. He certainly started his reign
well. As has been seen already, John was not the only candidate to succeed Richard
in 1199. Their nephew Arthur (the son of their brother Geoffrey) had plenty of
support in Brittany and Anjou as well as the backing of Philip II, who recognised
Arthur as Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and betrothed him to his daughter.
But John, with the vital support of his mother in southern France, acted quickly
and decisively. By the end of 1200 he had secured just about the whole of Richard’s
inheritance; contemporaries even praised his skills as a peacemaker. Soon, however,
things began to go wrong: John’s marriage to Isabella of Angoulême in 1200 and
his subsequent failure to recompense Hugh de Lusignan for the loss of his fiancé
were the first in a series of events, including the confiscation of John’s French ter-
ritories by Philip, John’s victory at Mirebeau, the murder of Arthur of Brittany
and John’s flight from Normandy at the end of 1203, which eventually led to the
conquest of the duchy by the French king in 1204. The death of Eleanor of Aquit-
aine in April 1204 only added further to the catastrophe. Without her to influence
them in John’s favour, many of the barons of Poitou decided to side with Philip
rather than John.
The Angevin Empire had collapsed, and all that remained of it outside England
were parts of Aquitaine and the Channel Islands. Contemporaries argued about
the extent of John’s responsibility for this, and historians still do. It is certainly fair
Power 257
to say that John contributed directly to the way events came to a head in 1203–4.
His bullying treatment of the Lusignans after 1200 was inept and alerted barons on
both sides of the Channel to his capacity for petty vindictiveness; he threw away
a position of strength after his victory at Mirebeau; his involvement in the murder
of Arthur of Brittany shocked and alienated many of his most important subjects;
and by billeting mercenary troops on the people of Normandy as the crisis reached
its climax, he pushed many into seeking out alternative lordship. At the same time,
having retained control of Richard’s great castle at Gisors on the river Epte, by
1199, King Philip already had a potentially decisive grip on the Norman frontier,
and the duchy was far harder to defend than it had been in 1189. Moreover, ties
between the ruling aristocracies of England and Normandy were not as strong as
they had been a century before. Most of those families which still had estates on
both sides of the Channel had already decided where their main interests lay, in
Normandy or England, and so John’s vested interest in keeping all his territories
together was not shared by many of his leading subjects. The Angevin Empire, with
its different languages, administrations and political cultures, had always been a
fragile thing. Perhaps, therefore, Angevin rule in Normandy was already in serious
peril when John came to the throne. To be sure, John had little of Richard I’s mili-
tary skill; few men did. But had Richard lived, even he would have had difficulty
stemming the tide of growing French power. Henry II had been much richer than
Louis VII, but, thanks principally to Richard, England was financially drained by
1199. Thereafter, John could probably count at best on roughly the same annual
income as Philip II, who had gradually been adding to his lands and revenues since
the 1180s. So it is arguable that John lost his continental lands in 1204, not pri-
marily because he was a bad lord, a poor soldier or an evil man (although all these
things were important), but because he ran out of money at the crucial time.
For the next ten years, John was largely confined to England, and he devoted
most of his energies to raising sufficient funds to win back his lost lands. He was
ruthlessly successful, and by 1214 John was probably richer than any previous
English king. Between 1199 and 1202, an annual average of about £24,000 was
received at the Exchequer. Between 1207 and 1212, the average was £49,000,
and this figure does not take into account other sums, such as those received by
John from the Church during the Interdict. By 1214, it has been estimated, he had
accumulated a war chest of some £130,000. By contemporary standards, England
was a rich country with a developed and sophisticated financial system, but the
enormous sums John raised could only be extracted if that system was abused and
stretched to breaking point. Money had been squeezed out of his subjects with
intense ferocity. Baronial families had been charged exorbitant sums for reliefs,
wardships and the marriages of heiresses. Scutage (payment in lieu of military ser-
vice owed to the crown) had become almost an annual tax rather than a sum raised
when there was a pressing military need. An enormous direct tax on movable
wealth raised at least £60,000 when it was raised in 1207, but there was nothing
specific (certainly no impending military campaign) for it to be spent on. The
king’s unpopular local agents, his sheriffs, castellans and bailiffs, many of whom had
previously served John in France as mercenaries or constables, had spared little in

extracting what was demanded by their royal master. John’s reputation as a just king
was also in tatters: inheritances had been manipulated, land had been seized with-
out judgment, justice had been denied or put up for sale. He was also oppressive
and had used the instruments of tyranny to enforce his will: mercenaries, hostages,
the law of the Forest. In 1208, the king turned on William de Braose, a member
of John’s inner circle since the 1190s and probably the closest thing John had to a
friend, perhaps because William knew too many of John’s secrets. Whatever the
cause of this quarrel, however, John pursued it relentlessly, forcing William to flee
to Ireland and eventually allowing Braose’s wife and son to starve to death in a
royal dungeon. In a strikingly wide range of ways, John had alienated the English
barons whose support was such a necessary prerequisite for political stability, and
the innumerable individuals who owed John money were increasingly desperate to
get out from under the pressure of his regime.
If John was unpopular, however, he was still mightily powerful after a decade
in power. He made this clear in his attitude to the rest of Britain and Ireland. As
will be seen, he embarked on campaigns in Scotland (1209), Ireland (1210) and
north Wales (1211) and was so successful that, according to one thirteenth-century
writer, the anonymous so-called Barnwell chronicler, ‘in Ireland, Scotland and
Wales there was no one who did not bow to the nod of the king of England,
which, as is well known, was the case with none of his predecessors’. Funded by
large scutages, however, these campaigns in regions where the English barons had
little interest did little to appease the king’s growing number of critics. He was also
involved in an ongoing quarrel with the papacy which went less well. After Arch-
bishop Hubert Walter died in 1205, there was a dispute over who should succeed
him, and John refused to accept Stephen Langton, the English candidate for the
archbishopric put forward and consecrated by Pope Innocent III in 1207. A bril-
liant scholar and a cardinal, Langton’s credentials were strong, but John rejected him
as a foreign spy (Langton had spent 20 years teaching in the Paris schools). In fact,
the principles at stake were more important: none of John’s predecessors would
have countenanced the appointment of an archbishop of Canterbury by a foreign
power. Like the Becket dispute, this was about who was in charge within England.
In 1208, Innocent placed England under sentence of interdict, meaning that no
church services were allowed except the baptism of infants and the confession of
the dying. Even in monasteries, the offices had to be whispered rather than sung.
This did little to bring John round, nor did his excommunication in 1209. He
actually made significant amounts of money (perhaps as much as £100,000) from
the church lands and revenues he seized while the interdict was in force.
By 1212, John was ready to return to France, but he had to cancel his plans
when there was a rising in Wales and when details of a conspiracy to murder him
on campaign there emerged. There was at least some good news. In May 1213,
King Philip’s plans to invade England were scuppered when the Earl of Salisbury,
John’s half-brother, destroyed the French fleet at Damme in Flanders. And at more
or less the same time, John finally reached a settlement of his long dispute with
Power 259
the pope when he agreed to accept Archbishop Langton and made England and
Ireland fiefs to be held from the papacy. At a stroke this apparent surrender of sov-
ereignty turned Innocent III into John’s most powerful ally. The English king also
had the support of his nephew, Emperor Otto IV, and of the counts of Boulogne
and Flanders, both of whom were anxious about continued French royal expan-
sion. Further south, the king of Aragon and the Count of Toulouse also backed
John’s plan to rein in Philip II. John appeared to have the initiative once again
and set in motion his plans for invasion. The intention had always been to divide
Philip’s forces: as John and his allies took them on in northern France, his confeder-
ates in the south would attack there. However, the defeat of Raymond of Toulouse
and the death of Pedro of Aragon at Muret in September 1213 persuaded John
that he would have to invade southern France himself, using his remaining French
lands in Poitou as a bridgehead. After he landed at La Rochelle in February 1214,
John initially did well, and a further advance towards Normandy seemed possible.
John appears to have lost his nerve, though, and retreated when he reached the
river Loire in June. Much more decisively, and with fatal consequences for John’s
continental ambitions, on 27 July 1214, his allies were crushed by Philip II at the
Battle of Bouvines in Flanders.
John’s failure abroad bore the highest of political prices in England. Once he had
returned in October, his strategy in tatters and his coffers exhausted, the grievances
created by his governance of England over the previous decade quickly crystal-
lised into reasons for rebellion. Hostilities began in the spring of 1215, and the
tide turned decisively in the rebels’ favour when they gained control of London in
May. John was forced to submit to their demands, and after lengthy negotiations,
he issued a charter, later called Magna Carta, on 15 June 1215 at Runnymede, a
meadow by the Thames near Windsor. The novel financial pressures John’s govern-
ment had inflicted on England and the hard personal experiences many barons had
of John’s methods meant that many of those who opposed the king in 1215 had
their own particular reasons for doing so. However, there was more to the rebels’
programme than private complaints and family grievances. The underlying thrust
of the charter was that the king was subject to the law and should rule according
to it. This view is best supported by Magna Carta’s two most famous chapters.
Chapter 39 stated,
No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or

exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go against him, nor will we send
against him save by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.
Immediately afterwards, chapter 40 ran: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will
we deny or delay, right or justice’. Beyond these resonant statements of general
principle, which appear to extol the virtues of due process, the rule of law and
impartial justice, the detailed provisions of Magna Carta attempted to make its
theory of kingship workable. Restrictions were placed on how the king could
henceforth exercise his feudal rights and raise money from his barons. Reliefs were
fixed for earldoms and baronies at £100, and for knights’ fees at £5. The extent to
which the king could manipulate wardships, heiresses and widows was significantly
restricted. Scutages and aids (general taxes) could only be raised in future with the
consent of the ‘common counsel’ of the kingdom – the lay and ecclesiastical nobil-
ity and tenants-in-chief. The conduct of royal officers was to be investigated, and
no new sheriffs would be appointed unless they ‘know the law of the kingdom
and wish to observe it well’. The oppressive workings of the royal Forest would
be moderated. John’s foreign captains and their troops would be removed from the
kingdom, and all hostages would be released.
Magna Carta was a list of promises which the king had sealed. Nonetheless,
John’s opponents were not naive enough to trust his good faith, and perhaps the
most remarkable part of the charter is that which set out how he would be made
to keep to it and remedy any breaches. Chapter 61, the so-called ‘security clause’,
established a committee of 25 barons which would investigate complaints about
the way the king or his servants were implementing the charter. If the king failed
to deal with a complaint, the committee could then discipline him ‘by the tak-
ing of castles, lands, possessions, and in other ways as they shall be able, until it
is redressed, according to their judgement’. This was revolutionary and implied a
rejection of John’s God-given right to be king. Not only did the charter as a whole
subject the king to the law in unprecedented ways, but also in chapter 61, it estab-
lished an authority superior to him in his own kingdom. No self-respecting king
would have accepted this arrangement willingly or permanently.
John issued the charter in order to gain time, and he almost certainly never
intended to abide by its detailed provisions. He soon asked his new overlord, Inno-
cent III, to annul it. Innocent was happy to oblige, and so civil war began again
in the late summer of 1215. John prosecuted it with vigour. He took Rochester
castle and then led a great expedition to the north. His opponents responded by
offering the throne to Prince Louis of France, Philip II’s son and heir, who claimed
the throne through his wife, Blanche of Castile, a granddaughter of Henry II.
Louis landed in England in May 1216, and when John died of dysentery at New-
ark in October, a French prince was in control of nearly half the kingdom, and
the future of England was in the balance. John’s death, however, transformed the
political situation. Those with grievances against him would struggle to main-
tain them against his infant son, Henry III (1216–72), who was quickly crowned
by his supporters. In November 1216, they reissued a revised version of Magna
Carta, shorn of some its more controversial sections, such as the security clause, and
sealed by the leaders of the interim government, William Marshal, Earl of Pem-
broke and the papal legate Guala, who was in England representing the new pope,
Honorius III. In May 1217, Louis’s forces were defeated at Lincoln; in August,
French reinforcements were destroyed off the coast at Sandwich; and in Septem-
ber, the French prince abandoned his claims to the English throne and returned to
France. A further version of Magna Carta was issued by the regency government in
November 1217 along with a separate charter regulating the administration of the
royal Forest. It was not until 1225, however, that the definitive version of Magna
Power 261
Carta appeared. In that year a great council of nobles and prelates agreed to fund
Henry III’s military campaign in Gascony; in return the Charter was reissued once
more. It was this text which eventually came to be viewed as one of the corner-
stones of the English constitution and as the ultimate guarantor of English liberties.
...
Two themes dominate Scottish history in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.
The first is the emergence of an increasingly institutionalised state ruled by a series
of long-lived monarchs whose authority was eventually acknowledged throughout
most of mainland Scotland. The second is the ongoing efforts of the Scottish kings
to defend their kingdom against aggressive English intervention. Despite plenty
of reverses along the way, by the end of the reign of Alexander II (1214–49), the
kingdom of Scots was as extensive and as independent as it had ever been. Scottish
politics and society, meanwhile, had been radically changed.
David I (1124–53) has traditionally been seen as the man who built a new
Scottish kingdom and entrenched royal power there by developing effective new
systems of government and importing a new English aristocracy. When David
became king of Scots in 1124, royal authority in Scotland was concentrated in the
south of the kingdom, in a zone stretching from the English border to the Forth–
Clyde line and thence north and west up to the Moray Firth. Within this zone,
there was an inner core centred on St Andrew’s, Angus, Fife, Perth and Stirling.
This was where the kings spent most of their time, and economically, it was the
most developed part of the country. Outside this zone, royal authority was weaker.
Norwegian kings claimed overlordship of the Western Isles, whilst in Galloway and
Argyll the political orientation was westwards towards the Irish Sea. All the while,
the Norse presence remained very strong in the far north, in Caithness, Sutherland,
Orkney and Shetland. Moray was another area with strong separatist tendencies,
but when its ruler, Angus, who also had a claim to the Scottish throne as Macbeth’s
great grandson, rebelled in 1130, David killed him, seized control of his lands and
built castles there. The mantle of opposition was then taken up by Malcolm, the
illegitimate son of Alexander I, but he was captured in 1134 and imprisoned for
life. These were pivotal moments. For the first decade of his reign, David had ruled
almost entirely from the south of his kingdom, surrounded by English lords. To
most Scots he was a foreigner, and Gaelic Scotland was alien to him. According
to William of Malmesbury, the contemporary English chronicler who dedicated
his work on the kings of England to David, a direct descendant of Aethelred II
and the senior surviving representative of the Old English royal line, ‘he had from
boyhood been polished by familiar intercourse with the English and rubbed off
all the barbarian gaucherie of Scottish manners’. But after 1130, while Moray was
not yet firmly part of David’s kingdom, he could begin the process of making it
so and, at the same time, begin to look further north and west. Soon, through a
combination of military force, strategic marriages and bribes, David’s overlordship
was tentatively recognised in Caithness and Orkney, while the presence of soldiers
from Argyll in David’s army in 1138 suggests that his authority was acknowledged
there, too.
But it was in the south that David made his most spectacular gains. King Stephen’s
mounting problems helped David immensely. After a series of campaigns between
1136 and 1139, including no fewer than three Scottish invasions of northern Eng-
land in 1138 alone, and despite a heavy Scottish defeat in Yorkshire at the so-called
battle of the Standard during the last of these, Stephen accepted David’s posses-
sion of Carlisle and that area south of the Solway Firth that the English were soon
referring to as Cumberland. David’s son Henry was also granted Northumberland
(Northumbria between the rivers Tyne and Tweed). Stephen probably liked to
think that these lands were held by David and Henry as his vassals, but David never
performed homage, and Henry did so only for the lands he held in England. In any
event, the hard-pressed English king would have no time to enforce a relationship
of this kind: in practice, these great swathes of northern England were now part of
an extended Scottish kingdom. And by the early 1150s, indeed, David’s supporters
had gone further and controlled parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Westmorland.
David greedily eyed York itself, but his efforts to have his nominee installed as
archbishop there failed. Nevertheless, he ruled more territory than any previous
Scottish king, and his conquests looked secure.
There was much more to David’s achievements than the acquisition of new
territory, however. It is open to question whether he deserves all the credit he has
usually received for modernising the structures of government he inherited, and it
is right to say that the institutionalisation of Scottish royal government had only just
begun to get underway by the time David died. Nevertheless, David had of course
been brought up at Henry I’s court (he was an English earl as well as a Scottish
king) and had seen how his brother-in-law’s government worked. Not surprisingly,
once he became king, he may have introduced elements of the English system into
Scotland, and his court and household probably looked very like Henry’s, albeit
on a smaller scale: there was a constable, marshal, chamberlain and steward, and
David had his group of household knights around him. There was a chancellor
with a great seal, and David’s reign saw an increase in the number of documents
issued by the royal clerks. Many of the English-style writs they issued (brieves,
the Scots called them) were addressed to sheriffs. The first recorded reference to
a Scottish sheriff dates from the 1120s, before David became king, but others are
soon recorded after 1124. There was still no Scottish Exchequer, but David was the
first Scottish king to issue coins. To do this he used silver dug out of the Cumbrian
mines at Alston, which he now controlled, a huge boon which funded David’s
wider ambitions. In the field of royal justice, too, there was progress, and those
aristocrats who enjoyed their own courts were told that the king would intervene if
they failed to provide justice; meanwhile, royal charters and writs show that justici-
ars (probably something like Henry I’s local justiciars) were being appointed from at
least 1140. Here as elsewhere, though, more significant steps towards centralisation
and institutionalisation were not taken until after David’s death. David did speed up
the urbanisation of Scotland, however, aided by settlers brought in from southern
Power 263
England and Flanders, by the 1150s there were at least 15 royal ‘burghs’, including
Edinburgh, Berwick and Stirling. These were primarily trading centres, and David
gave them privileges in return for tolls. But they were also outposts of royal influ-
ence and signifiers of royal power.
The most significant English import into Scotland during the twelfth century,
however, was people, specifically landholders. As Earl of Huntingdon in England,
David already had his own vassals before he became king, and these were among the
most prominent of those who joined him in Scotland; Walter FitzAlan was given
Renfrewshire, Hugh de Moreville Cunningham. Others whom David knew from
Henry I’s court were also favoured – Robert de Bruce in Annandale, for example.
During the first decade of the reign, in return for their support against Malcolm,
these men and more like them were given gifts of land by the king. This has led
to David conventionally being viewed as the ruler who feudalised Scotland along
English lines – in other words, he granted lands in return for homage and mili-
tary service. This meant that David could manage his tenants’ inheritances and the
descent of their lands by controlling wardships, heiresses and widows, just like his
English counterparts. Once in possession of their lands, moreover, the new tenants
would grant parts of them to followers of their own, many of them originally from
England or France. This interpretation is probably too neat, however, David did not
introduce military feudalism into Scotland. The wording of his charters is too vague
to support the idea that he did, and in any event Scottish kings do not appear to
have routinely used charters to grant land to their nobles before the 1160s and 1170s.
Even so, by the 1140s, much of David’s kingdom south of the Forth was under the
control of the king’s English followers. Further north, too, something similar hap-
pened in troublesome Moray, which was granted to a Fleming, Freskin. Quite where
David got all these lands from is hard to say. Not everything can have come from the
royal demesne, and there may have been native Scots who lost out. But however
the new settlers came by their lands, as they arrived and began to build their castles,
the shape and the substance of the Scottish kingdom were being profoundly altered.
By the 1150s, therefore, David had begun to repudiate his predecessors’ status as
the client kings of an English superior, expand his kingdom, develop its administra-
tion and introduce into it a new landed elite. He was also a great religious patron –
the monasteries he established at Dunfermline, Kelso, Jedburgh and Melrose show
that. But like the royal burghs, these abbeys were also enclaves of royal support.
When David sponsored new monasteries at Urquhart and Kinloss in Moray, for
example, he did so with at least half an eye on keeping the region in line. The dio-
cese of Moray, which David almost certainly created, can be seen in the same light.
David was adamant, too, that the Scottish bishops should refuse to acknowledge
any claims by the archbishops of Canterbury or York to ecclesiastical authority
over the Scottish church. Scotland’s independence from England was implied in
other ways as well. In 1149, David knighted his great-nephew, the young Henry
of Anjou (the future Henry II), at a splendid ceremony at Carlisle and extracted a
solemn promise that after Henry’s accession to the English throne, the Scots would
be left in undisturbed enjoyment of England’s northern counties.
Henry II would break this promise and take advantage of the Scots’ weakness
following David I’s death in 1153. David’s only surviving adult son, Henry, had
been associated with the royal government since the mid-1130s and had probably
been publicly proclaimed as the next king. As Earl of Northumberland, he gave
indispensable support to his father in annexing these lands and ruling them as part
of an extended Scottish realm. He even issued coins in his own name. But he
died in 1152, and David was forced to look to the next generation for a new heir.
Henry’s eldest son, Malcolm, who was only 12 when he became king, soon found
himself faced with internal rebellion and a resurgent English monarchy. He there-
fore had little choice but to submit to his English neighbour and perform homage
to him in 1157. In practice, this meant that Malcolm surrendered the lands his
grandfather had secured south of Solway and in Northumberland. Malcolm then
accompanied Henry on his 1159 expedition to Toulouse, and, ten years after a
grateful Henry had been knighted by David I, the new Scottish king was knighted
by his dominant English neighbour. He performed homage to Henry II once
more in 1163, albeit not in respect of his kingdom but for the lands in England
(the earldom of Huntingdon and estates in Tynedale) which he had been permitted
to retain in 1157. Malcolm had been put in his place by Henry II, and there was
little the Scottish king could do about it. This had consequences in Scotland. For
most of his reign, Malcolm had to deal with repeated attacks by the rulers of Argyll
(Somerled) and Galloway (Fergus). Meanwhile in 1160, five Scottish earls besieged
Malcolm at Perth in protest at his decision to go to Toulouse. This was probably
symptomatic of wider unease among the native Scottish nobility about the spread
of English influence into Scotland (an unease which David I had been able to
contain), but Malcolm was able to turn it to his advantage. Later in 1160, he took
a large army into Galloway no fewer than three times, forced Fergus to retire and
established a new royal outpost at Dumfries. And when in 1164 Somerled attacked
Renfrew, the base of Walter the Steward, perhaps the most prominent of all David
I’s English imports, he was defeated and killed. Malcolm also continued to resist
the claims of the archbishop of York to authority over the Scottish Church; more
burghs appeared during his reign, and in Clydesdale more land was granted to
Flemish settlers. The loss of the northern counties must have been a bitter blow to
Malcolm, but by the time he died in 1165, aged only 24, his kingdom was peaceful,
and he had solidified and extended royal authority within it.
The childless (perhaps celibate) Malcolm was succeeded as king by his brother
William I (1165–1214), known later as ‘the Lion’. Relations with England domi-
nated the reign once again, but William dealt with these more aggressively and
assertively than either of his predecessors had done. This approach was not always
successful; initially, however, it was conventional enough. William visited Henry II
in Normandy, and he performed homage to Henry ‘the Young King’ when the lat-
ter was crowned in 1170. But William had already been in touch with King Louis
VII of France, offering to help in his disputes with Henry II, and in 1173–4, he
was quick to join the Young King and his brothers in their French-backed revolt
against their father. In return William was promised everything that Malcolm IV
Power 265
had surrendered in 1157, and in the summer of 1173 and again in 1174, he led his
armies into the region. At various points Newcastle and Carlisle were besieged,
but little was achieved beyond ravaging the countryside, and in July 1174, William
was captured at Alnwick in Northumberland and taken to Normandy as a prisoner.
Once the wider revolt was over, the Scots were subjected to the most demanding
of treaties. In December 1174 at Falaise, the king of Scots became the liege man of
Henry II for Scotland and for all his other lands, while his magnates were required
to swear fealty to the English king, a requirement which indicated that their pri-
mary loyalty was to Henry rather than Malcolm. William also conceded the subor-
dination of the Scottish church to the English. The castles of Roxburgh, Berwick,
Jedburgh, Edinburgh and Stirling were handed over to Henry II, and William was
to assign revenues for their keeping; the harbouring of felons from one country in
the other was forbidden, and the Scots were to hand over 20 named noble hos-
tages. Ideas of recovering the northern counties must now have seemed risible:
the Scots had lost their sovereignty as a result of this crushing political settlement.
Any doubts about this were removed the following year. At York in August 1175,
William swore fealty to Henry II and, in a demeaning act of submission, placed
his helmet, lance, and saddle on the altar of York Minster. William’s relationship
with Henry II improved in some ways in the 1180s: for example, in 1185, Henry
returned the earldom of Huntingdon, and William recovered Edinburgh castle in
1186. However, the latter was a wedding present to William from the English king,
the dowry for a bride Henry had selected. William attended Henry’s court eight
times between 1175 and 1188: there is no doubt who was in charge.
William’s humiliating failure may have emboldened his critics within Scotland,
as from the late 1170s and for most of the next decade he faced a series of revolts
in Moray, Ross and Galloway. Eventually, however, William managed to pacify
Galloway in the west and install his own candidate as lord there, while his sup-
porters defeated the northern rebels in 1187. In due course, William embedded
royal authority more deeply by establishing new feudal settlements with men of
English descent north of the Forth and, eventually, beyond Inverness. In 1196–7,
royal military expeditions into Caithness brought that region (and Orkney) within
his expanding sphere of direct influence. Royal sheriffs appear in the records for
the first time in Moray during the 1170s, Galloway in the 1190s and at Inverness
by the early 1200s. A new royal coinage was introduced in 1195. Indeed, it was
during the last third of the twelfth century that Scottish royal power in general
finally began to become more institutionalised. To be sure, the king’s authority
in Scotland remained much less intensive and pervasive than in England, but it
was growing. Meanwhile, the tide had turned in William’s favour in other ways
as well. Once Richard I had succeeded Henry II as king of England in 1189, his
priority was to depart on crusade as quickly as possible. In his frantic search for
crusading funds, Richard agreed to cancel the Treaty of Falaise, and under the so-
called Quitclaim of Canterbury of December 1189, William was released from the
submission he had given to Henry II, he recovered Roxburgh and Berwick castles,
and the relationship of the two kingdoms was to be as it had been in the reign of
Malcolm IV. In return, the Scots paid 10,000 marks (£6,666), and a costly form of
independence was regained. Northumberland, however, was not part of the deal,
and when William offered Richard 15,000 marks to recover the earldom in 1194,
he was rebuffed.
King Richard’s absence in Normandy from 1194 meant that William’s pro-
posal for recovering Northumberland was never revived before Richard died in
1199. His successor, John, had no time for it either, but it was not until 1209 that
the English king intervened directly in Scottish affairs. Provoked into action after
hearing of a plan to marry one of William’s daughters to Philip II of France, John
marched north and at Norham re-imposed English overlordship on Scotland. Wil-
liam also agreed to pay £10,000 to John, and his two daughters were taken into
England on the promise of marrying two of John’s sons (this never happened); Wil-
liam may also have formally renounced his claims to the northern English counties.
Once again, the Scottish king’s temporary weakness seems to have encouraged his
enemies within Scotland. There was a fresh revolt in Ross and Moray in 1211,
which was only suppressed with John’s military help. As part of this deal, moreover,
William’s son Alexander was betrothed to John’s infant daughter, Joan, raising the
prospect of John’s grandson succeeding to the Scottish throne.
After these events, it would be reasonable enough to argue that William and
Alexander were as much subject to the English king as Malcolm IV had been after
1174. In fact, the Scottish kingdom’s decline in the early 1200s is easy to overstate.
By the time King William died in 1214, after a reign of almost 50 years, no terri-
tory inherited from Malcolm IV had been lost, and royal authority was more firmly
established over more of the kingdom than ever before. This time, too, Scottish
subjection was short-lived. Alexander II was quick to back the English rebellion
against King John in 1215. In Magna Carta, John had vaguely offered justice to
Alexander concerning not only his sisters (who remained unmarried) but also his
‘liberties and rights’. Following John’s rejection of the charter, William had to
withstand the English king’s ferocious raid into Lothian early in 1216, but after the
arrival in England of Prince Louis of France in May, Alexander took possession
of Carlisle and performed homage to Louis for the northern counties. Political
upheaval in England had played into Scottish hands once again, but, as so often in
the past, a revival in English fortunes forced the king of Scots to be realistic. Once
Louis had left England following his defeats at Lincoln and Dover in 1217 and the
minority government of Henry III had begun to establish itself with papal backing,
Alexander was isolated. In December 1217, he surrendered Carlisle and submitted
in person to the young English king. This was a pragmatic, probably embarrass-
ing step, but it inaugurated a period of unbroken peaceful relations between the
kingdoms of England and Scotland which would last until 1296. Alexander mar-
ried Joan in 1221 and so established the kind of personal link between the kings
of Scotland and England (now brothers-in-law) that had never existed before. The
marriage also reflected the heightened status of the Scottish kings – a century
before, Alexander I had married only an illegitimate daughter of Henry I. The
prolonged peace also gave Alexander the time and space he needed to expand his
Power 267
kingdom north and west. In the 1220s and 1230s, he decisively brought Moray,
Ross, Argyll and Galloway under his control. New lordships were established in the
Highlands along with a new earldom of Sutherland and a new line of pro-Scottish
earls of Caithness. By the time he died in 1249, moreover, Alexander had even
begun to challenge Norwegian royal power in the Western Isles. He ruled more
of Scotland more directly and effectively than any of his predecessors. And it was
not just a matter of undiluted military force. Royal success in the north and west
was founded on the support of native Scottish magnates like Farquhar MacTaggart,
who was made Earl of Ross by the king, and Alan of Galloway. Other families with
English heritage also played vital roles in Alexander’s reign, not least the Comyn
earls of Buchan (who were also lords of Badenoch in the north) and Menteith. And
there was softer power, too: by the 1230s, Scottish versions of English common law
remedies were in use, and royal judges were enforcing royal pleas (murder, assault,
robbery, rape and arson). Alexander II had extended royal control to the furthest
limits of mainland Scotland and even beyond. He was more firmly in control of the
Scottish kingdom than any ruler before him.
In 1237 at York, Alexander formally surrendered his claims to Northumberland,
Cumberland and Westmorland, thus effectively fixing his border with England
along the Solway–Tweed line. The drive to incorporate these regions into their
kingdom had motivated Alexander and his ancestors for the best part of 200 years,
and now that phase of Scottish history was over. Some may have regretted this,
although nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians tended to see the
Scottish obsession with Northumbria (rather as German historians of the same
period viewed their kings’ fixation on Italy) as a dangerous delusion which nearly
destroyed the kingdom more than once. To be sure, the York treaty signalled a
change of emphasis – it was certainly very different to those forced on the Scot-
tish kings at Falaise in 1174 and Norham in 1209. More profoundly, however, it
contained no mention of homage or any other sign of English lordship over Scot-
land and was made between two separate kingdoms and two sovereign monarchs.
Alexander and Henry were not equals – the Scottish king’s failed attempts to secure
papal permission to be anointed and crowned reminded everyone of this. But
when it was agreed in 1242 that Alexander’s baby son would marry Henry’s young
daughter, their cooperative partnership looked set to continue.
...
By the time the English king Henry I died in 1135, large parts of Wales were under
Anglo-Norman control. These areas, collectively known as the March, stretched in
the south from Pembrokeshire through Glamorgan and Gwent up to Brecon and
along to Chepstow. They then extended north through Montgomery and on to
Cheshire. The March was not a monolithic block of territory. It had been created,
even improvised, piecemeal, it contained large and small lordships, and it fluctuated
in size as baronial fortunes rose and fell. In those places where it penetrated more
deeply into Wales, the character of the lordships would be very different to those
closer to the English border. The conquest of the March had been a largely baronial
achievement – direct royal involvement had been limited. Nevertheless, the death
of Henry I changed the fortunes of the March just as it changed the political face
of Britain more generally. With his influence removed and an English civil war in
the offing, the rulers of Wales and Scotland were able (temporarily) to break free of
England’s domineering authority and pursue their own ambitions. English control
in the March soon began to dissolve as revolts erupted spontaneously in different
parts of Wales, and within only weeks of Henry’s death, the Welsh had set about
regaining much of the territory they had lost over the previous half century. The
rulers of Gwynedd (Gruffudd ap Cynan) and Deheubarth (Gruffudd ap Rhys)
both died in 1137, but this did not prevent a general rising against English rule
which led to the recovery of much of the southern kingdom – Ceredigion, Dyfed
and Ystrad Tywi. The English were certainly not driven out of Wales (they still
retained important bases, particularly in the south and the central March), but with
King Stephen fully occupied in simply holding on to England, he was unable to
play any role there, and a group of talented Welsh princes was able to make sub-
stantial gains. For example, the ruler of Powys, Madog ap Maredudd, encroached
across the English border when he built a castle at Oswestry in Shropshire in 1149;
the ruler of Deheubarth, Rhys ap Gruffudd, took Ceredigion back from the ruler
of Gwynedd, Owain ap Gruffudd ap Cynan (usually known as Owain Gwynedd);
and Owain himself extended his control along the north Wales coast as far as the
river Dee and the outskirts of Chester.
Henry II, in line with his wider determination to restore Henry I’s borders and
authority, invaded Gwynedd in 1157 and compelled Owain Gwynedd to perform
homage to him, the first Welsh ruler to do so. Owain performed homage again,
as did Rhys ap Gruffudd and the rulers of Powys, in 1163. It seems unlikely that
Henry was interested in conquering Wales – an acceptance of his overlordship was
probably enough. But the Welsh baulked at this, and Owain even went so far as
to contact the French king, Louis VII, to propose an alliance against their mutual
enemy Henry II. Meanwhile Rhys ap Gruffudd had been in rebellion against
Henry more or less continuously since 1158. He had a habit of submitting to the
English king only then to carry on attacking his neighbours, so staying true to
form after performing homage in 1163, Rhys attacked Ceredigion and was joined
by other Welsh leaders, including Owain. This time Henry II decided to deal with
them decisively. He prepared a major campaign for 1165, which he led personally
into north Wales. A great confrontation seemed likely as the Welsh princes united
under Owain Gwynedd’s leadership to meet Henry’s army – ‘All the Welsh united
to throw off the rule of the French’, the main native Welsh chronicle, the Brut,
asserted. But the royal forces were hit by summer storms as they tried to cross dif-
ficult terrain, and they were forced to withdraw before any serious fighting took
place. Within another five years, Rhys ap Gruffudd had recaptured Cardigan, and,
from his great castle at Rhuddlan, Owain Gwynedd was once again ruling north
Wales from Anglesey to the Dee.
Power 269
There was an alternative to a repeating cycle of Welsh advances followed by Eng-

lish recovery. After Owain Gwynedd’s death in 1170, the leading Welsh prince for
most of the next three decades was Rhys ap Gruffudd of Deheubarth. More com-
monly known as the Lord Rhys, after nearly a decade of conflict, which included a
period of imprisonment in England during the early 1160s, he decided to change
his approach and consolidate his position in south Wales by becoming Henry II’s
loyal friend. Twice in 1171 as Henry moved into and across south Wales on the
start of his journey to Ireland, he and Rhys met. Having submitted to Henry and
given him hostages and tribute on the first occasion, on the second Henry con-
firmed Rhys in possession of almost the whole of Deheubarth and made him what
the Brut called ‘justiciar on his behalf ’ there. Quite what this meant in practice
is not very clear, but Rhys was certainly expected to keep southern Wales quiet,
whilst his closeness to Henry II gave him some protection against greedy Marcher
barons and some claim to supremacy over the other Welsh leaders. In 1175, Henry
met Rhys and a number of other Welsh princes, and their agreement was renewed.
Two years later, a more formal gathering was organised. The princes of Wales were
summoned to England; most gave oaths of fealty and promises to keep the peace,
but Rhys of Deheubarth and Dafydd of Gwynedd (the son of Owain Gwynedd)
performed homage. Henry had already tried to define his relationships with the
rulers of Scotland in the Treaty of Falaise (1174) and the Irish in the Treaty of
Windsor (1175). The meetings of 1175 and 1177 saw Henry attempting to do
something similar in Wales. And indeed, despite some anxious moments, there was
peace there for the rest of Henry II’s reign.
Any idea that this peace might be permanent, however, was misplaced. Tensions
within the ruling dynasties, hostility between the rulers and other aspiring Welsh
families, friction between the Welsh and the Marcher lords: any of these, never
far below the surface, might re-emerge at any time. The Lord Rhys, indeed, suf-
fered from all of them in the last years of his life. Richard I, preoccupied initially
with his crusading plans and later with his war against Philip II, had no interest in
continuing his father’s friendship with the ruler of Deheubarth, and Rhys’s sons
argued with their father and each other. Meanwhile, when he died in 1197, Rhys
had become involved in a small-scale war with William de Braose, the royal cas-
tellan at Carmarthen and Swansea. Rhys had gained the respect of Henry II and
dominance over south Wales. He had promoted cults of both St David and Hywel
Dda, presumably in an effort to nurture some kind of southern Welsh identity. But
in the end his success was a personal one with little if any institutional substance.
Once he was gone and his sons began to compete with each other, the power of
Deheubarth rapidly declined.
There were power struggles in Gwynedd, too, between the sons of Owain
Gwynedd, who died in 1170. But by the 1190s it was his grandson, Llewelyn ab
Iorwerth (later known as Llewelyn Fawr [‘the Great’]), who had established his
supremacy in the north. Llewelyn’s approach to the English king was similar to
the conciliatory one adopted by the Lord Rhys. In 1201, he made a treaty with
John, the first formal written agreement between a Welsh prince and an English
king: Llewelyn and his leading men promised to perform homage to John, while
in an important recognition that Wales had a legal structure of its own, the king
conceded that Welsh or English law might be used in Llewelyn’s lands. In 1205,
Llewelyn married Joan, the king’s illegitimate daughter, and in 1209, he accom-
panied John on his campaign in Scotland. In return, John allowed Llewelyn to
march into southern Powys in 1208. Powys had become available because John had
imprisoned the ruler there, Gwenwynwyn.
Llewelyn and the other Welsh princes had to manage John’s much more inten-
sive interest in Wales. John had been lord of Glamorgan himself since 1198 in right
of his first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, and he held on to these lands even after his
marriage had ended in the early 1200s. After the fall of William de Braose, moreo-
ver, John confiscated his vast estates in the March in 1208. Confined to Britain
following the loss of Normandy in 1204, John visited Wales or the March every
year between 1204 and 1214, and when John sought to define his relationship with
the Welsh in writing, he did so with one-sided precision: the rulers in Gwynedd,
Deheubarth and Powys held their lands from the English king in return for homage
and service. In that sense they were no different to any of John’s other tenants-in-
chief. And they, of course, could have told the Welsh leaders just how unreli-
able John’s support was. Perhaps he had become suspicious of Llewelyn’s growing
power, but in 1211, following his successful campaigns in Scotland and Ireland,
John invaded Gwynedd ‘to dispossess Llewelyn and destroy him utterly’, according
to the Brut. In the first royal show of force in Wales since 1165, John advanced as far
as Bangor in the west and imposed a strict settlement on Llewelyn, who relied on
his wife to secure what terms she could from his father-in-law: hostages and tribute
were taken, but more importantly, John required Llewelyn to surrender north-east
Wales, thus taking a great portion of his principality, and he imposed himself as
Llewelyn’s heir for the rest of Gwynedd if his marriage to Joan produced no heirs.
John had shown how an English king might confidently set about subjugat-
ing north Wales, and later kings, not least John’s grandson Edward I, would use
the template he had made. In the short term though, and remarkably, Llewelyn
was not cowed. John may have pushed too far in 1211, and in the following year
Llewelyn brought the Welsh rulers together in a coalition, made an agreement
on his own behalf and theirs with King Philip II of France and took all of John’s
castles in Gwynedd apart from Deganwy and Rhuddlan. John planned to retaliate
but had to abandon his plans for another massive Welsh campaign when a baronial
conspiracy to murder him was discovered in England. It is hard to believe that
the Welsh princes had not been in touch with John’s opponents. In any event,
the king’s preoccupations in England, combined with his determination to push
through his scheme to recover his lost territories in France, allowed Llewelyn to
recover his losses in north-east Wales. Then, after John’s continental plans had col-
lapsed at Bouvines in July 1214, he was forced in Magna Carta to release the Welsh
hostages he had in his custody and restore to the Welsh rulers the privileges he
had taken from them in 1211. In 1218, peace was established. The Welsh princes
Power 271
accepted the overlordship of the new English king, Henry III, and in return they
were allowed to keep most of the gains they had made since 1212, which included
(in Llewelyn’s case) Cardigan and Carmarthen. By exploiting the political situation
in England, the Welsh had seized the initiative once again.
Llewelyn ab Iorwerth entered the 1220s as the dominant prince in Wales. His
authority over the other Welsh leaders had been recognised (almost explicitly) in
1218 when he had been given the responsibility for ensuring that they did hom-
age to the English king, and from that point his main priority was to consolidate
that position. The English royal government was not especially interested in Wales
in the 1220s and 1230s and intervened only when it felt provoked to do so. And
for the most part, Llewelyn was pragmatic. He protected Gwynedd from English
attack by marrying his daughter to the Earl of Chester’s heir in 1222; indeed, all
four of Llewelyn’s daughters were married to English barons. He did less well in
south-west Wales, where he lost control of Carmarthen and Cardigan, and in the
central March where Henry III’s regent, Hubert de Burgh, built a formidable new
castle at Montgomery. Nevertheless, although there were four separate royal cam-
paigns in Wales, in 1223, 1228, 1231 and 1233–4, none of them lasted more than
a few weeks, travelled far into native Wales or seriously undermined Llewelyn’s
supremacy there. Indeed, by 1234 (following the fall of Hubert de Burgh in 1232),
he had recovered Cardigan with Henry III’s agreement and was seemingly more
secure than ever.
What Llewelyn really wanted, however, was for the Welsh princes to do hom-
age to him, thereby leaving him as the only one required personally to submit to
the English king. This would have signified the establishment of a discrete Welsh
principality, however, and this was still some way off. The English government’s
position remained consistent: the homage of all the Welsh rulers belonged to the
king, no matter how powerful Llewelyn became. As they had done in 1218, all the
Welsh princes and magnates who were present at Montgomery in 1228 did hom-
age to Henry III, and ten years later the message was reinforced when royal letters
were sent to the native rulers forbidding them to swear homage to Llewelyn’s son
Dafydd, as Llewelyn had asked them to do. Their homage, they were told, was
owed to nobody but the king. Even so, Llewelyn’s wider pre-eminence in Wales
was not threatened before he died in 1240. The Prince of Aberffraw and Lord
of Snowdon, as he was styling himself by 1230 (Aberffraw on Anglesey was the
traditional seat of kingship in Gwynedd and its use in the title implied supremacy
over all Wales), was never able to realise his vision of a Welsh principality subject
only to him, but no previous Welsh prince had come closer, and he had still been
able to secure Henry III’s acceptance of Dafydd (the king’s nephew) as the future
ruler of Gwynedd. For more than 40 years, Llewelyn had responded with great
flexibility and no little skill to the changing situation in England. He had taken
advantage when he could and reacted realistically when under pressure himself.
The anger Llewelyn showed in 1230 when he hanged the Marcher baron William
de Braose after finding him in his wife’s bedchamber was uncharacteristic. Never-
theless, whilst Llewelyn’s success over such a lengthy period was remarkable, it is
worth remembering that, in the end, it always relied on English acquiescence. This
would not last forever.
...
Ireland, compared with Wales and Scotland, was largely untouched by the Nor-
man Conquest of England. Of course, the seismic impact of these events was felt
across the Irish Sea (for one thing, English refugees took shelter and English rebels
looked for support there), but until the 1160s, Irish politics was dominated as
usual by competition for regional power between rival native dynasties, and the
attempts by one individual or another to assert dominance over as much of the
island as possible. From the late 1160s, however, what the contemporary writer
Gerald of Wales described as Adventus Anglorum (‘The Arrival of the English’)
quickly changed everything. Gerald interpreted the events he described as divine
judgement on a barbarous Irish people whose version of Christianity was corrupt
and degraded. More realistically, land-hungry adventurers from England and south
Wales took control of large swathes of Irish territory, as a result of which the king
of England felt compelled to assert his authority over their conquests and reserve
many of them for himself. The English conquest was always piecemeal and never
complete; nevertheless, it was transformative. From this point on, how best to
manage Ireland would remain a major preoccupation for the rulers of Britain. The
Irish themselves, of course, would have their own ideas about that.
Before the 1150s, English kings had thought little about extending their power
into Ireland. In that decade, however, Henry II became the first seriously to con-
sider it. The Irish Sea trade with Bristol and Chester was valuable, and Ireland
would make a handsome kingdom for one of his sons; Henry even obtained papal
permission in 1155–6 to take over the island and update its reputedly old-fashioned
forms of Christian practice. Nothing came of this scheme, however, and it was the
internal politics of Ireland that eventually opened the way for the English invasion.
By the 1160s, the most powerful king in Ireland was Muirchertach Mac Lochlainn,
the ruler of Tir Eoghain in the north. But he was coming under increasing pressure
from the kings of Connacht and Breifne, Ruaidri Ua Conchobair and Tigernan Ua
Ruairc, and by the time Mac Lochlainn died in 1166, Ua Conchobair had taken
Dublin from him. Mac Lochlainn’s demise was ominous for his erstwhile ally Diar-
mait Mac Murchada, the ruler of Leinster, and soon enough his lands were overrun
by Ua Conchobair’s allies led by Tigernan Ua Ruairc, who had his own personal
grievance against Mac Murchada after the latter had abducted his wife a decade or
so before. These attacks forced Diarmait to flee Ireland in 1166, but he was deter-
mined to return, and to do so he sought out powerful help. He travelled to Aqui-
taine to meet King Henry II, and having performed homage, Diarmait was given
permission by Henry to recruit mercenaries from among his subjects. Most of
these came from south Wales, where the original Norman settlers had intermarried
with the local Welsh and produced a distinctive, hybrid society. By the late 1160s,
however, they were looking for fresh conquests, and from 1169, groups of fighting
Power 273
men began to cross the Irish Sea. Diarmait quickly recovered much of Leinster
with their assistance, and by the end of 1170, knights under Richard FitzGilbert,
the lord of Chepstow in Wales, had helped him take control of Waterford and
Dublin. FitzGilbert (later known as Strongbow) subsequently married Diarmait’s
daughter, Aife, and when Diarmait died in 1171, FitzGilbert ignored the claims of
his father-in-law’s male relatives and took over the kingdom of Leinster.
The rapid and striking success of the English invasion soon attracted Henry
II’s attention, and in October 1171, he became the first English king to come to
Ireland when he landed with an army at Waterford. On his arrival at least 15 Irish
kings submitted to him, but he had not come to join in the conquest or fight the
Irish, and his main aim was to assert his authority over Strongbow and his associ-
ates. Before he even set sail, Strongbow had handed over Dublin, Waterford and
Wexford to Henry and agreed to rule Leinster as a royal vassal, and during the
six months he spent in Ireland, he began to address the shortcomings of the Irish
Church. Not all of the Irish kings welcomed him, however, and Henry’s work was
unfinished when he left Ireland in April 1172. Despite having plans to return he
never did, although that did not stop him staying in touch with the situation there.
In 1175, in the so-called Treaty of Windsor made by Henry with Ruaidri Ua Con-
chobair, the king reserved Dublin, Leinster, Meath and Munster from Waterford
to Dungarvan for himself and his barons, whilst the rest of Ireland, in return for
a promise of obedience to the English king and a large annual tribute, was left to
Ua Conchobair to dominate if he could. Such an arrangement was never likely to
persuade the English in Ireland to rein in their expansionist ambitions, however,
and it was soon nullified by events. In 1177, John de Courcy invaded Down and
Antrim and built great castles at Carrickfergus and Dundrum to stamp his power
on Ulster. At the same time, Hugh de Lacy continued his takeover of Meath whilst
other English barons were edging their way into Cork and Limerick (although
King Henry took care to keep control of both towns himself).
King Henry was still determined to keep what was happening in Ireland under
royal control, and in 1177, he designated his youngest son, John, as its future king
(the pope later sent a crown of peacock feathers). He hoped that John would bring
some order to the increasingly unsettled situation there, but the boy was only ten,
and when he finally visited his Ireland in 1185, his expedition became notorious
for the way he and his entourage allegedly laughed at and pulled the beards of the
Irish leaders who came to pay their respects. In fact, John’s brief stay in Ireland was
more productive than this tabloid account suggests. He made grants of land and
ordered the construction of castles in an effort to build a network of support there.
Arguably he laid the basis for future English conquests there, but to the extent that
the expedition was a failure, this was because the likes of Hugh de Lacy and John de
Courcy had become significantly more powerful since the mid-1170s and proved
unwilling to take instructions from an inexperienced teenager who resented their
success. It was rumoured that de Lacy had plans to take the kingship of Ireland for
himself, whilst de Courcy openly referred to himself as princeps Ulidiae (Prince of
Ulster) and minted his own coins. But even though John never revived his father’s
plan to turn Ireland into a kingdom (he always remained ‘lord of Ireland’), and
he did not return there until 1210, his visit in 1185 was not a total disaster. John
ordered the construction of castles in Waterford, granted lands in Tipperary and
Louth to some of his followers and established a new royal centre at Athlone. It is
hard to say whether these actions were part of a wider plan, but they had the effect
of throwing up a protective cordon around Leinster and Dublin, now at the heart
of English rule. John’s expedition of 1185 may also have seen the start of attempts
to introduce aspects of English-style government and administration into Ireland.
Before 1200, Ireland had a Justiciar who acted as the king’s deputy on matters of
policy, issued writs in his name and managed routine day-to-day affairs. Soon there
was also an Exchequer at Dublin presided over by a treasurer and a chamberlain,
where taxes and other income were accounted for, whilst away from the centre,
many of the English-controlled areas of Ireland were being gradually divided into
counties and cantreds (the equivalent of English shires and hundreds) overseen by a
sheriff. These developments were patchy and inconsistent, but they had enormous
significance for the way Ireland would be governed in the future.
In the 1190s, John continued to assert his authority as lord of Ireland from a dis-
tance. Through bullying and fortuitous deaths, he gained control of Drogheda and
Limerick. More broadly, by the end of the twelfth century, large parts of eastern
and southern Ireland (most of the Irish coastline and its hinterland from Ulster to
Cork) were in English, and often royal, hands. John’s expedition of 1210 set the seal
on these developments and pointed the way yet further ahead. The mature king
was a much more decisive and intimidating figure than the callow young prince
of 1185. He crushed two of his own creations, first Hugh de Lacy to whom John
had granted Ulster following the removal of John de Courcy in 1205, and second
William de Braose, whom John had allowed to purchase the lordship of Limerick
in 1201. Both men were chased out of Ireland in 1210, simply because, it seems,
John decided they had become too powerful. Whatever the causes of their fall,
however, John kept hold of their lands. He also developed Ireland’s systems of gov-
ernment. He had already instituted the first Irish coinage in 1207, and in 1210, a
royal charter announced that English laws and customs were henceforth to be fol-
lowed in Ireland and enforced by royal judges based at Dublin or travelling around
the country. By this was meant, in the first instance, royal Ireland, but there is no
reason to doubt that John expected his laws, his courts and his authority to spread
into other areas soon enough.
Southern Europe: Reconquista and State Building

