R4.1 Medieval kingdoms and empires (circa 750–1400)

Between about 750 and 1400 the kingdoms of western and central Europe took shape. Many of the states of modern Europe, including France, Germany, England and Poland, trace their origins to this period, and so do institutions that still exist, such as the common law, juries, parliaments and universities. The way medieval rulers won and kept power shows how authority worked in societies with little money, few roads and almost no professional officials.

Medieval Europe, 750–1400: a framework

Historians divide the period into three phases. In the early Middle Ages (about 750–1000) Europe was overwhelmingly rural, towns were small and coins scarce, and states were held together by kings who led their warriors in war. In the high Middle Ages (about 1000–1300) population, farming, trade and towns grew strongly, and kings built more permanent systems of law, taxation and record-keeping. The late Middle Ages opened with a run of disasters in the fourteenth century: the Great Famine of 1315–1317, the Black Death of 1347–1351 and the Hundred Years War between England and France, which began in 1337.

The chart of the six states shows that they did not exist side by side as equals. The Carolingian Empire had broken up before most of the others began, and the North Sea Empire lasted barely a generation. The Holy Roman Empire and Capetian France were successor states of Charlemagne's empire, and England's Norman rulers were descendants of Scandinavian settlers in a Carolingian province. The states differ in size, lifespan and fortune, so comparing them shows which features of rule were general and which were peculiar to one case.

Kingdoms, empires and the language of power

A kingdom (Latin regnum) was ruled by a king, usually over one people or a group of peoples who shared a law. An empire claimed something more: rule over several kingdoms and peoples, and in western Europe, succession to the Roman Empire.

Royal power was personal. A king governed through those who owed him loyalty, and his most important task was to keep the great nobles on his side. Kings were expected to defend the Church, protect the weak and do justice, and the Church taught that a good king was chosen by God. The ceremony of anointing with holy oil, borrowed from the kings of the Old Testament, set the king apart from other laymen.

Two kinds of authority existed side by side: the regnum, the power of kings and lords, and the sacerdotium, the spiritual power of priests, bishops and the pope. For most of the period rulers controlled appointments to bishoprics and abbeys, because bishops were also great landholders and royal servants. From the 1050s reforming popes argued that the spiritual power was superior, and this led to the Investiture Contest between popes and emperors.

Lordship, vassals and fiefs

Medieval society was organised through lordship: the power of a lord over the land and people under him. A free warrior could become the man of a lord by performing homage, kneeling and placing his hands between the lord's hands, and by swearing fealty, an oath of loyalty. The lord promised protection and support; the man, his vassal, promised military service and counsel.

Most people were peasants who worked the land. Many were unfree serfs, bound to their lord's estate, owing him labour on his own land (the demesne) and dues in produce or money, and unable to leave without his permission. This system of estates worked by dependent peasants is called manorialism. The lord's court judged his peasants, so for most people "government" meant the lord and his steward more than the king.

Case study 1: the Carolingian Empire, 751–888

The Carolingian dynasty, named after its greatest ruler, Charles the Great (Charlemagne in French, Carolus Magnus in Latin), ruled the Franks from 751. At its height in 814 the empire stretched from the Pyrenees to the Elbe and from the North Sea to central Italy, and it brought most of the Christians of western Europe under one ruler for the only time after the fall of Rome.

Emergence: from mayors of the palace to kings, 714–768

The Franks were a Germanic people who had conquered Roman Gaul around 500 under the Merovingian dynasty. By the early eighth century the Merovingian kings had lost real power to their chief officials, the mayors of the palace, who controlled the royal lands, the army and the nobles' loyalty. The office became hereditary in one family from Austrasia, the north-eastern Frankish lands.

Charles Martel ("the Hammer"), mayor from about 717 to 741, rebuilt Frankish power by war. He fought the Frisians, Saxons, Bavarians and Aquitanians, and in 732 he defeated an Umayyad army from al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) between Tours and Poitiers. He rewarded his warriors with land, much of it taken from churches, which created a body of armed followers tied to his family.

His son Pippin III took the final step. The Royal Frankish Annals, written later at the Carolingian court, record that in 750–751 Pippin sent envoys to Pope Zacharias to ask whether it was right that the man who held no power should be called king. The pope answered that it was better for the one who held real power to be king. In 751 Pippin was elected by the Frankish nobles and anointed; the last Merovingian, Childeric III, was shaved as a monk and sent to a monastery.

The events of 751 amounted to a coup d'état with religious approval. The Carolingians had power but lacked royal blood, so they looked to the Church for a new source of legitimacy. Anointing made the king God's chosen ruler, like David in the Old Testament, so that his authority no longer depended only on descent.

The alliance with the papacy grew because each side needed the other. The Lombards, a Germanic people ruling northern Italy, threatened Rome, and the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, the pope's traditional protector, could no longer help. In 754 Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps, anointed Pippin and his sons at Saint-Denis near Paris, and named them protectors of the Romans. Pippin defeated the Lombard king Aistulf in 755 and 756 and handed the lands he took around Ravenna and Rome to the pope.

Expansion under Charlemagne, 768–814

Charlemagne became king in 768, at first sharing the kingdom with his brother Carloman, who died in 771. He then fought almost every year of his reign. His conquests nearly doubled the lands ruled by the Franks.

Several motives drove the conquests. The Frankish aristocracy expected war, because war brought plunder, tribute and land, and a king who could not provide them risked losing their loyalty. Einhard, Charlemagne's courtier and biographer, wrote that no war in the memory of the Franks had brought them such riches as the war against the Avars. Defence also mattered: the Saxons raided Frankish lands, and the Avars and the Umayyads of Spain were rivals on the frontiers.

Religion gave the wars a further purpose. Charlemagne saw himself as the defender and spreader of Christianity, and the Saxon wars became a war of conversion. In 782, according to the Royal Frankish Annals, he had about 4,500 Saxons executed at Verden after a revolt; the figure comes from a Frankish source and some historians think it exaggerated. Around the same time he issued a law for the conquered Saxons.

If any one of the race of the Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death.

Charlemagne, Capitulary concerning the parts of Saxony, clause 8, about 782–785 (trans. D. C. Munro, 1900). The law, written for a newly conquered people, shows how closely conquest and conversion were tied: refusing baptism was treated as rebellion. Its harshness also shows how weak Frankish control still was, since it was issued at a time of repeated Saxon revolts. Alcuin, Charlemagne's leading scholar, criticised forced baptism in his letters, and a milder capitulary followed in 797.

Charlemagne also demanded church dues from the conquered: the same capitulary orders that all "shall give a tithe of their property and labor to the churches and priests". The Saxon wars therefore illustrate several factors at once: defence against raids, plunder and land for the Frankish elite, and religious duty as the king understood it.

The imperial coronation of 800

In April 799 Pope Leo III was attacked in the streets of Rome by relatives of his predecessor, who accused him of crimes. He escaped and fled to Charlemagne at Paderborn in Saxony. Charlemagne came to Rome in late 800 to settle the matter. On 23 December Leo swore an oath that he was innocent, and on Christmas Day 800, in St Peter's, the pope crowned Charlemagne emperor and the Roman people acclaimed him.

It was then that he received the titles of Emperor and Augustus, to which he at first had such an aversion that he declared that he would not have set foot in the Church the day that they were conferred, although it was a great feast-day, if he could have foreseen the design of the Pope.

Einhard, Life of Charlemagne, chapter 28, written about 817–830 (trans. S. E. Turner, 1880). Einhard knew Charlemagne well, but he wrote years later and modelled his work on the Roman biographer Suetonius. His claim that Charlemagne did not want the title may be a convention (a good ruler refuses honours modestly), or a sign that Charlemagne disliked the idea that the pope could make an emperor. Either way, the passage cannot be taken at face value.

Historians weigh several explanations of the coronation. For the pope, crowning a protector strengthened his own position after the attack on him. For Charlemagne, the title recognised a power he already held over many peoples. The throne in Constantinople was then held by a woman, the Empress Irene, which allowed some in the West to argue that the imperial title was vacant. The Byzantines treated the coronation as a usurpation and recognised Charlemagne as an emperor (though not of the Romans) only in 812, after a war in the Adriatic.

Governing the empire

Charlemagne had no bureaucracy in the modern sense: no salaried civil service, no regular land tax and no standing army. He governed through about 600 counties, each run by a count drawn from the aristocracy, who held courts, raised troops, collected tolls and kept order. Counts were paid with the profits of their office and with royal land. On the frontiers, larger commands called marches were held by margraves.

To keep the counts in check, Charlemagne sent out the missi dominici ("those sent by the lord"), usually in pairs of one layman and one churchman. From 802 the system was made regular: each pair covered a district, heard complaints, checked the conduct of counts and announced royal orders. Royal orders were set out in capitularies, documents divided into chapters (capitula) that dealt with everything from army service to church discipline and weights and measures.

The great assemblies of the aristocracy, held usually once or twice a year, were where capitularies were discussed and announced and where campaigns were planned. Charlemagne also required every free man to swear an oath of fidelity to him, in 789 and again in 802, when the oath was extended to loyalty to him as emperor. The oath tied ordinary free men directly to the ruler, not only through their lords.

From about 794 Charlemagne spent most of his time at Aachen, where he built a palace and the Palatine Chapel. Like earlier kings, though, he and his court still travelled, living off royal estates. He also reformed the coinage, building on his father's work: the silver penny (denarius) became the standard coin, with 12 pennies to a shilling (solidus) and 20 shillings to a pound (libra). This system of pounds, shillings and pence lasted in Britain until 1971.

The table of methods shows a ruler whose authority rested more on persuasion, reward and personal presence than on institutions. Historians such as Rosamond McKitterick stress how far the Carolingians relied on writing to govern, while others point to the gap between what capitularies ordered and what happened in the counties.

Religion and the Carolingian Church

Religion was at the centre of Carolingian rule. Charlemagne presented himself as a new King David, responsible for the salvation of his people. The Admonitio generalis of 789, a long capitulary, ordered reforms of clerical conduct, preaching, the liturgy and education. Earlier, the English missionary Boniface (d. 754) had reorganised the Frankish Church with Pippin's support, holding councils and placing bishops under the authority of archbishops.

Bishops and abbots were royal servants as well as churchmen. They advised the king, served as missi, sent troops from their lands and ran the schools that trained clergy. Charlemagne chose them himself. The Church was therefore an arm of royal government, and in return it gained land, protection and the tithe. Under Louis the Pious, the monastic reformer Benedict of Aniane made the Rule of St Benedict the standard for monasteries across the empire (816–817).