in Iberia and Italy
The history of twelfth-century Iberia is complex and difficult to follow. It does not
lend itself to a single, coherent narrative because it is made up of the separate and
overlapping histories of multiple Christian kingdoms and their relations with each
other, as well as the ongoing story of Muslim al-Andalus and its dealings with a
multiplicity of Christian neighbours. It is clear enough, however, that the political
Power 275
structures of both Christian Spain and al-Andalus underwent profound changes

during this period. The Almoravid rulers of Muslim Iberia were overthrown and
replaced by another religious sect from north Africa, the Almohads, whilst Alfonso
VI’s kingdom of Leon-Castile, dominant in Christian Iberia until the end of the
eleventh century, was broken up into the three smaller, separate kingdoms of Leon,
Castile and Portugal. It is also clear that, by the second quarter of the thirteenth
century, the foundations had been laid for the Christian conquest of almost the
entire Iberian peninsula.
By about 1130, the Almoravids’ grip on al-Andalus was beginning to loosen.
Despite being invited by the taifa rulers to cross the Straits of Gibraltar in the
1080s, they had become an unpopular, corrupt occupying power and had ruled al-
Andalus like a colony, with governors sent from Marrakech to control the region.
When the Almoravid emir Ali ibn Yusuf died in 1143, widespread rebellions took
place, and, in an echo of what had happened a hundred years before following the
collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba, al-Andalus began once again to fragment
into smaller, unstable political units. What is more, at the same time the Almoravids
were also threatened in their Moroccan heartland by a newly established group of
radical Muslims, the Almohads. Their leader, Muhammad ibn Tumart (d.1130),
who was declared Mahdi (‘the rightly-guided one’ sent by God to purify Islam) by
his followers, taught that the Almoravids (originally religious zealots themselves,
of course) had lost their spiritual direction and so should lose their political power.
In the three decades after his death, the Almohads took control of Morocco from
the Almoravids, and in the 1140s they arrived in Spain. They took Seville and the
Algarve, and from there they began their conquest of the rest of al-Andalus, which
was complete by the 1170s. Their power peaked in 1195 when they smashed the
army of King Alfonso VIII of Castile at the Battle of Alarcos, and in 1203 they even
captured the Balearic Islands.
This prolonged upheaval in al-Andalus of course presented the Christian rulers
of Iberia with opportunities to expand their own power. Alfonso VII of Leon-
Castile raided deep into the south of the peninsula in the 1130s and 1140s, and he
even managed to secure papal approval for his capture of Córdoba and Almeria in
1146 and 1147, respectively. Within a decade, however, the Almohads had recov-
ered possession of both cities. More lasting was the conquest of Lisbon in 1147 by
Afonso Henriques of Portugal. This was achieved after he recruited a combined
force of Flemish, Rhinelanders, Normans and English en route to the Holy Land
for the Second Crusade, whose fleet had stopped for supplies at Oporto. After Lis-
bon was taken, some of the crusaders then left the main fleet to join the Count of
Barcelona in his siege of the city of Tortosa which surrendered in December 1148.
This was another conquest which ultimately proved to be permanent. It is not
clear whether the crusaders’ participation in the attack on Lisbon was arranged in
advance of their arrival or whether Afonso simply used the opportunity he was pre-
sented with as they sailed around western Iberia. Either way, Afonso certainly took
full advantage of the fleet’s arrival to develop his own state-building plans. The
county of Portugal had originally been created by King Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile
for his illegitimate daughter Teresa and her husband, Henry of Burgundy. Afonso
Henriques was their son, but he was only five when Count Henry died in 1112.
Neither her illegitimacy nor her gender prevented Teresa ruling Portugal for the
next 16 years, and she was even styling herself queen by the 1120s. Eventually her
relationship with her son fell apart as he grew to adulthood and looked to take over
Portugal himself. Even so, Afonso Henriques was only able to force his mother and
her lover out of power after defeating them in battle in 1128. He spent the next ten
years campaigning in the Muslim south, a period which culminated in his resound-
ing victory at Ourique in July 1139. Up to this point Afonso had acknowledged
the overlordship of the king of Leon-Castile, but in April 1140, like his mother
before him, he suddenly adopted a royal title and began describing himself as king.
His triumph at Ourique may have persuaded him to do this, although it seems
unlikely that this was a spur of the moment decision. In any event, Alfonso VII did
nothing to challenge Afonso’s upgraded status. The new king of Portugal’s willing-
ness to acknowledge Alfonso as emperor probably helped (he had been crowned
with an imperial title in 1135), but Afonso was also prudent enough to secure
himself a powerful patron and gain implicit high-level legitimation of his political
aspirations when he made himself a vassal of the pope. Seven years later, Afonso’s
conquest of Lisbon set the seal of divine approval on the fledgling kingdom. Like
Roger II at the other end of the Mediterranean, Afonso had used his mother’s
example as well as his own military ability, his political shrewdness and his rivals’
weaknesses to make himself into a king. In 1179, ‘the kingdom of Portugal and the
whole honour and dignity that pertains to kings’ was finally and formally granted
to Afonso by Pope Alexander III.
As Afonso Henriques continued to consolidate his new kingdom during the
1150s, the other Christian kingdoms of Iberia were pursuing agendas of their own.
On the death of Alfonso VII in 1157, the single kingdom of Leon-Castile was
divided into its two constituent kingdoms between his sons (they were united once
again in 1230). Soon after and further east, one union between two principalities
came to an end whilst another was created. When he died in 1135, King Alfonso I
‘the Battler’ of Aragon and Navarre left no heirs. In fact, in his will he bequeathed
his kingdoms to the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Church of the Holy Sep-
ulchre in Jerusalem. Back in Spain, however, the nobles of the two kingdoms were
not prepared to accept this. In Navarre, the descendant of an illegitimate son of
a king who had ruled 80 years earlier was found to succeed Alfonso, and the two
kingdoms were separated as a result; whilst in Aragon, Alfonso’s brother Ramiro
was forced to leave the monastery where he had lived as a monk since the 1090s,
marry and produce a daughter, Petronilla. Ramiro II (as he had briefly become)
then returned to his life as a monk, and the infant Petronilla was betrothed to the
Count of Barcelona, who was 23 years her senior. After the marriage eventually
took place, their son Alfonso II was born, and from 1162 he ruled both Aragon
and Barcelona.
Relations between all these kingdoms were typically fraught for much of the
twelfth century. Pacts and treaties were made and broken, marriages were arranged
Power 277
to encourage unity, but deep-seated divisions and rivalries persisted and even
played their part in Alfonso VIII of Castile’s catastrophic defeat by the Almohads at
Alarcos in July 1195. Rather than waiting for reinforcements to arrive from Leon
and Navarre, and with his own troops backed only by a token force of Portuguese,
Alfonso chose to attack the enemy alone and saw his army annihilated. In the end,
the kings were only reconciled after strenuous and prolonged efforts by Pope Inno-
cent III and his legates. Pope Innocent was determined to launch a new crusade
to recapture Jerusalem after it had been taken by Saladin in 1187, and, after the
disaster at Alarcos, he also wanted to inject new life into the Christian campaigns
against al-Andalus. This still took time, however: Alfonso VIII did not make his
new truce with Leon until 1206, but in 1207 he did the same with Navarre, and
in 1209 the Kings of Navarre and Aragon agreed to put their differences aside as
well. The intense papal pressure was finally paying off, and by 1210 the Christian
kings of Iberia were in a position to use their combined strength against their
common Muslim enemy. After another hiatus during which recruiting campaigns
were extended into France, Castilian, Aragonese and Navarrese troops mustered at
Toledo in the early summer of 1212, and together they set off southwards under
the command of Alfonso VIII. The Almohad emir was waiting for them on the
plains of Las Navas de Tolosa, roughly half-way between Christian Toledo and
Muslim Granada, and on 16 July, battle was joined. After prolonged hard fighting,
the Christians won a decisive victory, the importance of which was subsequently
trumpeted around Europe. The archbishop of Toledo later reported that 20,000
Muslims had been killed at Las Navas whilst Christian losses numbered only 25 –
an exaggeration on both counts certainly, but an indication of how comprehensive
and devastating this triumph had been.
It has become traditional to see the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa as the crucial
turning-point in the Christian conquest of Muslim Iberia – after 1212, the final
capitulation of al-Andalus was now certain. In reality, however, although the battle
was seen in retrospect as a defining moment in the development of a distinctively
Spanish national identity, things were not as straightforward as this. To be sure,
Almohad military power had been dealt a devastating blow, but it would be another
40 years before the Christian kings of Iberia could comfortably claim supremacy
over the greater part of the peninsula, and even then the kingdom of Granada in
the far south of Spain would survive as a sizeable Muslim enclave until the end of
the fifteenth century. Following Las Navas, Almohad power did collapse, and al-
Andalus began to break up. Nevertheless, even given these favourable conditions,
successful conquest could still only be achieved by kings of the highest ability. The
active parts of their reigns fall outside the scope of this book, but it is worth empha-
sising just how much they achieved. The Balearic Islands had fallen to King James
of Aragon (1213–76) by 1235, and he took Valencia in 1238, but these were only
the most obvious successes of a reign which turned Aragon into perhaps the most
powerful state in the western Mediterranean. Meanwhile, after he had reunited his
Castilian kingdom with Leon in 1230, Córdoba was taken by King Fernando III of
Castile (1217–52) in 1236 and Seville in 1248. And also by this time, King Sancho
II of Portugal (1223–45) had already conquered as far as the Algarve, thus adding
considerably to the size of his young kingdom. None of this was easy or inevita-
ble. Patience and diplomatic skill were required to lay the groundwork for these
resounding military successes, but by the end of the 1240s, there was no possibility
of a Muslim counter-attack or resurgence. They had built on the work of their
predecessors, but between them the Kings of Castile-Leon, Aragon and Portugal
permanently transformed the political and religious landscape of Iberia.
...
Bishop Otto of Freising (d.1158), the uncle of emperor Frederick I, visited Italy
twice and described what he saw there in his Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, written
in about 1149:
Practically that entire land is divided among the cities, each of them requires
its bishops to live in the cities, and scarcely any noble or great man can
be found in all the surrounding territory who does not acknowledge the
authority of his city . . . From this it has resulted that they far surpass all other
states of the world in riches and in power.
In northern and central Italy, indeed, the period from about 1100–1250 was domi-
nated by the rise of those self-governing towns and cities historians conveniently
refer to as communes. There was nothing new in this region about urban self-
consciousness of course: towns and cities of all sizes had been acting with increas-
ing autonomy since at least the tenth century, and strong civic traditions stretched
back to Roman times. The most obvious example of a city in control of its own
affairs was Venice. Venetian power had been growing since the late eighth century,
and by the eleventh, its commercial success based on contacts with Byzantium and
Islam had made Venice the dominant force in the Adriatic and a major power in
the eastern Mediterranean. The Fourth Crusade would show most clearly how
potent this autonomous maritime republic had become. Rome, too, with its impe-
rial traditions and as the centre of papal power, was always a special case, and it was
there that perhaps the most aggressively radical form of communal government was
set up during the 1140s when the pope was expelled from the city and a Senate
was appointed. Arnold of Brescia’s anticlerical demagoguery added to the sense of
extremism, but the experiment did not last.
In the rest of northern and central Italy, the first communes emerged between
about 1080 and 1120. It is hard to pinpoint the precise moment when a particular
commune was established, and most developed gradually rather than overnight.
There were circumstances peculiar to individual cities. Genoa and Pisa profited
enormously from the assistance they gave during and after the First Crusade, for
example: their fleets were instrumental in the conquest of coastal towns in Syria
such as Acre, Tripoli and Tyre, and the trading privileges they were given as a
result by the new Christian rulers of Outremer were enormously valuable. But
Power 279
there were also underlying processes that powered the growing self-reliance of
all the communes. The hold of the German emperors on the kingdom of Italy
had weakened during the eleventh century: their visits were infrequent and their
authority ever more remote and hard to enforce. At the same time, from the middle
of the century the supporters of the papal reform movement had placed increasing
stress on how inappropriate it was for bishops, hitherto the main agents of impe-
rial power in Italy, to exercise temporal power. Episcopal influence on secular and
military affairs declined quickly as a result. These changes left individual towns and
cities with a large amount of independence and good reason to organise their own
political, economic and military affairs.
Many of these communes were already long-established as hubs of trade and
communication. As their autonomy and prosperity grew, immigration from the
surrounding countryside and beyond increased the size and shape of their popula-
tions. By the end of the thirteenth century, Florence, Milan and Genoa would
have more than 100,000 inhabitants, while others (Pisa, Bologna and Verona, for
example) had populations of at last 40,000. These were very large numbers by
the standards of contemporary Western Europe, and to accommodate them, most
communes significantly increased their physical size by building new circuits of
walls from the mid-twelfth century onwards. Communal populations were also
made up of an increasingly wide and diverse range of classes and occupations.
There were noble families and their extended kins, households and hangers-on:
these groups came to be known as consorteria. There was the religious element:
bishops and their entourages, monks, nuns and, from the early thirteenth century,
friars. The large unskilled urban workforce serviced the business of the increas-
ingly prosperous and influential merchants and artisans, while lawyers and notaries
diversified the urban social structure even more. These tradesmen and professionals
were soon forming guilds to protect and promote the interests of their occupation
or craft. All of this contributed to the dynamism and aggressive confidence that the
communes displayed.
Communes competed with each other. Each wanted to control its surround-
ing countryside (the contado) in order to harness the manpower it contained and
protect food supplies and trade routes in and out of the communal area. Inevitably,
as communal frontiers were extended, there were disputes about where one com-
mune’s lands ended and another’s began. Wars between rival communes were com-
mon, and all communes were organised to meet the demands of ongoing military
conflict. There were other similarities in the ways they were organised. All held
regular assemblies of their citizens to air matters of public concern; all had elected
officials known as consuls who typically served for a short time and oversaw the
systems of communal justice and finance, law and order and elections. Eventually,
all communes had their own statutes which were the ultimate source of communal
law and took precedence over any legislation issued by an external power. By the
end of the twelfth century, too, most communes were appointing a single supreme
official, a podestà. Usually an outsider appointed for their neutrality, the podestà
was employed by the commune for a set term to take final decisions on matters of
justice and finance, but above all on matters of warfare, defence and law and order.
Because whilst communes fought wars amongst themselves, there was plenty of
violence and conflict within individual communes, too. Factions and followings
developed, not least the consorteria associated with particular noble families. The tall
towers they built within the walls of their communes were displays of prestige and
defiance, designed to impress and intimidate their rivals. They were also, perhaps,
signs of how desperately these particular elite groups were trying to hold on to
their traditional power and influence in the face of rapid social change. Either way,
it was one of the podestà’s main responsibilities to keep these rivalries and resent-
ments in check.
Imperial authority in Italy continued to weaken following the death of Emperor
Henry V in 1125. Lothar III, who succeeded Henry, visited Italy three times during
his 12-year reign (1125–37), but he was unable to assert much meaningful power
there. His successor Conrad III never came to Italy at all and was never crowned
emperor. The consequences of this continuing neglect were clear: by the time
Conrad died in 1152, communes had been established in all the major towns and
cities of Lombardy and Tuscany, and many of these had been administering their
own affairs for at least several decades. Their systems, conventions and attitudes
were well-rooted, and most of the urban populations of northern Italy would never
have known a time when they had not run their own governments. When Freder-
ick Barbarossa came to Italy for the first time in the 1150s, therefore, determined
to bring the communes under direct imperial rule, he was bound to face the fierc-
est resistance. The Italian campaigns of emperor Frederick Barbarossa have already
been described. Suffice to say here that the sweeping decrees he issued at Roncaglia
in 1158, designed as they were to recover what he saw as lost imperial rights and
revenues, were never going to be accepted by the communes. Barbarossa took his
revenge on Milan in 1162 when he razed the city to the ground, but the city was
soon rebuilt, and the emperor’s approach only hardened communal resolve and led
to the formation of the League of Verona which expanded to become the Lom-
bard League in 1167. Ultimately, Barbarossa’s defeat at the hands of the League’s
forces at Legnano in 1176 showed that the towns and cities of northern Italy could
act together in defence of their common interests. The League’s victory also put
paid to Barbarossa’s plans once and for all, and at Constance in 1183, he had lit-
tle choice but to accept the reality of communal power: he formally renounced
the Roncaglian decrees and recognised the communes’ right to choose their own
consuls, build their own fortifications and make their own treaties. The communes
made some concessions to imperial pride and prestige when they accepted the
emperor’s notional overlordship and agreed to subsidise him on his visits to the
kingdom. In practice, however, Barbarossa had acknowledged the independence of
the communes and their supremacy within northern Italy. His son Henry VI, who
was crowned king of Italy in 1186 and succeeded Barbarossa in Germany following
the latter’s death on the way to the Holy Land in 1189, had his own plans to reas-
sert imperial authority in Italy. His marriage to Constance of Sicily allowed him
to claim the succession there, but his plans to use northern resources (in particular
Power 281
the fleets of Genoa and Pisa) to pursue his southern ambitions, described later,
eventually came to nothing. Henry was crowned king of Sicily in 1194; however,
his death in 1197 ended any prospect of establishing an Italian kingdom extending
over the whole peninsula.
Henry VI’s death and the ensuing dispute over the imperial throne between
Philip of Swabia and Otto of Brunswick meant that, once again, there was no
meaningful imperial presence in Italy to check the expanding power of the com-
munes. At least partly as a result of this, the vigorous development of the towns
and cities of northern Italy continued, and new forms of self-government soon
emerged. Rule by the Popolo (literally ‘the people’, although the term meant dif-
ferent things in different places) was in force in some cities (Siena, Lucca, Bologna
and Genoa) by the 1250s. Meanwhile in others such as Piacenza, Verona, Milan
and Ferrara, single individuals, Signori (singular Signore, literally ‘lord’, although
sometimes mistranslated as ‘tyrant’ or ‘despot) were establishing their mastery and
beginning the process of making their positions hereditary. These urban strong-
holds (‘Signoria’) would become the norm in northern and central Italy in the
fourteenth century. In the early thirteenth, however, the transition from medieval
commune to Renaissance ‘city-state’ had only just begun.
...
Roger II, Count of Sicily from 1105, Duke of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily from
1128 and then king of Sicily, Apulia and Calabria from 1130 until 1154, was a
controversial figure in his own time and has remained so ever since. Contempo-
rary critics saw him as an upstart autocrat who ruled without restraint. Describing
Roger, the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis wrote how ‘with passionate
violence he destroyed men near and far and, by cruelly causing much bloodshed
and mourning, grew to greatness’. Another contemporary, the author of the so-
called Saxon Annals, described Roger as a ‘semi-pagan tyrant’. By contrast, his
admirers (and sometimes even his grudging detractors) praised his wisdom and
piety, his love of justice and desire for peace and his achievement in bringing the
political anarchy in southern Italy to an end. Later historians saw Roger as the
‘strong man’ this chaotic region needed, while more modern commentators have
seen him as effectively combining typical Western European aspects of rulership
(masterful personal monarchy) with the best aspects of Byzantine bureaucracy and
Islamic culture. In other words, Roger has been seen as a prototype ‘modern’ ruler –
innovative, imaginative and far-sighted. There is something to be said for all of
these views, but Roger should not be viewed anachronistically. Like his contempo-
raries, he ruled pragmatically and as circumstances dictated.
Roger was born in 1095, the second son of Count Roger I the Great of Sicily
and his wife, Adelaide. His elder brother Simon succeeded Roger I on the latter’s
death in 1101, but Simon died in 1105 aged only 12, and Roger II became Count
of Sicily with his mother acting as regent. At this time, on the Italian mainland,
Roger I’s nephew, Roger Borsa, was Duke of Apulia and Calabria. His authority
and effective power had reduced significantly as political power in southern Italy
fragmented following the death of Robert Guiscard in 1085. Even Guiscard, domi-
nant and charismatic though he was, had struggled to maintain ducal authority in
Apulia and Calabria (he faced repeated rebellions, not least from other Normans),
and he had left little by way of deep-rooted governmental structures to help his
successors there. This situation became even more pronounced in the 1090s as
Roger Borsa faced a challenge from his disinherited elder half-brother, Bohemond.
The First Crusade had eventually diverted Bohemond’s attention away from south-
ern Italy, but not before Roger had been forced to give Bohemond some impor-
tant territories (including Taranto and Bari), and the underlying instability had
persisted. When Roger Borsa died in 1111 and was succeeded as Duke of Apulia
and Calabria by his 11-year-old son, William II, the chances of things improving
looked slim.
The island of Sicily was the exception to this decentralising trend. Roger I had
inherited relatively stable and sophisticated systems of government and adminis-
tration, as well as a body of experienced officials, from his Muslim predecessors.
He had then adapted these in order to accommodate the new Norman ruling
class, and they were preserved after 1101 with little evident difficulty by Countess
Adelaide. Thanks to her, Roger II was therefore able to take personal control of
Sicily smoothly and unchallenged in 1112 at the age of 16. Adelaide soon left him
free to pursue his own policies when she became the wife of the childless King
Baldwin I of Jerusalem, but a plan to install Roger as Baldwin’s heir if the marriage
produced no sons eventually came to nothing (the marriage ended in 1117), and
the episode only damaged relations between Roger and the subsequent kings of
Jerusalem. Meanwhile, over the next 15 years, Roger set about consolidating his
authority on Sicily and extending it on to the mainland. He exerted tight, central-
ised control over the former, and took advantage of William II’s problems in Apulia
and Calabria. William was as troubled by internal rivalries and opposition as Roger
Borsa had been, and like his father, he looked to his Sicilian kinsman for financial
and military help. William eventually ceded Calabria to Roger in 1122, having
already surrendered his claim to half shares in Palermo and Messina which he had
inherited from Roger Borsa and Robert Guiscard. Within a few years, Roger was
in undisputed control there.
William II died childless in 1127, and Roger claimed the duchy of Apulia as his
nearest heir, even though there was a closer relative, Bohemond’s son Bohemond
II, who was by this point ruling the crusader principality of Antioch. Roger faced
opposition from a wide range of constituencies: the Apulian nobles valued and
feared for their independence, the Apulian towns liked being self-governing, the
Prince of Capua was alarmed at what Roger might intend for him, Pope Honorius
II feared the threat Roger might ultimately pose to the autonomy of the Church
in Apulia and Calabria and to papal authority in central Italy, and the merchants of
Venice viewed with concern the prospect of Roger’s navy dominating the Adriatic
and the central Mediterranean. Roger’s claims also impinged on the rights claimed
in southern Italy by both the western and eastern emperors. These diverse forces
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never worked long or effectively enough together to restrain Roger, however, who
quickly developed his control over Apulia and then extended it to Naples, Salerno
and Amalfi. Pope Honorius reluctantly accepted and invested Roger as Duke of
Apulia, Calabria and Sicily in 1128; soon after this Prince Robert of Capua agreed
to became Roger’s vassal, and the whole of southern Italy was effectively united
under Roger’s authority. In 1129 at Melfi, Roger extracted oaths of allegiance from
his Apulian vassals and issued new regulations forbidding private warfare. All he
lacked now was a title to match his unprecedented power, but in 1130, Roger was
able to exploit the schism which had arisen following the disputed papal election
earlier in the year to secure acknowledgement by one of the contending popes,
Anacletus II, in return for Roger’s support against Anacletus’s rival, Innocent II.
When Roger was crowned king of Sicily, Apulia and Calabria by Anacletus in
Palermo Cathedral on Christmas Day 1130, he claimed that he was simply restor-
ing a kingdom that had existed in classical times. This was all propaganda, how-
ever, and there was no disguising the novelty or significance of what Roger had
achieved.
Nevertheless, Roger had to fight hard to hold on to his new kingdom for the
rest of his reign, and he was never entirely secure. Indeed, at times he came close
to losing much of what he had gained. Roger ruthlessly eliminated opposition in
Apulia in two brutal campaigns in 1132 and 1133, and he forced the principality of
Capua to submit to him by the end of 1134. His use of Muslim mercenaries only
hardened opinion against him in many quarters, where he was portrayed as a tyran-
nical persecutor of fellow Christians. A serious illness which incapacitated Roger
for a while in 1135 and even prompted rumours of his death emboldened his oppo-
nents once again, but the king recovered, and the greatest threat he faced came in
1136 with Emperor Lothar III’s return to southern Italy (his earlier expedition in
1133 had achieved little beyond his imperial coronation). The emperor captured
Bari in May 1137 (the troops from Roger’s army, many of whom were Muslims,
were hanged) and Salerno in September; a new Duke of Apulia (Roger’s rebellious
brother-in-law Rainulf of Caiazzo) was then installed. Roger was forced to retreat
to Sicily, but Lothar’s success only lasted as long as he remained in Italy. After he
argued with Innocent II about who had lordship over the new Duke of Apulia,
he left, and, despite continuing resistance from Rainulf, Roger was able quickly to
recover his position: Salerno was retaken, Capua was destroyed, Naples and Ben-
evento surrendered. Meanwhile Innocent II, lacking his imperial ally but probably
buoyed when the death of his rival Anacletus II in 1138 ended the papal schism in
his favour, excommunicated Roger in 1139 and led an army against him. But just
as they had been at Civitate in 1053, the papal troops were defeated, and the pope
was captured. In 1139, Innocent was forced to recognise Roger as king of Sicily
in the Treaty of Mignano, which also formally acknowledged Roger’s sons Roger
and Alfonso as Duke of Apulia and Prince of Capua, respectively. In return, Roger
performed homage to Innocent, and the new kingdom became, technically, a papal
fief, just as Apulia, Calabria and Capua had been since 1059. In practice, however,
the legality of this new relationship mattered little, and dealings between the rulers
of Sicily and the papacy would remain tense and unpredictable for the rest of the
twelfth century and beyond.
After 1139, Roger’s territories on mainland Italy remained largely pacified. The
finishing touches in Apulia were applied when Roger had the body of Rainulf of
Caiazzo, who had been buried in Troia after succumbing to a fever and dying in
1139, dug up and thrown into a ditch, and after the leaders of the resistance in Bari
had been either hanged or mutilated. He also declared the lands of all those vas-
sals who had rebelled against him confiscated and forced many of them into exile.
But there was no proper peace with the new pope, Eugenius III (1145–53), just
a series of uneasy truces, and Roger persisted in his attempts to keep his enemies
divided by subsidising the Welf opponents of the Staufen King Conrad III and
unsettling the Byzantines. The Second Crusade distracted his main opponents for
a while, however, and in the 1140s, Roger began to develop his interest in the
wider Mediterranean. He had already captured Malta in 1127, and he expanded
his conquests later when he fixed his sights on Muslim North Africa. He captured
the strategically important island of Jerba in 1135 and the ports of Tripoli in 1146
and Mahdia, Sfax and Sousa in 1148. There was nothing particularly religious
about this: the conquered towns were given a large amount of autonomy, and the
populations were permitted to practise their religion and keep their Muslim offi-
cials. Roger’s aim was to control the lucrative trade routes between north Africa
and Sicily and protect the coast of Sicily from Muslim pirates. Roger had his eye on
other conquests, too. In 1147, he captured Corfu and Cephalonia from the Byz-
antines, giving him control of the entrance to the Adriatic on both sides. He also
raided Thebes and Corinth, and in 1149, Roger even sent ships into the Bospho-
rus which forced their way into the harbour of Constantinople, burned the city’s
suburbs and fired missiles at the imperial palace. These were as much pre-emptive
attacks as anything else, not aimed at permanent conquest but designed to deter
future Byzantine attacks on Apulia and pressurise the emperor into recognising the
legitimacy of the Sicilian kingdom. But after the Second Crusade, Conrad III put
aside his differences with the Byzantine emperor Manuel and allied with him to
bring Roger down. That the two emperors felt it necessary to combine their efforts
in this way shows just how big a problem Roger had become for both of them and
how profoundly Roger’s exploits had affected the balance of power at the heart of
the Mediterranean. The alliance came to nothing, however, and Conrad died in
1152, leaving Roger to enjoy the last two years of his reign in relative tranquillity.
However, whilst Roger’s adventures outside his own kingdom were significant
during his lifetime, it is only right to point out that, within a few years of Roger’s
death, all his conquests along the north African coast had been lost. With this it
could be said that the expansion of western Christendom which had been under-
way since the second half of the tenth century finally came to an end.
Roger’s political and military achievements were based on increasingly strong
and effective centralised control of the southern Italian church, and on systems of
government and administration which were designed to reinforce royal authority
and to extract the wealth and fighting strength he needed to defend his kingdom.
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As far as ecclesiastical affairs were concerned, John of Salisbury, an English contem-

porary writing at the papal court, accused Roger of having ‘reduced the church in
his kingdom to slavery’. But whilst it is clear that Roger did indeed enjoy compre-
hensive authority over monasteries and bishoprics in his kingdom, there was noth-
ing new about this, and he was only following the precedent set by his father who
had been granted effective control over the Sicilian church by the pope in 1098.
Moreover, there is little sign that the people Roger appointed were unsuitable or
unqualified. The same John of Salisbury who accused him of enslaving the church
admitted that ‘he was held guiltless of open simony and took pride in presenting
decent men wherever they might be found’. As to more secular matters, the docu-
ment known as the Catalogue of the Barons (Catalogus Baronum) is a good example
of Roger’s assertiveness. This was an inventory compiled in about 1150 of the
military obligations owed to the king by landholders in Apulia and Capua. It was
clearly designed to produce live troops rather than just money to hire mercenaries
and went a long way towards establishing a unified system of military service in
those parts of the kingdom where it applied. More broadly still, the sophisticated
and well-managed Byzantine and Muslim administrations inherited by the Nor-
mans in Calabria and on Sicily had been kept intact to a significant degree by the
new rulers, and this continuity was developed by Roger II. There were innovations
as well, however. On Sicily from the 1140s, for example, the principal administra-
tive office, which dealt primarily with the administration of land, was the newly
created Diwan al-Tahqiq al Ma’mur (‘the office of control’ or ‘court of accounts’),
and many of its officials were Muslim converts to Christianity. Overall, though, the
majority of Roger’s officials in both regions were Greeks, including the two men
who filled the office of amiratus, a sort of prime minister – Christodoulos until the
mid-1120s and George of Antioch thereafter. Until 1127, Roger’s charters were
issued in Greek, whilst other official documents could also have been written in
Arabic. The preponderance of Greek and Arabic officials did decline after 1127,
though, once Roger had acquired control of Apulia and founded his kingdom.
This was partly because more royal documents were needed in Latin, not least to
reflect the significant reorganisation Roger made on the mainland to many of the
most important lordships. Following the campaigns of the 1130s, he took these
from rebellious nobles who had been imprisoned or exiled and put them in the
hands of loyal supporters, many of whom were related to the king. Even so, the
cosmopolitan nature of Roger’s court was maintained in other ways: the king’s
chancellor, who was in charge of producing Roger’s Latin charters, became more
prominent from the 1140s, and from 1137–52 the position was held by an English-
man, Robert of Selby.
Meanwhile in Apulia and Capua, where the structures of government Roger
inherited were less well-developed and where the king had fewer lands of his own,
he had to be creative. Initially, he had looked to his sons to govern these regions
as duke and prince, but, not least because only his fourth son William survived
by 1149, active oversight of justice and finance was delegated to new officials,
justiciars and chamberlains, who were appointed from the mid-1130s to deal with
these matters in their own designated areas. The chamberlains oversaw the royal
lands and revenues, and tight royal control was kept over the export of valua-
ble raw materials like wheat, fruit and silk. Meanwhile, the justiciars, appointed
mostly from the nobility, dealt personally with most serious criminal offences and
important property disputes. Local counts, however, retained judicial authority
over serious criminal cases within their counties, but very much as royal officers,
not through any long-standing right. Below this level, local populations (Lombard,
Greek, Muslim and Norman) were dealt with by local judges or aristocrats with
delegated judicial powers. According to Roger’s own laws, these groups were to be
dealt with differently and according to their own customary rules and procedures,
as long as these did not breach royal law. This emphasis on the rights of the crown
was characteristic of Roger’s approach to government and the law: he was content
to leave most of what he inherited alone as long as the king’s ultimate authority
was respected. This was the central message of the legislation he published at Melfi
in 1129 and in the 1140s, whilst in 1144, a major inquiry into privileges (financial,
judicial and more) claimed by individuals and institutions throughout the kingdom
stressed that in future they were only to be valid if expressly confirmed by the king.
Royal authority in Apulia and Capua, therefore, was exercised mainly by the
local nobility. As for the king himself, he spent most of his time at Palermo after
1140 and ruled Sicily and Calabria directly from the royal court there. He was
genuinely interested in the details of administration, perhaps more so than any
other western ruler of the twelfth century. He was also keen to use the different
traditions he was surrounded by to develop a unique royal ideology. One of his
coins from the 1130s, made with gold which came into his treasury as payment
for Sicilian wheat exported to Tunisia, describes the king as ruling ‘by the grace
of Allah’ on one side, whilst it has a cross and the name of Jesus on the other. In a
mosaic at the Church of the Martorana in Palermo, built by George of Antioch in
the 1130s, Roger is depicted dressed as a Byzantine emperor receiving his kingdom
directly from Christ. And most magnificently of all, Roger’s royal chapel (the Cap-
pella Palatina), built within his palace at Palermo, contains Greek mosaics, Norman
arches and an Islamic wooden ceiling. Twelfth-century Sicily was probably not the
multicultural utopia it has sometimes been portrayed as, and after Roger II’s death,
his kingdom continued to become steadily more Latinised. Nevertheless, Roger
had created a unified kingdom out of the most diverse component parts, and when
he died in 1154, despite having been challenged by most of the great powers of
Western Europe at some time during his reign, he was able to pass it on intact to
his son, William I (1154–66).
Despite Roger’s achievements, however, the kingdom’s future was by no means
secure in 1154, and the foundation Roger had constructed had to be built on by
his successors before the Sicilian monarchy was accepted as one of Europe’s major
political powers. And things did not get off to a promising start following Roger’s
death. William I’s reputation certainly pales next to his father’s. In later centuries he
was referred to as William the Bad, and although he was certainly not as incompe-
tent as his later critics suggested, he lacked the dominant, charismatic will to power
Power 287
of his predecessor. He faced rebellion across his kingdom, including on Sicily itself
in 1155–6, and there was a serious attempt to overthrow and assassinate him in
1161. William must bear some of the responsibility for this: he was dominated, it
seems, by his increasingly unpopular chief minister, Maio of Bari, whose lowly ori-
gins and monopolisation of royal patronage were deeply resented by the established
nobility. Nonetheless, by no means all of this was William’s fault. Just like Rob-
ert Guiscard had done in 1085, Roger II left his successor with some intractable
problems to address. The papacy was already opposed to William after he had been
crowned king without papal consent in 1151, both the new king of Germany and
aspiring western emperor Frederick Barbarossa and the Byzantine emperor Manuel
Comnenus were keen to see the upstart kingdom of Sicily destroyed, the nobles
and towns of Apulia and Capua were desperate to break free of royal control, and
the general harshness of Roger’s regime may simply have provoked an inevitable
reaction after his death. William was not helped either when he fell gravely ill and
was incapacitated in 1155. This exposed Maio of Bari, and the rebels were boosted
further by the arrival of a Byzantine expeditionary force on the mainland. The
rebellion was defeated in 1156, however, after the king had recovered from his
illness enough to lead an army against Brindisi and Bari. This forced the pope to
come to terms, and in the Treaty of Benevento of 1156, William did homage and
swore fealty to Adrian IV who invested him with the kingdom and acknowledged
royal control over the church there. Palermo became an archbishopric, something
Roger II had wanted, but never managed, to achieve.
The kingdom was threatened again in 1160 when Maio of Bari was murdered
and a plot was hatched to replace King William. The coup quickly collapsed, but
these events had shown just how delicate the unity of the new Sicilian kingdom
was and how important the active presence of a masterful, dominant ruler con-
tinued to be. This remained lacking after William’s sudden death in 1166. His
son William II (1166–89) was only 13, and his wife, Queen Margaret, assumed
the regency. The favour she showed to her cousin, Stephen of Perche, whom
she appointed chancellor and archbishop-elect of Palermo, reignited the factional
squabbles at court, and after a popular uprising in Messina was provoked by the
excesses of one of Stephen’s officials, he was forced to flee the kingdom in 1168.
Despite its troubled start, however, William II’s reign subsequently came to be seen
as a golden age of prosperity and stability: in stark contrast to his father, he became
known as William the Good. There may have been some misty-eyed nostalgia in
this view, but in comparison with what preceded and followed it, William’s reign
was certainly a success. After William I’s troubles and his son’s disorderly minority,
the 1170s and 1180s were largely peaceful, and William was able to pursue ambi-
tions outside his kingdom. His fleet assaulted Alexandria (the largest and richest
port on the Mediterranean) in 1174, and in 1182, he captured the second city of
the Byzantine Empire, Thessalonica. None of these campaigns were particularly
successful in the end (Thessalonica was soon retaken by the Muslims), but they
brought William fame and prestige as a ruler of international significance. This
status was confirmed by his own marriage in 1176 to Joan, the daughter of King
Henry II of England, and it was reinforced, perhaps even more significantly, by the
marriage in 1186 of his aunt Constance (the daughter of Roger II) to Henry, the
son and heir of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. This union signalled a reversal of
German policy towards the kings of Sicily: no longer were the latter seen as usurp-
ers or their realm as illegitimate. Constance represented continuity with the ruling
regime, and when the childless King William declared her his heir in 1186, the
possibility arose of the union of the western empire with the kingdom of Sicily.
This prospect must still have felt remote in 1186 as William was still young and his
wife even younger, but William died still without heirs in 1189, and in southern
Italy more than 30 years of political turmoil followed.
Henry and Constance had their supporters in southern Italy. At the same time,
others (not least the pope, who feared for his authority in central Italy and his
claims to lordship over the Sicilian kings) were horrified at the thought of Barba-
rossa’s son taking the crown there and at the prospect, as some saw it, of hordes of
ferocious, uncouth Germans lording it over the streets of civilised Palermo. So a
faction at court elected their own local candidate as the next king, Count Tancred
of Lecce, William II’s illegitimate cousin. He was crowned in January 1190, by
which time Barbarossa had died, and Henry had become the German king. Henry
wanted his Sicilian inheritance, but, after he and Constance had been crowned
emperor and empress in Rome in 1191, his invasion of Sicily later in the same year
was a failure, and Henry had to return home. By early 1194, however, things were
different. Henry had King Richard I’s ransom to spend on a second Italian cam-
paign and specifically on fleets from Genoa and Pisa, and in February, King Tan-
cred had died, leaving only an infant son, William III. In no position to resist the
German invasion, the unfortunate boy was castrated and blinded and taken back
to Germany. Naples, Messina and Palermo all surrendered to Henry, and he was
crowned king of Sicily on Christmas Day 1194. Despite having Constance at his
side to give his regime credibility, however, Henry was never secure. Opposition on
the mainland continued until 1196, and in 1197, a serious revolt erupted on Sicily.
It was his status as an outsider and the uncompromising harshness of Henry’s rule
that provoked resistance, and although he suppressed the Sicilian uprising, he did
so brutally, only adding strength to his critics’ arguments. When he fell ill and died
suddenly in 1197, aged 32, his son Frederick was only three years old, and more
chaos loomed. When Frederick’s mother, Constance, died in the following year, it
became inevitable.
Constance was the legitimate heir of Roger II and represented dynastic stability.
But with her death, multiple problems arose. Constance had arranged for her son,
Frederick, to be crowned as co-ruler of Sicily just before her death, but after it the
new pope, Innocent III (1198–1216), asserted his right as overlord of the Sicilian
king to act as the orphaned Frederick’s guardian. Innocent found this role difficult
to perform from his base in Rome, and in practice, rival Sicilian lords vied for con-
trol of the infant king. The situation was complicated further because of the strug-
gle for the throne going on in Germany at the same time between Philip of Swabia,
Frederick’s uncle, and Otto of Brunswick, a younger son of Henry the Lion. Both
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men were crowned king of Germany in 1198; confusion reigned for another ten
years, and even the death of Philip of Swabia in 1208 failed to resolve the situa-
tion. Otto of Brunswick was finally crowned emperor by Innocent III in Rome in
October 1209, but, ignoring the undertakings he had given as the price of papal
support, Otto launched an invasion of southern Italy in 1211–12. Frederick, now
in his teens and nominally in charge of his increasingly turbulent kingdom, was
confined to Palermo and almost forced to flee to North Africa. However, he recov-
ered sufficiently to make a daring escape from Sicily and find his way to Germany,
where he occupied Constance and was crowned king at the end of 1212. This was
an enormously risky strategy on Frederick’s part and could easily have backfired,
but it did compel Otto to leave Italy. Two years later, Otto’s cause collapsed after
his defeat at the hands of King Philip II of France at Bouvines in July 1214, and in
1215, Frederick was re-crowned at Aachen. He did not return to Italy until 1220,
and in November of that year, he was crowned emperor by Pope Honorius III in
Rome. Then, on re-entering his kingdom, he issued a series of assizes at Capua
which were designed to begin the reassertion of royal authority. Just like Roger II
had done in his legislation, Frederick insisted on the ultimate superiority of royal
justice and the definitive power of the royal will. Over the next 30 years (Frederick
died in 1250), he would turn these theories into reality and make Sicily the most
intensively governed and centralised state in Western Europe.
Frontier Europe: Westernisation in the North and East