The Carolingian Renaissance

Charlemagne gathered scholars at his court from across Europe: Alcuin of York from England, Paul the Deacon from Lombard Italy, Theodulf from Visigothic Spain, and Franks such as Einhard. Alcuin, the leading figure, ran the palace school and later became abbot of Tours. The aim was practical and religious: priests who could read correct Latin could perform the services properly and teach the faith. A royal letter of the 780s, On the Cultivation of Letters (Epistola de litteris colendis), told abbots to set up schools because letters from monasteries were full of errors.

Caroline minuscule, a clear script of separated lower-case letters, made texts easier to read and copy. Renaissance printers in the fifteenth century based their typefaces on it, so modern lower-case letters descend from it. Monastic scriptoria copied the works of Roman authors such as Cicero, Virgil and Caesar, and many classical Latin texts survive only because they were copied in Carolingian monasteries. Charlemagne himself learned to read but, according to Einhard, struggled to write, keeping writing tablets under his pillow to practise.

In architecture, the Palatine Chapel at Aachen, consecrated around 805, was modelled on Byzantine churches in Italy, such as San Vitale in Ravenna, and used columns brought from Rome and Ravenna. It expressed the claim to Roman and Christian imperial authority in stone.

Women and marginalised groups in the Carolingian world

Royal women held real influence. Charlemagne's mother, Bertrada, arranged his first marriage to a Lombard princess, and his wives, above all Hildegard (d. 783) and Fastrada (d. 794), ran the royal household, which included the treasury. Einhard records that Charlemagne kept his daughters at court and would not let them marry, probably to avoid giving sons-in-law a claim to the throne. Noblewomen and abbesses, such as Charlemagne's sister Gisela, abbess of Chelles, controlled large estates and centres of learning.

The most remarkable female voice of the period is Dhuoda, a noblewoman who wrote a handbook of moral advice, the Liber manualis, in 841–843 for her son William, who was being held at the court of Charles the Bald as a guarantee of his father's loyalty. It is one of very few works by a lay woman to survive from the early Middle Ages, and it shows a woman educated, religious and acutely aware of the political dangers of civil war.

Most people were peasants. The estate survey of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés near Paris, compiled under Abbot Irminon in about 823–829, lists thousands of peasant households, their holdings and the labour and dues they owed. Such surveys, called polyptychs, show that free and unfree peasants often lived side by side, and that the line between them was blurring into a single dependent peasantry.

Slavery was still common. Captives from the wars against the Saxons and Slavs were sold, and merchants traded slaves through Frankish lands, with Verdun as a known centre, to the Islamic world in Spain. The historian Michael McCormick has argued that the export of European slaves was a major part of Carolingian trade with the Islamic Mediterranean. Jewish merchants were protected by royal charters: Louis the Pious granted privileges to Jewish traders and appointed an official to protect them. The archbishop Agobard of Lyon complained in the 820s that these privileges favoured Jews over Christians, which shows both royal protection and clerical hostility.

Charlemagne as a leader

Charlemagne's personal role in the rise of the empire was very large. He led most campaigns in person for over thirty years, chose counts and bishops himself, drew scholars to his court and was present at the assemblies where decisions were made. His long reign (46 years) and his survival of conspiracies, including a revolt led by his eldest son, Pippin the Hunchback, in 792, gave the empire stability.

Several points limit this judgement. Charlemagne inherited a kingdom already enlarged by his father and grandfather, an army used to annual campaigns, and the alliance with the papacy. His government worked through the aristocracy, whose support he could not do without. And his empire was a personal creation that his successors could not hold together, which suggests that it depended on him more than on lasting institutions.

Decline and division, 814–888

Charlemagne's only surviving legitimate son, Louis the Pious (r. 814–840), inherited the whole empire. In 817 he issued the Ordinatio imperii, which made his eldest son Lothar co-emperor and heir to the empire as a whole, with his younger sons as subordinate kings. It was an attempt to keep the empire united against the Frankish custom of dividing a ruler's lands among all his sons, known as partible inheritance.

The plan failed. After the birth of a fourth son, Charles (later "the Bald"), to his second wife Judith in 823, Louis tried to provide a kingdom for him, which threatened the shares of the older sons. They rebelled in 830 and again in 833, when Louis's supporters deserted him on the "Field of Lies" near Colmar in Alsace. He was forced to do public penance and was deposed for a time before being restored in 834. These revolts showed that the aristocracy would back whichever Carolingian offered them most.

After Louis died in 840 his sons fought a civil war. Lothar was defeated at the Battle of Fontenoy in June 841. In 842 Louis the German and Charles the Bald swore the Oaths of Strasbourg to support each other, in Old High German and Old French so that each other's troops could understand; it is one of the earliest texts in an early form of French. In August 843 the brothers agreed the Treaty of Verdun.

External attacks grew at the same time. Viking raiders from Scandinavia attacked the coasts and rivers of Francia from the 830s: they sacked Dorestad, the empire's main trading port, several times from 834, and in 845 they sacked Paris and were paid 7,000 pounds of silver to leave. Saracen raiders from North Africa and Spain attacked southern Gaul and Italy, and from the 890s the Magyars, horsemen from the Hungarian plain, raided deep into the East Frankish kingdom.

The kings struggled to respond because they had few forces of their own and depended on local lords, who gained power as the defenders of their regions. The counts, who had been royal officials, increasingly passed their offices to their sons. In 877, in the Capitulary of Quierzy, Charles the Bald accepted that a count's son could take over his father's county while the king was away on campaign, a sign of how far hereditary local power had grown.

For a short time the empire was reunited under Charles the Fat (emperor 881–887), because so many other Carolingian heirs had died. When the Vikings besieged Paris in 885–886, the city was defended by its count, Odo, while Charles paid the Vikings to move on and raid Burgundy. The nobles deposed him in November 887, and after his death in January 888 the empire divided for good: Odo, who was not a Carolingian, was elected king in West Francia, and Charles's nephew Arnulf ruled East Francia.

The diagram of causes shows why most historians give dynastic and structural factors the main weight. The empire had been divided in 843, before the worst Viking attacks; the attacks then turned local lords, not kings, into the protectors of the people. One settlement of Vikings had lasting consequences: in 911 the West Frankish king granted lands around Rouen to the Viking leader Rollo, the origin of the duchy of Normandy, whose dukes conquered England in 1066.

YouTube

Case study 2: Norman and Angevin England, 1066–1216

In 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England. For the next century and a half England was ruled by kings who also held large lands in France: first the Norman dynasty (1066–1154), then the Angevins, descended from the counts of Anjou (from 1154). The period saw a violent conquest, the replacement of the English ruling class, and the growth of one of the most centralised systems of royal government in Europe.

Emergence: the conquest of 1066

The kingdom William conquered was already well governed. Late Anglo-Saxon England was divided into shires (counties), each run for the king by a sheriff (shire-reeve), and shires into smaller units called hundreds, which had their own courts. The kings issued a single silver coinage from dozens of mints, sent orders to the shires in short sealed letters called writs, and raised a land tax, the geld, which had begun as payments to Viking raiders.

When Edward the Confessor died childless on 5 January 1066, three men claimed the throne. Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex and the most powerful English noble, was crowned the next day. Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, claimed it through an earlier agreement between Norwegian and Danish kings. William of Normandy, Edward's cousin, claimed that Edward had promised him the throne and that Harold had sworn an oath to support him during a visit to Normandy, probably in 1064. Pope Alexander II gave his support to William's invasion.

Harold defeated and killed Hardrada at Stamford Bridge, near York, on 25 September 1066. Three days later William landed at Pevensey on the south coast. Harold marched south and met him at Hastings on 14 October 1066. After a day-long battle, in which the Norman cavalry and archers wore down the English shield wall, Harold was killed. The English leaders submitted, and William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066.

The Bayeux Tapestry is the best-known source for the conquest, and it mainly reflects the Norman view. It tells the story of Harold's oath to William and his breaking of it, so that the conquest appears as just punishment for perjury. Yet it also shows Harold crowned and calls him king, a title that some Norman writers denied him. Whether the figure with the arrow is Harold has long been debated; the image may have been altered in nineteenth-century restoration.

Consolidation: force, land and castles, 1066–1087

At first William tried to rule with English cooperation, keeping English earls and bishops in office. A series of revolts changed this: in the south-west at Exeter (1068), and in the north and the Midlands in 1068 and 1069. In 1069 a Danish fleet joined northern rebels, who captured York and killed its Norman garrison. William's response was the Harrying of the North in the winter of 1069–1070.

Norman troops destroyed crops, livestock and villages across Yorkshire and beyond, so that the region could no longer support rebels or invaders. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that William went north "despoiling and laying waste the shire". Domesday Book, compiled sixteen years later, lists many Yorkshire settlements as "waste". The Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis, writing in the 1120s and 1130s, claimed that more than 100,000 people died of famine; historians treat his figure as an estimate from a later writer, but agree that the devastation was severe.

The last major English resistance was led by Hereward "the Wake" in the fens around Ely in 1070–1071. In 1075 the Revolt of the Earls, led by two Norman earls and the last English earl, Waltheof, was crushed; Waltheof was executed in 1076.

Castles were the main instrument of Norman control. They housed garrisons that could dominate a town or a river crossing, served as bases for the new lords, and displayed Norman power. Building them often meant demolishing houses: at Lincoln, Domesday Book records 166 houses destroyed for the castle.

A new ruling class

The revolts led William to replace the English aristocracy. Lands of those who had fought at Hastings or rebelled were confiscated and granted to his followers from Normandy, Brittany and Flanders. By 1086 almost all large estates were held by about 190 lay tenants-in-chief, men who held their land directly from the king, and only two Englishmen still held large estates in that way. Each tenant-in-chief owed the king a fixed number of knights, and granted parts of his land to knights of his own in return for service.

Data: commonly cited estimates from Domesday Book (1086); historians' calculations differ (the king's share is given as between about 17 and 20 per cent), so all figures are approximate. The figures show that the conquest was above all a transfer of land. The king himself held more land than any English king before him, which gave him the resources to reward followers and the power to dominate them.

The Domesday survey, 1086

At his Christmas court at Gloucester in 1085, with England threatened by a Danish invasion, William ordered a survey of his kingdom. Commissioners visited every shire in 1086 and took evidence on oath from juries of local men. The results were written up in two volumes, now called Domesday Book.