Between about 1120 and 1220, trends already discernible over the previous two
centuries in Scandinavia and on the eastern edge of Latin Christendom contin-
ued to mature. Despite civil wars and power struggles, and although there were
important differences between Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the north, and
between Bohemia, Hungary and Poland in the east, long-term processes such as
population growth, urbanisation and the spread of institutionalised Christianity
allowed for ever greater centralisation of public power in the hands of the kings and
their secular and ecclesiastical elites, and a clearer distinction between these elites
and the rest of the population. There were exceptions to this, notably in Sweden
and Poland, but even there Latin influences became ever stronger as time went on.
Methods of government and administration, forms of economic exchange, pat-
terns of cultural interchange and modes of religious practice and belief all served to
integrate these peripheral regions more firmly within the mainstream of western
society. Significant though they were, however, these developments were far from
complete by the end of this period.
By 1200, most of the territory occupied by the four main groups in Scandi-
navia (the Danes, Norwegians, Svear and Götar) had been incorporated into the
three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Denmark, which consisted
of Jutland and Skåne as well as Halland, Blekinge and Bornholm, was the most
powerful of these, not least during the twelfth century when Norway and Sweden
were destabilised by internal conflict. Having said that, there was also civil war in
Denmark from later years of Niels’s reign (1104–34) until the accession of Valdemar
I in 1157. The son of Eric I (1095–1103), Cnut Lavard, was killed by Magnus,
King Niels’s son, in 1131, and Magnus gave homage to Emperor Lothar III in
return for the latter’s support against another Eric, Cnut’s half-brother. Magnus
and Niels were both killed in 1134, however, Eric II reigned until 1137, and his
nephew Eric III from 1137 until 1146. The kingdom was then effectively divided
between Cnut V, the son of Magnus, who was based in Jutland, and Sweyn III,
the son of Eric II, who controlled Sjaelland and Skåne. Both looked to Frederick
Barbarossa for support, and Sweyn renewed homage to him. Sweyn then killed
Cnut, but Cnut’s cousin Valdemar killed Sweyn and became king in 1157. Valde-
mar I was the son of Cnut Lavard who had been killed in 1131, and one of Valde-
mar’s achievements was to secure his father’s canonisation in 1170. Valdemar’s long
reign (1157–82) also saw a reassertion of Danish royal power and the beginnings of
expansion along the Baltic coast. The threat from the German emperors actually
receded during the twelfth century as they became more preoccupied with Italy
and the Mediterranean. Frederick Barbarossa’s campaign against Henry the Lion in
1180 also put a stop to Saxon attempts to extend power in the north and cleared
a path for the Danes. By 1169, Valdemar had conquered Rugen, and in 1185, the
prince of the Pomeranians submitted to Valdemar’s son Cnut VI (1182–1202).
For a time, Denmark became the dominant power in the western Baltic, and in
1201, Lübeck, which had been founded by Henry the Lion in 1158, and Holstein
acknowledged Cnut as protector and lord. As a reward for having recognised Fred-
erick II as emperor, moreover, Valdemar II Sejr ‘Victory’ (1202–41) was granted
all the territory he had gained from the Elbe to the Oder. He then adopted the
title ‘King of the Danes and the Slavs’. Valdemar overstretched himself in the end,
however. Having occupied Hamburg in 1216 and conquered the northern part of
modern-day Estonia in 1219, he was captured in 1223, and, although released after
payment of a large ransom, he was defeated at the battle of Bornhöved in 1227 after
which he gave up attempts to regain the German territories he had lost. Neverthe-
less, under Cnut VI and Valdemar II Sejr, Danish power had been stronger than
at any time since the Anglo-Danish empire of the early eleventh century. When
Cnut VI’s sister Ingeborg married King Philip II of France in 1193, it was a clear
acknowledgment of Denmark’s enhanced status.
There was much at stake in the Baltic for the Danish kings beyond prestige.
Scandinavia was largely self-sufficient, but also made significant exports: furs, wal-
rus ivory, falcons, timber and lamp oil, for example. But the most important export
of all was preserved fish, which was in increasing demand in Western Europe as
the population there grew. Salted herring from Oresund made the annual fair in
Skåne one of the biggest in medieval Europe, while cod was caught in enormous
quantities off the Norwegian coast, dried and exported as stockfish. Needless to
say, this was particularly important in Norway where Trondheim and Bergen grew
on the back of this trade. But control of Baltic trade more generally was some-
thing worth fighting for, as the struggle for supremacy there between Danes and
Germans shows.
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A Norwegian kingdom had been firmly established in the eleventh century, and
by the early twelfth, it stretched from Lofoten in the north to estuary of Göta Älv,
where Gothenburg is now. The civil war which followed the death of Sigurd I in
1130 impeded the further development of centralised power, however, and lasted
on and off until the early thirteenth century. Rival kings were chosen by different
assemblies, and all eight of the Norwegian kings who reigned between 1130 and
1162 died violent deaths. One of these was Harald IV Gilchrist, who arrived from
Ireland in the 1120s claiming to be the illegitimate son of Magnus Barelegs (ille-
gitimacy was no bar to succession in Norway, it seems). He seized the throne after
blinding Magnus IV, Sigurd I’s son, in 1135. Harald himself was then murdered
by Sigurd II, who also claimed to be a son of Magnus Barelegs, in 1136. Eventu-
ally, one faction elected Sigurd’s young grandson Magnus V as king in 1162. His
most serious rival was Sverri (1184–1202), who arrived in 1177 from the Faroe
Islands. With a claim that he was the son of Sigurd III (killed in 1155), Sverri was
recognised as king in Tröndelag and had defeated and killed Magnus by 1184.
However, these smouldering conflicts were not finally extinguished until Sverri’s
grandson, Håkon IV (1217–63), was recognised as king throughout Norway in
1217. He ruled without opposition after putting down the last stirrings of rebellion
in 1239–40, and for the rest of the thirteenth century, Norwegian kings focused on
securing Iceland’s submission, which they finally obtained in the 1260s.
More than in Norway and Denmark, political instability in Sweden during
the twelfth century meant that kingship remained weak, and the development of
centralised monarchical power proved impossible. The unification of the Götar and
the Svear, which eventually led to the formation of a Swedish kingdom, had been
a slow process. The two people were divided by extensive forest, and the persis-
tence of paganism in Sweden until the late eleventh century was another obstacle
to union. By 1060, Sweden still had only one bishopric, in Västergötland, so the
scope for unity to be cultivated by the institutions of the Christian church was
limited. The first ruler to be called ‘king of the Svear and Gotar’ was Carl Sverk-
ersson (1161–7) in 1164, and the first Swedish king known to have granted land
and privileges in both parts of the kingdom, and who struck coins in Svealand and
Götaland, was Cnut Eriksson (1167–95). Cnut’s reign was untypically long, and
until the 1160s, sudden and frequent transfers of royal power had also frustrated
unification. One line of kings was replaced by another in about 1130. Power was
then seized by Eric Jedvardsson when he assassinated Sverker I in 1156. Eric was in
turn challenged by Sverker’s sons and killed by the eldest, Carl, in about 1160. Fol-
lowing Cnut Eriksson’s death in 1195, dynastic instability returned as rival families
continued to dispute and alternate power. Until 1250, none could hold power for
more than a single reign before conceding it to another. Ultimately, stronger unify-
ing factors included the slow development of Eric Jedvardsson’s saintly cult at Upp-
sala (the erstwhile centre of Swedish paganism) and the establishment by the papacy
of the archbishopric of Uppsala in 1164. The new province included two sees in
Götaland and three in Svealand, and the councils later summoned by the archbish-
ops of Uppsala or by papal legates were the first national councils of Sweden.
One feature of Scandinavian history during this period, which historians have
emphasised, was the creation of secular and ecclesiastical elites and a sharper distinc-
tion between those at the top of society and the rest of the population. Clearly, as
the formalised structures of Christianity spread across the region and dioceses were
established, a literate higher clergy comfortable with the Latin language developed
with a sense of itself as part of a wider international network. The establishment
of an archbishopric at Nidaros (Trondheim) in 1152 or 1153 as the centre of an
ecclesiastical province, including sees in Iceland and Greenland, was as important
for Norway as the creation of the archdiocese of Uppsala was for the Swedes a
decade later. Archbishops and their suffragans in turn encouraged the kings to
present themselves, not as traditional Scandinavian war-leaders, but as western-
style Christian kings. In 1163, Magnus V of Norway became the first Scandinavian
king to be anointed and crowned; the first Danish and Swedish coronations took
place in 1170 and 1210, respectively. A landholding aristocracy with more spe-
cialised military functions had also begun to appear by the start of the thirteenth
century, although this happened at different rates and to different extents across
the region. By the twelfth century, taxes were being raised for defence in place of
personal military service. These may have been in part a commutation of the tra-
ditional obligation to provide the king with hospitality. The king used this money
to hire mercenaries, but there is also evidence that cavalry was being deployed in
Denmark and Sweden by the mid-1100s, whilst castles had started to appear in
Denmark by the end of the century. The peasant levy remained more important
in Norway, however, as it was needed to man the large fleet required to protect
the long Norwegian coastline. Ongoing urbanisation also suggests the continuing
growth of royal and aristocratic power. In about 1000, there were only ten towns
in Scandinavia, whilst by 1200 there were about 30, with half of these in Denmark.
Kings supported and protected the towns and used them, as did the Church, as
administrative centres. But the spread of towns was also a product of population
growth more generally, and as competition for resources intensified, the theory
goes, more free peasants subjected themselves to the lordship of a powerful local
leader. As more food was produced to meet the needs of the growing population,
so agricultural surpluses also grew, giving lords the opportunity to sell them at local
markets, which thereby grew into urban trading centres. Such control of resources
of course made the lords richer and distinguished them more clearly from those
who actually farmed the land.
Even so, there were still significant limits to royal power across Scandinavia at the
end of this period. The growth of centralised political institutions had been slow.
Valdemar I of Denmark had a royal chancery, but general political assemblies which
dealt with more than just regional issues had only emerged in Norway by the early
1200s, and there is no sign of them in Denmark or Sweden before the second half
of the thirteenth century. Royal control over justice also remained elusive, although
the Church was keen to encourage kings to assert themselves as supreme judges and
lawmakers. Laws were issued at assemblies which applied to parts, not the whole,
of the kingdom, and it was not until the thirteenth century that Scandinavian kings
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issued laws for their entire realms. Cnut VI’s decree on homicide, issued in 1200,
proclaimed the Danish king’s right to issue laws, although in that case it purported
only to confirm an already existing one.
...
On the eastern edge of Latin Christendom during the twelfth century, one new
monarchy (Bohemia) was created whilst another powerful centralised state, Poland,
dissolved into fragments. In Hungary, meanwhile, royal authority reached a high
point by the 1190s, only to be reined in dramatically by an increasingly assertive
nobility. These contrasting political fortunes did not prevent this being, gener-
ally, a period of economic and cultural development across the region. Foreign
settlers continued to arrive in the region in significant numbers, leading to the
establishment or consolidation of castles, towns and villages. Walloons, Flemings
and Germans put down roots in western Poland and in Hungary. Clerics, knights,
craftsmen, traders and peasants found places for themselves, as did Jews and Mus-
lims, albeit in smaller numbers. The Hungarians also made efforts to colonise the
thinly populated areas to the east and north-east in Transylvania and the Carpathi-
ans. The newcomers naturally brought their westernised habits and assumptions
with them. German colonists in Pomerania and Silesia were often permitted to live
under ‘German law’ for example, and it is no surprise that other Latin influences
became visible in these states during this period. Several of the newly founded
religious orders, the Premonstratensians, Cistercians, Hospitallers and Templars,
made their way into the region, as did Romanesque and later Gothic architecture
and writing in Latin. Documents in general became more common, as did western
forms of government and administration and the use of cash in the economy. By
the early 1200s, therefore, political developments in central Europe, combined
with economic and religious changes, meant that Poland, Hungary and Bohemia
had become active and integrated members of Latin Christendom.
The Premyslid dukes had governed Bohemia as a fief of the empire since the
tenth century. Surrounded on three sides by imperial territory, it had always been
hard for the Bohemian rulers to break free of imperial influence. Loyalty to the
emperor was expected, along with military aid and support when required, attend-
ance at the imperial court and payments of tribute. No aspiring duke of Bohe-
mia could conceivably take power without the agreement of the emperor, who
bestowed the ducal title in a solemn ceremony of homage. Individual dukes of
Bohemia had been given a royal title by German emperors in the eleventh century,
and in 1158, Frederick Barbarossa did the same for Duke Wladislaw II. But these
were personal honours only, not to be inherited. This changed at the end of the
twelfth century, however, when the dukes were able to exploit their realm’s advan-
tage as the largest part of an empire weakened and divided following the death of
Henry VI in 1197. The rival claimants for the imperial throne needed support, and
in 1198, Duke Ottokar (1198–1230) was recognised as king, a development which
was made permanent in 1212 when Frederick II, whom Ottokar had supported
in the struggle for imperial power, recognised the right of the Bohemians to elect
their own monarch without imperial approval; henceforth, the emperor could only
confirm a choice which had already been made. The so-called Sicilian Golden Bull
which enshrined these rights also confirmed Bohemia’s independent status within
the empire, declared its borders inviolable and acknowledged the new monarchy as
hereditary. After 1212, therefore, all Bohemian rulers were kings, and their entitle-
ment to participate in the election of the emperor was officially recognised.
Even when German authority over Bohemia had been at its strongest, however,
there had been limits to it. The emperors could not ignore the dynastic claims of
the Premyslid dukes or the claims of the Bohemian nobility to elect their ruler. The
emperors had no lands in Bohemia, either, and they exercised no power, judicial or
otherwise, within the duchy. Internally, in fact, the power of the duke was legally
and practically unlimited. He had the right to demand military service from all
able-bodied men, and he was the sole source of law. Various labour services and
taxes could be taken from his subjects, and he was able to fix new ones, as well as
tolls, customs and market fees, by decree. The events of 1212 had as much sym-
bolic importance as practical effect, but these political developments inaugurated a
period of significant economic and cultural growth in Bohemian history. Later in
the thirteenth century, King Ottokar II (1253–78) would create a central European
empire by adding lands in Austria, Styria and Carinthia to the Bohemian realm. He
may even have had ambitions to take the imperial throne for himself. His success
was short-lived, and his empire was dismantled after his death in battle, but while
it lasted, the Bohemian king had been one of the most powerful rulers in Europe.
Just as Bohemian links with the Empire were deep and difficult to break, so
were Hungarian ones with Byzantium. Hungary had always been something of
a transitional point between west and east, but in this period its western orienta-
tion, and its autonomy, were confirmed. That did not mean that the relationship
with Byzantium ceased to be important, however; quite the contrary. The twelfth
century saw continuing attempts by the Hungarian kings to expand their power in
the Balkans at the expense of the eastern Empire. King Colman (1095–1116) had
taken over Croatia and parts of Dalmatia in 1097, and for a time Hungary occupied
important cities on the Dalmatian coast, including Spalata, Zara and Trau. This also
led to competition with Venice towards the end of the 1100s for control of the
head of the Adriatic. During the 1180s, the Venetian fleet actively but unsuccess-
fully tried to reconquer some of these coastal outposts, and they were quick to take
advantage of the financial and logistical grip they had on the Fourth Crusade to
finally retake Zara with western Christian help in 1202. Under Bela II ‘the Blind’
(1131–41), the Byzantine province of Bosnia was added to Hungarian territory,
and an additional aim was to conquer territory between Belgrade and Nis and sup-
port Serbian revolts against Byzantine authority. However, the Byzantines fought
back in the 1160s under Emperor Manuel Comnenus (1143–80) and retook the
lost Dalmatian lands. Manuel then forced a peace agreement on a reluctant King
Stephen III (1162–72), as part of which Stephen’s younger brother, Bela, was taken
to Constantinople and betrothed to Manuel’s daughter, Maria. Until Manuel’s son
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was born in 1169, indeed, Bela actually stood to inherit the imperial throne. Ste-
phen’s death eventually brought Bela back to Hungary, where he had to fight for
nearly a year before he became king against elements within the Hungarian rul-
ing elite who believed he would be no more than a tool of the Byzantines. In the
end, Pope Alexander III, who wanted Bela’s support against Frederick Barbarossa,
intervened to order his coronation. Once established in power as Bela III, however,
his reign (1172–96) was particularly successful. Military defeat at the hands of the
Seljuk Turks at Myriokephalon in 1176 and the destabilising minority that afflicted
the empire following the death of Manuel Comnenus in 1180 gave Bela the chance
to retake Croatia and Dalmatia; he also attacked Byzantine territories south of
Belgrade and in the far north-east tried to set up his son Andrew as ruler of Gali-
cia. Bela is also credited with establishing a royal chancery ‘after the model of
the papal and imperial courts’, a later account recorded. Certainly, the amount of
royal documentation seems to have increased by the end of the century. Bela was
also reputed to be very rich indeed. A list of royal revenues prepared on the king’s
orders in about 1195 shows that he could rely on income from a wide range of
sources in addition to his own lands. Like the English kings, he profited from regu-
lar changes of coinage, over which he had a monopoly, and the profits of justice:
nobles could judge minor crimes committed by their dependants, for example,
but not those involving the death penalty which could only be tried by judges
appointed by the king. There were also tolls and fees from markets and fairs as well
as significant amounts of income from the production and sale of salt. According to
the list, indeed, Bela’s annual income came to almost 170,000 silver marks, making
him richer than both the kings of England and France. Historians think that these
figures are almost certainly exaggerated, but there is no denying how strong and
dominant the Hungarian monarchy was by the end of the twelfth century.
Nevertheless, even these most powerful rulers were unable with impunity to
abuse their power or ignore vested interests for any length of time. The Hungarian
kings had long relied on servants with delegated powers to exercise their author-
ity. King Stephen I had divided his kingdom into counties in the early eleventh
century and made the appointed counts (ispans) who controlled them responsible
for administering the royal estates, administering justice and raising troops. Two
centuries later, however, the ispans had developed a strong sense of themselves as
a noble elite. Alongside them by then, moreover, were the other principal royal
officers, the so-called servientes regis (royal servants). These were typically warri-
ors of lowly status given lands by the king who, in due course, came to regard
themselves as minor nobility. A strong and competent king like Bela III could
control and manage these men, but at times of political weakness, or if the king
was inept, their power could be turned against the monarchy, or at least used to
extract concessions at the monarchy’s expense. King John discovered this in Eng-
land in the early thirteenth century, and so did his contemporary in Hungary,
Andrew II (1205–35). Andrew only became king after nearly a decade of bitter
conflict with his brother Imre (1196–1204), during which he established an effec-
tively independent power base of his own in the south of the kingdom, and after
forcing Imre’s infant son, Ladislas III (1204–5), into exile, where he soon died.
This early turbulence then continued in other forms, not least when Andrew’s
German wife, Gertrude, was murdered in 1213 by elements furious at what they
saw as the plundering of Hungarian resources by her Bavarian relatives. Andrew
was also obsessed with the conquest of Galicia. He led campaigns there virtually
every year between 1204 and 1216, recruiting more and more servientes regis to
swell the royal army. This was very costly indeed. Andrew’s favourites were given
royal lands and castles, and royal monopolies were farmed out, so to make up for
this and to fund his campaigns more generally, extraordinary taxes were levied and
the coinage was debased. Constant military activity did not prevent Andrew from
maintaining a lavish royal court, moreover, which only increased his spending and
his unpopularity. The king’s short and fruitless participation in the Fifth Crusade
was probably the last straw for his growing number of internal critics, and in 1222,
the nobles and servientes most alarmed by Andrew’s alienation of those royal estates
on which their livelihoods depended forced the king to issue a charter of privileges
known as the Golden Bull. The Bull was addressed to the kingdom’s nobility, and
its first provisions dealt with the sometimes very specific rights and privileges of
the servientes. Thus they were entitled to gather at the royal assembly held every
year on St Stephen’s feast day, they were exempted from certain taxes, they had
defined military obligations and were not required to perform military service
outside the kingdom except at royal expense, they could bequeath their property as
they wished even if they had no heirs, they were not obliged to give hospitality to
royal officers or pasturage to the royal pigs, they should not have their fields given
over by churchmen to the king’s horses under the pretext of tithe, and so on. Other
articles were of more general application: the coinage should not be debased and it
should henceforth be based on Bela III’s issues, the salt trade should be regulated,
foreigners would not be given royal office except following consultation with the
nobility, while Jews and Muslims were barred from holding royal office completely.
Andrew also guaranteed that if he or any of his successors violated the terms of the
bull, the barons would ‘have the right in perpetuity to resist and speak against us
and our successors without the charge of high treason’.
There is clearly much in Hungary’s Golden Bull to compare with England’s
Magna Carta. The circumstances which produced each document, moreover, in
which a high-handed king disregarded the political cost in order to raise enor-
mous sums of money for an ultimately futile military adventure, share many simi-
larities. There is no evidence that events in Hungary were directly influenced by
those in England, however, and the formal embodiment of rights and privileges
in documentary form was just one way in which landholding aristocracies across
Europe during the thirteenth century would seek to restrict royal power. Central-
ised authority in Poland, for example, effectively disappeared during this period,
albeit for different reasons and in different ways to Hungary, as after Boleslav III’s
death in 1138, power was divided between several branches of the Piast family, and
a prolonged period of political disintegration followed. Boleslav left four (perhaps
five) sons when he died. Some years before this, probably around 1133, he had
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published a decree (which has not survived and must be reconstructed) setting out
how power was to be apportioned between them after his death. All the brothers
would receive hereditary appanages of their own, but supreme rule over Poland
would be in the hands of the Grand Duke. The Grand Duke was to be the senior
prince of the ruling house, in this case Boleslav’s eldest son, Wladislaw. Crucially,
this position was not hereditary, so, as things stood in 1138, when Wladislaw died,
the next Grand Duke would be his brother, Boleslav the Curly. The Grand Duke
would rule Little Poland from Cracow, taking charge of foreign affairs and decisions
of peace and war for the whole country. The three eldest brothers also took pos-
session of their respective hereditary duchies after their father’s death – Wladislaw
in Silesia, Boleslav the Curly in Mazovia and Mieszko the Old in Greater Poland.
However, the fourth brother, Henryk, only received the district of Sandomierz
for life whilst the fifth, Casimir the Just, received nothing: he was either very
young when Boleslav III died or born posthumously. There were soon arguments
between the two eldest brothers: Wladislaw was forced into exile in 1146, and
Boleslav the Curly took over as Grand Duke. Wladislaw had the support of both
the emperor and the pope, however. Poland was placed under an interdict, and
Frederick Barbarossa invaded in 1157, forcing Boleslav to promise to restore his
elder brother. Boleslav never carried out this promise, and Wladislaw died in exile
in 1159. Boleslav himself died in 1173, and, despite opposition, his younger brother
Mieszko managed to take power and maintain the principle of seniority. But in the
late 1170s, civil war began, and Mieszko was forced out by the youngest brother,
Casimir, who took over as Grand Duke and was recognised by the papacy in 1180.
Mieszko subsequently tried on several occasions to return as Grand Duke, and
for short intervals he was successful. However, by the end of the twelfth century,
the position meant little. Boleslav III’s elaborate arrangements had been designed
to provide for all of his sons without disrupting national unity. In practice, they
did the opposite and caused seemingly endless difficulties. The Grand Duke had
no effective authority within the other duchies, but this did not stop the brothers
competing with each other for the title or from further dividing their duchies in
order to get support from other branches of their family. By 1202, there were five
separate duchies, and the number continued to increase during the thirteenth cen-
tury. There were seventeen by 1288, and Poland had become a collection of semi-
independent principalities, each ruled by a different segment of the Piast dynasty.
This family connection, along with a common ecclesiastical organisation across
the country, was just about enough to keep the idea of ‘Poland’ alive. The develop-
ing cult of St Wojciech (Adalbert of Prague), epitomised by the great bronze doors
of Gniezno Cathedral from the second half of the twelfth century which depict his
life and miracles, also served as a continuing focus for national unity. This was not
the Poland of Boleslav III, however. He had conquered and Christianised western
Pomerania, for example. But as his sons wrestled with each other over the increas-
ingly hollow title of Grand Duke, first Henry the Lion in 1164 and then Frederick
Barbarossa in 1181 took direct control of that region. And when in the late 1220s
Duke Conrad of Mazovia invited the knights of the Teutonic Order to help him
protect his northern frontier against the pagan Prussians, offered them the district
of Chelmno on the Vistula as their base and agreed to allow them to keep any ter-
ritory they conquered from the Prussian tribes, a major new force was established
in the region. The knights set about the systematic conquest of Prussia and soon,
with imperial and papal authorisation, established themselves as the rulers of a new
state along the Baltic coast. The Teutonic Order would prove to be a far more
formidable rival (sometimes enemy) for the Piast rulers of Poland than the heathen
Prussians had ever been. Perhaps the greatest impact on Poland, however, and
on central Europe generally, was made by the Mongol invasions, which began in
1241. The shock caused by these raids was enormous; they would continue to be a
serious threat and shape the politics of the region for the next 200 years. Hungary
was most directly in their path; it would be the descendants of the Magyars who
suffered more than any other group at the hands of the Mongols.
9
FAITH
c.1120–c.1220
The Papacy: Schisms and Supremacy

The Concordat of Worms (1122) and the First Lateran Council (1123) were
between them designed to bring an end to nearly 50 years of intermittent con-
flict between the popes and the western emperors and (in its supporters’ view) to
confirm the papacy on its path towards undisputed supremacy over the Christian
church. Papal hopes of a more stable and dominant future were short-lived, how-
ever. First in 1124 and again in 1130, factional and family politics in Rome com-
bined with rivalries inside the college of cardinals to produce two disputed papal
elections. Honorius II was installed as pope on the first of these occasions with no
reference to the requirements of the papal election decree of 1059; on the second
occasion, two different popes (Anacletus II and Innocent II) were chosen by differ-
ent cliques, and a schism began which lasted until 1138. On the face of things, all
of this marked a return to the chaotic and disreputable events of the early eleventh
century, when individual popes were often little more than pieces in a game of
local Roman politics.
Pope Anacletus had the initial advantage in 1130, as he had control of Rome
and the support of Duke Roger II of Sicily, whom he quickly crowned king. Inno-
cent II was forced to flee to France, but Bernard of Clairvaux supported him and
persuaded the kings of France and England to give the papal exile their backing.
Emperor Lothar III soon did the same, but it was only Anacletus’s death in 1138
that really brought the schism to an end. Things did not immediately get much
easier for Innocent, however. He held the Second Lateran Council in early 1139
in an attempt to stamp his authority on the church, but later in the same year he
was defeated in battle by Roger II and forced to recognise him as king of Sicily
in the Treaty of Mignano. Innocent also fell out with Louis VII of France over
the appointment of a new archbishop of Bourges, and in 1143, there was serious
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-13
rioting in Rome which led to the setting up of a communal government under an

independent Senate. Pope Lucius II (1144–5), the second pope after Innocent II,
actually died after being injured whilst leading an unsuccessful attempt to seize the
Capitol, where the Senate was sitting. The unrest in Rome continued and meant
that Lucius’s successor, Eugenius III (1145–53), was unable to spend more than
short periods of time in the Holy City, and his position there was always precarious.
He did not help himself by allowing Arnold of Brescia back into the city. Arnold
was a fierce critic of what he viewed as an irredeemably corrupt papacy; he had
been condemned by Innocent II and expelled from France by Louis VII. Eugenius
III thought he could redeem Arnold by having him perform penance in Rome,
but his return in 1146 backfired, and by 1148, Arnold was agitating for a complete
elimination of the papacy’s secular power, the removal of its wealth and its adoption
of apostolic simplicity. Eugenius excommunicated Arnold but still found it impos-
sible to remove him from the position of enormous influence he had established
in Rome. To make matters worse, although Eugenius was an ardent reformer (he
was the first Cistercian pope and a protégé of Bernard of Clairvaux, and he held
important reforming synods in France and Germany), his pontificate was ultimately
marred by the failure of the Second Crusade, which he had launched in 1145.
From the early 1150s and for the next 30 years or so, the papacy’s political out-
look was dominated by its relationship with Frederick Barbarossa. Eugenius III had
made the Treaty of Constance with the German king in 1153, under which each
undertook to protect and guarantee the other’s rights, the pope promised Barba-
rossa the imperial crown, and the latter swore not to make peace with the Roman
citizens or the Normans without papal consent. Adrian IV (1154–9), so far the
only English pope, then renewed the treaty, and in 1155, he both engineered the
arrest and execution of Arnold of Brescia and crowned Barbarossa emperor. Then,
in 1156, he made peace with the new king of Sicily, William I, in the Treaty of
Benevento. Adrian recognised William as king of Sicily with special rights over the
church in his kingdom, and in return, William acknowledged the pope’s lordship
and agreed to pay him an annual tribute. This agreement was forced out of the
pope after he had launched yet another doomed military expedition against the
Normans only to find himself trapped in Benevento and in no position to resist
William I’s demands. The treaty did mark the start of 30 years of peace between
the popes and the rulers of Sicily, but as one long-standing conflict was brought to
an end, another was just beginning.
The superficially cordial relations established between the popes and Barba-
rossa between 1153 and 1155 were anything but deep-rooted, and Barbarossa was
quick to see the Treaty of Benevento as a breach of the Constance agreement. The
growing tension came to a head at Besançon in 1157 when Barbarossa received
a letter from Pope Adrian which referred to the ‘benefits’ he had conferred on
the emperor. There was uproar when the German chancellor translated this as
implying, as it may have been intended to do, that the emperor was the pope’s
vassal. This particular quarrel was patched up after Adrian insisted that this was
not what he had meant, but the wider issues the episode had raised resurfaced at
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Roncaglia in 1158 when Barbarossa’s assertion of imperial claims over northern

Italy was received with horror by the communes of Milan, Piacenza and Brescia.
They all looked to the pope for help while the Roncaglian decrees were inter-
preted on the papal side as an attempt to override the pope’s prerogatives.
This dispute was only just starting when Adrian IV died in 1159. A minority
of pro-imperial cardinals then elected Victor IV whilst the majority chose Alexan-
der III, one of Adrian IV’s closest advisers and someone who had already clashed
with Barbarossa at Besançon in 1157. Barbarossa was quick to try and exploit this
new schism. He summoned a council of bishops to Pavia in 1160 which endorsed
Victor and excommunicated Alexander. Alexander, who had already excommu-
nicated Victor, promptly did the same to Frederick. The emperor’s determination
to stick with his preferred pope meant that this schism eventually lasted 18 years
(when Victor IV died, he was replaced by two more imperial anti-popes in 1164
and 1168), and Alexander was compelled to spend long periods in exile in France.
Only the collapse of Barbarossa’s plans in Italy led finally to the end of the schism.
The emperor was defeated by the Lombard League at Legnano in 1176. This per-
suaded him to negotiate, and in the Treaty of Venice of July 1177, in return for the
withdrawal of his excommunication, Barbarossa acknowledged Alexander as pope.
Alexander set the seal on the end of the schism when he presided over the Third
Lateran Council in 1179. Wide-ranging pronouncements were made at the coun-
cil, but perhaps the most important was the change made to the procedure for the
conduct of papal elections. Henceforth, a two-thirds majority was required in the
college of cardinals before an election could be deemed valid: the intention here
was to reduce as far as possible the chance of more damaging schisms in the future.
Alexander III had emerged from the long schism as the sole, undisputed pope.
The resilience and determination he had shown after 1159 were remarkable, and
his achievements in the end were considerable. More than 300 bishops from as far
afield as Ireland and Outremer attended the Third Lateran Council, a powerful
sign of how highly regarded Alexander was. Even so, the 1177 settlement with
Barbarossa had been a product of the emperor’s momentary political weakness;
the differences between papacy and empire which had caused the schism had not
gone away, and it was probably only a matter of time before they resurfaced. Con-
tinuity and stability on the papal side might have helped consolidate the position
Alexander had established, but between 1181 when he died and 1198, there were
five short-lived popes, none of whom was able to prevent papal–imperial tensions
increasing once again. Lucius III (1181–5), Alexander’s successor, struggled to find
a compromise over Barbarossa’s claim to the Matildine lands in northern Italy, and
papal fears of imperial encirclement were revived once again with the engagement
between the emperor’s son Henry and Constance, the daughter of Roger II of
Sicily and prospective heir of the childless King William II. Both sides were able
to put their differences to one side temporarily as they made their preparations for
the Third Crusade, but the sudden death of William II in 1189 threw everything
into confusion once more. Henry, who became king of Germany following Bar-
barossa’s death on crusade in 1190, was determined to pursue his wife’s claim to
the Sicilian throne (they had married in 1186), but the Sicilians were equally keen
to resist the imposition of a foreign ruler, and they elected their own king, Count
Tancred of Lecce, an illegitimate grandson of Roger II, in 1190. Pope Clement
III, desperate to avoid the unification of the western empire and the kingdom of
Sicily, gave his approval to Tancred’s coronation, but it was his successor, Celestine
III (1191–8), who was left to deal with the consequences of these events. Celestine
crowned Henry emperor when the latter came to Italy in 1191, but the question of
the Sicilian crown remained unsettled. Eventually, however, following the death of
King Tancred in 1194, Henry VI arrived in southern Italy and was crowned king
of Sicily. Celestine continued to prevaricate when Henry looked to him for papal
acknowledgement of his new position, and it was probably with some relief that
the pope received news of Henry’s death in 1197. Having said that, the future of
the Sicilian kingdom and the papacy’s relationship with it were still far from clear
when Celestine himself died in 1198.
Told like this, twelfth-century papal history is turbulent and untidy. However,
the history of individual popes is not the same as the history of the papacy, and
whilst Innocent II, Alexander III and the rest struggled to hold on to their posi-
tions and get the better of their various opponents, the institution over which they
presided grew stronger whilst the profile of the papacy was refined and developed
by its lawyers, officials and apologists. One indicator of the papacy’s increasing
influence during this period was the extent to which it became involved in the
internal affairs of kings and kingdoms around Western Europe. The popes and
their representatives could be assertive, even aggressive about this. When Cardinal
Nicholas of Albano (the future Adrian IV) travelled to Scandinavia as a papal leg-
ate in 1152–3, he was instrumental in establishing Nidaros (modern Trondheim),
the burial place of St Olaf (d.1028), as the metropolitan see for Norway; the new
archbishopric also incorporated Iceland, Greenland, Orkney and the Shetland and
Faroe Islands. This was followed in 1164 when Alexander III built on the ground
Adrian had prepared and conferred the same status on Uppsala in Sweden. In
return, the grateful kings of Norway and Sweden agreed to make an annual pay-
ment to Rome as part of their ongoing efforts to cultivate their own legitimacy.
Other aspiring rulers sought out papal approval, too: Afonso Henriques of Portugal
turned his fledgling kingdom into a papal fief in the 1140s, and even the kings of
Sicily, for all their problems with the papacy, appreciated how important it was to
get papal acknowledgement of their royal status: they were insistent on doing so in
1130, 1139 and 1156. Other kings tried to keep papal interference in their realms
at arm’s length, but this was becoming increasingly difficult. Henry I of England
would probably have liked to follow his father William’s example and reject any
papal attempt to assert authority over his kingdom, but even he saw advantages in
cultivating papal support: in 1124–5, the legate John of Crema was allowed to hold
a council in London (something Henry had strongly resisted earlier in his reign)
after the pope had annulled the marriage between William Clito, Henry’s nephew,
and the daughter of the Count of Anjou, thus neutralising a threat to King Henry’s
control over Normandy. Then in 1135, papal support for Stephen of Blois was
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crucial in enabling him to take the English throne, and in 1170, Alexander III’s
threat to excommunicate Henry II was a significant factor behind the king’s deci-
sion finally to attempt a settlement with Archbishop Thomas Becket. The popes’
relations with the French kings were usually good and constructive, too. Innocent
II anointed the future Louis VII at the Council of Reims in 1131, whilst Louis VII
and Eugenius III were active collaborators in planning the Second Crusade. Even
the German kings sometimes found themselves acknowledging papal supremacy:
Lothar III did so in 1133, and it is no surprise that the mural in the Lateran Palace
of him submissively receiving imperial coronation from an enthroned pope caused
such offence to the members of Frederick Barbarossa’s entourage when they saw
it in 1155. Even for these critics of the papacy, however, there was no escaping the
fact that only a pope could make Barbarossa an emperor.
What all this meant was that the papacy, in stark contrast to the situation only
a hundred years or so before, was no longer irrelevant to the policy-making and
diplomatic manoeuvring of the western monarchies: it had to be taken seriously.
Having said that, it is only fair to point out that where the kings of Western Europe
sought papal approval or acceded to papal demands and ultimatums, they tended
to do so for tactical reasons of their own and during times of relative political
weakness. The papacy was not so powerful that it could get its way whatever the
circumstances, and often it failed to get its way at all: the popes spent as much time
on the defensive as they did on the attack during the twelfth century. The king-
dom of France was a necessary safe refuge because, of course, by no means all papal
interactions with the rulers of Western Europe were carried out on the popes’ own
terms. Until the 1150s, the papacy’s position in central Italy was threatened by the
growing power of Roger II in the south: in the end the popes had little choice but
to accept and confirm the legitimacy of the Sicilian kings and their kingdom. After
that and until the late 1170s, an even greater challenge to papal interests came from
Frederick Barbarossa: his political ambitions in Italy and his support for a series of
anti-popes after 1159 endangered papal autonomy more profoundly than anything
since the time of Gregory VII. Meanwhile, political upheaval in Rome and the
ascendancy of Arnold of Brescia during the 1150s meant that the Holy City was
simply not a safe place to be. As a result the popes were forced to spend consider-
able amounts of time in exile outside Italy. Calixtus II, Innocent II, Eugenius III
and Alexander III were all grateful for the shelter and support the French kings
offered them. Innocent was in France for 17 months from 1130–2 and Alexander
for more than three years between 1162 and 1165. Even then, however, the popes
remained active. Seven papal councils were held in France between the pontificates
of Calixtus II and Alexander III, and all of the popes who fled to France held coun-
cils there during their stays.
Some of these were ‘general councils’ of the church. These were councils
attended by clergy from all parts of Christendom, and their pronouncements
(‘canons’ or ‘decrees’) were considered to be binding on all Christians. The term
‘general council’ (concilium generale in Latin) was first used to describe the council
held by Calixtus II at Reims in 1119. After this it was used to designate Calixtus’s
First Lateran Council (1123), Innocent II’s councils at Reims (1131) and Pisa
(1135) and his Second Lateran Council (1139), Eugenius III’s council at Reims
(1148) and Alexander III’s Third Lateran Council (1179). The holding of a gen-
eral council was a demonstration of the pope’s universal authority and an assertive
reminder that the power of the papacy transcended whatever political problems a
particular pope might be having at the time a general council was held. And it was
through the decrees of these councils that the popes expanded and honed their
jurisdictional rights and continued to develop their ideology of papal supremacy.
During the twelfth century, that ideology expanded to encompass new powers
over the holding of tournaments and the conduct of warfare: the use of catapults
and crossbows against Christians was banned at the Second Lateran Council, as was
arson as a method of waging war. The pope’s role as the protector of all Chris-
tians against heresy was also brought more into focus as challenges to religious
orthodoxy began to surface: the councils of Reims in 1148 and Tours in 1163
condemned the heretics reportedly dwelling in Gascony and Provence, whilst the
Third Lateran Council named them as ‘Cathars’. At the same time, the popes were
attempting to tighten their control over holy wars and crusades. These could be
launched against heretics within Christendom or pagans outside it. In 1147, Euge-
nius III confirmed that those fighting the Slavs in the Baltic would receive the same
remission of sins as those going to Jerusalem, whilst the war against the Muslims
in Spain was deemed equivalent to that against the Muslims in the Holy Land at
the First and Second Lateran Councils. Later, in the 1190s, Celestine III actually
forbade Spanish knights from going to fight in Outremer, and in 1196, he excom-
municated King Alfonso IX of Leon after he had allied with the Muslim Almohads
against his fellow Christian rulers. To be sure, it was not always possible for the
popes to enforce their claims to authority: tournaments still took place, the Second
Crusade soon slipped out of papal control and heretical beliefs continued to exist.
Nevertheless, and for all its travails and setbacks along the way, the position of the
papacy as the guardian of orthodoxy and the defender of Christian unity had been
strongly reinforced by the end of the twelfth century.
Underpinning these developments were increasingly strong and sophisticated
structures of papal government and administration. These were broadly similar
to those found in contemporary secular kingdoms. The household institutions of
chapel, chancery and chamber formed the papal court or curia: the chapel carried
out ceremonial and liturgical functions, the chancery handled official communica-
tions and the chamber managed papal finances. All of these departments expanded
the range and scale of their activities in the twelfth century. As the amount of
documentation issued by the chancery increased, so the number of scribes, notaries
and clerks grew as well. The stream of papal instructions and commands, decrees,
judgements and routine correspondence all had to be drafted, whilst copies of
official decisions were kept in papal registers. The chamber, too, had to develop its
bureaucratic side to supervise the income from the papal estates, the tributes and
payments from various secular rulers and monasteries, customary offerings such as
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Peter’s Pence and the ever-increasing sums paid for the pope’s intervention in legal
disputes.
Individual popes could be very hands-on as far as the routine operations of the
curia were concerned, but even the most active needed help, and the cardinals were
central to the smooth running of papal affairs. By this time, there were three ranks
of cardinal – the bishops, the priests and the deacons. The seven cardinal bishops
were the most senior. They all occupied bishoprics around Rome and had risen
to greater prominence when they started helping the pope carry out his liturgical
duties in the earlier Middle Ages. The 28 cardinal priests were the senior parish
clergy of Rome, while the cardinal deacons were appointed by the pope to the
18 deaconries within the city. The election decree of 1059 had done much to
engender an esprit de corps amongst the cardinals, and they increasingly saw them-
selves as the pope’s natural advisers. Having said that, the recurring papal schisms
of this period showed that the cardinals did not always act as one. In normal cir-
cumstances, however, their responsibilities were primarily administrative, and the
cardinals were involved in all kinds of papal business. They might sit as judges, hear
petitions or act as legates and ambassadors. They became rich from the income of
their own churches but also from the gifts and payments for services they received.
All of this meant that the papacy was steadily becoming a more efficient and
impressive organisation, but the scope for corruption and bribery was also grow-
ing. Critics of the papacy, such as Arnold of Brescia and Frederick Barbarossa,
could point to its loss of spiritual focus and bemoan the mounting worldliness of
the institution.
The growing strength of the twelfth-century papacy was reinforced by law,
that is to say by an increasingly coherent body of principles and regulations which
together made up the substantive rules of the church (canon law), and by an ever
more effective set of enforcement mechanisms and systems. The papacy had long
been universally recognised as Western Christendom’s supreme court of appeal
in spiritual matters. Ecclesiastical disputes, however mundane or trivial, could be
brought to Rome for settlement or dealt with by the pope’s representatives abroad.
The scope of canon law was potentially very wide indeed. The medieval church
was involved in every area of ordinary people’s lives. Strict rules governed the
organisation of the liturgical calendar, for example, and in an age before clocks and
the development of other reliable methods for measuring time, saints’ days and reli-
gious festivals provided the gauge by which people measured out their lives. The
church also claimed to have exclusive jurisdiction over any offences committed
by clerics, not just priests and bishops, but lowly clerks in minor religious orders,
too. Moreover, the lives of ordinary laymen and women were dominated by the
rules of the church. Church courts were steadily claiming authority over all sorts
of personal matters: marriage, the legitimacy of children, rape, bigamy, incest and
other family relationships; wills and testaments, too. They also had jurisdiction over
many financial and commercial matters: usury (the lending of money at interest),
for example, was a sin and therefore subject to ecclesiastical law.
Whilst the papacy was weak and lacking in influence, however, litigants rarely
sought help from Rome. But as ideas on papal authority developed in the elev-
enth century, the reforming popes and their supporters began to appreciate the
importance of canon law in reinforcing their claims to superiority and jurisdiction
over the whole of Christendom. However, the lack of a definitive collection of
canon law was a significant problem. The authorities from which canon law was
derived included the Bible, the writings of the so-called Church Fathers (men like
St Augustine and St Jerome), the canons (decisions) of church councils and the let-
ters (‘decretals’) or statements of popes. The decisions and pronouncements against
abuses such as simony and clerical marriage made at papal synods and reforming
councils had the status of law; Nicholas II’s election decree of 1059 was a new piece
of canon law. Urban II, in particular, was a great law-maker: numerous canons
issued by him found their way into permanent collections in the twelfth century. In
the mid-eleventh century, however, the vast pile of conciliar and synodal decisions,
papal pronouncements and the rest which all counted as law were not systemati-
cally organised or arranged; different canons made at different times might conflict
with one another, and there was no way of deciding which was to be preferred
in a particular set of circumstances. Thus, collections of canon law were produced
by the supporters of papal reform which were designed to support the reform-
ers’ arguments. Perhaps the most important canonist of the eleventh century was
Bishop Ivo of Chartres, whose Decretum comprised 3,760 canons divided into 17
books. But the most influential canon law collection of all was the so-called Decre-
tum of Gratian. Gratian was a canon lawyer in Bologna, the European centre of
legal studies, in the first half of the twelfth century. The Decretum, which was first
published in the early 1140s, is a collection of nearly 3,800 canonical texts touching
on all areas of church discipline and regulation. The work is not just a collection of
texts, however, but also a treatise attempting to resolve the apparent contradictions
and discordances in the rules accumulated from different sources.
As canon law itself was being refined and streamlined, so the systems for enforc-
ing it were being developed too. By the time of the First Lateran Council in 1123,
the papal synod had been transformed from a provincial gathering with purely
local (Roman) concerns into a general council of the entire Church, which dis-
pensed laws to the whole of Latin Christendom. General councils of the church,
as has been seen, were regularly used by the twelfth-century popes to express their
authority, spell out policy and pronounce on matters of principle. Papal legates
acting as the popes’ envoys to different parts of Christendom also began to appear
on an unprecedented scale during this period. They were investigators who were
supposed to find out what was going on at a local level. They were also legislators,
authorised to issue rules for the region to which they were sent; they were diplo-
matic representatives, sent to convey papal plans and policies to kings and bishops;
and they were traveling judges or prosecutors with the power to take action against
those who violated church law. Urban II (in Germany), Paschal II (in Spain),
Calixtus II (in France, Burgundy and England) and Adrian IV (in Scandinavia)
were all legates before they became pope. But, for all this activity, the papal curia in
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Rome was the beating heart of this expanding legal system. Even under Gregory
VII only the most serious cases had reached Rome, but the sudden availability of
a reinvigorated curia under Urban II stimulated enthusiasm for papal justice, and
within a few decades that enthusiasm had spread through the church. One single
dispute, for example, the contest for spiritual supremacy in England between the
archbishops of Canterbury and York, was referred to Rome no less than six times
between 1102 and 1126. And the curia also became a court of first instance as well
as a court of appeal. It did this in two ways: first, by slowly reserving certain types
of case to the decision of the pope alone and, second, by dealing with disputes
involving a party (usually a monastery) to whom the pope had previously granted
exemption from other types of authority. To make matters easier for litigants, too,
in the early twelfth century the practice evolved of appointing ‘judges delegate’
who would hear cases outside Rome with the authority of the pope.
By the end of the twelfth century, therefore, popes were making law, interpret-
ing it and enforcing it, too, either in person or through representatives directly
answerable to Rome. The system was not yet fully formed, and it did not always
work as well in practice as it did in theory. But the development of canon law and
of the structures and mechanisms that enabled it to function in a practical way was
one of the great achievements of the papacy in the years between 1050 and 1200.
By 1200, the pope in Rome was at the heart of a centralised system of ecclesiastical
government and justice. It was a truly international system, too, which cut across
national and local law and which helped to make the presence of the papacy felt at
all levels of society across Christendom. The popularity of papal justice, moreover,
showed that people had faith in the effectiveness of this new regime. Power which
had always existed in theory could now be backed up by clear and well-defined
rules and by meaningful coercive authority.
In the right hands and in the right circumstances, these advances gave the
papacy an unprecedented opportunity to assert its claims to universal supremacy in
both secular and ecclesiastical affairs across Christendom. Alexander III had been
a renowned teacher of canon law in Bologna earlier in his career, and his Third
Lateran Council was the most important expression to date of papal legislative
authority. However, Alexander was preoccupied and constrained by his quarrel
with Frederick Barbarossa, and the two decades after his death were frustrating
ones for the advocates of papal pre-eminence. This all changed after 1198, how-
ever, when Lothar de Segni became Pope Innocent III (1198–1216). Innocent was
only 37 in 1198, and his youth, his noble birth and his connections through his
mother to powerful Roman families might have turned him into yet another inef-
fectual papal puppet. However, his education had prepared him well for his new
position – he learned his theology in Paris and his canon law in Bologna, and for
most of the 1190s, he had been working quietly as a cardinal deacon in the papal
administration for his kinsman Celestine III and getting to grips with the mechan-
ics and routine detail of papal power.
What is more, by 1198, Innocent already had a clear and developed conception
of papal authority, along with the determination and resolve to turn it into reality.
For Innocent, the pope held a unique position between God and humanity – a
mediator between the two. To further emphasise the exceptional nature of papal
power, Innocent frequently referred to himself as ‘vicar of Christ’ (vicarius Christi),
a term which became part of the papacy’s standard lexicon in later generations. In
less able hands, Innocent’s exalted view of what he called the papacy’s ‘fullness of
power’ (plenitudo potestatis) would have led to confrontation and conflict, but he had
the political and diplomatic skills necessary to manage the rulers of Western Europe
with tact and prudence. To be sure, he argued with them, but he usually came out
on top. Innocent controlled the kingdom of Sicily after 1198 and until Frederick II
came of age in 1208. He excommunicated King John of England and King Philip
II of France, but both submitted to him in the end (England even became a papal
fief). Innocent pressurised the Christian rulers of Iberia to put aside their differ-
ences and focus their joint energies on their common Muslim enemies: the victory
at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 was the result. The struggle for the western empire
was more prolonged and tortuous: Innocent was let down by Otto of Brunswick
after he had crowned him in 1209, but after the Battle of Bouvines had destroyed
Otto’s hopes in July 1214, Innocent’s preferred candidate, Frederick II, was finally
installed on the imperial throne.
Innocent was helped by circumstances, it is true. Henry VI’s death in 1197 and
the ensuing power struggle in Germany between Philip of Swabia and Otto of
Brunswick lifted the intense pressure Henry had been exerting on southern Italy. It
also left the kingdom of Sicily in political limbo as Henry’s heir was his three-year-
old son, Frederick, whose guardianship Innocent successfully claimed. It is also
true that not all of Innocent’s plans were a success. The Fourth Crusade, which he
called to liberate Jerusalem as soon as he became pope, ended in 1203–4 with the
catastrophic attacks on Constantinople which Innocent had been powerless to pre-
vent. His sponsorship of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southern
France also failed to exterminate heresy in that traumatised region. Innocent was
far-sighted enough in 1210 to recognise and give papal approval to the Franciscans,
however. He had already done the same for other poverty-based religious move-
ments, the Humiliati in 1201 and the Waldensians in 1204, when he might have
categorised them as heretics. And amidst all these wider concerns, Innocent never
lost sight of the need to secure the frontiers of the papal lands in Italy: by 1216, after
recovering lands deemed to have been lost and improving their financial admin-
istration, he controlled a band of territory stretching across central Italy from the
Mediterranean to the Adriatic. The chance of northern and southern Italy being
reunited under a single ambitious ruler was thus significantly reduced.
Innocent III dominated the ecclesiastical and political affairs of Western Europe
more than any of his predecessors had done. His ideas ultimately found their clear-
est expression, and arguably the medieval papacy reached the peak of its power and
influence, with the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. This was the best-attended
general council of the Middle Ages: around 1,200 clergy, including 361 bishops,
made their way to Rome from all parts of Europe. It was also the most ambitious.
The letters of summons had declared the pope’s intention to call a new crusade for
Faith 309
the recovery of the Holy Land and to reform the universal church. Its 70 canons
proved suitably wide-ranging when they were published at the end of the council.
They dealt with international politics – Magna Carta was annulled, Count Ray-
mond of Toulouse was deposed and Frederick II was accepted as king of Germany –
but they dealt predominantly with spiritual matters. The opening canons restated
some of the basic principles of Christian belief, such as transubstantiation, a neces-
sary step in a world where heretics were questioning the very nature of what was
orthodox and divine. Thus, God is ‘the one principle of all things, creator of all
things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal’. To improve the pastoral minis-
try, clerical discipline had to be established and maintained, so the need for clergy
and laity to be separate and distinct, a concern of church reformers since at least the
1050s, was emphasised with renewed clarity. The procedure for electing bishops
was revamped and taken further out of the reach of unscrupulous lay rulers; the
responsibilities of archbishops for the conduct of their bishops and the duties of
bishops towards their parish priests were emphasised strongly. The council’s stipu-
lations that clergy should not marry, wear showy clothing or get drunk were not
new, but the idea that they should not be involved in the passing of sentences which
involved the shedding of blood was a challenge to the way legal systems across
Europe, which relied on significant clerical involvement, were organised. The judi-
cial ordeal, a procedure initiated by priests which invoked divine intervention in
the legal process, was thus rendered obsolete almost at a stroke. Another challenge
was presented to secular authority by the requirement that the clergy should not be
taxed by a lay ruler without papal consent. As for ordinary Christians, they should
confess their sins at least once a year and take communion every Easter, and in
order to protect the credulous from the menace of Judaism, Jews were required to
wear a distinguishing badge on their clothing. The canons of the Fourth Lateran
Council were put together after only three weeks of deliberation and discussion
at the end of 1215. Taken together, however, they laid down a programme which
would inform the conduct of Christian life and underpin the organisation of the
Christian Church until the Reformation of the sixteenth century.
Preachers and Friars: The Reinvention of Orthodoxy

Individual Christians have always had a responsibility to live as good a life as pos-
sible, but it was generally acknowledged during the Middle Ages that some peo-
ple were more holy than others. The most holy of all were the monks, nuns and
hermits who had deliberately withdrawn themselves from worldly life and devoted
themselves to prayer and contemplation. They embodied the highest ideals of
medieval society (austerity, celibacy, self-sacrifice), and their prayers were more
powerful and efficacious than those of ordinary, fallible men and women. So it was
their job to nurture their close relationship with God and keep praying in order to
hold at bay the demonic forces that, if left unchecked, would condemn humanity
to eternal damnation. There was nothing new about this – monasteries, nunneries
and hermitages were long-established features of the religious landscape by the turn
of the first millennium. However, between the last quarter of the eleventh century
and the middle of the thirteenth, a wide variety of new ways to live a religious life
developed and spread across Western Europe and beyond. The start of the process
has already been discussed, but as it continued and the range of possible religious
lives expanded, more radical alternatives emerged which tested established institu-
tions and questioned traditional hierarchies. The future of western Christianity
would depend to a large extent on whether those institutions and hierarchies wel-
comed or rejected the challenges they faced.
As the twelfth century went on, the Templars and the Hospitallers presented
perhaps the most obvious challenge to contemporary assumptions of what it meant
to live a religious life. And as the Military Orders’ prominence grew, so did seri-
ous misgivings about their ethos and conduct. Their worldliness and the violence
which formed such a crucial aspect of their members’ vocation were viewed with
unease and distaste by many who continued to crave separation from secular affairs
and a return to the simplicity and purity of the apostolic life. This is of course what
the Cistercians and the other new religious orders of the twelfth century (the Car-
thusians, the Premonstratensians and the Augustinian Canons, for example) were
supposed to offer. Even here, though, and particularly in the case of the Cistercians,
the new orders were to some extent victims of their own success. To be sure, this
success was striking: there were already about 350 Cistercian monasteries by the
mid-twelfth century, and a hundred years later there were more than 600. More
than that, religious houses had spread into parts of Europe which traditionally had
little experience of Benedictine monasticism: Scotland, most of Scandinavia, Ger-
many east of the Elbe, Hungary, Poland and Bohemia, as well as parts of Iberia until
recently under Muslim control. The new monasticism had also given the chance
of entering a monastery to men from the lower ranks of society: the Cistercian lay
brothers (conversi) constituted a workforce which was used to clear and farm the
vast tracts of empty land bequeathed by lay patrons keen to profit spiritually from
their connection with the order. As those bequests multiplied and as the amount
of land under Cistercian control increased enormously, the order was able to sell
its surplus produce and get rich. Their most profitable crop of all was wool from
the thousands of sheep which grazed the acres they had been given, and inevitably,
as the range and scale of their economic activities increased, they began to appear
incompatible with the principles which had led to the founding of the order in
the first place. From as early as the 1160s, the same kinds of criticism that Ber-
nard of Clairvaux had levelled at the monks of Cluny earlier in the century were
being directed at the Cistercians instead: they were avaricious and self-interested
materialists, ruthless exploiters of the peasantry who had lost sight of their original
ideals.
The charges levelled at the Cistercians were probably over-stated. It was quite
conventional for the latest generation of aspiring holy men and women to push
for reform and thereby accuse the established upholders of the status quo (who
were once young radicals themselves) of slackness and indiscipline, perhaps even of
decadence. Even so, it is certainly arguable that by the end of the twelfth century,
Faith 311
the distinctiveness of the Cistercian model had been lost and that Cistercian monks
were little different in practice from other Benedictines. The Carthusians’ limited
numbers (there were about 37 charterhouses by 1200) allowed them to stick to
their founding values more easily, but even in their case, the pressure to adapt to
changing circumstances was considerable: it was hard to live a life of isolation and
seclusion when populations were getting larger and more mobile. The Augustinian
Canons continued to live their communal lives while administering to the needs of
local people, and perhaps as much as any other group, they understood that the tra-
ditional monastic emphasis on separation from the world was increasingly unsuited
to meeting the needs of contemporary society. Engagement with the world was
needed rather than flight from it, and as local economies became more complex
and commercialised and as the numbers of articulate people in towns and cities
continued rapidly to grow during the twelfth century, the idea that service to God
also meant service to man gradually gained ground. And it was in this bustling, busy
urban context that yet more innovative ways of living a truly holy life emerged.
One of these new paths to salvation was offered by Valdes, a merchant from
Lyons who had grown rich on the profits of moneylending. He gave up his worldly
wealth in the 1170s and began a life of preaching to the poor. He attracted follow-
ers and in 1179 appeared before Pope Alexander III at the Third Lateran Council.
The pope applauded Valdes’s adoption of poverty but prohibited any preaching by
him or his supporters unless it had been authorised by a bishop. Preaching with-
out a licence was seen by the established ecclesiastical order as an act of rebellion
(whether or not the preaching contained heterodox ideas was another matter), but
the pope’s instruction to stop was soon being ignored by some Waldensians (as they
are usually known). They relied entirely on the Bible as the sole source of teaching
and belief, and they replaced the mass with preaching services. Unsurprisingly, they
came to be regarded as heretics. A similar group, the Humiliati, emerged in north-
ern Italy at about the same time. In an effort to revive what they thought was the
lifestyle of the primitive apostolic church, these laypeople also adopted poverty and
simplicity in food and dress. They prayed and preached to the urban poor, and their
preaching was also forbidden in 1179. In 1184, the Waldensians and the Humiliati
were declared heretics by Pope Lucius III, but his successor Innocent III was more
sympathetic towards them. They could preach, he decided, as long as they did not
discuss the meaning of scripture in their sermons. Both the Waldensians and the
Humiliati set out to address the unmet religious needs of the pious laity in towns
and cities, where the established institutions of parish and monastery were unable
to keep pace with the rapid urbanisation of this period or address the poverty and
hardship that were an inevitable product of economic growth. But it was their
anticlerical outlook that most concerned the ecclesiastical authorities: if ordinary
laymen could start preaching on any subject they liked, where did that leave priests
and bishops? If only the Bible had authority, what did that mean for the works of
the Church Fathers or the decisions of popes? These movements probably did not
attract many followers, but implicit within their philosophies was a serious threat
to the established religious order.
Equally threatening on the face of it were the actions of another charismatic

layman, Giovanni di Bernardone, known to his friends and followers as Francis.
Born in 1181, Francis was the son of a cloth merchant from Assisi in central Italy,
and after a lively and occasionally unruly youth and adolescence, he underwent a
profound spiritual conversion in his twenties and devoted the rest of his life to the
care of the poor and sick, particularly lepers. He adopted a life of complete poverty,
rejected all material possessions and wore only the roughest of simple clothes; he
lived on charity (the friars were later known as mendicants from the Latin mendi-
care, meaning ‘to beg’), and his unconventional life was an embarrassment both to
his family and his former friends. Nevertheless, Francis attracted supporters, and
by 1209–10, there were a dozen of them living together in Assisi and preaching in
and around the town. The only model for their way of living and working was the
life of Christ and his disciples as described in the Gospels, and to imitate that, the
brothers had to adopt absolute poverty. Anyone seeking to join the group had to
sell all his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. They were then expected
to wander through the world with no money and no belongings, sleeping where
they could and begging for their food. Of course, traditional monks took vows of
poverty as well, but individual monasteries could acquire wealth and use it. For
Francis, the destitution had to be institutional as well as personal: his followers
would own nothing, nor would his organisation. Francis also made no distinctions
of class or status when he accepted new followers into his fraternity. Early recruits
tended to be from relatively comfortable families: poor people had little to give up,
and the idea of doing so was probably not as exciting for them! But in theory, and
whatever their background in the outside world, all were equal in this new way of
religious living. The point was to identify the brothers with the poorest and most
deprived members of the community. To many in this strictly hierarchical society,
this was a disturbing challenge to long-accepted social norms.
Together, Francis and his followers travelled to Rome in 1209 where Innocent
III welcomed them and praised their lifestyle, but he stopped short of recognising
the group as a new religious order. That did not happen until 1223 when Pope
Honorius III gave papal approval to a new rule for the Order of Friars Minor (‘little
brothers’). Meanwhile, in 1217, the decision had been taken to turn the brothers’
preaching mission into a universal one, meaning that brothers were henceforth sent
to all parts of Europe. In 1219, Francis himself travelled as far as Egypt where he
joined the army of the Fifth Crusade outside Damietta and had an audience with
the Egyptian sultan al-Kamil. Shortly before or after he went to Egypt, Francis
resigned the leadership of the order to one of his earliest disciples, Peter Catanii,
and when Peter died in 1221, another close follower, Brother Elias, succeeded him.
By then, there were already more than 1,000 Franciscans, a significant number
of whom were women. The first of these, in 1212, was Clare, a young noble-
woman from Assisi who would become the founder of the order later known as the
Clares. They adopted a poor and simple lifestyle, and Clare herself was determined
to follow Francis’s example of absolute personal poverty. But the idea of female
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mendicancy was too much even for Francis, and the Clares eventually became an
enclosed order of the traditional kind.
The ideas of Valdes, the Humiliati and Francis had much in common. All pro-
vided responses to the dissatisfaction felt by some about the traditional Church’s
ministry and gave expression to the desire amongst an increasingly urbanised
laity to play a more active role in religious life; all had an evangelical piety which
compelled them to adopt poverty and preach; they all aspired to live the simple,
unadorned life led by Christ and his apostles, and, like Christ, they prioritised
the weakest and most needy members of society in their ministry. Their mes-
sages about penance and repentance were simple and literal, uncomplicated by the
obscure technicalities of scholarship and learned theology. For Francis in particular,
the humanity of Christ was what mattered, and identifying with his suffering was
an essential part of his mission – in 1224 Francis himself miraculously acquired the
stigmata (the four wounds inflicted on Christ’s hands and feet whilst he hung on
the cross) after an angel appeared to him. And whilst this was an extreme event of
the kind most believers would never personally have, Francis was interested in pro-
viding people with the kind of direct religious experiences previously monopolised
by a cloistered religious elite.
Where they differed, however, was in their approach to the established hierar-
chies of the Christian Church. Valdes himself always remained perfectly orthodox,
but the more extreme Waldensians and the Humiliati rejected the need for priests
and continued preaching even when forbidden to do so by the pope. They also
rejected the authority of any text but the Bible. Francis by contrast deferred to
the pope, and he never showed anything but respect for the established structures
of ecclesiastical power. Even so, and not for the first time, the success of a new
kind of religious existence brought problems in its wake, and the tension between
the life Francis wanted his followers to lead and the role of the Friars Minor as a
distinct, developed religious order within the Church was bound to raise issues of
both principle and practice. When Francis died in 1226, there were thousands of
Franciscans across Europe, the order had been divided into 13 provinces and it had
outposts in France, England, Germany, Iberia, the Holy Land and North Africa.
This was almost certainly not what Francis had intended: his original ideal of the
evangelical life required the rejection not just of material wealth but also of any
kind of power, and this quest for humility was compromised by the increasing size
and institutional formality of the order. As he became increasingly ill and frail in
the final years of his life, and having handed over the running of the order to oth-
ers, Francis spent more and more time in isolated contemplation dwelling on the
discomfort he felt at the way his movement was developing.
Francis faced an unavoidable paradox: the Franciscans had been allowed to
develop because they had papal backing – without that they would probably have
been classed as heretics and suppressed. However, the price of the order’s survival
and growth was submission to papal direction, and over the thirteenth century,
the papacy continued to tinker with Francis’s founding ideals on issues such as
the holding of property. The papacy threw its weight behind the Franciscans and
accommodated their originally radical views because the order appeared to offer
laypeople the spiritual outlet they craved without them having to reject the entire
institutional framework of traditional western Christianity. The Franciscans gave
ordinary people a way of participating directly in their own religious lives with-
out having to join a heretical organisation, and it is no coincidence that papal
approval for the order was given at just the time when Innocent III was about to
launch his crusade against the Cathars in southern France. But whilst the order was
taken under the wing of the papacy, the popes were determined to remodel it and
trim away its more extreme ideas. Eventually, a split developed which saw those
Franciscans who followed the papal line and were content to refashion the order
into something resembling a conventional monastic organisation (the Conventu-
als) lined up against others (the Spirituals) who advocated a return to the apostolic
simplicity of Francis himself. To some degree, these divisions came as a result of
other developments within the order: it became less oriented towards the laity as
more priests joined it, and it soon began to give special emphasis to the impor-
tance of learning, establishing strong links with the intellectual centres at Paris and
Bologna where many Franciscans later came to train and teach. Francis’s vision
had not had many priests or scholars in it, but these were the men who inherited
control of his order, and they had less time for the romantic idea of the wandering
mendicant. The culmination of these trends came less than a hundred years after
Francis’s death, in 1322, when Pope John XXII (1316–34) declared that the idea
of apostolic poverty was itself heretical, and the Spirituals were condemned. Like
the Cistercians and the Military Orders before them, the Franciscans had found it
impossible to reconcile a desire for spiritual purity with the worldly realities of life.
Francis may have been a radical as far as religious practice was concerned, but
he was a conservative when it came to notions of authority. The same, perhaps
even more so, went for a contemporary of his, Dominic de Guzman. Dominic was
born in about 1172 in Caleruega, about halfway between Valladolid and Zaragoza
in northern Spain. His family was affluent and noble, and as a boy Dominic was
set on a path towards a career in the church. By the late 1190s he had joined the
community of Augustinian canons at Osma cathedral, just south of Bilbao, where
he had become sub-prior by 1201. Two years later, his bishop, Diego, took Domi-
nic with him on a mission to northern Germany to negotiate a marriage for the
king of Castile’s son. In the course of this journey, Dominic and Diego saw the
disastrous results of invasions by Cumans, the pagan tribes used as mercenaries by
the local princes, and decided to set about converting them. They went to Rome
to ask for Innocent III’s support, but on their return they passed through Toulouse
and were appalled by the extent to which the heresy of Catharism had spread there.
The Cistercians had been given the task of preaching against the Cathars, but in
1206, Dominic and Diego saw for themselves how ineffective the white monks had
been: with their rich clothing and extravagant entourages, the monks contrasted
sharply with the austere simplicity of the Cathar perfecti. Diego and Dominic both
realised that new methods were needed to cope with this dangerous sect, and they
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decided to stay in Languedoc and live in poverty themselves in an attempt to bring

the Cathars back into the Christian fold through preaching. Public debates on
scriptural and doctrinal questions were organized and won by the travelling preach-
ers; Dominic also founded the nunnery of Prouille which was intended to take in
women rescued from Catharism.
Diego died in 1207, and Dominic himself took no part in the violence of
the Albigensian Crusade. In his view, the long-term solution to the problem of
Catharism was a better-trained clergy supported by itinerant preachers. In 1214,
he settled in Toulouse and founded a small community of preachers dedicated to
working with the local bishop to save souls and to improving the standards of the
local clergy. This group was approved by Innocent III after the Fourth Lateran
Council, but since the council had prohibited the foundation of any new religious
orders and stipulated that new organisations had to adopt an existing rule which
had already been approved, Dominic and his followers were instructed to use the
Rule of St Augustine. Dominic was already familiar with this of course, but he
did not feel constrained by it, and over the next five years, the organisation he led
expanded in size and developed its structures in distinctive and novel ways. In a
series of papal bulls issued in 1216–17, the Order of Preachers was approved by
Pope Honorius III. It was to be an order dedicated to poverty and study, and it was
universally authorised to preach, a power formerly reserved to bishops and those
whom they licensed. By 1219, there were Dominican houses in Paris, Bologna
and Orleans, all university cities where recruits to the order could first study and
then go on to preach. By 1221, there was a priory in Oxford, too; there were 25
Dominican priories in all (including several for women) spread across major centres
of population in five provinces (Lombardy, Provence, Tuscany, Spain and France),
and the order was starting to expand further into northern and eastern Europe.
Francis’s first biographer, Thomas of Celano, records that Francis and Domi-
nic met once, in Rome. If this meeting actually happened it probably took place
round about 1220, by which time both of their orders were beginning rapidly to
develop. They must have discussed areas of common interest, but it is remarkable
that these two extraordinary men developed their ideas about poverty and preach-
ing simultaneously but seemingly independently of each other. There is nothing
to suggest that Dominic was influenced in the early years of his mission by Francis,
or vice versa. Ideas like theirs were in the air by the early thirteenth century, as the
Waldensians and Humiliati had shown – all they needed to become mainstream
was charismatic and committed leadership. Unlike Francis, however, Dominic
approached his mission from the start as a clerical movement, not a lay one – he
was a regular canon after all and never abandoned his institutional background.
Dominic also had the talent and appetite for organisation which Francis signally
lacked, and he provided his order with the basis of a strong, centralised system of
internal governance based on the General Chapter. From 1220, it met in alternate
years at Bologna and Paris, and representatives from all the priories were required
to attend. These representatives were elected by the brethren of individual priories,
as were the priors; the heads of each province – the provincial priors – were in turn
elected by the heads of individual houses within the province, and the head of the
order, the Master, was elected by an enlarged session of the General Chapter. Such
arrangements gave the Preachers’ constitution a representative, democratic dimen-
sion which was radical for the time. There was a coordinated academic system, too.
Priory schools gave recruits basic training in Bible study, theology and the works of
Aristotle; those singled out as potential teachers were sent on to provincial schools;
and the ablest scholars went on to become university Masters. The whole system
was tailor-made to create a brotherhood of highly trained, expert preachers who,
with their own adoption of poverty, could take the divine message to the urban
poor and sick.
By the time Dominic died in 1221, exhausted by his efforts and weakened by
his austere lifestyle, he had begun to provide for Western Europe as a whole, not
just for southern France, a body of young enthusiasts equipped with the skills
needed for a specialised preaching mission. Their approach would be controlled,
informed and strictly orthodox, the result of tough scholarly training and probably
very different to the spontaneous, inspired preaching of the early Franciscans. To
be sure, there were problems – vested interests in towns, monasteries and cathedrals
did not always welcome the friars, and there could be resentment at their perceived
intrusiveness and at the privileges and autonomy they appeared to enjoy. It was dif-
ficult, too, as it had been for the Franciscans, for the Dominicans to maintain the
absolute poverty their founder had insisted upon. Nevertheless, the new versions
of religious life created by the Franciscans and the Dominicans deeply affected
the way thirteenth-century Latin Christians thought about spirituality. The ideas
they embodied – committed Christians did not have to separate themselves from
the world in order to be truly holy; humility and poverty were the optimal states
for those who aspired to enter Heaven – were powerful and dynamic. By contain-
ing them within the established framework of Christian thought and practice, the
ecclesiastical authorities ensured that they did not also become dangerous.
Religion, Renewal and the Laity

The vast majority of people in tenth- and eleventh-century Western Europe would
have identified themselves as Christians. Only in those areas previously under Mus-
lim rule (most notably Sicily and much of Iberia) would this not have been the
case. However, as the discussions in Chapters 3 and 6 showed, the particular nature
of these Christians’ religious experiences, in so far as they can be known at all given
the nature of the available source material, must have varied considerably. Bishops
and monasteries can only have exercised very limited control over everyday wor-
ship, and the pastoral provision provided to the overwhelmingly peasant population
was surely patchy and intermittent at best. In the twelfth century, however, things
started to change. The papacy, invigorated by its reforming principles, definitively
strengthened its universal authority, canon law was codified and the parish system
finally extended across most of Latin Christendom. As a result, and as the canons
of the Fourth Lateran Council confirmed, the structures and institutions needed to
Faith 317
standardise doctrine and enforce observance were in place by 1215. That is not to
say that there was uniformity of either belief or practice by then, however. Residual
pagan ideas about such things as charms and offerings were stubbornly persistent,
while at the same time rising levels of lay literacy, accelerating urbanisation and
the fallout from the Crusades gave rise to practical challenges and forms of dissent
which the ecclesiastical authorities struggled to manage. Meanwhile new ideas
about, for example, purgatory and the humanity of Christ needed to be accommo-
dated within an orthodox framework. By the start of the thirteenth century, there-
fore, and despite the generally successful efforts of the institutional Church to assert
control over devotional practices and forms of religious expression, the dynamic
forces more broadly at play within society allowed these things to remain vigor-
ously diverse. The new religious orders and heretical movements that emerged
during this period were different manifestations of this spiritual energy and are
described elsewhere. But if most Christians were not involved in these headline
developments, there is no reason to think that they were untouched by the vibrant
sense of spiritual renewal that characterised twelfth-century Western Europe.
Generalisations about the ways in which people practised their religion in West-
ern Europe during this period must be made cautiously. Ninety per cent of the
population were illiterate, uneducated peasants. Consequently, they have left little
behind with which to assess how they thought and felt about their spiritual lives.
Such things evidently did matter, however. The Crusades, with their penitential
focus on the remission of sins, can be seen as large-scale expressions of contem-
porary lay piety; the military orders were founded by laymen. Also, many of those
from lower social backgrounds who joined Cistercian monasteries as lay brother
(conversi) must have done so in search of greater spiritual satisfaction and reward.
It seems likely that most laypeople approached religion with a set of fairly simple
assumptions: God had created the world in seven days, his son Jesus had sacrificed
himself to save humanity and an afterlife awaited them, with their eternal destina-
tion dependent on how well they had avoided sin and followed divine orders dur-
ing their earthly lives. Depictions of the Last Judgement, painted on church walls
or sculpted into great friezes above the doors of cathedrals, must have brought
this home dramatically and often. Good and evil were present in the world as
was hard evidence of God’s love (abundant harvests and healthy families) and his
wrath (famines, floods and disease). Unlike their earlier medieval predecessors,
however, who also understood the same things, by the end of the twelfth century,
most western Christians lived reasonably close to a parish church and could look
to the priest who lived there to remind them of their Christian duties and the
consequences of a sinful life. The parish system had been spreading across Western
Europe since the tenth century, and the priests who staffed it had steadily acquired
a near monopoly over the sacraments. Baptism and the blessing of the dying were
of particular importance and were represented by the font and the graveyard that
every parish church was supposed to have. It was by way of the sacraments that
Christians navigated the path from earth to heaven, but increasingly they needed
priestly help to find their way. Most priests were still poorly educated and trained,
though, and the reform papacy’s prohibition of clerical marriage and encourage-
ment of higher clerical standards had probably been only partially successful at best.
Moreover, the relationship between a priest and his congregation cannot always
have been a harmonious one. The main source of the priest’s income was tithe, a
tax of a tenth levied on agricultural produce. Resistance to such payments by the
small-scale agricultural producers who made up a typical parish was predictably
common. Nevertheless, as the number of parish churches increased, it seems likely
that twelfth-century Western Europeans went to church more often than their
forebears and that, even if it was often the idea of clerical purity that spread more
than the reality, they came increasingly to see the clergymen who baptised their
children and buried their dead as different from them, authoritative and special.
Not everyone had access to a parish priest, however. In towns the establish-
ment of parishes could lag behind the growth in population, leaving parts of the
new urban population without pastoral care. In such circumstances, alternative,
unorthodox ideas could spread more easily. Even so, many of the traditional beliefs
and practices described in Chapter 6 were also maintained and developed during
this period. Pilgrimage continued to be a popular form of penance and a clear
expression of lay piety, but the Crusades opened up new possibilities as it became
easier and safer to travel to the Holy Land by sea and bypass hostile Muslim terri-
tory. Meanwhile, new and popular pilgrimage destinations were established within
mainland Europe during the twelfth century, most notably the shrines of the apostle
James at Compostela in northern Iberia, the Three Kings at Cologne and Thomas
Becket at Canterbury. Relics also continued to be venerated and relied on as a
means of communication with the saints who had left them behind on earth. Their
continuing importance was shown when shiploads of such items were brought
back from Constantinople in Venetian ships in the aftermath of the Fourth Cru-
sade. Saints themselves were of course trusted to intercede with Christ on behalf
of a repentant sinner, although the ecclesiastical authorities gradually took control
of the process of canonisation during this period in order to regulate the spread of
local cults. Papal guidelines were issued in the second half of the twelfth century,
setting out criteria for sanctity. In particular, a full account of the candidate’s life
and miracles came increasingly to be expected, and in 1229, the papacy asserted
its exclusive right to judge claims to canonisation. At the same time, however, the
cult of the Virgin Mary, which had begun to take shape in the eleventh century,
had developed fully by the end of the twelfth. She was the Mother of God who
brought salvation to the world by giving birth to Jesus; Mary was the antithesis
of Eve who had introduced sin, and her role as intercessor par excellence, who
could help supplicants in even the most desperate cases, set her apart. Her four
feast days (the Purification [called Candlemas in England], the Annunciation, the
Assumption and the Nativity of the Virgin) had been celebrated for centuries, but
there was an increase in devotion to the Virgin during this period. Lady chapels,
statues, manuscript illustrations, stained glass and anthologies of miracles celebrated
her; St Mary’s was one of the most common dedications for a parish church, and
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all Cistercian monasteries were dedicated to the Virgin. The establishment in the
second half of the twelfth century of the Priory of Our Lady of Walsingham in
Norfolk, a church that contained a replica of the house lived in by the Holy Family
in Nazareth, was emblematic of this wider trend.
Marian devotion was not a stand-alone phenomenon, however, and a particular
interest in the Virgin’s motherhood went hand in hand during this period with an
increasing enthusiasm for another idea: the humanity of Christ. Previous genera-
tions had tended to portray Jesus as a majestic figure, enthroned and mighty, or
as a serene, passive victim, seemingly unaffected by the torture of his crucifixion.
Jesus was wholly God after all. But he was also wholly Man. Mary had given
him his human form and nature, and by the twelfth century, there was a much
greater emphasis on her role as mother to a son who had laboured on behalf of
others and suffered in agony on the cross, and on the grief of those like her who
had witnessed his pain. Christ’s humanity was emphasised by writers like Arch-
bishop Anselm of Canterbury in order to allow ordinary Christians to share his
distress and feel his friends’ anguish: these were emotions and experiences they
could understand. The human life and death of Christ also provided models for
others to emulate: he was selfless, and his sacrifice was an act of love. Perhaps no
one embraced the imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) with greater commit-
ment than Francis of Assisi. He adopted poverty and ministered to the poor and
sick; when he acquired the stigmata, the same wounds that were inflicted on the
crucified Christ, by seemingly supernatural means, he and his followers were able
to share in the pain of that experience too. Even taking holy communion had
become officially associated with the earthly reality of Christ’s existence by the end
of this period. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council declared unambiguously that
the bread and wine given during mass, once consecrated by a priest, became liter-
ally the flesh and blood of Jesus. Communicants consumed ‘the body of Christ’
and took it into their own, and, as a result of another pronouncement in 1215,
faithful Christians were required to do this (as well as confess their sins to a priest)
at least once a year.
This doctrine of transubstantiation had been debated long before it became offi-
cial Christian dogma in 1215. In the late eleventh century, for example, eminent
scholars such as Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury and Berengar of Tours had
argued over the nature of the changes undergone by the bread and wine during
the mass as the Last Supper was ritually commemorated. As the twelfth century
went on, however, discussions like this on matters of theological and doctrinal
orthodoxy were given a new intensity and focus in the emerging universities of
Western Europe, and particularly in the schools of Paris as they moved towards
some kind of institutional coherence. In his Sentences, the great scholar Peter Lom-
bard (d.1160), who taught at the cathedral school of Notre Dame in the 1140s and
1150s, attempted to present a comprehensive collection of definitive statements
about all aspects of the Christian faith. It would become the most important uni-
versity textbook of the Middle Ages. Peter the Chanter (d.1199) taught in Paris
from 1173 at the latest and became chancellor of Notre Dame in 1183. He was
at the centre of a circle of theologians and preachers concerned with relating the-
ology to the lived world and to issues such as the role in society of lawyers and
moneylenders.
Peter’s programme influenced the decisions made at the Fourth Lateran Coun-
cil, not least the one that prohibited clerical involvement in trials by ordeal. Over-
whelmingly, however, the intellectuals who populated the schools concerned
themselves with more esoteric areas. One of these was the issue of what hap-
pened to the soul after death, and in the second half of the twelfth century, new
and important ideas about purgatory were developed. The idea of some kind of
intermediate zone or region where the souls of the dead awaited their ultimate
fate at the Last Judgement was not new, but it has been argued that it was dur-
ing this period that purgatory came to be seen as a physical place where the souls
of those who had committed relatively minor sins and who were destined for
Heaven were first purified by the ordeals they underwent. The amount of time
these souls spent in purgatory depended on their own virtues and on the efforts of
those they had left behind on earth, whose prayers and good works could reduce
the length of time in purgatory that their departed loved ones would have to
endure. In 1247 at the Council of Lyons, the official position of the Church on
purgatory would be defined for the first time. However, well before this, ordinary
Christians knew that the place existed. Various descriptions of the afterlife were
given in the twelfth century by laymen who had recovered after falling into deep
comas and being considered dead. They vary in their details, but purgatory fea-
tures prominently in most of them, and the cleansing torments inflicted on them
are typically described with great relish. One describes souls passing first though
fire, then through a pool and finally over a bridge covered with nails and spikes.
Another depicts different levels of purgation, the first a muddy swamp, the second
a gloomy valley and the third a field covered with foul smoke. The challenges of
the journey are increased or reduced according to how virtuous the individual had
been in life, but the assistance of the living was also essential if time in purgatory
was to be kept to a minimum. Prayers had to be said, masses celebrated and debts
paid. In a new way, therefore, laypeople could play an active role in determining
how much time they and their loved ones spent in torment; at the same time, the
role of the clergy as intermediaries between heaven and earth (they arranged the
services and received the offerings) was inevitably strengthened. Purgatory was also
a great leveller: the souls of kings spent time there as did the souls of peasants, and
all carried scars which could only be healed through the medicine of purgatorial
pain. The individuals who described these experiences were not the ones who
wrote them down, of course, and it is impossible to know whether the versions of
their stories that survive were embellished or concocted by the educated clergymen
who recorded them. Nevertheless, even with these reservations in mind, there is no
reason to doubt that these accounts show western Christians of the twelfth century
grappling hard with ideas about the afterlife that awaited them and the fate of their
souls after death.
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Muslim Revival and the Crisis of Crusading