So very narrowly, indeed, did he commission them to trace it out, that there was not one single hide, nor a yard of land, nay, moreover (it is shameful to tell, though he thought it no shame to do it), not even an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine was there left, that was not set down in his writ.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, annal for 1085 (trans. J. Ingram, 1823). The chronicler was an English monk, probably writing soon after the event. His disapproval ("it is shameful to tell") shows how the survey felt to the conquered English: a foreign king counting their property. As evidence of the survey's thoroughness it is supported by Domesday Book itself, which records about 13,000 places.

Historians debate the survey's purpose. It recorded who held each piece of land in 1066 and in 1086, so it settled the many disputes over land created by the conquest. It recorded the value of estates and their tax assessment, so it helped the king collect the geld and the dues owed to him. It also showed what military service each landholder could support when an invasion was expected. In August 1086, at Salisbury, the leading landholders of England, including the knights of the tenants-in-chief, swore an oath of loyalty to William directly. The Salisbury Oath and the survey together reminded every landholder that his land came, in the end, from the king.

The Church and the Norman settlement

William replaced the English leaders of the Church as well. In 1070 papal legates deposed Archbishop Stigand of Canterbury, and William appointed Lanfranc, an Italian scholar and abbot from Normandy. By 1087 only one bishop, Wulfstan of Worcester, was English. Lanfranc held reforming councils, moved some bishoprics to larger towns and enforced clerical celibacy more strictly. William ordered that cases concerning the Church be heard in separate church courts. Norman bishops and abbots rebuilt almost every major church in the new Romanesque style, from Canterbury to Durham.

William supported reform but kept control of the Church. He appointed bishops and abbots himself, and when Pope Gregory VII demanded that William swear fealty to him in 1080, William refused. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's verdict on his death in 1087 captures both sides of his rule: he kept such "good peace" that a man might travel through the kingdom with his "bosom full of gold", but he was so stern that he "recked not the hatred of them all", and he took money from his people "by right and by unright". The chronicler also condemned his forest law, which reserved huge areas for royal hunting under severe penalties.

Henry I and the Anarchy, 1100–1154

William's second son, William II "Rufus" (r. 1087–1100), was killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest. His younger brother Henry I seized the treasury and the crown before their elder brother Robert, Duke of Normandy, could act. To win support, Henry issued a Charter of Liberties at his coronation in 1100, promising to end the abuses of his brother's reign, such as excessive payments demanded from heirs. In 1106 he defeated Robert at Tinchebray and reunited England and Normandy.

Henry I (r. 1100–1135) developed royal administration. The Exchequer, named after the chequered cloth on which accounts were calculated with counters, audited the sheriffs twice a year. Its records were kept on pipe rolls; the earliest that survives is for 1130, and it shows the king's income from land, justice, fines and payments for royal favour. Henry also sent royal justices around the shires to hear cases, which brought more profit and more royal control.

Henry's only legitimate son, William, drowned when the White Ship sank in the Channel in November 1120. Henry later made the barons swear (in 1127) to accept his daughter Matilda, widow of the German emperor Henry V and known as "the Empress", as his heir. When he died in 1135, however, his nephew Stephen of Blois seized the crown. Many barons preferred a man to a woman, and Matilda was married to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, a traditional enemy of the Normans.

Matilda landed in 1139. In 1141 her forces captured Stephen at Lincoln, but she was driven from London before she could be crowned, and Stephen was released in an exchange of prisoners. The war became a stalemate. The Peterborough version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes how "every rich man built his castles" and robbed the people, so that men "said openly, that Christ slept, and his saints". The account is written by a monk who wanted to show the sins of the time and describes the worst-hit areas, but other evidence, such as the collapse of royal income recorded at the Exchequer, confirms a serious breakdown of royal government. The Treaty of Winchester (also called Wallingford) in 1153 made Matilda's son Henry Stephen's heir, and he became king in 1154.

Henry II and the Angevin empire, 1154–1189

Henry II was already Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou when he became king, and in 1152 he had married Eleanor of Aquitaine, heiress to the largest duchy in France and the former wife of King Louis VII of France. His lands stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees, and his rule was far larger than that of the King of France.

Henry spent the early years of his reign restoring royal power after the Anarchy. He took back royal lands and castles that had been seized, had castles built without royal permission destroyed, and expelled the Flemish mercenaries Stephen had used. He travelled constantly through his lands, holding courts and hearing complaints.

The growth of the common law

Henry's most lasting achievement was in justice. Through a series of royal decrees, called assizes, he made the king's courts the normal place for serious crime and for disputes over land held freely. In 1166 the Assize of Clarendon ordered juries of local men to report suspected criminals to the royal justices. The Assize of Northampton (1176) divided England into circuits for travelling justices in eyre.

The chain of procedure shows how royal justice reached into local life. For civil cases, Henry created simple procedures, the possessory assizes, which let a free man who had been thrown off his land recover it quickly through a royal writ and a jury. Novel disseisin (recent dispossession) and mort d'ancestor (claims by an heir) were popular because they were fast and backed by royal power. Royal courts applied the same rules everywhere, and decisions began to form a body of law common to the whole kingdom.

Henry also tightened control of local officials. In the Inquest of Sheriffs of 1170 he investigated their conduct and dismissed most of them. He made more use of scutage, a payment that a landholder could make in place of knight service, which let the king hire paid soldiers for his long wars in France. Justice, too, was a source of revenue: fines, payments for writs and the property of convicted criminals all went to the crown.