The First Crusade was a remarkable success. Against formidable odds and in
extraordinary circumstances, and after nearly three years of arduous travelling and
sometimes bitter fighting, western knights captured Jerusalem in July 1099 and
then proceeded to build four new Christian states in the Holy Land – the Kingdom
of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch and the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli.
By the late 1130s these states were established and viable, but it is important to
remember that their early survival was made easier by the continuing political
fragmentation and internal disunity of the surrounding Islamic world. From the
late 1120s onwards, this situation began to change, and the Muslim reaction to the
presence of the westerners in Syria and Palestine gradually became more coordi-
nated and coherent. The crusader states faced other problems too, some structural
and some self-inflicted, but an increasingly assertive Muslim approach led in the
1140s to the destruction of one crusader state, Edessa, and contributed significantly
in the 1180s to the Muslim reoccupation of Jerusalem and the near obliteration of
the entire kingdom. These events in their turn triggered new crusades to the Holy
Land from Western Europe, but none of these came close to repeating the success
of the first. The Second Crusade was a humiliating failure; the Third Crusade just
managed to keep the Kingdom of Jerusalem alive but left the Holy City itself in
Muslim hands; the armies of the Fourth Crusade never reached Outremer at all and
ended up venting their ferocious energies on the Christian city of Constantinople;
and the Fifth Crusade, aimed at the conquest of Egypt, more or less just faded
away with nothing to show for its efforts. Such failures and disappointments not-
withstanding, however, the crusading movement that developed during the twelfth
century had an enormous impact on the political, religious and intellectual cultures
of Western Europe. It also had a profound effect on the western economy as new
ways to transport thousands of people, their equipment and supplies over long
distances were found, and sophisticated, novel ways of financing these ventures
were developed.
The crusader states faced a range of serious problems from the outset, as the
discussion in Chapter 6 showed. Succession disputes continued periodically to
threaten political stability. A shortage of adult male heirs was not a problem exclu-
sive to Outremer, but it was perhaps more acute there given that dynastic founda-
tions were so freshly laid and the aristocratic pool was so small. It was common
when a ruler left only a daughter to succeed him for a nobleman, either from
Western Europe or another crusade state, to be imported into a principality in
order to marry them and thereby, it was assumed, strengthen their position. Count
Fulk had come from Anjou to Jerusalem in the late 1120s and married Baldwin
II’s eldest daughter, Melisende, for example, while William of Montferrat arrived
in the kingdom in the 1170s to marry Sibylla, the sister and heir of King Baldwin
IV. Such marriages might cause as many problems as they solved, however, and
the women in question were not always prepared to accept a passive role as con-
sort. Indeed, these situations presented opportunities for aristocratic women in
Outremer to play a more prominent and public political role than they might have
been allowed in Western Europe. In Antioch following the death of Bohemond II
in 1130, his widow, Alice, and then his daughter, Constance, attempted to pursue
their own policies, particularly with regard to Byzantium. In the end they were
reined in by the barons of the principality, but although Alice and Constance have
been characterised respectively as wilful and flighty, they may have suffered in the
sources from the same attitude that condemned other twelfth-century women,
such as Empress Matilda in England, for example, who tried to occupy positions
conventionally held by men. Later in the period, during the 1170s and 1180s,
Sibylla of Jerusalem became an increasingly significant figure in Jerusalem as her
brother Baldwin IV’s health declined and her position as heir apparent became
more certain. Her relationship with her second husband, Guy de Lusignan, whom
she chose herself, would show how strong an understanding she had of her own
rights and how fierce her determination was to get her own way. Sibylla probably
learned much from her mother, Agnes of Courtenay, the second wife of King
Amalric I. Her considerable influence on the factional politics that eventually
consumed the kingdom following the death of her husband in 1174 cannot be
underestimated. And both Sibylla and Agnes are likely to have been inspired and
cautioned by the fate of Queen Melisende, a woman who dominated the politics of
the kingdom of Jerusalem for more than 20 years until she fell from power in 1152.
The heavy-handed efforts of her husband Fulk of Anjou to bring in his own sup-
porters and rule on his own account without Melisende had provoked the revolt
of Count Hugh of Jaffa in 1134. After this Fulk was forced to share power with,
if not defer to, his wife. Then, after Fulk died in 1143, Melisende took control of
the kingdom in her own right. Even in the late 1140s and early 1150s, long after
her son Baldwin III had passed the age when he might have expected to wield sole
power, Melisende continued to rule and emphasise her status as Baldwin II’s joint
successor. In the end, a short civil war was required before her authority was lost.
It is possible to see Melisende as a selfish, disruptive influence on the politics of
her day and as a threat to the unity of the crusader kingdom, but she had extensive
resources and an administration of her own as well as powerful backers. At least
one prominent commentator, Archbishop William of Tyre, writing in the 1170s,
depicted her as an active and wise ruler.
Equally if not more challenging to the crusader states than divisive factional
politics, however, was a chronic shortage of manpower. Regular appeals to the west
for reinforcements, the sporadic arrival in Outremer of fresh troops and even the
creation of the Military Orders had not successfully addressed this by the late 1130s.
However, roughly from the time of the Second Crusade onwards, the Orders’
military role developed significantly, and they came to form what was in effect a
standing army for the principalities of Outremer. In the mid-1180s, the king of
Jerusalem’s most important vassals (the holders of the great lordships such as Jaffa,
Sidon and Tyre) collectively owed him the service of about 675 knights. Between
them, the Templars and Hospitallers could muster about 300 knights each, thus
almost doubling the size of the kingdom’s elite force. The loss of more than 120 of
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these fighters at the Battle of Cresson in May 1187 meant that the military capac-
ity of the kingdom was significantly weakened in the weeks prior to the Battle of
Hattin in July, where another 230 members of the Military Orders were lost. But
as well as playing their part in battle and on campaign, and as rulers and nobles in
the crusader states struggled to defend their territories with limited human and
financial resources, the Military Orders were assigned extensive authority across
Outremer through their control of lands and castles. In the late 1130s, for example,
the Templars were put in charge of the area around the castle of Baghras in Antioch
which controlled the main northern route in and out of Syria. Later, the Hospi-
tallers were given large tracts of land in northern Tripoli and southern Antioch,
which they controlled from several castles, the most famous of which was Krak des
Chevaliers. By the 1180s, from the north of Antioch to the border with Egypt,
Templar and Hospitaller castles and forts were visible across the landscape.
Hand in hand with their increasing military importance went a growth in
the economic and political influence of the Military Orders. High-status patrons
helped boost their profile in the early years: Bernard of Clairvaux developed the
theoretical foundations of the Orders, but others with money and power began to
give them lands in Europe, the income from which financed the Orders’ operations
in the East and provided vital manpower and supplies for the defence of Outre-
mer. The Templars were already rich enough by the late 1140s to fund Louis VII’s
contribution to the Second Crusade, and in 1191, they agreed to buy Cyprus from
Richard I. In time, the Orders became in effect international corporations, and
they set up sophisticated systems across Europe to manage their rapidly expanding
property empires which were administered by provincial masters (in the Templars’
case) or priors (in the Hospitallers’). These men in their turn played important
political roles in their regions, as did the Grand Masters of the two orders from
their headquarters in Jerusalem. For example, Gerard de Ridefort, Grand Master of
the Templars, was a central figure in the regime of Baldwin IV. Such worldly pre-
occupations inevitably provoked criticism, and some contemporaries commented
disapprovingly on the Orders’ avarice, pride and self-interest. The ecclesiastical
privileges they enjoyed only added to the jealousy felt by some. For example, in
the 1140s, the pope granted them exemption from the payment of tithes and gave
them the right to appoint their own priests. All of this added to the impression in
some quarters that the Orders were becoming unaccountable. The Orders did not
always help themselves either. In 1173, Templar knights killed some Muslim envoys
who had been travelling home after negotiations with King Amalric. The king had
guaranteed the envoys safe conduct and was furious at the Templars’ interference.
A few years before this, in 1168, the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, G ilbert
d’Assailly, had been instrumental in persuading Amalric to invade Egypt. The cam-
paign was a failure, and Gilbert was blamed both for this and for wasting the
Templars’ funds. He resigned, and eventually the pope had to intervene to remind
members of the order that their primary function was still caring for the poor.
Despite the controversy they stirred up, the Templars and the Hospitallers still
inspired imitation. Already by the 1140s, the Order of Lazarus had been set up for
leper knights. Later, after the Third Crusade, the German hospital at Acre became
the Teutonic Order of St Mary. Meanwhile in Spain, the Order of Calatrava was
founded in 1158, the Order of Santiago in 1170 and the Order of Mountjoy in
1173. All of these orders were designed to keep knights from the Iberian Peninsula
at home and stop them signing up as a Templar or a Hospitaller in the Holy Land.
The Military Orders thus contributed to the crusading movement at both ends
of the Mediterranean, and they would do so in other parts of Western Europe,
too, not least where Christianity met paganism: the Teutonic Knights (as they are
usually known) would play a central role in establishing Christian control over the
pagan lands of north-eastern Europe during the thirteenth century.
Back in the 1130s, however, the manpower deficit in Outremer remained a
pressing concern, and its significance only increased when the Muslim world
finally started to gather and combine its own resources in an effort to break the
Christians’ hold on their territories. The warlord Zengi had become the ruler
(atabeg) of Mosul and Aleppo by the end of the 1120s, and although he had been
unable to realise his ambition to seize Damascus during the 1130s, he was still
ambitious and confident enough at the end of 1144 to besiege and capture the
city of Edessa and take control of most of the surrounding county. Edessa had
been the first crusader state to be established, and it was the first to go back into
Muslim hands. On hearing news of these events, in December 1145, Pope Euge-
nius III issued the bull Quantum praedecessores, which called on the knighthood of
Western Europe (in particular, France: the bull was addressed to King Louis VII
and his subjects) to e mulate their illustrious crusading forebears and march to the
relief of their oppressed fellow Christians in the East. However, the response to
the papal summons was initially underwhelming, and it was only when Bernard of
Clairvaux threw his weight behind the idea of a new crusade that it really began
to gain momentum. Louis VII may have been planning a pilgrimage to Jerusa-
lem anyway, but Bernard persuaded him to turn his expedition into a military
one, and the king along with many of his nobles took the cross in March 1146.
Bernard also used his influence to persuade the German king, Conrad III, to join
the crusade at the end of the year, and so in the summer of 1147, large French
and German armies under the command of their respective kings set out for the
Latin East. The journey was a difficult and damaging one for both contingents.
As they approached Constantinople, the Germans were hit by flash floods and lost
both men and equipment. Having been received politely by the emperor Manuel
Comnenus (who, of course, and unlike in 1095, had not asked for this expedition
to enter his territories) and shipped across the Bosphorus, they were then all but
wiped out by Turkish archers at Dorylaeum in October 1147. Conrad himself was
injured and struggled to escape. Meanwhile, elements within the French army had
argued for an attack on Constantinople when they arrived there just after the Ger-
mans had left, and although Louis managed to keep control at this point, press on
into Asia Minor and even get the better of the Turks in two encounters either side
of Christmas, another Turkish army inflicted a major defeat on his forces at Mount
Cadmus in January 1148. The French sustained substantial losses of men, horses
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and equipment, and the expedition was in danger of collapsing entirely. Louis was
determined to press on, however, and in March he set sail from Adalia on the Med-
iterranean coast with the rump of his army and arrived at Antioch, which was ruled
at the time by Raymond de Poitiers, Queen Eleanor’s uncle. Raymond was hoping
that Eleanor (who had accompanied her husband on the crusade) would help him
persuade Louis to join in with Raymond’s planned campaigns in the north, but
Louis refused and was determined to carry on to Jerusalem. It was later rumoured
that Louis refused to help Raymond because Queen Eleanor had begun an affair
with him during their stay in Antioch. Whatever the truth of this, however, Louis
probably also thought that his reduced and weakened army needed time to recover
from its experiences in Asia Minor and that it deserved a clearer and more notable
target than any Raymond was offering.
That target, the Muslim-controlled city of Damascus, was finally selected at a
great assembly held near Acre in June 1148. In attendance were Louis, Conrad
(who had rejoined the crusade after recovering from his wounds), King Baldwin
III of Jerusalem and his mother, Melisende, as well as many of the most important
nobles of the kingdom. Damascus was selected, it seems, because it was the near-
est Muslim city to the kingdom of Jerusalem’s borders and also because the rulers
of Damascus were becoming worryingly close to the new lord of Aleppo, Zengi’s
son Nur ad-Din (Zengi had been murdered in 1146). The fact that Damascus was
chosen by committee, however, suggests much about the lack of clarity at the heart
of the crusade by this stage. It is hard to know what the expedition was now for:
the recovery of Edessa (if that had ever been the expedition’s goal) was deemed
pointless if not impossible after the city was destroyed in 1146, whilst other loca-
tions (Ascalon, for example, the only port on the eastern Mediterranean in Muslim
hands) would have been valuable strategically but lacked any kind of glamorous
prestige. This want of focus arguably became evident during the attack on Damas-
cus itself at the end of July 1148. Christian sources describe how the attacking
armies fought hard to establish a strong position on one side of the city only to
throw it away and inexplicably move to the other side where they were exposed
and lacked a water supply. After only four days, they abandoned the siege and with-
drew. Muslim sources, by contrast, attribute their forces’ victory to the skills of their
warriors: the Christians were simply outfought by superior troops. Probably just
as important in persuading them to pull back, however, was the news that a relief
army under Nur ad-Din was rapidly approaching the city.
There was more to the Second Crusade than the failure at Damascus, however.
Western knights on their way to join the crusade in Outremer stopped off in Iberia
and helped seize control of Lisbon, Almeria and Tortosa in 1147 and 1148, and as
the armies of Conrad III and Louis VII marched towards Constantinople, Saxon
knights were attempting to extend the frontiers of Christianity in north-eastern
Germany. But events in the Holy Land dominated contemporary opinions about
the crusade, and these were damning for the rulers of Jerusalem and the western
kings who had travelled so far for so little. Conrad went straight back to G ermany,
whilst Louis and Eleanor spent the next few months visiting holy sites – this may
have been Louis’s prevailing concern all along. Allegations and recriminations
about the causes of the fiasco soon began to surface. Needless to say, Bernard
of Clairvaux argued, the crusaders must have behaved sinfully for God to have
abandoned them in this way. But there were more specific claims, too: Muslim
bribes had been taken by the Christian troops, an embittered Raymond of Poitiers
had plotted the downfall of the expedition from his northern stronghold and the
Templars had an agenda of their own which did not involve the fall of Damascus.
None of these charges carries much evidential weight, but it is certainly right to
say that the feeble collapse of the Second Crusade in Outremer damaged the cred-
ibility of the crusading project in Western Europe and that it became even more
difficult over the next 40 years to recruit enthusiastic new troops for the defence
of the Latin East. On the Muslim side, of course, this was an enormous victory for
jihad. Jihad is primarily an internal process – an individual believer’s struggle to fight
against sin and immorality and become a better Muslim. But there is also a more
externalised form of jihad which requires Muslims to defend and extend their faith.
Muslim scholars had talked about the struggle against the Christians being a holy
war and an aspect of jihad since the early 1100s. But first under Zengi and then
particularly under Nur ad-Din, the idea that Islam needed to gather its spiritual
strength to fight back against the Christian interlopers entered the political and
religious mainstream. The religious zeal which had so helped the first crusaders
was now being cultivated in the Muslim world. With able leadership and increas-
ing political unity underpinning this spiritual revival, the challenge to the crusader
states would only grow larger.
Nur ad-Din soon proved to be an even more formidable threat to the crusader
states than his father, Zengi, had been. In 1149, he defeated the army of Antioch
at the battle of Inab; Prince Raymond was killed in the fighting, and Nur ad-Din
sent his head and right arm to the caliph in Baghdad. Later, in 1164, he crushed
another Antiochene army at the battle of Artah. Together these victories left the
principality bogged down in political and military crises for years. Meanwhile,
in 1157, he overwhelmed an army led by Baldwin III of Jerusalem at Banyas and
came close to capturing the king himself. Perhaps Nur ad-Din’s most significant
early achievement came in 1154, however, when Damascus submitted to him. This
put the failure of the Second Crusade to take the city in an even harsher light: for
the first time, the two most important cities in Muslim Syria (Nur ad-Din already
controlled Aleppo) were under the control of the same man. He also presented
himself more and more as a spiritual leader the whole Islamic world could respect.
He made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1157–8, and during the 1160s, he made a
point of dressing simply. He is recorded giving judgements in legal disputes; he
built mosques and madrasas as well as hospitals, orphanages and public baths. Poets
and propagandists acclaimed his virtues and continued to stress the vital importance
of carrying the fight to the Christian enemy.
Whilst Nur ad-Din’s rise looks ominous with hindsight, it is worth pointing
out that the rulers of Outremer continued to work and fight hard during the
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1150s and 1160s to keep their territories secure. They were not always successful,
of course, but the ultimate collapse of Christian control was far from inevitable.
Various strategies were developed to compensate for the lack of new arrivals from
Western Europe. The crusaders had begun building castles as soon as they arrived
in the Holy Land, but in the second half of the twelfth century, they became
more important than ever. Individual lords built their own castles, and not all were
erected in vulnerable areas or with primarily defensive roles, but as Muslim profi-
ciency in siege warfare grew, crusader castles began to need thicker walls and larger
grain stores. In the kingdom of Jerusalem, existing sites like Belvoir and Montreal
were extended and refortified. Further north, large tracts of land were given into
the hands of the Military Orders, and with their increasingly vast resources to draw
on, they built some of the most advanced and elaborate of fortifications, such as
Krak des Chevaliers, for example, which was held by the Hospitallers.
Direct military action could also work to strengthen the crusaders’ position.
As they grew in size and wealth, the Military Orders played an increasingly sig-
nificant role in this regard too, but primary responsibility for leading armies into
battle remained with the rulers of the crusader states. Baldwin III strengthened
the southern frontier of the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1153 when he captured
Ascalon, and in 1159, an army made up of troops from Jerusalem, Antioch and
Byzantium marched on Aleppo and forced Nur ad-Din to make a truce and release
the Christian prisoners he was holding. The presence of Byzantine troops on this
expedition was the result of a new approach adopted by King Baldwin towards the
emperor in Constantinople. For most of the first half of the twelfth century, west-
ern resentment about the role played by the Byzantines during the First Crusade
and Byzantine hostility towards Bohemond of Taranto and the subsequent rulers
of Antioch had meant that relations between eastern and western Christians had
been typically tense and sometimes violent. Baldwin III wanted to change this, and
he appreciated that a productive relationship with the emperor could contribute
significantly to the stability of Outremer’s northern frontier. In 1158, therefore,
Baldwin married Theodora, emperor Manuel’s niece, and subsequently, Manuel
himself married Maria, the daughter of the late Prince of Antioch, Raymond de
Poitiers, and his wife, Constance.
An even bigger shift in approach was developed under Baldwin III’s successor as
king of Jerusalem, his brother Amalric (1163–74). For most of his reign, the politi-
cal and military focus was on Egypt rather than Syria. He was not the first ruler
of Jerusalem to appreciate Egypt’s significance (Baldwin I had died on campaign
there in 1119), but Amalric was determined to take advantage of Egypt’s political
weakness and get his hands on its resources. The phenomenal wealth of the Shi‘ite
Fatimid rulers of Egypt was based on the fertility of the River Nile and the pre-
eminence of Alexandria as the greatest port in the Mediterranean. At the same
time, however, the Fatimid regime was in chaos during the 1160s following the
death of the vizier al-Salih in 1161. Different factions competed for control of the
caliph, who was never more than a figurehead, and this opened up the possibility of
intervention in Egypt by external powers. One of these was Amalric, but another,
inevitably, was Nur ad-Din. Whoever won the struggle for Egypt would gain a
potentially decisive advantage over their principal enemy.
Amalric campaigned in Egypt five times between 1163 and 1169, whilst Nur ad-
Din sent armies there in 1164 and 1167. Amalric enjoyed some major successes –
he even occupied Alexandria for a time in 1167 – but matters finally came to a
head in 1168 when, with Amalric’s army encamped outside Cairo and seemingly
poised to capture the city, Nur ad-Din sent a third expeditionary force which
forced the Christians to withdraw. Like the other forces he had sent, Nur ad-Din’s
army in 1168 was under the command of Shirkuh, one of his most trusted lieuten-
ants. Having relieved the city, the powerless caliph was forced to name Shirkuh as
his new vizier, and Egypt became the latest and most magnificent addition to Nur
ad-Din’s empire. Shirkuh died after only two months in charge, but he had been
accompanied on campaign by his nephew Salah al-Din (Saladin), and he replaced
his uncle as ruler of Egypt.
Saladin was 32 years old in 1169 and an experienced warrior. But he was an
unproven political leader, and although he would eventually become one of the
great figures of Islamic history, there was nothing pre-destined about this. Until
Nur ad-Din died in 1174, Saladin was his viceroy in Egypt. Their relationship
was far from straightforward, and an open breach between them was probably
only averted by Nur ad-Din’s death. From this point on, Saladin set about using
his Egyptian resources to take control of Muslim Syria. This was a long process,
and Saladin was faced by considerable opposition from within the Muslim world.
Already in 1171, he had abolished the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo and announced
the return of Egypt to Sunni orthodoxy. In 1174, he took control of Damascus, and
by the mid-1170s, he ruled over all of Muslim Syria except Aleppo. In 1183, he
finally secured that city, and in 1186, the ruler of Mosul accepted his overlordship
too. Given the difficulties Saladin had in re-establishing Nur ad-Din’s empire, it is
not surprising that he gave relatively little attention to the crusader states before the
mid-1180s. He had entered the kingdom of Jerusalem with an army in 1177 and
had been defeated at Montgisard by Baldwin IV, and in 1179, he made a point of
destroying the half-built crusader castle of Jacob’s Ford on the kingdom’s eastern
frontier. The castle was only 35 miles from Damascus, and Saladin saw its construc-
tion as the aggressive move it was intended to be.
The building of Jacob’s Ford was an expression of Baldwin IV’s growing con-
fidence, and its destruction was a major setback for a king whose capacity to rule
was starting to come under close scrutiny by the start of the 1180s. Baldwin had
succeeded his father, Amalric, as king of Jerusalem in 1174 when he was only 13,
but his relative youth was far from the most serious problem he faced. Baldwin
suffered from leprosy, and by the end of his teens he was blind, he had lost his
nose and his limbs were badly deformed. It seems unlikely that his condition was
already diagnosed when he became king – had it been, he almost certainly would
never have been allowed to take the throne. This was not a tolerant age, and con-
temporary notions of kingship would not have supported the idea of a leper-king,
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someone who had evidently done something to displease God and who would find
it difficult if not impossible to fulfil a king’s basic duty of leading his troops into
battle. As it happened, Baldwin was an able and brave young man, and he won a
major victory over Saladin at Montgisard in 1177. However, as Baldwin’s condi-
tion worsened and as he suffered more frequent bouts of incapacity, it became clear
that something would have to be done to stabilise the royal regime whilst he was
still alive and that careful thought was needed to determine what would happen
after his death. It was assumed that Baldwin would not live very long, and it was
taken for granted that he would not marry and produce heirs of his own. Baldwin’s
nearest relative was his sister Sibylla, and by the second half of the 1170s, she was
clearly being groomed to succeed him. In 1176, she had married Count William
of Montferrat. This prestigious French prince, it was hoped, would be the strong,
capable husband needed to help his wife control the kingdom following Baldwin’s
death. Together, they would have a son and govern as regents as he grew to adult-
hood, and indeed, the first part of this plan was completed when a boy, the future
Baldwin V, was born in 1177. Disastrously, however, Count William had died
during Sibylla’s pregnancy, and by the end of the 1170s, the political future of the
kingdom of Jerusalem looked more uncertain than ever.
To make matters worse, just as Saladin was turning his long-cherished impe-
rial dreams into reality, the kingdom of Jerusalem was consumed by increasingly
poisonous factional infighting and internal political wrangling. In 1180, Sibylla
married Guy de Lusignan. Far from this match being forced on her, however,
Sibylla had chosen Guy herself. This was a remarkable show of independence on
her part, but it provoked a hostile response. As a newcomer to the Latin East, Guy
was resented as an over-promoted upstart by many of the established nobility of the
kingdom, and the thought of him becoming regent for Baldwin V in due course
and then king was too much for many to contemplate. Chief amongst Guy’s adver-
saries was Count Raymond of Tripoli. He was an experienced and respected figure
in Outremer – he had ruled the county of Tripoli since 1152, during which time
he had spent seven years in Muslim captivity from 1164 to 1171; his marriage to
the heiress to the lordship of Galilee had also given him a stake in the kingdom of
Jerusalem, and he had already acted as regent for Baldwin IV during a debilitating
bout of the king’s illness between 1174 and 1176. When Baldwin fell ill again in
1183, however, he overlooked Raymond and instead selected his new brother-
in-law, Guy, as regent. It soon fell to Guy to defend the kingdom when Saladin
invaded in the autumn of the same year. Guy gathered as large an army as he could
(about 1,300 knights and 15,000 infantry) and shadowed Saladin’s army as it moved
around the kingdom. The tactic was designed to exhaust Saladin’s troops and, once
starved of resources, force them to withdraw. It worked, but Guy was criticised by
some for not challenging Saladin directly and for giving him the chance to recover
and return on a later occasion. Bowing to pressure and seemingly convinced by the
arguments about Guy’s incompetence, King Baldwin stripped him of his powers,
and when he needed to appoint another regent early in 1185, he turned once again
to Raymond of Tripoli.
Baldwin IV died in May 1185, aged only 23. Raymond of Tripoli’s first step,
now as regent for Baldwin V, was to arrange a truce with Saladin, but his posi-
tion was fatally undermined in the summer of 1186 when the nine-year-old king
died. Raymond was set on keeping control of the kingdom, but this was the
chance Sibylla and Guy had been waiting for. Both Raymond and Sibylla had their
supporters, but the nobles of the kingdom eventually agreed that Sibylla should
succeed as queen on the clear understanding that she divorced Guy, who remained
unpopular and was distrusted by many. Sibylla agreed on condition that she could
choose her next husband, and the patriarch of Jerusalem proceeded to crown her
in September 1186. Then, when asked who her next husband was going to be,
she promptly named Guy and placed a crown on his head. It is hard to know
how spontaneous this remarkably autonomous assertion of female power was, and
it is difficult to believe that the entire nobility of the kingdom of Jerusalem was
so easily duped in this highly theatrical way. Nevertheless, however it happened,
Sibylla and Guy were now the queen and king of Jerusalem. A furious Raymond
of Tripoli stormed out of court and, it was later reported, immediately made a deal
with Saladin in which the Muslim leader agreed to make Raymond king if Muslim
troops were permitted to move through the count’s lands in Galilee. The divisions
within the Jerusalem elite had widened to a chasm just as Saladin had imposed his
overlordship on Mosul. The new ruler of the Muslim world must have thought that
the weakened and unstable Christian kingdom was too tempting a target to resist.
Saladin invaded the Kingdom of Jerusalem on 1 July 1187, and straight away
began to besiege the town of Tiberias on Lake Galilee. The onus was now on
King Guy to respond. He received conflicting advice which reflected the wider
differences amongst his nobles. Raymond of Tripoli (even though his own wife
was among the besieged occupants of Tiberias) advised the king not to engage the
Muslim invaders; rather wait to see what they did and hope that they withdrew. Guy
was unlikely to trust Raymond’s advice, and there were others, most prominently
the Master of the Templars, Gerard de Ridefort, another long-time adversary of
Raymond, who urged a more combative, aggressive response. King Guy must also
have remembered the events of 1183 and how the passive attitude he had taken to
Saladin’s invasion then had lost him the regency. So after heated arguments over the
night of 2 July, Guy decided to lead his troops into battle. The following morning
the royal army set out on the 18-mile march to Tiberias. It was hot, the ground
was dry and there were no easily accessible water sources. Progress was slowed even
more because of constant harassing from Saladin’s mounted archers. By the end of
the day, Tiberias was still more than six miles away, and the Christian army was
thirsty and exhausted. Few of Guy’s troops can have slept or felt remotely confident
when they set off again for Tiberias on the morning of 4 July 1187, and Saladin was
content to let them march into the full heat of the day. As they did so, the Muslim
troops kept up a relentless noise of drums and screaming, and they set fire to the
dry grass in front of the advancing army so that the smoke would blow back into
the enemy’s face, parching and confusing the Christians even more. Eventually,
though, something had to give, and it was Raymond of Tripoli who ordered his
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troops to charge Saladin’s lines. Amazingly, he broke through but then kept going;
proof, some thought, of the discreditable deal Raymond had struck with Saladin.
Whether it was or not, however, the rest of Guy’s army had to act quickly, and the
decision was made to retreat and make a stand on a hill now known as the Horns
of Hattin. Guy and his troops fought desperately, and Saladin sustained sizeable
losses. In the end, though, a Muslim victory was all but inevitable, and the army of
the kingdom of Jerusalem was smashed to pieces. Guy was captured, and dozens of
Templars and Hospitallers who had survived the battle were executed on the spot
by Saladin’s men. Also taken was the magnificent reliquary containing a piece of
the cross on which Jesus had been crucified. This was the kingdom’s most sacred
relic and had been borne aloft at the head of the army as it approached Tiberias. Its
loss was a devastating psychological blow.
Saladin quickly followed up his great victory at Hattin. In October 1187, the
city of Jerusalem itself surrendered, and within a year his armies had swept through
the rest of the kingdom and into Tripoli. The only significant outpost in the south
remaining in southern hands was the port of Tyre, which was saved by the timely
arrival in the Holy Land of Conrad of Montferrat, the late William’s brother.
Meanwhile, news of Saladin’s victory at Hattin had stunned Western Europe. Pope
Gregory VIII issued the crusading bull Audita Tremendi in October 1187, and the
response reflected the seriousness of the situation: the emperor (Frederick Barba-
rossa) and the king of France (Philip II) both took the cross, as did Count Richard
of Poitou, the eldest surviving son of King Henry II of England. Barbarossa was the
first to set out in May 1189. He made good quick progress and was in Asia Minor
by spring 1190; he even inflicted a major defeat on the Seljuq Turks at Iconium
in April. But his campaigning came to a disastrous end in June when the emperor
drowned whilst crossing a river at Silifke in southern Turkey. The attempt by his
son Frederick of Swabia to continue the crusade was then wrecked by a vicious
attack of dysentery which killed thousands of his troops. Barbarossa’s death and
the end of the German expedition dealt serious blows to the crusade before it had
really even started. It has been estimated that his army comprised 15,000 troops,
including 3,000 knights – such a boost to the military capacity of the crusader
states would have been more than welcome. More than that, however, the emperor
himself was the pre-eminent ruler in Western Europe with years of political and
diplomatic experience to draw on as well as first-hand knowledge of Outremer –
he had been on the Second Crusade before he became king. He was the obvious
leader of the crusade and someone capable of neutralising the damaging squabbles
which came to dominate the relations between Richard I and Philip II.
They set out for the Holy Land together in July 1190, by which time Richard
had succeeded his father as king of England and ruler of the Angevin Empire.
Philip was therefore Richard’s overlord for his French lands but his equal as a king,
whilst in practice Richard’s enormous territories made him significantly richer
than Philip. Such ambiguities in their relationship were bound to cause tension,
and Richard’s evident desire to upstage Philip wherever possible only made the
French king more irate and frustrated as the journey went on. They split up when
they reached the Mediterranean coast and set sail with their respective fleets. They
rendezvoused on Sicily late in 1190 and spent an acrimonious winter there; and
while Philip made the last leg of his journey to the Holy Land, Richard stopped
off on Cyprus and took control of the island from its Byzantine ruler, Isaac Com-
nenus. The two kings met up again at their agreed destination, Acre, which had
been besieged energetically but not very successfully by Guy de Lusignan since
August 1188. Guy had been released from captivity by Saladin in June of that year
and had gone straight to Tyre where Conrad of Montferrat was still mounting
a stout defence. Conrad refused to hand over control of Tyre to Guy, however,
and Guy had begun the siege of Acre in an effort to recover some of his lost
authority. Inevitably, however, his besieging forces had been besieged in turn by
Saladin’s troops, and a stalemate had developed by the time King Philip arrived in
March 1191. Philip’s arrival was gratefully received, and he helped with the pro-
gress of the siege. However, contemporaries saw Richard’s arrival at Acre in June
as the decisive turning-point of the operation. He was rich, well-equipped and
vigorously energetic, and after a month of intense bombardment and undermining
of the city walls, Acre surrendered to the Christians on 12 July. The kings then
brokered an agreement between Guy and Conrad about the kingship of Jerusalem:
Guy would remain king for his life, but Conrad and his heirs would succeed him.
King Philip was furious at the way Richard had outshone him at Acre, he
had not been well, and there was pressing business to deal with in France. So in
August 1191, he began his return journey home, leaving Richard in sole command
of the rest of the crusade. Over the next year, Richard’s reputation as one of the
great generals of the Middle Ages was sealed. His march along the coast to Jaffa
between the end of August and the start of September was a model of organisation
and discipline, while the victories Richard achieved at Arsuf on 7 September 1191
and later at Jaffa in August 1192 dealt major blows to Saladin’s prestige and his
reputation for invincibility. Having said this, aspects of Richard’s conduct have
been argued over ever since: before he left Acre he ordered the public execution
of perhaps as many as 3,000 Muslim prisoners, and although he approached Jeru-
salem with his army twice, in December 1191 and June 1192, on both occasions
Richard decided against attacking the city and allowed it to remain under Muslim
control. Contemporary Christian attitudes justified the massacre at Acre, although
there was criticism at the time of Richard’s ambivalent attitude to the re-capture of
the Holy City, which was after all the principal aim of the crusade. Sound strategic
reasons could be advanced to justify both choices, but they must be weighed in
the balance with Richard’s other achievements when his posthumous reputation
is assessed.
In August 1192, just a few weeks after giving up on Jerusalem for the second
time, Richard and Saladin agreed to a three-year truce – the Treaty of Jaffa. Richard
had been unwell, and he was aware that, back in England and France, his younger
brother John was plotting to seize power with the help of Philip II. So it was clear
that he needed to return home, and the pragmatic terms he agreed reflected his
urgency: the Christians would keep possession of the stretch of coastline they had
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recovered between Tyre and Jaffa, and Christian pilgrims would be allowed to enter
Jerusalem. Given that the Third Crusade was originally intended to liberate Jerusa-
lem, reverse Saladin’s conquests and recover the piece of the True Cross captured at
Hattin, this reads like a meagre return for such an ambitious and costly enterprise.
The modern consensus, however, is that Richard had done well and that, given the
perilous situation faced by the kingdom of Jerusalem at the end of 1190, when only
Tyre was held securely and the siege of Acre had stalled, the recovery of the coast-
line was a considerable achievement and ensured the survival of the kingdom in
some form for the next hundred years. Richard’s opportunistic conquest of Cyprus
in 1191, meanwhile, gave Outremer a valuable off-shore base for supplies and a
useful staging-post for later crusades. For his part, however, by the time Richard
began his eventful journey back to Europe in October 1192, he had never met
Saladin, and he had never visited the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He took with him a
strong feeling of unfinished business and certainly planned to return to the East.
He never did, however, and it was left to others to try and succeed where Richard
had come up short.
The Third Crusade had enabled a partial recovery of the Kingdom of Jerusalem,
whilst in the north of Outremer, the county of Tripoli and a reduced principality of
Antioch remained in Christian hands. At the start of 1193, however, the prospects
for the crusading movement were unpromising. In Jerusalem especially, political
instability continued. Early in 1192, before Richard I left for home and with his
agreement, a council of the kingdom’s nobles had decided that Conrad of Mont-
ferrat should be crowned king. Guy de Lusignan’s position had been weak since
the death of his wife, Sibylla, in 1190. His claims to the kingship came entirely
through her, and only Richard’s support had kept them alive. To compensate him,
Guy was given control of Cyprus, and his family would remain rulers of the island
until 1489. However, the plan to make Conrad king never came to fruition: he
was assassinated in April 1192, and another husband had to be found quickly for
his widow, Isabella (Sibylla’s younger sister), who now held the hereditary claim
to the throne. Conrad had been Isabella’s second husband, and she would eventu-
ally have two more, both of whom ruled Jerusalem. But they were short-lived,
too: Count Henry of Champagne died in 1197, and Aimery de Lusignan (Guy’s
brother, and his successor as ruler of Cyprus) died in 1205. Isabella died shortly
after Aimery, leaving only her 13-year-old daughter by Conrad, Maria, to succeed
her. Once again the absence of a male heir made the need to find a husband for
the next queen of Jerusalem a paramount concern, and in 1210, she married John
de Brienne. John was hardly a prince of the stature of Fulk of Anjou or even Guy
de Lusignan; his family had crusading pedigree, but John had few resources of his
own to spend in his new kingdom. Nevertheless, following Maria’s death in 1212,
he would rule on his own as king of Jerusalem until 1225.
The political uncertainty within the Kingdom of Jerusalem was to some degree
balanced out by arguably even greater volatility within the Muslim world. In
March 1193, Saladin died, and his family struggled (often with each other) to
hold it together. This gave the Christians a welcome breathing-space and a new
opportunity to make inroads into Saladin’s conquests, so when a potentially very

powerful German crusade reached the Holy Land in the autumn of 1197, thoughts
of further recovery were encouraged. It had some initial success when Beirut and
Sidon were captured, but the crusade’s leader, Emperor Henry VI, died in 1197
before he could actually join his army in Outremer, and the crusade withered away
as the political uncertainty in Germany drew the troops back home. Some were still
in the Holy Land, however, when the Fourth Crusade began. It was launched in
1198 by the new pope, Innocent III (1198–1216), and Jerusalem was the intended
goal once again. It is not clear who Innocent thought would lead the crusade: a
struggle was underway for the German throne following the death of Henry VI in
1197; Richard I died in April 1199, and the papacy’s critical views about Philip II’s
marital status made his participation highly unlikely. In the end, after a shaky start
to the recruitment campaign, it was leading members of the French nobility, most
notably the counts of Blois, Champagne and Flanders, who took responsibility for
the crusade. In early 1201, their envoys struck a deal with the ruler of Venice, the
doge Enrico Dandolo, who agreed to transport the crusaders to the East. More
precisely, in return for a payment of 85,000 marks, the contract required the Vene-
tians to carry 4,500 knights and their horses, 9,000 squires and 20,000 infantry. It
was also agreed that the crusade would be shipped to the Holy Land via Egypt.
Not for the first time, Christian control of Egypt was seen as the key to the long-
term security of Outremer, whilst the Venetians were keen to acquire as large a
commercial stake as possible in the great port city of Alexandria. The amount of
money promised to the Venetians was enormous (perhaps twice as much as the
annual incomes of the kings of England and France), and the crusaders struggled to
raise it from the start. To make matters worse, only a third of the crusading force
had reached Venice by October 1202. In lieu of payment, therefore, the crusade
leaders agreed to help the Venetians recover Zara, a city on the Adriatic coast
which had transferred its allegiance to the king of Hungary in the 1180s. But Zara
was a Christian city, and many crusaders had strong misgivings about attacking it,
not least because the pope had expressly forbidden any such assault. Nevertheless,
with no other option if the crusade was to continue, Zara was besieged in Novem-
ber 1202 and quickly taken.
At this point, a political crisis within the Byzantine Empire changed the course
of the crusade once again. In 1195, the emperor Isaac Angelus (1185–95) had been
deposed and blinded by his brother Alexius III (1195–1203). Isaac’s son, also called
Alexius, fled the empire to seek help, and his envoys arrived at the crusader camp
outside Zara in the winter of 1202. Their proposal was astonishing: if the crusad-
ers helped restore Alexius and his father to their rightful positions, Alexius would
pay them 20,000 marks, add 10,000 Byzantine troops to the crusading expedition
in the Holy Land and, most startlingly, reunite the eastern and western Christian
churches under the authority of the pope. The Venetians and most of the crusade
leaders agreed, but once again there were plenty of crusaders who viewed with
dismay the prospect of attacking another Christian city and left the crusade to
head directly for the Holy Land. Meanwhile, at the end of June 1203, the main
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army arrived outside Constantinople, and on 17 July, the city was taken. This was
not straightforward: the crusade army had run dangerously short of supplies by
the time of the final assault, and the attack of 17 July was made out of desperation
against a much larger Byzantine force defending the city. Alexius III, however,
inexplicably refused to engage the crusaders, withdrew his troops behind the city
walls and then fled during the night. Isaac Angelos was released from captivity,
and Prince Alexius was crowned alongside him and became Alexius IV. There
was little chance of Alexius’s pledges to the crusaders being fulfilled. Isaac was
horrified by what his son had promised and strong anti-western sentiment soon
developed within the general population. By Christmas 1203, relations between
the Byzantines and the crusaders had broken down completely. At the same time,
Alexius IV’s authority over his own subjects, never strong, had evaporated, and he
was deposed and murdered along with his father in February 1204. By killing their
erstwhile ally and patron, the new emperor, a Byzantine noble who styled himself
Alexius V, had handed the crusaders a justifiable reason to attack Constantinople.
Given how low they were on supplies and how poor the prospects for the crusade
looked, they probably didn’t need one and would have acted anyway, but in any
event on 13 April 1204, the assault began, and, having forced their way into the
city, the crusaders embarked on three days of unrestrained looting and violence.
The people of Constantinople were brutally targeted, Hagia Sophia was ransacked,
and thousands of treasures were plundered, packed and subsequently taken back
to the West. Finally, in May 1204, Count Baldwin of Flanders was crowned the
first Latin emperor of Constantinople in the great church which his troops had so
recently desecrated.
The Fourth Crusade was a failure. After the sack of Constantinople, the idea of
carrying on to the Holy Land never seems to have resurfaced, and the westerners
who had travelled so far now lacked the resources and support to go any further.
Having said that, much of what constitutes modern Greece was quickly partitioned
after 1204 into a series of new crusader states which would last for most of the
thirteenth century, the Venetians were delighted to assume control of Byzantium’s
trade routes and, although its conquests were not the ones originally intended, the
crusade did well militarily: the argument that control of Constantinople would
benefit future crusades was worth making even if later expeditions tended to bypass
it entirely. And Innocent III had not given up his dream of retaking Jerusalem. In
1213, four years after he had launched the crusade against the Cathars in Langue-
doc and buoyed by news of the great Christian victory over the Almohads at Las
Navas de Tolosa in 1212, Innocent announced the start of a new crusade in his bull
Quia maior. Extensive efforts to recruit participants followed over the next couple
of years, and at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215–16, the finishing touches were
put to the wording of the indulgence on offer and other technicalities. Innocent
died in July 1216, but what historians usually refer to as the Fifth Crusade con-
tinued nonetheless. Duke Leopold VI of Austria set out first and was joined at
Acre by Andrew and Hugh, the kings of Hungary and Cyprus, respectively. But
although some small-scale campaigns were fought in Palestine over the winter of
1217–18, the results were inconclusive, and King Andrew’s departure for home
combined with the arrival of fresh troops from Italy and Germany persuaded the
crusade leaders to look elsewhere for a target. Their choice, not for the first time,
was Egypt, and between May 1218 and November 1219 when it finally surren-
dered, they besieged Damietta at the mouth of the Nile Delta. By then, there were
divisions within the crusade leadership and doubts about the best way to develop
the expedition. The papal legate Pelagius, cardinal-bishop of Albano, who had
arrived in Egypt in 1218, did not see eye to eye with King John of Jerusalem, and
when during the siege the sultan al-Kamil (Saladin’s nephew) offered to return to
Christian hands most of the twelfth-century kingdom of Jerusalem, including the
Holy City itself, if the crusaders withdrew from Egypt, John’s willingness to agree
was overridden by Pelagius’s objections. The legate had bigger ambitions and was
planning to move south into Egypt once the army promised by Emperor Freder-
ick II had arrived. However, there was no sign of the imperial army throughout
the whole of 1220, and as time went on, the crusaders grew fractious while the
Muslims strengthened their position further down the Nile. In the end, when it
finally arrived in spring 1221, Frederick’s great army turned out to contain just
500 knights under the command of Duke Louis of Bavaria. Further arguments
between King John, Pelagius and Louis followed about the best course of action,
but P elagius got his way again, and the crusader army set off towards Mansurah.
The Muslim defenders were ready for them. They cut off the crusaders’ supply
lines to Damietta and broke dykes to flood the surrounding land. This left the
Christian army stranded on a narrow island, and in the circumstances, Pelagius
could only sue for peace. He surrendered Damietta, accepted an eight-year truce
and agreed to withdraw the crusaders from Egypt.
The remarkable coda to the Fifth Crusade followed a few years later. Frederick
II had taken the cross when he was crowned king of Germany in 1215, and he
had restated his desire to go on crusade after his imperial coronation in 1220. But
his failure to join the armies of the Fifth Crusade in Palestine or Egypt had been
a major factor in that expedition’s collapse, and in the end, Frederick did not give
serious attention to his crusading promises until 1225 when he married Yolanda
de Brienne, the daughter and heir of King John of Jerusalem. Having then had
himself crowned king of Jerusalem on Sicily whilst his new father-in-law was still
alive and well, Frederick set off for the Holy Land in 1227 only to fall ill and delay
his expedition once again. This was too much for the exasperated Pope Gregory
IX (1227–41), who excommunicated the emperor. Having recovered, however,
Frederick pressed on and arrived at Acre in September 1228. A few months later,
in February 1229, he reached a negotiated settlement known as the Treaty of Jaffa
with the sultan al-Kamil. A ten-year truce was agreed, and al-Kamil conceded
that the Christians could retake control over Jerusalem (except Temple Mount),
Bethlehem and the corridor of land linking them both to the sea, Nazareth and
parts of Galilee, Toron and Sidon. On 18 March 1229, Frederick solemnly wore
his imperial crown in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. On the face of it, Fred-
erick had achieved by diplomacy what the great armies of the Third, Fourth and
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Fifth Crusades had failed to achieve by force. But matters were not as simple as
this. Frederick’s actions and motives were seriously questioned by the pope, the
barons of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Military Orders, all of whom had
expected Frederick to challenge al-Kamil much more forcefully. At the same time,
Frederick’s status as an excommunicated king only further clouded assessments of
what he had done, whilst his behaviour during the crusade was perceived as high-
handed by many: as he left Acre in May 1229 he was pelted with offal by abusive
crowds. More broadly, the lands he had gained, particularly Jerusalem itself, could
easily be retaken by al-Kamil’s forces whenever the sultan thought of doing so, and
they were indefensible without long-term political and military commitment from
the west. There was no sign Frederick was interested in giving this kind of support.
Indeed, his reasons for acting as he did derived more from a desire to embellish his
imperial prestige and bolster his authority in the west than they did from an urge to
recover the Holy Land for Christianity. There appeared to be little either spiritual
or penitential in Frederick’s approach, and more expeditions to the East would be
needed to add substance to his hollow victory.
Closer to Home: Crusading in Europe and the

Battle with Heresy
For nearly 50 years after the capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusaders in 1099,
crusading was all about the Holy Land. The papacy acknowledged the religious
importance of what was happening in Iberia, but it was above all armed pilgrim-
ages to Outremer which were needed to reclaim and then protect the Christian
territories which had been seized by Muslim invaders – they were acts of self-
defence. From the 1140s onwards, however, these views began to evolve, and the
original crusading ideal of fighting as a soldier of Christ in the East for the remis-
sion of sins was redefined. Soon, military campaigns intended to conquer lands
in north-eastern Europe were officially transformed into wars of conversion, and
eventually Christian armies were being deployed within Europe against those cat-
egorised as heretics. In the second half of the twelfth century, mainstream Christi-
anity became more muscular, more aggressively militant and more associated with
armies and war. Issues of faith were certainly at stake in these conflicts, but increas-
ingly they also contributed to the formation of a new political order in Europe as
secular and ecclesiastical rulers used the war against heresy to increase their own
power and prestige.
It was the Second Crusade which fully brought authorised religious warfare
into Europe itself. It has already been seen how a combined fleet of fighters from
Flanders, the Rhineland, Frisia, Normandy and England helped King Afonso
Henriques of Portugal capture Muslim-controlled Lisbon in October 1147. Other
Muslim strongholds in Iberia – Almeria, Tortosa and Faro – were also seized by
Christian forces in 1147–8. How far these expeditions should be seen as integral
parts of the crusading movement is open to question. Pope Eugenius III certainly
supported King Alfonso VII of Castile in his campaign against Almeria and equated
it with the official crusade. The events at Lisbon may have been more opportun-
istic as Afonso Henriques took advantage of the fortuitous arrival in his lands of
a crusading fleet. On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that Bernard of
Clairvaux had tried to recruit support for the Lisbon campaign when he was in the
Rhineland mustering troops for the Second Crusade in 1146 and that, therefore,
the arrival of the northern Europeans in Iberia was expected and planned for. Even
so, it seems clear that the papacy had little if any control over these campaigns:
the initiative remained with the Christian princes of Iberia, who presumably were
happy to receive papal encouragement but did not feel they needed it to justify
their wars of conquest.
Something similar happened in northern Europe at the end of the 1140s, on
the frontier between Denmark, Saxony and the pagan lands along the coast of the
southern Baltic. The inhabitants of these lands (a collection of different tribes –
Wagrians, Abotrites, Polabians, Rugians, Liutizians, Pomeranians – collectively
known in Scandinavia and Germany as Wends) were long-accustomed to raids by
their Christian neighbours from Germany. Carolingians, Ottonians and Salians had
invaded, plundered, extracted tribute and established bishoprics and monasteries
in order to add conversion to conquest. But by the twelfth century, these efforts
had run out of steam, and much of the land conquered by Christian armies over
the previous 200 years was back in non-Christian hands. Calls for a revival of Latin
expansion into this area fell on largely deaf ears, even when its attractions were so
obvious. Writing in 1108, for example, an anonymous Flemish clerk with links to
the archbishop of Magdeburg described these pagan lands as ‘the best, rich in meat,
honey, corn and birds; and if it were well cultivated none could be compared to it
for wealth of its produce’, and he called on the aristocracy of Saxony and Lorraine
as well as France and Flanders to take their chance: ‘this is an occasion for you to
save your souls and, if you wish it, acquire the best land in which to live’. It was
not until the 1140s, however, that small-scale expansion began again as a number
of Saxon families on the east side of the River Elbe began to push further eastwards
into Wagria. In 1143, Count Adolf II of Holstein began the construction of what
was to become the great trading city of Lübeck, and by 1145, further advances
had been made into the lands of the Abotrites. So when news of the fall of Edessa
reached Western Europe, the Saxon nobility led by their duke Henry the Lion was
able to persuade Bernard of Clairvaux that their continuing campaigns against the
Wends were just as meritorious as the one planned for Outremer. This suited King
Conrad III of Germany as well. A disgruntled and potentially insubordinate Duke
Henry, who showed no desire to travel to Outremer himself, might pose a threat
during the king’s absence, so a Saxon-led campaign in the Baltic would serve to
keep the Lion busy. Accordingly, in April 1147, on Bernard’s advice, Pope Eugenius
III issued the bull Divina dispensatione which authorised the Christians of northern
Europe to make war on their heathen neighbours instead of marching to Jerusalem.
More than that, however, the particular rules of engagement in this region were
made very clear by Bernard: the war against the pagans should continue until they
had been converted or killed. This uncompromising stance (baptism or death) was
Faith 339
unusually hard-line and is difficult to explain. The Saxons were used to invading
and taking tribute and land, whilst their Danish neighbours to the north were more
concerned with the pagan pirates and slave traders who menaced their coastline.
So perhaps Bernard was attempting to shake them all out of their conventional
approach and reinforce the idea that the campaigns were now primarily religious
rather than just another attempt to acquire resources. There was nothing wrong
with truces and tribute, but now these could only follow conversion.
How far the Saxon and Danish leaders took this message on board is hard to say,
and it probably had little to do with how they responded to a Wendish attack on
the new Christian settlements in Wagria (including Lübeck) in 1147. Two Danish
fleets and two Saxon armies were mustered: one joint force targeted the Abotrite
outpost of Dobin, and the other focused on the Liutizian stronghold at Demmin.
The garrison at Dobin eventually agreed to accept baptism, but the assault on
Demmin was a failure, and the Christian troops sent there were diverted to besiege
the city of Stettin. Stettin was already a Christian city, however, and once its people
had displayed crosses from their walls and explained themselves to the besieging
army, the campaign was abandoned. This so-called Baltic Crusade, therefore, was
hardly a resounding success: the conversions, even if genuine, were few in number
and far from the permanent triumph of Christianity over paganism envisaged by
Bernard and his papal backers. This disappointment, followed by the death of both
Bernard and Pope Eugenius in 1153, may in part explain why official enthusiasm
for carrying on the war against the heathens in the north waned from this point
on. The campaigns themselves continued, however, albeit intermittently and in the
hope of securing submission, tribute and lands. In 1160, 1164, 1168–9 and 1177,
Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony and King Valdemar I of Denmark (1154–82) con-
ducted joint operations against the Wendish tribes. Ultimately, in 1185, Pomerania
submitted to Cnut VI of Denmark (1182–1202), and its prince became his client.
When Valdemar I conquered the lands of the Rugians in 1169 and destroyed
their temples and idols, he was congratulated by Pope Alexander III: ‘inspired with
the heavenly flame, strengthened by the arms of Christ, armed with the shield of
faith, and protected by divine favour’, Valdemar had saved his defeated opponents
and ‘recalled them from their most scandalous enormities to the faith and law of
Christ’. How extensive or permanent any such conversions were, of course, is
impossible to know, and Valdemar himself was probably more interested in the
more earthly benefits that came with his victory. Moreover, this was not part of any
papal masterplan, and Alexander was reacting to welcome, but unexpected, news.
Indeed, the Wendish wars seem to have become a sideshow by the early 1170s as
far as the papacy was concerned, and Pope Alexander’s attention was soon fixed on
other non-Christian regions in northern Europe. In 1171 or 1172, he issued the
bull Non parum animus noster, which put the war against the pagans of Estonia and
southern Finland on the same footing as crusading to the Holy Land. It was some
time before the Danish kings turned their minds to these regions. Danish fleets
attacked Finland in 1191 and 1202 and Estonia in 1194 and 1197. These raids had
little long-term effect, however, and it was not until King Valdemar II (1202–41)
forced the islanders of Ösel to submit to him in 1206 that the Danish monarchy
began to have thoughts of permanent conquest. It needs to be remembered that the
overriding priority for the Danes was controlling the Baltic with their dominant
fleet and maintaining access to the lucrative trade in furs, amber and timber which
came from the east. Therefore, the acquisition of territory was always a means to
an end, and progress was far from rapid. In 1218, Pope Honorius III gave Valdemar
permission to annex as much territory as he liked from the pagans, and in 1219–20,
he landed with a fleet at the northern tip of Estonia, began building a fort at Reval
(Tallinn) and occupied the hinterland.
By this time, other pagan territories further south had already started to come
under Christian control. In the 1190s, both Pope Celestine III and Innocent III
had authorised the efforts being made to convert the pagan Livs to Christian-
ity. But it was Bishop Albert of Riga who intensified these missionary activities
when he founded a new military order, The Swordbrothers, in 1202. They were
responsible for protecting the city of Riga itself, a new German trading centre, but
by 1230 they had conquered Livonia (approximately modern Latvia). The cult of
Our Lady of Riga was starting to flourish, and Livonia itself was now described
in fundamentally religious terms as ‘Our Lady’s dowry’. Over the next 50 years
or so, Swedish kings would spearhead efforts to conquer southern Finland, whilst
another new religious order, The Teutonic Knights, would eventually subjugate
Prussia. The Knights had developed as an order out of the remnants of the German
forces which had fought at the siege of Acre in the early 1190s, but within a cou-
ple of decades, they had turned into a powerful force which, whilst it retained its
interests in the Holy Land, came increasingly to concentrate on developing its role
in northern Europe. They were invited to Prussia in the 1220s by the Polish duke
Conrad of Mazovia, who had been trying to conquer the Prussians himself for
more than a decade, but once they had arrived, they soon took charge of the mis-
sion and set about a methodical takeover of Prussia. This was based on a network of
strong stone fortifications which extended down the river Vistula in the west and
along the Baltic coastline to the north, and on the generous terms they granted to
the settlers whom they encouraged to come to Prussia from northern and eastern
Germany. In 1234, the papacy claimed Prussia as a fief of its own, but the reality on
the ground was different and better reflected in the power Pope Innocent IV gave
the Teutonic Knights in 1245 to grant their own crusading indulgences without
any papal authorisation to Germans who assisted them against the Prussians. By the
mid-thirteenth century, the order was effectively ruling its own independent state
in Prussia, and it had the power to fight a perpetual crusade to sustain it.
The southern and eastern Baltic were transformed by military conquest in the
thirteenth century, but it is difficult comfortably to fit the northern Crusades into
the wider crusading movement. It was stretching things to justify the campaigns
against the Wends on the same basis as those conducted in the Holy Land. The
latter were originally intended not to convert but to recover lands occupied by
Muslims in Outremer which Christians claimed were once theirs; the pagans in
the north, by contrast, could never be accused of having stolen anything. What is
Faith 341
more, and like the Christian campaigns in Iberia, those in the Baltic would have
happened whether or not they had crusading credentials. What was at stake for
the lords and rulers there was not the questionable faith of their opponents. Their
wars were principally about the acquisition of resources and territory from their
neighbours, who happened to be pagans, making gains at the expense of their local
Christian rivals, and control of lucrative trading systems. When referring to Henry
the Lion’s campaigns in the region, one contemporary Saxon chronicler, Hel-
mold of Bosau, noted that ‘no mention has been made of Christianity, but only of
money’. The ambivalent and hesitant attitude of the papacy towards the campaigns
in the Baltic reinforces the idea that the popes did not know how to regard them.
Ideological support and sometimes particular privileges were given periodically
by the issue of a crusading bull, but there was nothing systematic or over-arching
about the way the popes viewed these wars: they tended to respond to events rather
than make any attempt to control them or dictate a course of action. Nevertheless,
and however intermittent and patchy the papal response to them was, the events
in the Baltic were important in establishing the idea that Christians could fight a
holy war against more than just Muslims. At this stage, the enemy still had to be
non-Christian, but the Fourth Crusade would show by its devastating attack on
Constantinople that the scope of crusading could be extended further still to take
in those whose Christianity was deemed to be different and, therefore, dangerous.
Even here, though, and as it did in the Baltic, the target of the crusade remained
beyond the frontier of Latin Christendom. However, it would only take a small
conceptual shift for the full light of the crusading cause to refocus on the men and
women within those frontiers (‘heretics’, the authorities called them) who were
deemed to pose a serious threat to the established Christian order.
...
The second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of several different
heretical sects in Western Europe. The Waldensians and the Humiliati have already
been mentioned, but whilst they were taken seriously by the Church authorities,
it seems they were not regarded as an existential threat to the Christian way of
life. The more radical members of these groups resisted official attempts to control
their preaching, but the majority just yearned for a more austere and simple ver-
sion of the religious life, and many of their concerns were met by the appearance
of the Friars in the early 1200s. In the words of one orthodox critic in the thir-
teenth century, Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay, the Waldensians ‘were evil men, but
much less perverted than other heretics; they agreed with us in many matters and
differed in some’. The ‘other heretics’ Peter had in mind were the Cathars. The
Cathars were dualists. In other words, they believed that there were two Gods:
one God was good, the creator of Heaven and all things eternal, including souls;
the other God (Satan) was evil, and had created the physical world and all material
things. Some Cathars believed that Satan was originally either a son of God or a
fallen angel; others, more extreme, favoured the idea that the two divinities were
separate and had both existed eternally. Either way, dualist beliefs had the potential
fatally to undermine conventional Christian theology and practice. At their root
they explained how and why evil persisted in the world despite the existence of
a benevolent deity, but more broadly, they necessarily brought into question the
idea that Jesus had taken on human form and, by extension, challenged the idea of
the Resurrection itself. And if all things earthly were evil, amongst those were the
established institutions and personnel of the Church. So priests were unnecessary
as were the sacraments: the idea that the Eucharist literally became the body and
blood of Christ during the mass was unthinkable in Cathar belief. Conventional
baptism was also rejected in favour of a baptism of the spirit, the consolamentum:
this was not performed on children because they had not yet acquired faith, and
it could only be administered by one of the Cathar élite, the perfecti. These ascetic
men and (radically) women renounced all property and ate a diet as free as possible
from the products of warm-blooded animals, which were of course produced by
sexual intercourse. They also abstained from sex themselves, as carnal activity only
did Satan’s work for him by producing more souls trapped inside their evil physical
shells. These rigorous perfecti provided a stark contrast to the frequently less than
exemplary parish clergy of the twelfth century and set an example of purity and
humility to their less fervent followers, who, for the most part, were content just to
live their lives as modestly as possible. Convinced by the arguments of the perfecti,
however, Cathars rejected the Old Testament, whose God Jehovah was the evil
creator and whose prophets were his diabolical agents, whilst the New Testament
represented the world of the spirit and the Good God. Many of them took the
consolamentum as death approached.
Historians argue about when and how Cathar beliefs first entered Western
Europe. It must also be borne in mind that the overwhelming weight of contem-
porary evidence on the subject of Catharism comes from commentators and insti-
tutions deeply hostile towards it. It is therefore difficult to get a clear sense of how
pervasive and widespread the heresy actually was, and some historians have gone
so far as to suggest that Catharism never existed as the organised, coherent faith
its critics described. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that dualist beliefs were
established in various parts of Western Europe by the 1160s, and it has been esti-
mated that there were probably several thousand Cathar perfecti by about 1200 and,
therefore, tens of thousands of people sympathetic to Cathar beliefs. Catharism was
certainly a pressing concern to the ecclesiastical authorities by the end of the 1170s.
At the Third Lateran Council of 1179, legislation was passed against ‘the loathsome
heresy of those whom some call the Cathars’ and a remission of two years’ penance
was granted to any Christian who took up arms against them.
There were Cathars in Lombardy, Tuscany, Catalonia, the Rhineland and else-
where by the last quarter of the twelfth century. There is evidence of organisation,
too: Cathar bishoprics were in turn subdivided into deaneries, whilst the perfecti
lived in single-sex communities and carried out a range of pastoral and spiritual
duties for their supporters. Perhaps the faith also benefited from not having a sin-
gle charismatic leader who could be targeted and removed by the authorities. But
Faith 343
it was in Languedoc in southern France that Catharism appears to have taken

hold most strongly and with the most severe consequences. The region was politi-
cally fragmented and lacked the kind of strong, centralised lay and ecclesiastical
power needed decisively to suppress heretical beliefs. In England, when some Ger-
man Cathars were discovered in Oxford in 1166, King Henry II ordered their
immediate arrest: they were stripped, flogged, branded and driven out of the city.
Catharism never appeared in England again. In Languedoc, by contrast, the most
powerful nobleman, Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, was in direct control of only
parts of the region, and he, like other nobles there, was thought by some to have
had Cathar sympathies of his own: he received perfecti at his court, it was alleged,
and he allowed his divorced second wife to become a perfecta herself.
Raymond’s failure to rid his lands of Catharism during the 1190s was attributed
in some quarters to the count’s unwillingness to act. But by the time he became
count in 1194, Catharism was thought to be well-entrenched in Languedoc, and it
seems just as likely that he simply lacked the machinery to do much about it. The
papal response to the lack of local action in the region was to appoint legates with
wide powers to take on the heresy. Alexander III sent two missions to the area,
but papal efforts did not really intensify until after Innocent III had become pope.
The Cistercians were deployed to tour the region and preach about the errors of
Catharism to the local population, but they received little support from the local
nobility or the local bishops, who were wary of the threat to their positions such
external intervention might signal. So in 1204, Pope Innocent strengthened the
Cistercian legation, which was headed by Pierre de Castelnau, by sending Arnald-
Amaric, the abbot of Citeaux himself, to join it. Even this high-powered partner-
ship failed to make much headway, however, and it was not until 1206, when the
legates were joined by Bishop Diego of Osma in Castile and his assistant Domi-
nic Guzman (later the founder of the Dominicans), that things began to change.
On Diego’s advice, a large-scale preaching tour of Languedoc was undertaken in
1206–7 using the preaching methods of the perfecti. In an effort to show that it was
not just the Cathars who could imitate the life of Christ, the preachers walked the
roads barefoot, begged for their food, slept in fields and held public debates with
the Cathar leaders.
Progress was still slow and converts were few in number, but matters came to a
head after Pierre de Castelnau excommunicated Raymond of Toulouse in 1207.
The specific charge against Raymond was that he had failed to join a peace-league
organised by the legate amongst the barons of Languedoc for the suppression of
heresy; but the legates may have been looking for an excuse to target Raymond
for some time. The count tried to reach a settlement with his accusers, but on 8
January 1208, after the negotiations had collapsed, Pierre was assassinated by one of
Raymond’s men. It seems very unlikely that the count knew about this in advance,
but on hearing about the murder, Innocent III ordered a crusade to be preached.
Known now as the Albigensian Crusade because the southern French city of Albi
was an early centre of Catharism, the crusade was directed in the first instance
against Toulouse, and the Pope offered the participants the same privileges they
would have received for going to the Holy Land: ‘Attack the followers of heresy
more fearlessly even than the Saracens – since they are more evil – with a strong hand
and an outstretched arm’. Raymond’s excommunication was eventually reversed in
June 1209 after he submitted to the legates in a humiliating public ceremony, and
he even took the Cross himself. Given that the count was now a loyal son of the
Church once again, however, and with the crusading army fast approaching, a new
target had to be identified, so when the crusaders arrived in the region at the end of
June, they moved against the lands of the Trencevals, traditional rivals of the counts
of Toulouse. When the Viscount of Trenceval, Raymond-Roger, offered to submit
to the legates, they refused and proceeded to lay siege to his city of Béziers at the
end of July 1209. The crusaders soon broke into the city, sacked it and slaughtered
the inhabitants. Thousands died in the cathedral, which was burnt down after they
had fled there to take refuge. Not everyone in Béziers was a Cathar, of course, and
some Cathars probably pretended to be orthodox in order to avoid being killed.
None of this mattered: when he was asked by his troops how they might distin-
guish Cathars from the rest, Abbot Arnald-Amaric is said to have replied, ‘Kill
them all. God will know his own’.
Having seen what had happened at Béziers, the Trenceval’s chief city, Car-
cassonne, soon surrendered to the crusaders, and Raymond-Roger himself was
imprisoned (he died in prison, perhaps murdered, at the end of 1209). His lands
were given to Simon de Montfort, a baron from the Ile-de-France, who soon
found himself in effective control of what was left of the crusade after most of the
soldiers returned home. He was a determined, resourceful and cruel leader. As
crusaders came and went during the campaigning seasons over the next few years,
Montfort besieged towns, confiscated lands and burned heretics. The authorities
also focused on ruining Raymond of Toulouse when he repeatedly failed, in their
view, to commit himself to the war against heresy. For his part, Raymond probably
saw the campaign against him, not in religious terms, but as an attempt by north-
ern freebooters to get their hands on his lands. Raymond was excommunicated
again, and by the end of 1212, he was left in control of little more than the city
of Toulouse itself. Meanwhile, Montfort was behaving as the de facto count, and
his growing power had begun to alarm a powerful neighbour, King Pedro II of
Aragon, who ruled the county of Provence and had claims to suzerainty in parts
of the Pyrenees. Fresh from his great victory over the Almohads at the battle of
Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, and as orthodox as any ruler could possibly be, Pedro
intervened in Toulouse in support of Count Raymond and his son, but his army
was defeated, and the king himself was killed by Montfort’s heavily outnumbered
forces at the battle of Muret in September 1213. Over the next five years, Mont-
fort continued to keep the crusade going, but Raymond of Toulouse was far from
beaten and determined to protect the right of his son, Raymond VII, to succeed
him as count. Raymond VI entered Toulouse once again with Aragonese help in
September 1217, and, after beginning a siege of the city at Easter 1218, Montfort
was killed in June by a stone thrown from the battlements.
Faith 345
With Montfort’s death, the crusade entered a new phase in which the inter-
ests of the French kings themselves came to the fore. Initially, Pope Honorius III
acknowledged Montfort’s son, Amaury, as heir to his conquests in Languedoc. But
Amaury lacked his father’s abilities, and his army was small. The pope saw the cap-
ture of Toulouse as key to the success of the crusade, but even when a large French
army under the heir to the throne, Prince Louis, came south in the spring of 1219,
it was unable to take the city and returned home. In this political and military
vacuum, Raymond VI had recovered all his lands by the time he died in 1222 and
was succeeded as count by Raymond VII. Two years later, Amaury de Montfort,
having lost all his father had gained, retired to Paris and surrendered his claims in
Languedoc to Louis VIII, who had become king in 1223 following the death of
Philip II. In 1226, King Louis led a new crusade against Languedoc and took the
submission of most of the southern French lords (not Raymond VII, however, who
had been excommunicated), but he was unable to build on this success before he
died in November. The war against Raymond VII resumed in 1228, and he even-
tually accepted that he could not fight without allies against an intransigent pope
(by this time Gregory IX) and a determined monarchy. He therefore made peace
with both at Paris in April 1229. Having made various concessions – amongst other
things, Raymond agreed to prosecute heretics, restore church property, dismantle
castles and go on crusade to the Holy Land – he was reconciled to the Church and
confirmed in almost all of his lands west of the river Rhône. Raymond’s daughter
Jeanne would marry one of the king’s brothers, and their children would have sole
rights of succession in Toulouse. If they died childless, these rights would revert
to the crown: this is what happened when Jeanne and her husband, Alphonse of
Poitiers, died without heirs in 1271.
As has been seen already, the French kings successfully took advantage of the
crusade in Languedoc to extend their political influence into the far south of their
kingdom. For all the violence of the crusade and its occasional successes, however,
it failed to eradicate heresy in Languedoc, which had recovered since Montfort’s
death in 1218 and was still prevalent by 1229. In the agreement he made at Paris,
Raymond VII had agreed to enforce the heresy laws in his lands, but his attempts
to do so were unsuccessful as the local priests and laymen appointed to root out
Catharism proved unwilling to take action against their friends and neighbours.
Therefore, Pope Gregory IX commissioned the Dominicans to take on the task.
From 1233, Dominican friars learned in theology were selected to make inquisi-
tion for heresy across Languedoc, and for the next decade, they travelled across the
region calling on those guilty of heresy to come forward and confess their sins. If
individuals did this spontaneously and fully, they could be absolved without fur-
ther punishment, but only after they had given the inquisitors the names of others
they knew to be heretics. The named individuals were then summoned before the
inquisitors. If they failed to appear, they were excommunicated and liable to arrest
by the secular authorities, but if they made willing, full confessions, they would
be given penance in accordance with the severity of their offences – the payment
of alms, pilgrimage and so on. Those accused who were thought to have given
incomplete or insincere confessions could be imprisoned for life, whilst those who
refused to repent at all or lapsed into heresy again faced being handed over to the
secular authorities and burned alive. Burning and torture seem to have been used
only rarely in the normal course of events. Having said that, known heretics who
were already dead could also be dug up and publicly burned. There was resistance
to the Inquisition, most famously in 1242 when the inquisitor Guillaume Arnaud
and his colleagues were murdered at Avignonet by a group of knights based at the
castle of Montségur. This stronghold, built on a seemingly impregnable moun-
taintop south of Foix, was a Cathar stronghold, but following the murders at Avi-
gnonet, it was targeted by the inquisition and besieged. The castle was captured
after ten months in March 1244, and more than 200 alleged perfecti were burned
to death.
On the face of things, the Inquisition had much more success in eradicating
Catharism than the Albigensian Crusade. The secular aristocracy in Languedoc
seems to have cooperated with the inquisitors (Raymond VII and his successor
as Count of Toulouse, Alphonse of Poitiers, both became staunch supporters of
orthodoxy), perhaps for fear of being seen as sympathetic to heresy themselves, and
without significant high-level support, there was little ordinary men and women
could do to avoid having their lives and beliefs scrutinised and questioned. By the
early fourteenth century, it seems, Catharism in Languedoc had ceased to be a
major problem, and in 1321, the last known Cathar perfectus was burned in Tou-
louse. Having said all this, it is still hard to judge just how effective the Inquisition
actually was, and this raises bigger questions about the seriousness of the Cathar
challenge as a whole. Perhaps in the end there was not that much for the Inquisi-
tion to suppress because Catharism had never been as popular or as widespread
as its contemporary critics alleged. Indeed, perhaps it never existed as a separate,
organised and coherent faith at all, and perhaps the descriptions of it which sur-
vive were fabricated later by hostile chroniclers keen to justify the imposition of
northern French rule on a part of the kingdom with a long tradition of defiant
autonomy.
It is certainly possible to see the Albigensian Crusade as a civil war for the
control of southern France rather than a war primarily about the suppression of
heresy. After all, the kind of dissatisfaction with the established Church which is
conventionally seen as underpinning the development of Catharism was hardly
unique to Languedoc. The Church’s growing wealth and power were unattrac-
tive to many devout men and women who tried to live more pious, ardent and
austere lives based on scripture. Such individuals could provide a more meaningful
example to friends and relatives than hapless, illiterate parish priests, but it required
only a small imaginative leap on the part of those concerned about the influence
of such boni homines and bonas femnas (or, indeed, on the part of those keen to find
a justification for political and military intervention in Languedoc) to see them as
agents of a much bigger, much more sinister and coordinated Europe-wide hereti-
cal movement. This is not to say that heretical beliefs did not exist in twelfth- and
Faith 347
early thirteenth-century Europe – evidently they did. And it is probably also going
too far to talk of what some historians have referred to as the fiction or myth of
Catharism. Nevertheless, the traditional view of the Albigensian Crusade as a holy
war directed against a discrete, institutionalised alternative to Christianity is almost
certainly too simplistic, and the possibility remains that the differences between
orthodox Christians and those accused of heresy were neither great nor obvious.
To be sure, the secular and ecclesiastical authorities behind the crusade saw heresy
as a serious menace, but the military campaigns they launched and the subsequent
establishment of the Inquisition were as much about political power as they were
about religious faith.
...
By the early thirteenth century, crusades had been authorised by the papacy against
Muslims in Iberia, pagans in northern Europe and heretics in France. All of these
groups were seen as threats to the institutions of the western Church and to the
eternal salvation of faithful Christians. There was still one more group that would
feel the force of the papacy’s crusading fury by the end of this period, however, as
the popes turned on those Christian Europeans whose political plans and ambitions
stood in the way of the papacy’s own. Throughout the twelfth century, popes had
argued with, fought against and sometimes excommunicated their political oppo-
nents, particularly those like Roger II and Frederick Barbarossa who had challenged
papal interests in Italy. But no pope had ever declared such wars and campaigns to
be crusades. Innocent III began to change this. Following the death of Emperor
Henry VI in 1197, one of his most trusted lieutenants, Markward of Anweiler, was
left in control of much of central Italy and claimed to be the appointed regent of
the Sicilian kingdom. This was a delicate moment, and Innocent III was still in sev-
eral minds about which of the rival candidates for the German and Sicilian thrones,
and along with them the imperial title, he should back – Henry VI’s brother Philip
of Swabia and Henry’s young son Frederick both had solid hereditary claims (the
pope was also the latter’s guardian), while support for the Welf candidate Otto of
Brunswick, the son of Henry the Lion, was also strong. In the meantime, however,
Markward was more than a nuisance. He had ambitions to extend his influence
further south in Italy and to invade Sicily and even (perhaps) claim the Sicilian
crown for himself. At the end of 1199, therefore, Innocent wrote in thundering
tones to the people of Sicily. Markward was ‘another Saladin’ and ‘a worse infidel
than the infidel’: he had conspired with his Muslim allies and would surrender
Sicily to them, putting all future crusades to the Holy Land in peril. Those who
opposed him, the pope declared, would receive the same privileges as if they were
campaigning to save Jerusalem.
The crusade against Markward of Anweiler was not widely preached, and his
death in 1202 took care of the problem he posed. Nevertheless, and despite Inno-
cent’s attempt to portray Markward as something other than a Christian, a prec-
edent for political crusading had been set. Something similar happened in England
a few years later. Having placed the kingdom under interdict and excommunicated
King John in 1208–9 because of his refusal to accept Stephen Langton as archbishop
of Canterbury, the thirteenth-century English chronicler Roger of Wendover later
claimed that the pope was prepared to sanction a French invasion of the kingdom
and classify it as a crusade. There is no convincing evidence to support this charge,
however, and more telling is the way Innocent vilified those English barons who
continued to oppose John after he had submitted to the pope in 1213, taken the
Cross and successfully asked his new papal overlord to annul Magna Carta. Oblig-
ingly, the pope declared the recalcitrant barons ‘worse than the Saracens’ in their
attempt to depose a king who had vowed to go on crusade. So even if there was no
crusade as such, the language Innocent deployed came straight from the crusading
lexicon: those who opposed the pope in politics were as bad, if not worse, than
those whose religious beliefs he rejected. The ultimate targets of this developing
ideology, of course, were the emperor Frederick II and his sons. The story of their
quarrels with the papacy lie beyond the scope of this book, but a string of crusades
was launched against the Hohenstaufen from the late 1230s in an eventually suc-
cessful attempt to oust them from Sicily. And when the new Angevin rulers of the
island were themselves removed from power by the Aragonese in the 1280s, the
papacy responded by calling for yet more crusades to restore Angevin control.
Between the 1140s and the 1240s, crusading came to be employed regularly for
purposes other than the recapture of the Holy Land. Crusades were no longer just
defensive wars designed to recover lost Christian territory, and crusading ideology
was refined to justify extending the boundaries of Latin Christendom into areas
where Christianity had never before had a presence and to wage war within Europe
for overtly political purposes. At the heart of these developments was the papacy
which, during this period, finally became the kind of major political power envis-
aged by Gregory VII in the 1070s. For Alexander III, Innocent III and Gregory IX,
Christian unity was imperilled by the rise of heresy, and that unity could only be
preserved through forceful papal leadership of the Church. Whether the challenges
of paganism and heresy were real or exaggerated, they had to exist in order to
justify the ever-increasing involvement of the established Church in international
affairs and the lives of ordinary Christians.
CONCLUSION
Traditionally, the period between about 900 and about 1200 has been seen as
one that began in darkness and ended in light. Ninth-century, post-Carolingian
Western Europe was chaotic and in crisis, its recognisably cultivated structures of
government and administration had broken down and enemies from outside were
stressing its frontiers and imperilling its future. Three hundred years later, however,
all of this was just a bad memory. Latin civilisation had not just survived, it had
triumphed; a more ordered, more rational world had been created, nation states
had begun to emerge and the foundations of modern Europe had been laid. These
processes were affected by a series of interrelated revolutions. In the countryside,
profound changes in the status of the peasantry occurred in parallel with the trans-
formation of aristocratic society: more intensive exploitation of land was facilitated
by dramatic developments in agricultural methods and techniques, leading to the
creation of a subjugated peasantry, while knighthood emerged as the dominant
means of elite self-identification alongside an increasing emphasis on primogeni-
ture as the basis for the transmission of landed resources and power. And there was
an intellectual revolution, too, particularly at the end of this period. Historians over
the last century or so have written extensively about a ‘Twelfth-Century Renais-
sance’. In their different ways, the simultaneous and overlapping effects of the papal
reform movement, the Crusades, the new monastic orders of the twelfth century
and the growth of religious heterodoxy gave rise to dynamic spiritual revival and
renewal, while the rediscovery of classical texts and Roman law and the growing
influence of the schools of Paris and Bologna led to the invention of new ways of
learning. There were advances in science and the emergence of new artistic and
architectural styles. Novel approaches to ideas fed into Western European systems
of secular and ecclesiastical government, too, where the emphasis on the written
word as the principal expression of authority became increasingly marked, as did
DOI: 10.4324/9781003013662-14
the associated need for trained administrators and dedicated officials to staff and
nurture this culture of expertise.
Now there is no doubt that fundamental changes did affect Western Europe
between the end of the tenth century and the start of the thirteenth. By the early
1200s, more than 200 years of aggressive territorial expansion meant that every-
where from Ireland in the west to Poland in the east, from Scandinavia in the north
to the Syrian coastline in the south was part of Latin Christendom. Western Europe
was simply much bigger in the 1220s than it had been in the 890s, and far more
people worshipped in Latin and accepted the authority of the pope as their spiritual
leader than ever before. This increase in numbers did not just come about through
the subjugation of people moreover, or by the incorporation of pagans, Greeks or
Muslims into one Latin Christian polity or another. This was a period of significant
population growth within those areas that were already part of Western Europe at
the start of the period covered by this book. This demographic shift was both a cause
and a consequence of other dramatic developments. The number of settlements
increased as did the amount of cultivated land. Many of these settlements evolved
into towns, and accelerating urbanisation was a key feature of these three centuries,
more obviously in some parts of Western Europe than in others, but everywhere
to an extent. To feed these towns and create a saleable surplus for its landlords, the
countryside was farmed more efficiently and productively by increasingly subservi-
ent peasants, while extensive networks of roads and bridges were established to keep
a growing economy moving and money became the principal means of exchange.
It is important to emphasise, however, as I have tried to do throughout this book,
that, to the extent that these changes did happen, they did so at different times in
different places, at different rates, to different degrees and with different degrees of
permanence. And for all the talk of ‘progress’, women remained excluded from the
public exercise of power, while the treatment of Europe’s minorities, particularly
its Jewish populations, serves as a reminder that toleration of cultural and religious
differences went only so far. Western Europe in the early 1200s remained politi-
cally, economically, culturally, linguistically and spiritually diverse, and it would be
simplistic to see the story of this period as one of uniform, inexorable movement
away from ignorance towards enlightenment. Lazy talk of ‘the medieval founda-
tions of the modern state’ also ignores the fact that what happened next was not
always indicative of continuing evolution. To be sure, representative institutions,
bureaucratic regimes and systems of national taxation began slowly to emerge in
some areas, but both territorial expansion and population growth peaked during
the thirteenth century, while economic stagnation and plague were the most strik-
ing characteristics of the fourteenth; major dynastic wars convulsed the principal
monarchies of Western Europe, while the power of the papacy declined rapidly.
Back in the 1220s, there was nothing inevitable or predestined about the way West-
ern Europe would develop over the next 300 years.
So if what actually happened in Western Europe between about 890 and about
1220 cannot bear the weight of the origin stories so often built upon it, where does
that leave considerations of this period? This book is primarily about developments
Conclusion 351
in politics and religion, so I will focus on those just one more time. As far as the
latter is concerned, there can be no doubt that, between the late ninth and early
thirteenth centuries, the Latin Christian Church became more organised, more
institutionalised, richer and more powerful. At the start of this period, ecclesiasti-
cal organisation was atomised and incoherent at the local level, and there was little
by way of meaningful centralised (that is, papal) leadership. At its end, by contrast,
entire regions around the newly expanded edges of Western Europe, in Iberia,
southern Italy, Syria, Scandinavia and eastern Europe, had been incorporated into
Latin Christendom for the first time; new dioceses had been established to cater
for this; a network of parishes had been constructed to meet the needs of local
congregations; and the status of the clergy as a superior caste whose job it was
to lead a flawed laity to salvation had been settled. As for leadership, the papacy’s
status, influence and power had been radically transformed. Weak and corrupt in
900, by 1200 it was a superpower: papal influence was felt across Western Europe,
and no other authority, secular or religious, could ignore it without consequences.
A concerted attempt to prescribe, codify and enforce canon law underpinned all
these developments, and their culmination came at the Fourth Lateran Council in
1215 where Christian orthodoxy was defined and a comprehensive vision for the
future of Christianity was set down. The triumph of Latin Christianity was not
complete, of course. As Innocent III presided over his great council in 1215, the
crusading movement was in crisis, and Cathar heretics were still at large in southern
France. Bitter struggles between the papacy and secular rulers in Western Europe
would be as much a feature of the thirteenth century as they had been of the pre-
vious three, while other issues would arise to challenge notions of papal control.
The Franciscans, for example, would fail to manage the tension between idealistic
poverty on the one hand and the demands of being an international religious order
on the other. Further afield, the Mongol threat that appeared for the first time in
the mid-thirteenth century was arguably more serious than anything the vikings
and Magyars ever presented. In neither case would the papacy show itself capable
of effective, imaginative leadership.
As for the exercise of secular power, historians in recent years have been keen
to moderate and temper notions of institutionalisation and state formation. In
the tenth and eleventh centuries, control of territory and the ability to exploit
resources were based on personal relationships between more and less powerful
men. Lordship was what counted, and lordship was idiosyncratic, arbitrary and vio-
lent, founded on control of fortified strongholds and a ruthless capacity to domi-
nate and terrify local and regional populations. Even kings had little sense of acting
in any kind of public role. They were lords, too, the only difference between them
and other lords being the extent of their resources and the size of their followings.
If something they did looks like institutional development to a modern eye, this is
anachronistic. Everything, even Henry I’s Exchequer, was designed first and fore-
most to enhance a particular lord’s control over his vassals and facilitate the extrac-
tion of resources for their personal gain. Government, such as it was, existed for the
benefit of the king, not for the welfare of his people.
Personal lordship certainly remained a dominant, destabilising force in politics

until well into the twelfth century and beyond. Nevertheless, it is still probably fair
to say that many parts of Western Europe in the early 1200s were more ordered and
more intensively governed than they had been in the turbulent, chaotic early 900s.
Lords were beginning to appreciate that, rather than exploit resources crudely and
brutally, it might be better to manage them more thoughtfully (that is, peacefully)
in order to make them more productive. For their part, kings understood that, if
they could impose greater control over lesser lords, not only might life become
more stable and peaceful, but also their own power would increase as would their
capacity to extract even more resources. To do this, effectual centralised systems and
enforceable new laws needed to be developed: consciously or not, and certainly for
their own self-aggrandisement, kings began to act as architects of the state. Other
changes during these centuries underpinned these evolving approaches to power.
For example, the gradual transition to a more monetised economy meant that lords
needed cash rather than payments in kind to sustain their lifestyles and meet their
wider needs. In order to do this, more sophisticated systems of estate administration
and money-raising were required. Ultimately, this meant more experts who could
read and write, and competence began to challenge, or at least exist alongside, loy-
alty as the main qualification for positions within a lordly entourage.
Many historians of Anglo-Saxon England would argue strongly that key ele-
ments of state infrastructure were in place there by 1066: a network of territo-
rial units (shires) that facilitated administration, systems of national coinage and
taxation, law courts and more. The same historians would probably also claim,
however, that eleventh-century England was unique in this regard. It has been
more widely acknowledged that the growth of bureaucratic professionalism and
efficiency, along with the emergence of more recognisable state mechanisms, were
prominent features of twelfth-century royal government across most of Western
Europe to some extent. The growing amount of surviving administrative sources
from the late twelfth century onwards may distort the picture here, and it is pos-
sible to argue that, where changes did occur and where state institutions did begin
to appear, this still only happened to service the personal needs of dominant royal
lords. However, it does seem fair to argue that something was changing in the way
rulers went about their business by the early thirteenth century. For example, Hun-
gary’s Golden Bull (1222) at least suggested that a king had responsibilities as well
as rights, and it is hard to deny that Magna Carta contains ideas and concepts that
make it more than a response to a list of sectional, lordly grievances. In 1215, the
programme put together by England’s political elite considered more than just their
own selfish whims and tentatively began to set out norms of good, accountable
government in the interests of a wider community. It would be unwise to push this
too far at this stage – rulers and powerful elites would monopolise political power
and use it to pursue their own interests for centuries to come. But whilst govern-
ment had always been a matter of negotiation between a ruler and his elites, from
this point onwards institutions would begin to emerge that formalised the need
Conclusion 353
for kings to take account of, and concede to, views other than their own. What is
more, in some places the seeds of another idea had arguably been planted by the
end of the period covered by this book, the idea of rational government directed
towards public ends. By the 1220s, a recognisably modern political culture was still
far in the distance, but the next stage in Western Europe’s long and difficult journey
towards that destination had begun.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER
READING
This is no more than a short list of the printed primary sources and secondary
works that I have found most useful while writing this book. I hope that an inter-
ested reader might go on to look at some of them and take things further from
there. The list contains only works written in English or published in English
translation. This inevitably means that there is a preponderance of material about
British history, although that is also partly due to my own relative unfamiliarity
with the material available for studying the other regions of Western Europe dur-
ing this period. All references to NCMH are to the specified volumes of The New
Cambridge Medieval History. The essays there are essential reference points.
General Works Covering All or Part of this Period

Barber, M., The Two Cities: Medieval Europe, 1050–1320, 2nd edn (Abingdon, 2004).
Bartlett, R., The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change, 950–1350
(London, 1994).
———, Blood Royal: Dynastic Politics in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2020).
Bisson, T.N., The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship and the Origins of European
Government (Princeton/Oxford, 2009).
Blockmans, W. and Hoppenbrouwers, P., Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300–1500, 3rd edn
(Abingdon, 2018).
Cotts, J.D., Europe’s Long Twelfth Century: Order, Anxiety and Adaptation, 1095–1229 (Bas-
ingstoke/New York, 2013).
McKitterick, R. (ed.), The Early Middle Ages: Europe 400–1000 (Oxford, 2001).
Moore, R.I., The First European Revolution, c.970–1215 (Oxford, 2000).
Mossman, S. (ed.), Debating Medieval Europe: The Early Middle Ages, c.450–c.1050 (Manches-
ter, 2020), esp. Chs.4–9.
Nelson, J.L, ‘Rulers and Government’, in NCMH III, Ch.4.
Power, D. (ed.), The Central Middle Ages: Europe 950–1320 (Oxford, 2006).
Reynolds, S., ‘Government and Community’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.4.