Henry II and Thomas Becket

Henry's attempt to extend royal justice brought him into conflict with the Church. In 1162 he made his chancellor and friend Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, expecting his support. Becket instead defended the Church's rights. The central issue was the punishment of "criminous clerks": clergy accused of crimes were tried in church courts, which could not impose death or mutilation. In the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), Henry demanded that clergy convicted in church courts be handed to royal courts for punishment and that appeals to Rome need royal permission.

Becket refused to accept the Constitutions and went into exile for six years. Soon after his return, on 29 December 1170, four of Henry's knights, who had heard the king's angry words against him, murdered Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. Becket was made a saint in 1173 and his shrine became one of the greatest pilgrimage centres in Europe. In the Compromise of Avranches (1172) Henry gave up the most controversial clauses, and in 1174 he did public penance at Becket's tomb, though in practice royal control of appointments to bishoprics continued.

In 1173–1174 Henry faced the Great Revolt, led by his own sons, Henry "the Young King", Richard and Geoffrey, with the support of Eleanor, Louis VII of France and William the Lion, King of Scots. Henry defeated it, and Eleanor was imprisoned until his death. His sons rebelled again at the end of his reign, and he died in 1189 after being defeated by Richard in alliance with Philip II of France.

Richard I and John: the loss of Normandy, 1189–1204

Richard I (r. 1189–1199) spent about six months of his ten-year reign in England. He left on the Third Crusade in 1190; the crusade is treated from the Islamic side in the regional study of North Africa and the Middle East. On his way home in December 1192 he was captured by Duke Leopold of Austria and handed to the German emperor Henry VI, who demanded a ransom of 150,000 marks, two or three times the crown's normal annual income. England paid most of it through a tax of a quarter of the value of people's movable goods, which shows how much wealth Angevin government could extract. Richard spent his last years defending Normandy against Philip II of France, building the great castle of Château Gaillard (1196–1198), and died in 1199 from a crossbow wound at a siege in the Limousin.

His brother John (r. 1199–1216) faced a rival claim from his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, who was backed by Philip II. In 1200 John married Isabella of Angoulême, who was already betrothed to a member of the Lusignan family, one of John's vassals in Poitou. The Lusignans appealed to Philip as John's overlord, and in 1202 Philip's court declared John's French lands forfeit. John captured Arthur in 1202, but Arthur disappeared in 1203, probably murdered on John's orders, and John's barons in France deserted him. Château Gaillard fell in March 1204 and Rouen in June: Normandy was lost.

The loss of Normandy changed the kingdom. The Anglo-Norman barons had to choose between their English and Norman lands, and England became the centre of Angevin rule, not a province. John spent the next ten years raising money to win his lands back, through heavy scutages, fines, payments from heirs and widows, and a tax on movable goods in 1207. He also quarrelled with Pope Innocent III over the election of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury. The pope placed England under an interdict from 1208 to 1214, suspending most church services, and excommunicated John in 1209. In 1213 John submitted, making England a fief of the papacy, to gain the pope's support.

In 1214 John's great alliance against Philip collapsed when his allies, the German emperor Otto IV and the Count of Flanders, were defeated at Bouvines in July. John returned to England with no victory and an empty treasury. In May 1215 rebel barons renounced their allegiance and took London.

Magna Carta, 1215

On 15 June 1215, at Runnymede on the Thames, John agreed to a charter of liberties drafted with the rebels and probably shaped by Archbishop Langton. Magna Carta ("the great charter") had 63 clauses. Most dealt with specific grievances of the barons: the payments demanded from heirs, the sale of wardships and widows' marriages, the abuse of the forest law and the conduct of royal officials. Some clauses had wider meaning.

39. No freemen shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. 40. To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.

Magna Carta, clauses 39 and 40, 15 June 1215 (translation from the Avalon Project, Yale Law School). The clauses were written by barons who wanted protection from a king who had seized lands and imprisoned opponents without trial. They protected only "free men", which excluded the unfree villeins who were probably a majority of the rural population. Later generations read them as a general guarantee of due process, which is why the charter became famous.

Clause 12 said that no scutage or extra aid could be taken "unless by common counsel of our kingdom", and clause 14 set out how that counsel was to be obtained, by summoning the bishops, earls and greater barons. Clause 61, the "security clause", created a council of 25 barons who could seize the king's property if he broke the charter. John had no intention of keeping it. Within weeks he appealed to the pope, who annulled the charter in August 1215, and civil war followed, with the rebels inviting Louis, son of Philip II, to take the throne. John died in October 1216. His young son's regents reissued the charter in 1216, 1217 and 1225, and from then on it was confirmed repeatedly.

Women in Norman and Angevin England

Two women came close to the centre of power. The Empress Matilda was recognised as heir by the barons in 1127 and called herself "Lady of the English" in 1141, but she was never crowned, and contemporary chroniclers blamed her failure on her supposedly arrogant manner, a charge rarely made against male rulers. Her son's succession in 1154 came through her claim. Eleanor of Aquitaine was duchess in her own right, queen of France and then of England, and a major patron of literature. After her part in the revolt of 1173–1174 Henry kept her in confinement for fifteen years, but she governed England while Richard was on crusade and helped to raise his ransom.