Rollason, D., Early Medieval Europe, 300–1050: The Birth of Western Society (Harlow, 2012).
Wickham, C., The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400–1000 (London, 2009).
———, Medieval Europe (New Haven/London, 2016).
Germany and the Empire
Some Relevant Sources and Source Collections

Bachrach, B.S. and Bachrach, D.S. (trans.), Widukind of Corvey, Deeds of the Saxons (Wash-
ington, 2014).
Hill, B.H. (ed.), Medieval Monarchy in Action: The German Monarchy from Henry I to Henry IV
(London, 1972).
Mommsen, T.E. and Morrison, K.F. (trans.), Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century
(New York, 1962).
Robinson, I.S. (trans.), Eleventh Century Germany: The Swabian Chronicles (Manchester, 2008).
———, The Annals of Lampert of Hersfeld (Manchester, 2015).
Warner, D.A. (trans.), Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg (Manchester,
2001).
Some Important Secondary Works

Althoff, G., Otto III, trans. P.J. Jestice (Philadelphia, 2003).
———, ‘Saxony and the Elbe Slavs in the Tenth Century’, in NCMH III, Ch.10.
Arnold, B., Medieval Germany, 500–1300: A Political Interpretation (New York, 1997).
———, ‘The Western Empire, 1125–1197’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.14.
Bachrach, David S., Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany (Woodbridge, 2012).
Bernhardt, J.W., Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany, c.936–
1075 (Cambridge, 1993).
Blumenthal, U.-R., The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the
Twelfth Century (Philadelphia, 1988).
Freed, J., Frederick Barbarossa, the Prince and the Myth (New Haven/London, 2016).
Fuhrman, H., Germany in the High Middle Ages, c.1050–1200, trans. T. Reuter (Cambridge,
1986).
Hampe, K., Germany Under the Salian and Hohenstaufen Emperors (Oxford, 1974).
Haverkamp, A., Medieval Germany, 1056–1200, trans. H. Braun and R. Mortimer, 2nd edn
(Oxford, 1992).
Leyser, K., Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979).
———, Medieval Germany and Its Neighbours 900–1250 (London, 1984), esp. Chs.2, 4, 7.
Müller-Mehrtens, E., ‘The Ottonians as Kings and Emperors’, in NCMH III, Ch.9.
Parisse, M., ‘Lotharingia’, in NCMH III, Ch.12.
Reuter, T., ‘The “Imperial Church System” of the Ottonian and Salian Rulers: A Recon-
sideration’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33 (1982), pp. 347–74; reprinted in T. Reuter,
Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. J.L. Nelson (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 325–54.
———, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, c.800–1056 (London/New York, 1991).
Robinson, I.S., Henry IV of Germany, 1056–1106 (Cambridge, 1999).
Vollrath, H., ‘The Western Empire Under the Salians’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.3.
Wolfram, H., ‘Bavaria in the Tenth and Early Eleventh Centuries’, in NCMH III, Ch.11.
356 Suggestions for Further Reading
France

Benton, J.F. (trans.), Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent
(1064?-c.1125) (New York, 1970).
Christiansen, E. (trans.), Dudo of St Quentin, History of the Normans (Woodbridge, 1998).
France, J. (ed.), ‘Rodulfus Glaber, the Five Books of the Histories’, in J. France, N. Bulst and
P. Reynolds (eds.), Rodolfus Glaber Opera (Oxford, 1998).
Suger, The Deeds of Louis the Fat, trans. With introduction and notes by Richard C. Cusi-
mano and John Moorhead (Washington, 1992).

Baldwin, J.W., The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the
Middle Ages (Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1986).
———, ‘Crown and Government’, in ‘The Kingdom of the Franks from Louis VI to Philip
II’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.17(a).
Bates, D., Normandy Before 1066 (London, 1982).
———, ‘West Francia: The Northern Principalities’, in NCMH III, Ch.16.
Bradbury, J., Philip Augustus, King of France 1180–1223 (London/New York, 1998).
———, The Capetians: Kings of France 987–1328 (London, 2007).
Brittain Bouchard, C., ‘The Kingdom of the Franks to 1108’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.5.
Bull, M. (ed.), France in the Central Middle Ages (Oxford, 2002).
Bur, M., ‘The Seigneuries’, in ‘The Kingdom of the Franks from Louis VI to Philip II’, in
NCMH IV Part II, Ch.17(b).
Dunbabin, J., France in the Making, 843–1180, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2000).
———, ‘West Francia: The Kingdom’, in NCMH III, Ch.15.
Hagger, Mark, Norman Rule in Normandy, 911–1144 (Woodbridge, 2017).
Hallam, E.M., Capetian France, 987–1328, 3rd edn (Abingdon, 2020).
Hallam, E.M. and West, C., ‘The King and the Princess in Eleventh-Century France’, Bul-
letin of the Institute of Historical Research, 53 (1980), pp. 143–56.
Zimmerman, M., ‘West Francia: The Southern Principalities’, in NCMH III, Ch.17.
Britain and Ireland

Anderson, A.O. (ed.), Scottish Annals from English Chroniclers, AD 500–1296 (London, 1908).
———, Early Sources of Scottish History, AD 500–1286 (Edinburgh, 1922).
Brown, R.A. (ed.), The Norman Conquest of England: Sources and Documents (Woodbridge,
1984).
Campbell, A., Encomium Emmae Reginae, with a supplementary introduction by Simon
Keynes (Cambridge, 1998).
Chibnall, M. (ed.), The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1968–80).
Davis, R.H.C. and Chibnall, M. (eds. And trans.), The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers
(Oxford, 1998).
Douglas, D.C. and Greenaway, G.W. (eds.), English Historical Documents, Vol.2: c.500–1042,
2nd edn. (London, 1981).
Evans, D.S. (ed. And trans.), A Medieval Prince of Wales: The Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan (Lla-
nerch, 1990).
Mac Airt, S. and Mac Niocaill, G. (eds. And trans.), The Annals of Ulster (Dublin, 1983).
Mynors, R.A.B., Thomson, R.M. and Winterbottom, M. (eds. And trans.), William of
Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, 2 vols. (Oxford,
1998–9).
Rothwell, H. (ed.), English Historical Documents, Vol.3: 1189–1327 (London, 1975).
Whitelock, D. (ed.), English Historical Documents, Vol.1: c.500–1042 (London, 1955).
Whitelock, D., Douglas, D.C. and Tucker S.I. (eds. And trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
A Revised Translation (New Brunswick, 1961).
Williams, A. and Martin, G.H. (eds. And trans.), Domesday Book: A Complete Translation
(London, 2003).
Williams ab Ithel, J. (ed.), Brut y Tywyssogion; or, The Chronicle of the Princes (London, 1860).
Wilson, D.M. (ed.), The Bayeux Tapestry: The Complete Tapestry in Colour (London, 2004).

Aurell, M., The Plantagenet Empire, 1154–1224 (Harlow, 2007).
Barrow, G.W.S., The Kingdom of the Scots: Government, Church and Society from the Eleventh to
the Fourteenth Century, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 2003).
———, ‘Scotland, Wales and Ireland in the Twelfth Century’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.19.
Bartlett, R., England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford, 2000).
Bates, D., William the Conqueror (New Haven/London, 2016).
Bolton, T., Cnut the Great (New Haven/London, 2017).
Carpenter, D.A., The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066–1284 (London,
2004).
———, Magna Carta (London, 2015).
Chibnall, M., The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English
(Oxford, 1991).
Church, S.D., King John: England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant (London, 2015).
Clanchy, M.T., England and Its Rulers, 1066–1307, 4th edn (Oxford, 2014).
Davies, R.R., Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–
1300 (Cambridge, 1990).
———, The Age of Conquest. Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1991).
Downham, C., Medieval Ireland (Cambridge, 2018).
Duffy, S., ‘Ireland c.1000-c.1100’, in P. Stafford (ed.), A Companion to the Early Middle Ages:
Britain and Ireland, c.500-c.1100 (Oxford, 2009).
Foot, S., Aethelstan: The First King of England (New Haven/London, 2011).
Gillingham, J., Richard I (New Haven/London, 1999).
Green, J., Henry I. King of England and Duke of Normandy (Cambridge, 2006).
Higham, N.J. and Ryan, M.J. (eds.), The Anglo-Saxon World (New Haven/London, 2013).
Huscroft, R., The Norman Conquest: A New Introduction (Abingdon, 2009).
———, Ruling England, 1042–1217, 2nd edn (Abingdon, 2016).
———, Making England, c.796–1042 (Abingdon, 2018).
Keynes, S.D., ‘England, c.900–1016’, in NCMH III, Ch.18.
King, E., King Stephen (New Haven/London, 2010).
Licence, T., Edward the Confessor: Last of the Royal Blood (New Haven/London, 2020).
Maddicott, J.R., The Origins of the English Parliament, 924–1327 (Oxford, 2010).
Mason, E., William II: Rufus the Red King (Stroud, 2005).
Molyneaux, G., The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford, 2015).
Oram, R., David I: The King Who Made Scotland (Stroud, 2005).
———, Domination and Lordship: Scotland 1070–1230 (Edinburgh, 2011).
Owen, D.D.R., William the Lion, 1143–1214: Kingship and Culture (East Linton, 1997).
Roach, L., Aethelred the Unready, 978–1016 (New Haven/London, 2016).
Stafford, P., Unification and Conquest: A Political and Social History of England in the Tenth and
Eleventh Centuries (London, 1989).
———, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh Century
England (Oxford, 1997).
Taylor, A., The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124–1290 (Oxford, 2016).
Warren, W.L., Henry II (New Haven/London, 1973).
Woolf, A., From Pictland to Alba, 789–1070 (Edinburgh, 2007).
Almost anyone of any importance in British history during this period will be
the subject of an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Colin
Matthew, Brian Harrison, Lawrence Goldman, David Cannadine (Oxford, 1992-).
This is an extraordinary and immensely helpful resource, both in its printed and its
online forms (www.oxforddnb.com/). Written by leading specialists, the essays are
scholarly, informed and digestible.
Iberia
Some Relevant Sources

Barton, S. and Fletcher, R. (eds. and trans.), The World of El Cid: Chronicles of the Spanish
Reconquest (Manchester, 2000).
Raffel, B. (trans.), The Song of the Cid (London, 2009).

Barton, S., ‘Spain in the Eleventh Century’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.6.
Collins, R., ‘The Spanish Kingdoms’, in NCMH III, Ch.28.
Fletcher, R., Moorish Spain (London, 1992).
Kennedy, H., Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (Harlow, 1996).
———, ‘Muslim Spain and Portugal: al-Andalus and Its Neighbours’, in NCMH IV Part
I, Ch.16.
Linehan, P., ‘Spain in the Twelfth Century’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.16.
Reilly, B.F., The Medieval Spains (Cambridge, 1993).
Italy

Loud, G.A. and Wiedemann, T. (trans. and annotated), The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by
‘Hugo Falcandus’, 1154–69 (Manchester, 1998).
——— (trans. and annotated), Roger II and the Creation of the Kingdom of Sicily (Manchester,
2012).
van Houts, E. (ed. and trans.), The Normans in Europe (Manchester, 2000), Part V.

Abulafia, D. (ed.), Italy in the Central Middle Ages, 1000–1300 (Oxford, 2004), esp. Chs.1–3.
Houben, H., Roger II of Sicily: A Ruler Between East and West (Cambridge, 2008).
Kennedy, H., ‘Sicily and al-Andalus Under Muslim Rule’, in NCMH III, Ch.27.
Loud, G.A., The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (Harlow,
2000).
———, ‘Norman Sicily in the Twelfth Century’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.15(b).
———, ‘Southern Italy in the Eleventh Century’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.4(b).
———, ‘Southern Italy in the Tenth Century’, in NCMH III, Ch.26.
Matthew, D., The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Cambridge, 1992).
Sergi, G., ‘The Kingdom of Italy’, in NCMH III, Ch.14.
Tabacco, G., ‘Northern and Central Italy in the Eleventh Century’, in NCMH IV Part II,
Ch.4(a).
———, ‘Northern and Central Italy in the Twelfth Century’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.15(a).
Waley, D. and Dean, T., The Italian City-Republics, 4th edn (London, 2010).
Scandinavia
Some Relevant Sources

Friis-Jensen, K. (ed.), Saxo Grammaticus, The History of the Danes, trans. Peter Fisher, 2 vols.
(Oxford, 2015).
Monsen, E. and Smith, A.H. (trans.), Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, trans. in part in From the
Sagas of the Norse Kings (Oslo, 1967).
Tschan, F.J. (trans.), Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, with a new
introduction by T. Reuter (New York, 2002).

Bagge, S., From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway, c.900–1350
(Copenhagen, 2009).
Brink, S. and Price, N. (eds.), The Viking World (London, 2008).
Helle, K. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Vol. I: Prehistory to 1520 (Cambridge,
2003), esp. Parts II–III.
Lund, N., ‘Scandinavia, c.700–1066’, in NCMH II, Ch.8.
Sawyer, B. and Sawyer P., Medieval Scandinavia: From Conversion to Reformation, c.800–1500
(Minneapolis/London, 1993).
Sawyer, P., ‘Scandinavia in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in NCMH IV Part II,
Ch.11.
Poland, Hungary and Bohemia

Bakay, K., ‘Hungary’, in NCMH III, Ch.28.
Berend, N., ‘Hungary in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.12.
Manteuffel, T., The Formation of the Polish State: The Period of Ducal Rule, 963–1194 (Detroit,
1982).
Sedlar, J.W., East Central Europe in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500 (Washington, 1994).
Strzelczyk, J., ‘Bohemia and Poland: Two Examples of Successful Slavonic State-Formation’,
in NCMH III, Ch.20.
Wyrozumski, J., ‘Poland in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in NCMH IV Part II,
Ch.10.
Church and Papacy

Emerton, E. (trans.), The Correspondence of Gregory VII: Selected Letters from the Registrum
(New York, 1932).
Matarasso, P. (trans.), The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century (London,
1993).
Miller, M.C., Power and the Holy in the Age of the Investiture Contest: A Brief History with
Documents (Boston, 2005).
Robinson, I.S. (trans.), The Papal Reform of the Eleventh Century: Lives of Pope Leo IX and Pope
Gregory VII (Manchester, 2004).
Squatriti, P. (trans.), The Complete Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Washington, 2007).
Tierney, B., The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1964).

Berman, C., The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century
Europe (Philadelphia, 2000).
Blumenthal, U.-R., ‘The Papacy, 1024–1122’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.2.
Constable, G., ‘Religious Communities, 1024–1215’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.10.
Cowdrey, H.E.J., Pope Gregory VII, 1073–1085 (Oxford, 1998).
———, ‘The Structure of the Church, 1024–1073’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.8.
Hamilton, B., ‘Religion and the Laity’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.13.
Lambert, M., The Cathars (London, 1998).
———, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 3rd
edn (Oxford, 2002).
Lawrence, C.H., Medieval Monasticism, 2nd edn (London, 1989).
Lynch, J.H. and Adamo, P.C., The Medieval Church: A Brief History, 2nd edn (Abingdon,
2014).
McKitterick, R., ‘The Church’, in NCMH III, Ch.5.
Moore, R.I., The War on Heresy, Faith and Power in Medieval Europe (London, 2012).
Morris, C., The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford, 1989).
Roach, A.P., The Devil’s World: Heresy and Society, 1100–1300 (Harlow, 2005).
Robinson, I.S., The Papacy, 1073–1198: Continuity and Innovation (Cambridge, 1990).
———, ‘The Institutions of the Church, 1076–1216’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.11.
———, ‘The Papacy, 1122–1198’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.13.
———, ‘Reform and the Church, 1073–1122’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.9.
Sayers, J., Innocent III (Cambridge, 1994).
Tellenbach, G., The Church in Western Europe from the Tenth to the Early Twelfth Century, trans.
T. Reuter (Cambridge, 1993).
Watt, J.A., ‘The Papacy’, in NCMH V, Ch.5, esp. pp. 114–26.
Webb, D., Medieval European Pilgrimage (Basingstoke, 2002).
Wollasch, J., ‘Monasticism: The First Wave of Reform’, in NCMH III, Ch.6.
The Crusades

Allen, S.J. and Amt, E., The Crusades: A Reader, 2nd edn (Toronto, 2014).
Gabrieli, F. (ed.), Arab Historians of the Crusades, trans. E.J. Costello (Berkeley and Los Ange-
les, 1969).
Hill, J. and Hill, L.L. (trans.), Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem
(Philadelphia, 1969).
Lindsay, J.E. and Murad, S.E., Muslim Sources of the Crusader Period: An Anthology (Indian-
apolis/Cambridge, 2021).
Peters, E. (ed.), Christian Society and the Crusades, 1198–1229 (Philadelphia, 1971).
———, The First Crusade: The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres and Other Source Materials
(Philadelphia, 1971).
Riley-Smith, L. and Riley-Smith, J. (eds.), The Crusades: Idea and Reality, 1095–1274 (Lon-
don, 1981).
Sewter, E.R.A. (trans.), Anna Komnene, the Alexiad, revised with introduction and notes by
P. Frankopan (London, 2003).
Tyerman, C. (ed.), Chronicles of the First Crusade (London, 2012).

Asbridge, T., The First Crusade: A New History (London, 2004).
———, The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land (London, 2010).
Barber, M., The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge, 1994).
———, The Crusader States (New Haven/London, 2012).
Christiansen, E., The Northern Crusades (London, 1997).
Cobb, P.M., The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford, 2014).
Frankopan, P., The First Crusade: The Call from the East (Cambridge, MA, 2012).
Harris, J., Byzantium and the Crusades (London/New York, 2006).
Hillenbrand, C., The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh, 1999).
Mayer, H.E., ‘The Latin East, 1098–1205’, in NCMH IV Part II, Ch.21.
Nicholson, H., The Knights Hospitaller (Woodbridge, 2001).
Pegg, M.G., A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (Oxford,
2008).
Phillips, J., The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (London, 2004).
———, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven/London,
2007).
———, Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (London, 2009).
———, The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (London, 2019).
Riley-Smith, J. (ed.), Atlas of the Crusades (London, 1991).
———, The Crusades: A History, 2nd edn (New Haven/London, 2005).

———, ‘The Crusades, 1095–1198’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.14.
Tyerman, C., God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (London, 2006).
———, The World of the Crusades: An Illustrated History (New Haven/London, 2019).
Economy and Society

Amt, E. (ed.), Women’s Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London/New York, 1993).
Chazan, R. (ed.), Church, State and Jew in the Middle Ages (New York, 1980).
McCarthy, C. (ed.), Love, Sex and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook (London/New
York, 2004).
Skinner, P. and van Houts, E. (trans.), Medieval Writings on Secular Women (London, 2011).

Bitel, L.M., Women in Early Medieval Europe, 400–1100 (Cambridge, 2002).
Chazan, R., The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 2006).
———, ‘The Jews in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.17.
Flori, J., ‘Knightly Society’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.6.
Fossier, R., Peasant Life in the Middle Ages, trans. Juliet Vale (Oxford, 1988).
———, The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages, trans. L.G. Cochrane
(Princeton, 2010).
———, ‘Rural Economy and Country Life’, in NCMH III, Ch.2.
———, ‘The Rural Economy and Demographic Growth’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.2.
Johanek, P., ‘Merchants, Markets and Towns’, in NCMH III, Ch.3.
Keene, D., ‘Towns and the Growth of Trade’, in NCMH IV Part I, Ch.3.
Lopez, R.S., The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge, 1976).
Parsons, J.C. (ed.), Medieval Queenship (Stroud, 1994), esp. Chs.3, 5–7.
Shahar, S., The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London/New York,
1983).
INDEX
Aachen 22, 25, 30, 32, 39 Adhemar (Count) 240

Abd Allah 70 Adhémar of Le Puy 186, 199
Abd al-Rahman II 69 Adolf II of Holstein (Count) 338
Abd al-Rahman III 69 Adolf I of Schauenburg 219
Abd ar-Rahman 68 Adrian IV (pope) 223 – 4, 300 – 301,
Abu’l-Qasim 74 302, 306
Achard of Montmerle 184 Adventus Anglorum 272
Adalbero of Carinthia (Duke) 114 Aed (son of Kenneth I) 61
Adalbero of Reims (Archbishop) 39 Aelfgar 143, 144
Adalbero of Trier (Archbishop) 221 Aelfgifu of Northampton 123, 132, 161
Adalbert (son of Berengar and co-king Aelfthryth 18, 53
of Italy) 26, 122 Aelfweard 51
Adalbert of Bremen (Archbishop) 117, 118 Aelfwyn 50
Adalbert of Mainz (Archbishop) 218 Aethelflaed of Mercia 18, 49 – 50, 56
Adalbert of Prague (Saint and Bishop) 32, Aethelred I 49, 50
33, 85, 297 Aethelred II (the Unready) 18, 43, 52,
Adaldag (Archbishop) 95 53 – 6, 57, 83, 110, 261
Adam of Bremen 77, 81, 160 Aethelstan (English king) 24, 51 – 2, 57, 61
Adela (spouse of Duke Richard III) 43 Aethelweard 51
Adela (spouse of Stephen of Blois) 110 Aethelwold (Bishop of Winchester) 93, 97
Adelaide (spouse of Boniface and Aethelwold aetheling 49
Godfrey) 153 Afonso Henriques (Portuguese king) 275,
Adelaide (spouse of Count Roger I of 276, 302, 337 – 8
Sicily) 110, 160, 199, 215, 281, 282 agnatic structures 108 – 9, 111
Adelaide of Aquitaine (spouse of Hugh Agnes of Courtenay 322
Capet) 40 Agnes of Méran 235
Adelaide of Italy (spouse of Lothar and Agnes of Poitou (Empress) 110, 116, 118
Otto I) 18, 22, 26, 28, 31 agricultural methods 103 – 5, 205 – 6, 349
Adelaide of Maurienne (spouse of Aidan (Irish monk) 65
Louis VI) 230 Aimery de Lusignan 333
Adela of Champagne (spouse of Louis VII) Alan II (grandson of Alan the Great) 44 – 5
232, 233 Alan of Galloway 267
Adémar of Angoulême 238 Alan the Great (King of Brittany) 44
364 Index
Alberic (Duke of Spoleto) 89 Anna of Kiev (daughter of Jaroslav) 124

Alberic II (Duke of Spoleto) 26 Anno II of Cologne (Archbishop) 118
Alberic III (Count of Tusculum) 168 Antioch, siege and battle 192, 194, 196,
Albert of Riga (Bishop) 340 198, 200
Albert the Bear 206, 219 – 20, 221, 222 Anund Jacob (Swedish king) 161
Albigensian Crusade 243, 308, 341 – 7; Apulia 155, 285 – 6; Apulian revolt 75
see also Catharism Aquitaine 36, 45 – 6, 234
Alexander I (Scottish king) 143, 266 – 7 Arduin (Italian king) 35, 73, 155
Alexander II (pope) 171 Aribert of Milan (Archbishop) 115, 153
Alexander II (Scottish king) 261, 266, 267 aristocracy, development of 17 – 19, 77, 80,
Alexander III (pope) 224 – 6, 250, 252, 295, 107, 212 – 13, 292
301, 303, 307, 311, 339, 343, 348 Arnald-Amaric (Abbot) 343, 344
Alexius I Comnenus (Byzantine emperor) Arnaud, Guillaume 346
158 – 9, 174, 187, 197 Arnold of Brescia 221, 278, 300, 303, 305
Alexius III (Byzantine emperor) 334 – 5 Arnulf de Montgomery 146
Alexius IV (Byzantine emperor) 335 Arnulf II of Bavaria (Duke) 21, 23, 25
Alfonso II of Aragon 70, 276 Arnulf II of Flanders 39, 42
Alfonso I of Aragon “the Battler” 110, 151 Arnulf I of Flanders 42
Alfonso IX of Leon and Castile 304 Arnulf of Carinthia (Emperor) 20
Alfonso VIII of Castile 275, 277 Arnulf of Reims (Archbishop) 88
Alfonso VII of Leon and Castile 151, 207, Arthurian tales 213 – 14
232, 275, 276, 337 – 8 Arthur of Brittany/Normandy/Aquitaine
Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile 149 – 51, 239 – 41, 242, 256, 257
275 – 6 artisans and craftworkers 14, 105, 107,
Alfonso V of Leon 70 207, 279
Alfred the Great (king of Wessex) 49, 50, assemblies: during Carolingian Empire 2 – 3,
64, 79 37, 47; eleventh century Scandinavia
Alice of Antioch (spouse of Bohemond II) 163 – 4; during Ottonian dynasty 22 – 3;
200, 322 tenth century England 57; things in
Alice of France, Countess of Vexin 237, Scandinavia 78
238, 239, 254 assizes 248 – 9, 289
Ali ibn Yusuf 275 Asturias-León, kingdom of 70
allegiance, oaths of 17, 214, 229, 283; Audita Tremendi (Gregory VIII) 331
see also oaths of loyalty Augustinian canons 311
Almohad rulers 275, 277, 304 Augustinian order 179, 310
Almoravid rulers 150 – 1, 275
Alphonse of Poitiers 345, 346 baillis 242
Amalric I, King of Jerusalem 322, 323, Baldwin II (King of Jerusalem) 197 – 8,
327 – 8 199 – 200
Amatus of Montecassino, 75, 154 Baldwin III (King of Jerusalem) 42, 325, 326
Amaury de Montfort 243, 345 Baldwin II of Flanders (Iron Arm) 42
Anacletus II (antipope) 219, 220, 283, 299 Baldwin I of Boulogne (King of Jerusalem)
al-Andalus (Andulasia) 68 – 71, 150 – 1, 42, 191 – 2, 195, 197 – 8, 199,
274 – 8 200 – 201, 282
Andrew I (Hungarian king) 166 Baldwin IV (King of Jerusalem) 321, 322,
Andrew II (Hungarian king) 295 – 6, 335 – 6 323, 328 – 30
Angelcynne 49 Baldwin IV of Flanders (the Bearded) 40,
Angevin Empire 236, 238 – 9, 242, 247 – 8, 42, 123
331, 348; collapse 256 – 7 Baldwin IX of Flanders (Count and
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 6, 50, 51, 53, 54, 60, Emperor of Constantinople) 335
83, 131, 132, 143, 246 Baldwin V (King of Jerusalem) 329, 330
Anglo-Saxons 48; see also England Baldwin V of Flanders (Count) 117,
Angus (Macbeth’s great grandson) 261 124 – 5, 235
Anna Comnena 158 Baltic Crusade 339
Index 365
Bamberg: Bamberg Chronicle 121; Bertha of Blois 45

bishopric 95; cathedral 35, 90 Bertha of Burgundy 40, 41
Basil II (Byzantine emperor) 30 Bertha of Sulzbach 222
Battle of Alarcos 275 Bertha of Turin 119
Battle of Andernach 25 Berthold IV of Méran 235
Battle of Ashingdon 56 Berthold of Rheinfelden 120
Battle of Bouvines 230, 256, 259, 270, 308 Berthold of Zähringen 118, 120
Battle of Brémule 126 Bertrada de Montfort 125
Battle of Brunanburh 51, 61, 66 Bible 65, 91, 306, 311, 313
Battle of Cresson 323 Billung family 27, 117, 118
Battle of Hastings 106 – 7, 130; see also bishops: bishoprics in East Frankish
William the Conqueror kingdom 27; interactions with
Battle of Hattin 322 monarchies 42; roles 92 – 8
Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa 277, 308, 344 Blanche of Castile 240, 260
Battle of Mirebeau 240 Bohemia: tenth century 29 – 35, 84 – 6;
Battle of Muret 243 eleventh century 164 – 5; twelfth century
Battle of Recknitz 27 293 – 4
Battle of Roncesvalles 67 Bohemond II of Antioch 282, 322
Battle of Sagrajas 150 Bohemond I of Antioch (Prince of Taranto)
Battle of Stiklestad 161 158 – 60, 191, 196, 198, 200, 282
Battle of Tamaron 149 Boleslav Chrobry (Polish king) 33, 34 – 5,
Battle of the Field of Blood 198, 200 78, 85 – 6, 116, 165
Battle of the Holy River 131, 161 Boleslav I (Bohemia) 85
Battle of Ucles 151 Boleslav II (Bohemia) 33, 86, 165
Battle of Unstrut 24 Boleslav III (Bohemia) 86
Bavaria see East Frankish kingdom Boleslav III Krzywousty (Polish prince)
Bayeux Tapestry 108 165 – 6, 220, 296 – 7
Beatrice (spouse of Barbarossa) 223 Boleslav II Szczodry (Polish king) 165 – 6
Beatrice (spouse of Duke Frederick) 39 Boleslav IV the Curly (Polish duke) 297
Beatrice (spouse of Godfrey) 117 Boniface of Canossa 153
Becket, Thomas 225, 230, 233, 235, Book of Armagh 66 – 7
250 – 2, 303 Borivoj (Czech leader) 86
Bede the Venerable (Saint) 48 Bretislav (Bohemian king) 86, 117, 164
Bela I (Hungarian king) 166 Brian Bóruma 66 – 7, 146, 147
Bela II the Blind (Hungarian king) 294 – 5 Britain see England
Bela III (Hungarian king) 295 Brittany 44 – 5, 239 – 40, 250, 256 – 7
Benedict (Saint) 95 Brogne, monastery 97
Benedictine Rule 89, 95 – 6, 177 – 8; Brun (Bruno) of Cologne (Archbishop) 25,
Benedictine revival 96 – 8 26, 27 – 8, 38 – 9, 93, 176
Benedict IX (pope) 115, 168 – 70 Bruno of Augsburg (Bishop) 113
Benedict V (pope) 29 Bruno of Toul (Bishop) 170; see also
Benedict VIII (pope) 35, 73, 75, 90, 91, Leo IX (pope)
92, 168 Burchard, bishop of Worms 91
Berbers of North Africa (Almoravids) Burgundy 45, 115
150 – 1, 275 burhs 14, 56 – 7
Berengaria of Navarre 238, 256 Byzantine Empire 155, 158, 187, 284 – 5,
Berengar II of Italy (of Ivrea) 26, 39, 89 287 – 8, 334 – 5
Berengar I of Italy (of Friuli) 72, 73
Berengar of Tours 319 Cadwallon 146
Bernard de Sédirac 152 Calixtus II (pope) 128, 175, 303 – 4, 306
Bernard of Anhalt 226 canon law see Christian church
Bernard of Clairvaux 177 – 9, 202, 216, Capetian dynasty 36, 39, 127 – 8, 207
219, 221, 299, 300, 310, 323 – 4, 326, capitularies 3, 58
338 – 9 Capua 154 – 5, 156, 159, 283, 285 – 6
366 Index
Carolingian Empire: disintegration of transubstantiation, doctrine of 319 – 20;

1 – 4, 20, 26, 36, 71; and English Truce of God 94; Virgin Mary 182,
administration 58 318 – 19; vocations in twelfth century
Carta Caritatis 178 309 – 16; see also papacy
Carthusian system 176 – 7, 310, 311 Christina of Markyate 180
cartularies 8 Christodoulos 285
Casimir the Just 297 Christopher (pope) 88
Castile 50, 69 – 70, 71, 126, 149, 275 chroniclers, medieval, as historical sources
castles 16, 18, 46 – 7, 107 – 8, 137, 212; 6–9
England twelfth century 248, 255; in Church councils see Christian church
Holy Land 327 – 8; in Wales 146 Church Fathers 306
Catalogue of the Barons 285 Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem
Catanii, Peter 312 182 – 3, 276
Catharism 243, 304, 308, 314 – 15, 341 – 7; Cistercian order 177 – 9, 310 – 11, 314,
see also Albigensian Crusade 317, 343
cathedrals 137; and bishops’ roles 92 – 8 Cîteaux 177 – 8
Cecile (spouse of Philip I) 200 civil law 248 – 9
Celestine III (pope) 228, 235, 302, 304, 340 Clairvaux 177; see also Bernard of Clairvaux
chansons de geste 213, 214 Clare of Assisi 312 – 13
Charlemagne 1, 20, 25, 32 Clement II (pope) 116, 170
Charles of Lotharingia (Duke) 30, 39 Clement III (antipope) 166, 172
Charles the Fat 20, 26, 36, 72 Clement III (pope) 120, 121, 302
Charles the Good of Flanders 129, 199 clerical marriage 91, 169 – 73, 306, 318
Charles the Simple (West Frankish king) Clito, William 126, 207, 302
21, 37, 43, 47 Cluniac movement 97; houses for women
charters, royal 8, 127 179; monastery at Cluny 96 – 7, 175 – 6;
chivalry 211; see also knighthood monasticism 177 – 8; monks 151 – 2, 310
Cholchillaich (king) 80 Cnut (English/Danish king) 43, 54, 55 – 6,
Chrětien de Troyes 214 110, 116, 130 – 2, 160 – 1
Christian church: anti-popes 87, 120; Cnut IV (Danish king) 164
bishops and monks 92 – 8; canonisation of Cnut Lavard (Danish prince) 290
saints 318 – 19; canon law 91 – 2, 305 – 7; Cnut V (Danish king) 290
clerical discipline 309; conversion in Cnut VI (Danish king) 235, 290, 339
Denmark 81 – 3; conversion in England cognatic family structures 108 – 9
48; conversion in Hungary 84 – 5; coin production 47, 48, 57 – 8, 137, 140,
conversion in Ireland 65; conversion 162, 248, 296; see also Exchequer
in Norway 162; conversion in Sweden Colman (Hungarian king) 166, 294
78 – 9; encounters with European colonialism 195
pagans 337 – 41; general councils 303 – 4; Columba (Irish monk) 65
heretical movements 304, 341 – 7; Columbanus (Irish monk) 65
Inquisition 346 – 7; laity 180 – 6, 313, commerce and mercantile growth 13 – 14,
316 – 20; lay brothers 178 – 9; missionary 105 – 7, 290
efforts 5, 94 – 5; monastic reform communal regimes 207, 224, 227, 279 – 80
175 – 80; pagan influences on 98; parish Concordat of Worms 154, 175, 299
system and organisation 98 – 9, 318, confraternities 207
351; political opponents 347 – 8; poverty Conrad I (East Frankish king) 21, 23, 37
174 – 5; on purgatory 320; reform Conrad II (East Frankish king and emperor)
efforts from within 128, 309, 317 – 18; 21, 35, 112 – 16, 131 – 2, 152 – 3
reforming synods 173; role in peace- Conrad III (German king) 219, 221 – 3,
keeping 94; and royal authority 4 – 5, 280, 284, 324, 338
47 – 8, 115 – 16, 125; sacramental system Conrad of Bavaria (duke) 117 – 18
98 – 9; saints 181 – 2; shrines 182 – 3; Conrad of Burgundy (king) 28
Thomas Becket affair 250 – 2; three Conrad of Carinthia 113
pope period, eleventh century 169 – 70; Conrad of Mazovia (Polish duke) 297–8, 340
Index 367
Conrad of Montferrat (King of Jerusalem) Danevirke 80, 81

331, 332, 333 David I (Scottish king) 139, 143, 249,
Conrad of Wettin (Margrave of Meissen) 261 – 3, 264
219 – 20 Decretum (Burchard) 91
Conrad the Red 25 – 6, 112 Decretum (Gratian) 306
Conrad von Staufen 220 Decretum (Ivo of Chartres) 306
consorteria 279 – 80 Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa (Otto of
Constance (French queen, spouse of Freising) 278
Robert II) 55 Deheubarth 143 – 4, 268, 269
Constance, Princess of Antioch Denmark 79 – 83, 131, 290 – 2, 339 – 40;
(daughter of Philip I) 198 see also Scandinavia
Constance, Queen of Sicily (spouse of Diarmait mac Máel na mBó 147, 252–3,
Henry VI) 227 – 8, 288, 301 272–3
Constance of Antioch (daughter of Diarmait Mac Murchada (Dermot
Bohemond II and Alice) 200, 322, 327 MacMurrough, Irish king) 253, 272
Constance of Arles 18, 40 – 1, 110, 123 Diaz, Rodrigo 149 – 50, 213
Constance of Castile 232 Dictatus Papae 172
Constantine I (Scottish king) 60 Diego of Osma, Bishop 343
Constantine II (Scottish king) 50, 51, 60 – 1 Diet of Roncaglia 224, 227, 280, 301
Constitutions of Clarendon 251 – 2 Divina dispensatione (Eugenius III) 338
conversi (lay brothers) 178 – 9 Diwau al-Tahquq al Ma’mur 285
conversion see Christian church Dobrava (spouse of Mieszko I) 85, 86
Córdoba, Caliphate of 148 – 9 Domesday Book 103, 104, 135, 138
Council of Burgos 152 Dominican Order 345
Council of Clermont 125, 173 – 4, 186, Dominic de Guzman (Dominican Order)
188, 189 314 – 16
Council of Lyons 320 Donald (Scottish king) 60
Council of Reims 303 Donald Bàn 142 – 3
Council of Troyes 202 Drogo de Hauteville 155, 156
crusader states 186, 195 – 8, 201, 211, dualism 341 – 2
321 – 3, 335 Dub (Scottish king) 62
Crusades 108, 150, 159, 166 – 7, 174; Dudo of St. Quentin (monk) 6, 43
and anti-Semitism 208; Fifth Crusade Duncan I (Scottish king) 141, 142 – 3
296, 312, 335 – 7; First Crusade 183, Dunfermline abbey 142
184, 186 – 202, 321; Fourth Crusade Dunstan of Canterbury 52, 88, 97
278, 294, 308, 333 – 6; and laity 317,
318; Military Orders 179; and Muslim Eadred 52
Revival 321 – 37; personal charters 184, Eadric Streona of Mercia 55 – 6, 57
190; political purposes 348; Richard Eadwig 52, 130
Lionheart 254 – 5; Second Crusade 231, ealdormen 57, 64, 140
234, 275 – 6, 284, 300, 321 – 7, 337 – 8; Ealdred 50
siege of Acre 238; Third Crusade earls 133, 134, 139, 140, 144, 163, 204,
327 – 34 264, 267
Cullen (son of Indulf) 62 East Anglia 49
cult of St. Wojciech (Adalbert of East Frankish kingdom 20 – 35; see also
Prague) 297 Germany
curia 304 – 5, 306 – 7 Eberhard of Bavaria (duke) 25
Cynan ap Iago 147 Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Czech kingdom 86, 117 (Bede) 48
Edgar (English king) 19, 52 – 3, 62, 97
Dafydd of Gwynedd 269, 271 Edgar (Scottish king) 143
Daimbert of Pisa, Archbishop 199 Edgar II (Atheling) 133 – 4, 141
Damasus II (pope) 170 Edith (spouse of Edward) 133
Dandolo, Enrico 334 Edith (spouse of Gruffudd) 144
368 Index
Edith (spouse of Henry I, English king) Ferdinand I of Leon-Castile 149

136, 141, 143 Fergus of Galloway 264
Edith (spouse of Otto) 24 Fernando III of Castile (King) 277
Edmund I (English king) 52, 61 Fernando Sánchez 70
Edmund Ironside 56, 130, 134 feudal incidents 139, 255
education and schools 92, 98, 216 – 17, 316 feudalism 17 – 18, 138 – 9, 212, 263
Edward the Confessor 124, 130, 132–4, 139 fiefdoms 17, 212
Edward the Elder 49 – 51, 56, 60, 64 First Lateran Council 151, 175, 299,
Edward “the Martyr” (English king) 53 304, 306
Egypt 193, 312, 327 – 8, 334, 336 FitzAlan, Walter 263
Einsiedeln, Abbey 97 FitzGilbert, Richard Strongbow 253, 273
Ekkehard of Aura (Abbot) 154 FitzNigel, Richard 247
El Cid see Rodrigo Diaz FitzOsbern, William 138
Eleanor de Beaumont 235 – 6, 238 FitzRichard, Gilbert of Clare 144 – 5
Eleanor of Aquitaine 126 – 7, 214, 215, Fleury-sur-Loire 96 – 7
230 – 2, 238, 239 – 40, 247, 256, 325 – 6 Forest, royal 126, 258, 260
Elizabeth of Vermandois 235 Formosus (pope) 87
Elvira (spouse of Alfonso V) 70 Fourth Lateran Council 208, 230, 308 – 9,
Emicho of Leiningen 191 315, 316 – 17, 319, 320, 335, 351
Emma (spouse of Aethelred II and Cnut) France: tenth century (West Frankish
41, 43, 55, 110, 123, 130, 132 – 3 kingdom) 35 – 48; eleventh century
Emma (spouse of William IV Fierebras) 46 123 – 9; twelfth century 230 – 44
encellulement, 15, 105 Francis of Assisi 312 – 13, 315, 319;
Encomium Emmae 55 Franciscan Order 313 – 14, 351
England: tenth century 48 – 59; eleventh Franconia 20, 113; see also East Frankish
century 130 – 9; twelfth century kingdom
244 – 61; monastic reform 97 – 8; state Frederick I Barbarossa (Frederick III of
infrastructure 352 Swabia) 207, 222 – 7, 280, 288, 290,
eremitical life 176 – 7 300 – 301, 307, 331
Eric Bloodaxe (Norwegian king) 52, 62, 79 Frederick II of Swabia (Duke) 218 – 19,
Eric I (Danish king) 164, 290 220, 222
Eric II (Danish king) 220, 290 Frederick II Roger (Emperor) 228, 288 – 9,
Eric III (Danish king) 290 293 – 4, 336 – 7
Erik (king of the Svear) 78, 83 Frederick of Lorraine 118
Eriksson, Cnut 291 Fulcher of Chartres 201
Ernst II, Duke of Swabia 113 – 14 Fulk I, Count of Anjou (Fulk the Red) 44
Eugenius III (pope) 221 – 2, 223, 284, 300, Fulk III Nerra, Count of Anjou 40, 41, 44,
303 – 4, 324, 337, 338 – 9 46 – 7, 183
Eupraxia-Adelaide 120 Fulk IV, Count of Anjou 125
Eustace III of Boulogne (Count) 199 Fulk V of Anjou, King of Jerusalem 123,
Eustace II of Boulogne (Count) 117 129, 136, 200, 202, 321, 322
Eustace IV of Boulogne (Count) 232, 247 fyrd 16, 56
Exchequer 137 – 8, 246, 248, 257, 262,
274, 351; see also coin production Gandersheim Abbey 22, 68
Eystein (Norwegian king) 163 Garcia Sanchez V 149
Garlande, Anselm 127
fairs 209, 290, 295; see also commerce and Garlande, William 127
mercantile growth Gascony 70, 46
family systems: aristocratic families 108 – 10; Gelasius II (pope) 175
cognatic family structures 108 – 9; Geoffrey Grisegonelle 44
paternal lineage 108 – 10; tenth century Geoffrey II (Duke of Brittany) 239 – 40, 253
peasants 14 Geoffrey II (Martel) Count of Anjou 44,
farming techniques 103 – 5, 205 – 6, 349 124, 129
Fatimid caliphate 74, 327 – 8 Geoffrey Malaterra 154
Index 369
Geoffrey of Coutances (Bishop) 138 Gruffudd ap Cynan 143, 145, 146, 147,
Geoffrey of Monmouth 213 163, 268
Geoffrey of Rennes 43 Gruffudd ap Llewelyn 143 – 4
Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou 126, Gruffudd ap Rhys 268
136 – 7, 215, 230, 231, 233, 245, 247 Guerech (Count of Nantes) 45
geographical expansion of Western Guibert of Nogent (Abbot) 125 – 6, 183
Europe 350 guild systems 107, 207 – 8, 279
George of Antioch 285, 286 Gunnhild (Queen consort of Germany)
Gerald of Wales 272 116, 131
Gerard de Ridefort 323, 330 Guy de Lusignan 322, 329 – 31, 332, 333
Gerberga (spouse of Duke Gilbert and Guy of Spoleto 72
Louis IV) 38 Gwynedd 268, 269 – 70
Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Silvester II) 32,
88, 89 Hadwig (spouse of Hugh the Great) 38
Germany: tenth century (East Frankish Håkon IV (Norwegian king) 291
kingdom) 20 – 35; eleventh century Hakon the Good (Earl of Lade) 79, 81
112 – 22; twelfth century 218 – 30 Harald Bluetooth (Danish king) 27, 54, 79,
Gero (son of Count Theitmar) 25, 27 80 – 2, 160
Gertrude (spouse of Andrew II of Harald Fairhair 79
Hungary) 296 Harald Greycloak 79
Gertrude (spouse of Henry Jasomirgott) 221 Harald Hardrada 134, 144
Gertrude (spouse of Henry the Proud) 218 Harald II (Danish king) 160
Gesta Danorum 77 Harald III Hardrada (Norwegian king)
Geza (Hungarian prince) 84 161 – 3
Gilbert (Duke of Lotharingia) 38 Harald IV Gilchrist (Norwegian king)
Gilbert d’Assailly 323 291
Gilbert of Sempringham 179 Harding, Stephen 177, 178
Giovanni de Bernardone 312; see also Harold Earl of Wessex 143 – 4
Francis of Assisi Harold Godwineson 132 – 4, 139, 144, 147
Gisela of Hungary (spouse of Stephen I) 84 Harold Harefoot (English king) 132, 161
Gisela of Swabia (spouse of Conrad II) Harrying of the North 135
113 – 14 Harthacnut (Danish king) 132 – 3, 134, 161
Glaber, Ralph 6, 41, 75, 183 Hauteville family 154 – 5
Godfred (Danish king) 80 Hawise of Normandy (spouse of Geoffrey
Godfrey de Bouillon 191, 192, 197 of Rennes) 43
Godfrey of Lorraine 117, 153, 199 hegemonial kingship see kingship
Godred Crovan 147 Heimskringla 77
Godwine, Earl of Wessex 131, 132, 133 Helmond of Bosau 341
Golden Bull (Eger) 230 Heloise d’Argenteuil 180, 216
Golden Bull (Hungary) 296, 352 Henry (East Frankish king) 114
Golden Bull (Sicily) 294 Henry Duke of Saxony see Henry I “the
Golden Bull (Venice) 197 Fowler” (East Frankish king)
Gorm the Old 79, 80 Henry I (English king) 122, 126, 128, 136,
Gorze, monastery 176 137 – 8, 179, 267 – 8
Gotthard (Saint) 97 Henry I (French king) 18, 110, 123 – 4
Gratian (emperor) 306 Henry I “the Fowler” (East Frankish king)
Gregorian reform 172 14, 21 – 5, 34 – 5, 37, 81
Gregory IX (pope) 336, 345, 348 Henry II (Emperor) 73, 76, 85, 90, 97,
Gregory of Tours 80 113, 114 – 15, 152, 168, 272 – 3, 303
Gregory V (pope) 32, 88, 89 Henry II Jasomirgott (Duke of Austria)
Gregory VI (pope) 90, 169 221, 222, 223
Gregory VII (pope) 106, 120–1, 153–4, Henry II of Anjou (English king) 226,
158–9, 165–6, 170–3, 175, 187, 307, 348 231 – 3, 236 – 7, 247 – 54, 263 – 4, 265,
Gregory VIII (pope) 175, 331 268 – 9, 288, 331, 343
370 Index
Henry II “the Quarrelsome” (Duke of Hugh de Lusignan 240, 256

Bavaria) 29 – 30, 31, 34 – 5, 84 – 5 Hugh de Moreville Cunningham 263
Henry III (English king) 242, 260, 266, 271 Hugh de Payns 201 – 2
Henry III “the Black” (Emperor) 116 – 18, Hugh du Puiset 125
131, 153, 155 – 6, 164, 166, 169 – 70, Hugh Earl of Chester 145
218, 219 Hugh Earl of Shrewsbury 145, 163
Henry IV (Emperor) 106, 110, 112, 117, Hugh Magnus 123
118 – 21, 153 – 4, 158 – 9, 165 – 6, 171 – 4, Hugh of Flavigny 154
188 – 9 Hugh of Jaffa 200, 322
Henryk (Boleslav’s son) 297 Hugh the Great (Duke of the Franks) 27,
Henry of Bavaria (Duke) 25, 27, 38 38, 45 – 6
Henry of Burgundy 276 Humbert (Cardinal) 118
Henry of Champagne 333 Humbert of Moyenmoutier 170
Henry of Schweinfurt 34 Humbert of Silva Candida 171
Henry of Scotland (son of David I) Humiliati 308, 311, 313, 341
264 Humphrey de Hauteville 155, 156
Henry the Lion (Duke of Saxony) 206 – 7, hundreds (administrative areas) 57
221 – 3, 225 – 9, 288 – 90, 338, 339, 341 Hunfridings family 20
Henry the Young King (English king) 250, Hungary: tenth century 84 – 5; eleventh
253 – 4, 264 century 164 – 5, 166 – 7; twelfth century
Henry V (Emperor) 107, 112, 121 – 2, 128, 293 – 8
154, 174, 218, 220, 234, 280 hunting 2, 17, 212
Henry VI (Emperor) 227 – 8, 238, 280 – 1, Hywel Dda (Welsh king) 63, 64, 65
288, 302, 334, 347
Henry X “the Proud” (Duke of Bavaria) Iberian peninsula: tenth century 67 – 71;
218, 219, 220 – 1 eleventh century 148 – 52; twelfth
Hermann (Duke of Swabia) 23 – 4 century 274 – 9
Hermann Billung 27, 119 Ibn Tashfin 150
Hermann of Salm 120 Ibn Timnah 157
hermits 95, 176 – 7 Imre (Hungarian prince) 295 – 6
Hildebrand 118, 170, 172, 175 Ingeborg of Denmark (Queen of France)
Hildegard of Bingen 180, 216 235, 240
Hisham II 69 Innocent II (pope) 219 – 21, 230 – 1, 283,
Historia Normannorum (Dudo of 299, 303 – 4
St. Quentin) 43 Innocent III (pope) 217, 229 – 30, 235,
History of the Archbishops of Hamburg (Adam 258 – 60, 277, 288 – 9, 307 – 9, 312,
of Bremen) 77 334 – 5, 340, 343, 348, 351
History of the Kings of Britain (Geoffrey of Innocent IV (pope) 340
Monmouth) 213 Inquisition 346 – 47
Holy Lance, Antioch 192, 194 – 5 investiture, lay 171 – 4
homage 17, 108, 109, 126, 211, 271 Investiture Dispute 112, 128
Honorius II (pope) 219, 282 – 3, 299 Iona (Scottish island) 142
Honorius III (pope) 230, 260, 289, 312, Ireland: tenth century 48, 65 – 7; eleventh
315, 340, 345 century 146 – 8; twelfth century 252 – 3,
Hospitallers 202, 276, 310, 322 – 4, 272 – 4
327, 331 Isaac Angelos 334 – 5
Hroswitha (canoness, Gandersheim Isaac Comnenus 332
Abbey) 68 Isabella, Queen of Jerusalem 333
Hubert de Burgh 271 Isabella of Angoulême 240, 256
Hubert Walter 239, 255, 258 Isabella of Gloucester 270
Hugh (Count of Arles) 72 Isabella of Hainault 235
Hugh (Cyprian king) 335 – 6 Islam see Muslims
Hugh Bigod of Norfolk 248 Italy: tenth century 71 – 6; eleventh century
Hugh Capet 31, 38 – 40, 47 152 – 60; twelfth century 278 – 89;
Hugh de Lacy 273 – 4 post-Carolingian 26;
Index 371
Ivarr the Boneless 50, 66 kingship: assemblies and land distribution

Ivo of Chartres 306 37; as divinely ordained 4 – 5, 41 – 2;
eleventh century France 123 – 9; eleventh
Jacob’s Ford 328 century Germany and royal authority
James I of Aragon (King) 244, 277 112; establishment in England 56 – 7;
Jaromir, Duke of Bohemia 86 evolving roles, tenth century 2 – 3;
Jaroslav I, Grand Prince of Kyiv 124 Golden Bull (Hungary) contrasted with
Jeanne (spouse of Alphonse of Poitiers) 345 Magna Carta (England) 296; hegemonial
Jedvardsson, Eric 291 kingship 28, 29, 33, 34; in Kingdom
Jelling dynasty (Denmark) 80 – 1 of Jerusalem 198 – 9; and local lords’
Jerusalem 174; Church of the Holy power 47 – 8; Magna Carta 259 – 61; and
Sepulchre 182 – 3; Kingdom of 197, national peace 248 – 9; and papal support
198 – 9; see also Crusades 302 – 3; personality and leadership
Jewish communities 185 – 6, 208; 245; Philip II’s twelfth century French
anti-Semitism 236; France, twelfth reforms 242 – 4; and political control
century 236 under feudalism 139; public roles 351 – 2;
jihad 326 role in East Frankish kingdom 21, 23 – 4;
Joan (spouse of Alexander II) 266 and royal chapels 93 – 4; royal control
Joan (spouse of Llewelyn) 270 of justice 292 – 3; Saxon revolt 119 – 20;
Joan (spouse of William II) 287 – 8 in Scandinavian society 77 – 8; and tax
John (English king) 207, 229, 239 – 42, systems 257 – 8; and wealth 57 – 9
253, 254, 256 – 61, 266, 269 – 70, 273 – 4, knighthood 16, 18, 108, 211 – 13; and
308, 348 Crusades 322
John de Courcy 273 – 4 Kunigunde of Luxembourg (East Frankish
John Gratian 169 queen) 34, 35
John II Crescentius 90
John of Brienne (King of Jerusalem) Ladislas I (Hungarian king) 166
333, 336 Ladislas III (Hungarian king) 296
John of Crema 302 Lambert of Hersfeld 110, 119, 121
John of Sabina (Bishop) 168 Lambert of Spoleto 72
John of Salisbury 212, 230, 285 land distribution: assizes 248 – 9;
John Philagathos 32 landholding in Scotland 263; and
John Philip II (Angevin king) 236 military obligations 285
John Tzimisces (Byzantine emperor) 29, 30 Landfriede (Barbarossa’s Land Peace) 222
John X (pope) 89 Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury 319
John XI (pope) 89 Langton, Stephen 258 – 9, 348
John XII (pope) 28 – 9, 89 Languedoc 335, 343 – 5, 346
John XIV (pope) 31 Latin language 213, 292; and written
John XIX (pope) 113, 115, 168, 176 records 9
John XV (pope) 88 law codes 52, 57, 58, 130
John XVI (pope) 32, 89 lay investiture 171 – 4
John XXII (pope) 314 League of Verona 224 – 5
Jordan I of Capua 159 Leofgar Bishop of Hereford 143 – 4
jousting 212 – 13 Leofric of Mercia 131, 143
Judith (spouse of Frederick II, Duke of Leo IX (pope) 90, 116, 118, 153, 155 – 6,
Swabia) 222 162, 170, 187
Judith of Brittany 43 León-Castile, kingdom of 70 – 1, 149, 150,
275, 276
al-Kamil (Egyptian sultan) 312, 336 – 7 Leopold III of Austria 218
Kazimierz I (Polish prince) 165 Leopold IV of Austria 221
Kenneth II (Scottish king) 53, 62 Leopold VI of Austria 335
Kenneth III (Scottish king) 141 Leopold V of Austria 228, 238
Kenneth I MacAlpin 59, 61 Leo V (pope) 88
Kerbogah (ruler of Mosul) 192, 194 – 5, 196 Leo VIII (pope) 29
372 Index
life expectancy 14, 205 Magnus III Barelegs (Norwegian king) 145,
Liudolf (Duke of Swabia) 25 – 6 147, 163, 291
Liudolfing family 20 Magnus IV (Norwegian king) 291
Liutgard of Saxony 112 Magnus the Good (Norwegian king) 161
Liutpolding family 20 Magnus V (Norwegian king) 291, 292
Liutprand of Cremona, Bishop 6, 87, 89 Magyar warriors 5, 21, 24, 26 – 7, 84 – 5
Llewelyn ab Iorwerth 269 – 70, 271 – 2 Mainz 22, 122, 221
Llewelyn ap Seisyll 65, 143 Maio of Bari 287
Lombard, Peter 319 Malcolm (son of Alexander I) 261
Lombard kingdom 71 – 3 Malcolm I (Scottish king) 61 – 2
Lombard League 225 – 6, 227 Malcolm II (Scottish king) 62 – 3, 139 – 41
lordship 351 – 2; local lords during Malcolm III (Scottish king) 135, 141–2, 264
agricultural revolution 104 – 5; local lords’ Malcolm IV (Scottish king) 249 – 50, 264 – 6
power 15 – 16, 47 Malcolm of Strathclyde 53
Lorraine (Lotharingia) 20; see also Malik Shah 194
East Frankish kingdom al-Mansur 69
Lothar (West Frankish king) 28, 30, 38 – 9 Manuel (Byzantine emperor) 224, 327
Lothar de Segni 307; see also Innocent III Manuel I Comnenus (Emperor) 222, 294 – 5
(pope) Maredudd ap Owain 64, 65
Lothar II (Italian king, 26, 72 Margaret (spouse of Malcolm III) 141 – 2
Lothar III (Emperor) 166, 222, 280, 283, Margaret (spouse of William II) 287
290, 299, 303 Margaret of France (spouse of Henry the
Lotharingia (Lorraine) 20, 22, 37; see also Young King) 232, 250
East Frankish kingdom Maria Queen of Jerusalem (spouse of
Lothar of Supplinburg (Saxon duke) 119, Amalric) 294
122, 175, 218 – 20 Maria Queen of Jerusalem (spouse of John
Louis IV (West Frankish king) 27, 28, 37 – 8 de Brienne) 333
Louis of Bavaria (Duke) 336 Marie de France 213, 214, 215
Louis of Provence 72 Markward of Anweiler 347
Louis the Child 20, 21 Marozia (senatrix of Rome) 88 – 9
Louis the Pious 1, 20 marriage: conquest and forced marriage
Louis V (West Frankish king) 39 130; dowries and family power 19; and
Louis VI (French king) 122, 123, 125 – 9, paternal lineage 109 – 10
207, 216, 230 – 1 Massacre of St. Brice’s Day 54
Louis VII (French king) 207, 216, 222, Matilda (Fulk V of Anjou’s daughter) 136
224 – 5, 230 – 5, 264, 266, 268, 299 – 300, Matilda (spouse of Odo II) 43
303, 324 – 6 Matilda, Countess Palatine of Lotharingia 22
Louis VIII (French king) 244, 345 Matilda, Empress (spouse of Geoffrey
Lucius II (pope) 300 of Anjou) 126, 136 – 7, 214 – 15, 230,
Lucius III (pope) 301, 311 245 – 7, 322
Lusignan family 240, 242, 257 Matilda of Scotland (spouse of Henry I) 179
Matilda of Tuscany 120, 122, 153 – 4, 172,
MacAlpin, Kenneth 140 173, 175
Macbeth (Scottish king) 141 Maximilla (spouse of Conrad) 120
MacTaggart, Farquhar 267 Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem, 200, 202,
Madog ap Maredudd 268 214, 245, 321, 322
Magdeburg, monastery 27, 33 Memleben, monastery 27
Magna Carta 242, 249, 259 – 61, 266, merchants and trade 13 – 14, 105 – 7, 290
270, 348 Mercia 49 – 52, 56
Magnus (Norwegian king) 132, 134 Mercian Register 49 – 50
Magnus, Duke of Saxony 119 Michael VII (Byzantine emperor) 158
Magnus Billung 122 Mieszko I (Polish ruler) 27, 33, 85
Magnus I of Sweden 290 Mieszko II (Polish ruler) 115, 165
Magnus II (Norwegian king) 144, 163 Mieszko III “the Old” (Polish ruler) 297
Index 373
Milan 171, 223 – 4 Nôtre Dame, cathedral 216, 243

Miles of Bray 189 Nur ad-Din 325, 326 – 8
military obligations 16 – 18, 285
Military Orders 179, 322 – 3, 324, 327 oaths of loyalty 17, 29, 58, 94, 107, 214, 283
ministeriales 108, 113, 119, 211 – 12 Odo I Count of Blois 40
missi dominici 3 Odo II Count of Blois 41, 43, 44, 45, 115, 124
missionaries see Christian church Odo of Bayeux 138
missionary efforts 5, 94 – 5; see also Christian Odo of France (West Frankish king) 36 – 7
church Odo of Ostia (Bishop) 173
monarchy see kingship Olaf Cuáran (ruler of Dublin) 66
monasteries 4, 22, 96; Benedictine rule Olaf Guthfrithson 51, 52, 61, 66
95 – 8; Benedictinism 35; in East Olaf II Haraldsson (Saint) 132, 160 – 1, 162
Frankish kingdom 27; monastic reform Olaf III (Norwegian king) 163
95 – 9, 175 – 80; monks 92 – 8; and Olaf Tryggvason (Norwegian king) 78, 83
record-keeping 8 Oldrich, Duke of Bohemia 86
Monte Gargano 182 Olof Skötkonung 78 – 9, 83, 161, 162
Moravia 85 – 6, 164 Ongendus (Danish king) 80
mormaers 140 – 1 Orderic Vitalis 110, 125, 281
Muhammad ibn Tumart 275 Order of Calatrava 324
Muirchertach Mac Lochlainn (Irish king) 272 Order of Lazarus 323 – 4
Muirchertach Ua Briain 147 – 8, 163 Order of Mountjoy 324
al-Muqtadir 149 Order of Santiago 324
Murchad son of Diarmait 147 Ordono II of Leon 70
Muslims: Almoravids 150 – 1; divisions in Ordulf (Duke of Saxony) 119
Muslim world 194; in Italy 157 – 8; jihad Oskytel of York 88
and crusades 326; lay Christian feelings Oswald (Archbishop of York) 97
concerning 185; Muslim revival and Otto I (Duke of Saxony) 22, 23
Crusades 321 – 37; rule in Spain 68 – 71, Otto I (East Frankish king) 24, 25 – 30,
148 – 52; Sicily 73 – 4; see also Crusades 72 – 3, 82, 87, 93
al-Mu’tamid 149 Otto II (Emperor) 27, 29 – 31, 39, 72 – 3, 89
al-Muzaffar 69 Otto III (Emperor) 18, 22, 31 – 4, 72 – 3, 85,
89 – 90
al-Nasir 70 Otto IV of Brunswick (Emperor) 229 – 30,
Navarre 69 – 70, 71 259, 281, 288 – 9, 308, 347
Nicholas II (pope) 118, 153, 156, Ottokar I (Bohemian duke) 226, 293 – 4
170, 306 Ottokar II (Bohemian king) 294
Nicholas of Albano 302 Ottonian dynasty 22, 27, 32, 72
Nicola de la Haye 215 Ottonianum 28 – 9, 33, 35, 89, 90
Nidaros (Trondheim) 302 Otto of Freising (Bishop) 278
Niels (Danish king) 164, 290 Otto of Northeim (Duke of Bavaria)
Nilus (hermit) 32 118, 119
Non parum animus noster (Alexander III) Otto of Wittelsbach (Duke of Bavaria) 226
339 Our Lady of Riga cult 340
Norbert of Xanten 179 Outremer (Latin East) 195 – 6, 199 – 200,
Norman Conquest 129 – 30, 134 – 6, 139, 202, 324 – 7
244; see also William the Conqueror Owain ap Gruffudd 146
Normandy: alliances with Aethelred 55; Owain Gwynedd 249, 268 – 9
formation of 37, 42 – 4 Owain of Strathclyde 61, 62 – 3
Normans: conquest of Sicily 209; invasions
of southern Italy 75 – 6, 155 – 60, 170; in pagan influences on Christianity 81 – 2, 98,
Wales 145 – 6 162, 169, 317, 340
Northumbria 49, 52 pallium 88
Norway 79 – 80, 132, 291; see also papacy: and canon law 91 – 2; and celibacy
Scandinavia 169; clerical marriage 91, 169, 170,
374 Index
171 – 2; corruption 87 – 92; disputed Poem of the Cid, The 213

elections 299, 301; eleventh century Poland: eleventh century 165 – 6; tenth
168 – 75; government and administration century 85 – 6; twelfth century 293,
304 – 5; Gregorian reform 172; influence 296 – 8
and power 351; married priests 90 – 1; Popes see papacy
papal authority 307 – 8; papal authority Poppo of Brixen (Bishop) 170
and canon law 305 – 6; papal control of population and demography: Iberian
Rome 88 – 9; papal elections 28 – 9, 171; peninsula 68; Paris 216, 243;
papal reform movement 279; partnership Scandinavia 79 – 80; Sicily and Italy 73,
with emperor 33; power struggles 74 – 5, 157 – 8, 279
twelfth century 221 – 2; scandal and chaos population growth 103 – 7, 205 – 6, 209 – 10,
168 – 9; schism, twelfth century 299 – 309; 289, 292, 318, 350
see also Christian church; names of Portugal 69 – 70; see also Iberian Peninsula
individual popes Premonstratensians 179, 310
parias system 149 Premyslid dynasty 86, 293, 294
Paris 216, 243 prévôtés 234, 242
parishes see Christian church primogeniture 109, 212, 349
Parzival (von Eschenbach) 213 purgatory see Christian church
Paschal II (pope) 121, 122, 164, 174, 306
Paschal III (pope) 224 Quantum Praedecessores (Eugenius III) 324
Patarenes (Milan) 171 Quedlinburg, convent 22, 29
paternal lineage in aristocratic families Quia maior (Innocent III) 335
108 – 10 Quitclaim of Canterbury 265
Peace of Constance 227
peasants: free contrasted with unfree Ragnall 50 – 1
15 – 16; land use during agricultural Rainulf I 155
revolution 104 – 5; life in twelfth century Rainulf II 155
210 – 11; lordly control over 15; peasant Rainulf of Caiazzo 283 – 4
life, tenth century 14 – 15; subjugation Ralph de Mantes 143
of 349 Ralph of Coggeshall 255
Pedro II (king of Aragon) 243, 244, 259, Ralph of Vermandois 127, 231
344 Ramiro II of Aragon 276
Pelagius (Saint) 68 Ramiro II of León 70
Pelagius of Albano (papal legate) 336 Ramiro III of León 70
People’s Crusade 191; see also Crusades Raoul (West Frankish king) 24
Peter Abelard 216 Raymond de Poitiers 325, 327
Peter Damian 118, 170, 176 Raymond de St. Gilles 191
Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay 341 Raymond III Pons of Toulouse 46, 193,
Peter of Provence 184 196, 250, 259, 309
Peter Orseolo 166 Raymond IV Count 129
Peter the Chanter 319 – 20 Raymond of Aguilers 192 – 3
Peter the Hermit 191 Raymond of Poitiers 231
Petronilla of Aragon 276 Raymond of Tripoli 329 – 31
Philip I (French king) 124 – 5, 173, 198 Raymond-Roger, Viscount of
Philip II (French king) 208, 216, 230, Trenceval 344
234 – 4, 254, 259, 269, 308, 331 – 3 Raymond V of Toulouse 232, 234
Philip of Alsace 235 Raymond VI of Toulouse 243, 343 – 4, 345
Philip of Flanders 237, 238 Raymond VII of Toulouse 243, 345, 346
Philip of Swabia 229, 281, 288 – 9, 308, 347 Reconquista 67, 108, 211, 213
Piast dynasty 33, 85, 296, 297 regalia 174, 224
Picts 59 – 60 Regularis Concordia 97
Pierre de Castelnau 343 relics of saints 181 – 2
pilgrimages 181 – 4, 318; see also Crusades Renovatio Imperii Romanorum (Otto III) 32–3
pipe rolls 138, 246 Rhodri Mawr (Welsh king) 64, 65
Index 375
Rhys ap Gruffudd 249, 268 – 9 Roger of Salisbury (Bishop) 137 – 8, 245

Rhys ap Tewdwr 145 Roger of Wendover 348
Rhys of Deheubarth 269 Rollo (viking warlord/Count of Rouen)
Richard de Lucy 248 37, 43
Richard I Lionheart (English king) 214, Roman de Brut (Wace) 213
228, 236, 237 – 9, 253, 254 – 6, 265 – 6, Roncaglia, Diet of 224, 227, 280
288, 331 – 3 Rozala (spouse of Arnulf II and Robert II
Richard I of Normandy (Duke) 44 of France) 39, 40
Richard II of Normandy (Duke) 40, 43, Ruaidri Ua Conchobair (Rory O’Connor,
44, 55 Irish king) 253, 272, 273
Richard III of Normandy (Duke) 44 Rudolf II of Burgundy 24, 28, 37, 72
Richard of Aversa 155, 156, 170 Rudolf III of Burgundy 115
Richard of Capua 156 Rudolf of Rheinfelden 118
Richard of Poitou see Richard I Lionheart Rudolf of Swabia 120
(English king) rural life 210; see also agricultural methods
Richard the Justiciar (Duke of
Burgundy) 45 sacramental system in Christianity 98 – 9
Richenza of Northeim 221 saints see Christian church
Rigord (French chronicler) 208, 243 Saladin (Salah al-Din) 227, 228, 237 – 8,
Robert, Prince of Capua 283 254, 277, 328, 329, 330 – 4
Robert Curthose (Duke of Normandy) Salian dynasty 112 – 13, 118
125, 126, 129, 135 – 6, 191 Samuel (Hungarian king) 117
Robert de Bellême 146 Sancho Garces IV 149 – 50
Robert de Hauteville 155 Sancho II (Portugese king) 277 – 8
Robert Guiscard 153, 156 – 9, 170 – 1, 172, Sancho III the Great of Navarre 70 – 1, 149
198, 282, 287 Sancho IV of Navarre 149
Robert I (Duke of Burgundy) 110 Santiago de Compostela 69, 70, 230, 318
Robert I (Duke of Normandy) 123, 183 Saxo Grammaticus 77
Robert I (West Frankish king) 37 Saxon Annals 281
Robert II (French king) 55, 97, 123 Saxon revolt 119 – 20
Robert II (West Frankish king) 36, 39, 110 Saxony 20, 22, 117 – 18, 119, 219, 226;
Robert II Count of Flanders 191 see also East Frankish kingdom
Robert of Arbrissel 179 Scandinavia: Denmark 79 – 83; eleventh
Robert of Gloucester 245, 246 century 160 – 4; influence in Normandy
Robert of Leicester 248 43 – 4; Scandinavian raiders 5, 48 – 9;
Robert of Mortain 138 settlement in England 131; tenth century
Robert of Rhuddlan 145 76 – 83; twelfth century 289 – 93; see also
Robert of Selby 285 vikings
Robert the Bruce 263 schools and education 92, 98, 216 – 17, 316
Robert the Frisian 125 Scotland: tenth century 59 – 63; eleventh
Robert the Pious 45 century 139 – 43; twelfth century 261 – 7
Robert the Strong 36 scutage 257, 260
Rodrigo Diaz (El Cid) 149–50, 213 Second Lateran Council 299, 304
Roger Borsa 158–60, 281–2 Seljuq Turks 158, 174, 187 – 8, 191, 193 – 4,
Roger de Montgomery 146 198, 295, 324, 331
Roger Earl of Shrewsbury 144 Sentences (Peter Lombard) 319
Roger Guiscard 157 – 8 Sergius III (pope) 88, 89
Roger II (King of Sicily) 160, 209, 219, Sergius IV (pope) 90
220 – 2, 227, 228, 281 – 3, 299, 301 – 2 servientes regis 295, 296
Roger I the Great, Count of Sicily 120, Seville, kingdom of 148
159 – 60, 281 – 7 sheriffs 137, 138, 248, 255, 260, 262,
Roger of Howden 237 – 8 265, 274
Roger of Montgomery 138 shire formation 56 – 7, 137
Roger of Salerno 198, 200 Shirkuh (military commander) 328
376 Index
Sibylla Queen of Jerusalem 321, 322, Sweyn Forkbeard (Danish king) 54, 78, 82,
329 – 30, 333 83, 160, 164
Sichelgaita (spouse of Robert Guiscard) 156 Sweyn II Estrithson (Danish king) 161 – 4
Sicily 73 – 4, 281 – 9; see also Italy Sweyn III (Danish king) 290
Siegfried (Count of Merseburg) 25 Swordbrothers 340
Sigurd (Earl of Lade) 79 Synod of Constance 116
Sigurd I (Norwegian king) 163, 291 Synod of Sutri 116
Sigurd II (Norwegian king) 291
Sigurd III (Norwegian king) 291 Taifa kingdoms 69, 148 – 9, 150 – 1
Sihtric 50 – 1 Tanchelm of Antwerp 184
Silesia 164, 165 Tancred de Hauteville 109, 154 – 5
Silvester II (pope) 32, 89 Tancred of Lecce (King of Sicily) 228,
Silvester III (pope) 168 – 9 288, 302
Simon de Montfort 243, 244, 344 – 5 Tancred (Prince of Galilee) 191, 196,
Simon of Hauteville 160 198, 200
simony 116, 170, 171, 172, 173, 306 tax systems 137 – 8, 257 – 8, 259 – 60, 318
Siward Earl of Northumbria 131, 141 Templars 202, 276, 310, 322 – 4, 331
slavery 15, 69, 71, 78, 210, 285 Teresa of Portugal 214, 245, 276
Slavic tribes and territories 24, 27 – 8, 30, Teutonic Orders 297 – 8, 324, 340
32, 84, 86, 206 thanages 140
Snorri Sturluson 77, 79, 160, 163 Thankmar 25
Solomon (Hungarian king) 166 Theobald of Blois 44, 124, 127, 230 – 1, 233
Somerled of Argyll 264 Theodora Queen of Jerusalem 327
Song of Roland, The 213 Theophanu, Empress (spouse of Otto II)
Song of the Cid, The 149 – 50 18, 22, 29, 30, 31
sources, historical 6 – 9 Theophylact 88 – 9
Spain 67 – 71; see also Iberian peninsula Thierry of Alsace 126
Spytihnev I 164 – 5 Thietmar Billung 117
Staufen, Frederick 220 Thietmar of Merseburg (bishop) 6, 31
Staufen family 218, 219, 220, 222, 227, things (assemblies) in Scandinavia 78
229, 284 Third Lateran Council 213, 301, 304, 307,
St. Denis 128 311, 342
Stephen (English king) 230, 232, Thomas de Marle 125
245 – 7, 262 Thomas of Celano 315
Stephen I (Hungarian king) 33, 84 – 5, 114, Thorfinn the Mighty 140
166, 183, 295 Thorkell the Tall 83
Stephen II (Hungarian king) 166 Thoros (ruler of Edessa) 192
Stephen II of Troyes 124 Three Books Against the Simoniacs (Humbert
Stephen III (Hungarian king) 294 – 5 of Silva Candida) 171
Stephen IX (pope) 118, 156 Thyra (spouse of Gorm the Old) 79, 80
Stephen VI (pope) 87 Tigernan Ua Ruairc (Tiernan O’Rourke,
Stephen of Blois 110, 126, 191, Irish king) 272
302 – 3 Toirdelbach Ua Briain 147
Stephen of Perche 287 Tostig of Northumbria 133, 134, 144
Suger (Abbot) 128, 233 tournaments 212 – 13
Suidger (Bishop of Bamberg) 169 – 70 towns see urbanisation
Al-Sulami 197 trade and commerce 13 – 14, 74, 208 – 9
Sverker I (Swedish king) 291 tradespeople 105 – 7, 207 – 9
Sverkersson, Carl 291 transubstantiation see Christian church
Sverri (Norwegian king) 291 Treaty of Benevento 300
Swabia 20, 22; see also East Frankish Treaty of Constance 300
kingdom Treaty of Devol 198
Sweden 77 – 9, 291 – 2; see also Scandinavia Treaty of Falaise 254, 265, 269
Sweyn Estrithson (Danish king) 135 Treaty of Jaffa 332, 336
Index 377
Treaty of Mignano 283, 299 responsibility 16 – 18; Truce of God 94;

Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte 37 see also knighthood
Treaty of Venice 301 Welf family 218 – 19, 220 – 1, 222 – 3,
Treaty of Winchester 247 229, 284
Treaty of Windsor 269 Welf II of Swabia 113
Tristan and Isolde (von Strassburg) 213 Welf III of Carinthia 117 – 18
Truce of God 94; see also Christian church Welf IV, Duke of Bavaria 120, 153, 173
Turks 158, 174, 187 – 8, 191, 193 – 4, 198, Welf VI, Duke of Bavaria 221, 222,
295, 324, 331 223, 225
Twelfth Century Renaissance 349 Welf VII, Duke of Bavaria 225
Wenceslas I (Duke) 86
Uí Chenneslaig (Ireland) 147 Wends 338 – 40
Uí Neill (Ireland) 65 – 6 Wessex 49 – 52, 56
Umayyad Caliphate 67 – 9, 148 West Frankish kingdom 35 – 48; see also
universities 216 – 17 France
Uracca, Queen of Leon-Castile 110 Wichman the Elder (Billung) 25
Urban II (pope) 90, 120, 125, 151, 153, Widukind of Corvey 6, 14, 22, 23, 24,
157, 173 – 6, 183 – 4, 306 – 7; and First 27, 82
Crusade 186 – 202 William (English prince) 136
Urban III (pope) 227 William de Braose 174, 258, 269, 270, 271
urbanisation 13 – 14, 105 – 7, 206, 208 – 9, William de Hauteville “Iron Arm” 155
292, 313, 350 William des Roches 240
Urraca of Leon-Castile (queen) 110, 151, William de Warenne 138
214, 245 William I “the Bad” (King of Sicily) 223,
224, 285, 286 – 7, 300 – 301
Vajk (Stephen I) 84 – 5 William I the Lion (Scottish king) 264 – 6
Valdemar I (Danish king) 290, 292, 339 William II (Duke of Apulia) 282
Valdemar II (Danish king) 290, 339 – 40 William II of Normandy 129; see also
Valdes of Lyons 311, 313 William the Conqueror
Venice 278, 334 William II Rufus (English king) 135 – 6, 142
Vermudo II of Leon (king) 70 William II “the Good” (King of Sicily)
Vermudo III of Leon (king) 70, 149 228, 287, 301
Vexin (Norman territory) 124 – 5, 231, 232, William III (Count of Poitou) 40
239, 250, 255 William III (king of Sicily) 288
Victor II (pope) 170 William III Towhead (Duke of
Victor III (pope) 173 Aquitaine) 45
Victor IV (antipope) 224, 234 William IV Fierebras (Duke) 45 – 6
Victor IV (pope) 301 William V “the Great” of Aquitaine 46, 116
vikings 5 – 6, 43, 50, 54 – 5, 64 – 6, 77 William IX (Duke of Aquitaine) 136, 214
Virgin Mary see Christian church William X of Aquitaine 126 – 7
Visigoths 67 William Longsword (Duke of Normandy)
Vlatislav II Duke 165 38, 43
von Eschenbach, Wolfram 213 William Marshal 260
von Strassburg, Gottfried 213, 214 William of Apulia 75, 154
William of Boulogne 248
Wace (Norman poet) 213 William of Malmesbury 7, 261
Waldensians 308, 311, 313, 341 William of Montferrat 321, 329
Wales: tenth century 63 – 5; eleventh William of Newburgh 205
century 143 – 6; twelfth century William of Tyre 322
267 – 72 William Sanchez 46
Walter Sansavoir 191 William the Conqueror 103, 106 – 7,
Walter the Steward 264 109, 110, 124, 128 – 9, 130, 134 – 5, 137,
warfare 108; Church’s role in 164
peace-keeping 94; and military William the Lion (Scottish king) 254
378 Index
William the Pious of Aquitaine 45, 96 power and Sibylla 330; power, informal
Willibrord (bishop of Utrecht) 80 exercise of 18 – 19; property ownership
Wladislaw, Grand Duke 297 215; in Scandinavia 78
Wladislaw II, Duke 293 Wreck of the White Ship 136
Wladyslas I Herman 165 – 6 Wulfstan of York (Archbishop) 54, 58
women’s roles: Clares 312 – 13; in convents
215; informal power and influence Yolanda de Brienne 336
111; Matilda of England 245 – 6; York, kingdom of 52
Matilda of Tuscany 153 – 4; monastic life
179 – 80; in Outremer 321 – 2; peasant Zbigniew (Polish duke) 165 – 6
women, tenth century 14; political Zengi (warlord) 324, 325, 326
power 110 – 1, 151, 214 – 15; political Zirid family 148

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Richard Huscroft - Power and Faith - Politics and Religion in Western Europe From The Tenth To The Thirteenth Century-Routledge (2023)

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POWER AND FAITH

Examining the developments in the political and religious landscape of Western

Richard Huscroft is Head of History at Westminster School, London. His interests

1 The Social and Economic Context 13

2 Power: The Political Framework, c.890–c.1020 20

3 Faith: The Church in Western Europe, c.890–c.1020 87

4 The Social and Economic Context 103

5 Power: The Political Framework, c.1020–c.1120 112

6 Faith: The Church in Western Europe, c.1020–c.1120 168

7 The Social and Economic Context 205

8 Power: The Political Framework, c.1120–c.1220 218

9 Faith: The Church in Western Europe, c.1120–c.1220 299

Suggestions for Further Reading 354

0 200 400 kms

AL-ANDALUS Gaeta Benevento

MAP 1 Western Europe, About 1000

MAP 2 The Kingdom of Germany, About 1000

MAP 3 The Kingdom of France, About 1000

Wroxeter Leicester Stamford Fens EAST

Wexford Ramsey ANGLIA

Cork Waterford C E St Neots

St. David’s Ipswich

0 50 100 150 miles

0 100 200 kms

MAP 4 Britain and Ireland, About 1100

MAP 5 The Iberian Peninsula

0 50 100 150 200 km

MAP 6 Italy, About 1000

MAP 7 Scandinavia and the Eastern Frontier, About 1000

MAP 8 The Eastern Mediterranean in the Twelfth Century

I should say something about my methodology. I have tried to keep my analyses as

Power and Faith in Western Europe in About 900

How Do We Know? Sources and Interpretations

The East Frankish Kingdom and the Renewal of Empire

by establishing his supremacy over his neighbours. Before he died, moreover, he

The West Frankish Kingdom and the Challenge of Survival

and Church conformed to essentially Frankish, and ultimately Carolingian, mod-

IV Fierebras retired to a monastery in 990, he enjoyed hegemony of some kind

Britain and Ireland: Kingdoms and Peoples

Edward’s superiority, this meeting perhaps amounted more to a declaration of a

called hundreds (or wapentakes in the former viking-controlled parts of England),

Southern Europe: The Multicultural Experience

Frontier Europe: Christians and Pagans

the best-known of which was at Uppsala, continued to be very powerful (Adam of

Christianity and in establishing an organised ecclesiastical structure there. Stephen

The Papacy: Too Corrupt to Matter?

could be properly formulated by Otto’s difficulties in holding on to Rome and by

Benedict VIII understood the importance of cooperating with the German

Bishops and Monks: Local Power in Cathedrals

emerged from the chapel might be appointed to lead dioceses or monasteries of

Priests and People: Popular Practice and Everyday Belief

Some parishes were established by bishops or monasteries keen to extend their

Many of the trends and processes identified in Chapter 1 continued to develop

in wider trading networks and constituted an increasingly important link between

Germany: Royal Authority and Mighty Rebellion

Another impressive acquisition by Conrad II was the kingdom of Burgundy.

self-contained Czech kingdom free from German overlordship, were destroyed,

however. Pope Paschal II renewed Henry’s excommunication in 1102, and the

France: Petty Kings and Potent Princes

Britain and Ireland: Conquest and Survival

he came of age. The marriages of a tenant-in-chief ’s widow and daughters could

1101 Muirchertach agreed to help the Montgomery brothers in their rebellion

Southern Europe: Spanish Kings and Norman

1 The Social and Economic Context 13

2 Power: The Political Framework, c.890–c.1020 20

3 Faith: The Church in Western Europe, c.890–c.1020 87

4 The Social and Economic Context 103

5 Power: The Political Framework, c.1020–c.1120 112

6 Faith: The Church in Western Europe, c.1020–c.1120 168

7 The Social and Economic Context 205

8 Power: The Political Framework, c.1120–c.1220 218

9 Faith: The Church in Western Europe, c.1120–c.1220 299

Suggestions for Further Reading 354