For most women, law and custom limited their independence. A married woman's property was controlled by her husband. Widows were more independent, holding a share of their husband's land (the dower), but the king sold the right to marry wealthy widows and heiresses. Magna Carta's clauses 7 and 8 show this: a widow was to receive her inheritance and dower "without difficulty", and no widow was to be "compelled to marry, so long as she prefers to live without a husband", though she still needed the king's consent to remarry if she held land from him. Peasant women worked in the fields, in brewing and in textile production alongside men, and appear in manorial records as tenants, especially as widows.

Jews and other marginalised groups in England

Jews came to England after 1066, probably from Rouen, invited by William I. Because the Church forbade Christians to lend money at interest, Jews became important as moneylenders to kings, barons and churches. They lived under royal protection, but in law they were treated as the king's property: the king could tax them at will (the tallage) and took over their debts when they died. Under Richard I a special department, the Exchequer of the Jews, was set up to record Jewish loans and collect royal revenue from them.

This position made Jews both useful and vulnerable. The first known accusation that Jews had ritually murdered a Christian child, the blood libel, followed the death of a boy, William, in Norwich in 1144, promoted by a local monk, Thomas of Monmouth. At Richard I's coronation in September 1189 a crowd attacked Jews in London, and in March 1190, as crusading fervour spread, the Jews of York took refuge in the royal castle (on the site of the later Clifford's Tower); about 150 died, many by their own hand, rather than be killed or forcibly baptised. The attackers then burned the records of debts owed to Jews, which shows that debt as well as religious hatred drove the violence.

Royal protection turned into exploitation and then expulsion. Heavy tallages in the thirteenth century impoverished the community; from 1218 Jews were required to wear a badge, following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215; the Statute of the Jewry of 1275 banned them from lending at interest; and on 18 July 1290 Edward I ordered the expulsion of all Jews from England, which brought him a grant of taxation from Parliament. Jews were not readmitted until 1656.

The unfree majority also experienced change. Domesday Book counted slaves as about a tenth of the recorded population in 1086; slavery largely disappeared in the following decades as slaves were settled as dependent peasants. However, as Henry II's common law developed, the royal courts were opened only to free men, and the lawyers defined the unfree villein as a man whose lord controlled his land and labour. The same reforms that gave free men royal justice therefore made the line between free and unfree sharper.

The Angevin kings as leaders, and the limits of decline

The decline of the Angevin position centres on the collapse in France in 1202–1204 and the crisis of 1215–1216. Historians weigh John's personal failures, such as his treatment of Arthur and of his barons, against structural problems: the French lands were far larger than the English, Philip II's revenues were growing quickly, and the barons of Poitou and Anjou had little reason to fight for a distant king. John Gillingham, in The Angevin Empire (1984), treats it as a real if loosely organised power and lays much of the blame for its collapse on John's own failures; others argue that its separate parts were bound to fall to a stronger French monarchy.

England itself did not decline. The kingdom survived the civil war of 1215–1217, and the common law, the Exchequer and the practice of seeking consent for taxation continued under Henry III (r. 1216–1272) and Edward I (r. 1272–1307), when Parliament developed out of the great councils. In the fourteenth century the kingdom faced new crises: the deposition of Edward II in 1327, the Hundred Years War from 1337, the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (both linked to the effects of the plague), and the deposition of Richard II in 1399. These crises weakened kings but not the institutions of the state.

Other kingdoms and empires: four shorter profiles

Each of the four profiles follows the same pattern as the case studies: emergence, legitimacy and consolidation, religion, culture and society, decline, and the leader most often studied. Each gives a full outline of one state, and together they provide comparisons for the case studies.

The Holy Roman Empire, 962–c. 1400

Emergence: Otto I and the revival of the empire

After the last East Frankish Carolingian died in 911, the dukes of the German regions (Saxony, Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia and Lotharingia) elected their kings. In 919 they chose the Saxon duke Henry I, and his son Otto I (r. 936–973) made the monarchy the strongest power in Europe. Otto crushed rebellions by the dukes, including his own brother and son, and in August 955 he destroyed a large Magyar army at the Lechfeld near Augsburg, ending their raids into Germany. The victory made him the protector of Latin Christendom.

Otto took control of the kingdom of Italy in 951 and on 2 February 962 Pope John XII crowned him emperor in Rome. From then on, the German king claimed the right to be crowned emperor by the pope, and the empire included Germany, much of northern Italy and, from 1033, Burgundy. Historians call it the Holy Roman Empire, though "Holy" was added only under Frederick Barbarossa in the 1150s and the full title became usual in the thirteenth century.

Consolidation: the imperial Church

Otto and his successors governed largely through the Church. They appointed bishops and abbots, often from the royal chapel, and gave them lands, counties and royal rights such as markets, tolls and justice. Unlike counts, bishops could not pass their offices to sons, so their lands returned to royal control at their death. Historians call this the Ottonian imperial church system. It also meant that control of church appointments was essential to the emperor's power, which is why the papal reform movement struck at the heart of the empire.

Religion: the Investiture Contest

From the 1040s reformers in the Church attacked the buying and selling of church offices, called simony, and the marriage of priests. Emperor Henry III himself supported reform, deposing three rival popes at Sutri in 1046 and appointing German reformers. But the reformers came to argue that the root of the problem was control of the Church by laymen, and above all lay investiture: the ceremony in which a ruler handed a new bishop his ring and staff, the symbols of his spiritual office.

Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085) set out a sweeping view of papal power in a list of 27 propositions entered in his register in 1075.

2. That the Roman pontiff alone can with right be called universal. 3. That he alone can depose or reinstate bishops. 12. That it may be permitted to him to depose emperors. 27. That he may absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.

Gregory VII, Dictatus Papae, 1075 (trans. E. F. Henderson, 1910). The document was a private list of principles in the papal register, not a public decree, so it shows what Gregory believed more than what he announced. Its claim that the pope could release subjects from their oaths was revolutionary: it meant that a king's authority depended on the pope's approval.

The dispute came to a head with Henry IV (r. 1056–1106). When Gregory challenged his appointment of the Archbishop of Milan, Henry's German bishops declared Gregory deposed at Worms in January 1076, and Henry wrote to him as "Hildebrand, at present not pope but false monk". Gregory excommunicated Henry and released his subjects from their oaths. The German princes, many of whom had rebelled against Henry in Saxony, threatened to elect a new king unless he was absolved. In January 1077 Henry crossed the Alps in winter and stood as a penitent outside the castle of Canossa for three days until Gregory lifted the excommunication.

Canossa did not end the conflict: the princes elected a rival king, Rudolf of Rheinfelden, and Germany suffered years of civil war. Henry later captured Rome, and Gregory died in exile in 1085. The long-term result was that the princes gained power at the emperor's expense, and that the emperor lost the unquestioned sacred status that Otto I had enjoyed.

Decline: the princes and Italy

The Staufer emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (r. 1155–1190) tried to restore imperial authority in Italy, but the cities of the Lombard League defeated him at Legnano in 1176, and he had to recognise their self-government. His grandson Frederick II (d. 1250), who was also King of Sicily, fought the papacy for most of his reign and granted the German princes wide rights in 1231–1232 in order to concentrate on Italy. After his death the empire had no generally accepted ruler for two decades, the Great Interregnum (1250–1273), until the princes elected Rudolf of Habsburg in 1273.

By 1400 the Holy Roman Empire was a loose federation of princes, bishops and cities under an elected emperor who ruled effectively only in his own family's lands. Historians explain the change by the elective monarchy, which let the princes demand concessions at each election; the conflict with the papacy, which weakened the emperor's sacred authority; and the pull of Italy, which drew emperors away from Germany. Some historians now question the idea of "decline", arguing that the empire worked as a framework for peace and law among many rulers.

YouTube

The North Sea Empire of Cnut, 1016–1042

Viking raids on England resumed in the 980s, and King Æthelred II paid ever larger sums of tribute, later called Danegeld, to buy off the raiders. In 1013 the Danish king Sweyn Forkbeard conquered England, though he died early in 1014. His son Cnut returned in 1015 and, after defeating Edmund Ironside at Assandun in 1016, became king of all England when Edmund died in November of that year.

Cnut combined conquest with continuity. In 1017 he married Æthelred's widow, Emma of Normandy, which linked him to the old dynasty and to Normandy. He divided England into great earldoms, giving some to Danes and some to Englishmen, among them Godwin, the father of Harold, who became Earl of Wessex. In 1018 he raised a huge payment to pay off his fleet: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records "two and seventy thousand pounds" from England and ten thousand five hundred from London. The same year, at Oxford, Danes and English agreed to live "under Edgar's law", the law of a respected English king.

Cnut became King of Denmark after his brother's death around 1018–1019 and drove King Olaf Haraldsson out of Norway in 1028. His rule linked England, Denmark and Norway, with influence over parts of Sweden, the Scottish kings and the Irish Sea, and historians call it the North Sea Empire, though it was never a single state. He governed it from England, the richest part, and ruled Denmark and Norway through relatives and regents.

Religion was central to his legitimacy. Cnut, the son of a recently converted Danish king, presented himself as a model Christian ruler. His law codes were drafted by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, and combined royal law with Christian moral teaching. In 1027 he travelled to Rome for the imperial coronation of Conrad II, where he negotiated lower tolls for English pilgrims and merchants. He endowed English monasteries and encouraged the conversion of Scandinavia using English missionaries. Queen Emma commissioned a work in praise of herself and her family, the Encomium Emmae Reginae (about 1041–1042), one of the first works in which a medieval queen shaped her own political image.

The empire collapsed quickly after Cnut's death in 1035. Norway was lost to Olaf's son Magnus, and Cnut's sons Harold Harefoot and Harthacnut quarrelled over England and Denmark. Both died young, and in 1042 Æthelred's son Edward the Confessor became King of England. The North Sea Empire is the clearest example of a state that depended on one leader: it had no common institutions, the sea made communication slow, and each kingdom had its own aristocracy and law.

Capetian France, 987–1328

When the last Carolingian king of West Francia died in 987, the great nobles elected Hugh Capet, Duke of the Franks, as king. The early Capetian kings were weak. They ruled directly only a small area around Paris and Orléans, the royal demesne, while dukes and counts such as the dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine and the counts of Flanders and Champagne held far greater lands and paid little attention to the king. The kings did, however, have their anointed status, a close alliance with the Church, and the formal overlordship of all the great nobles.

The dynasty survived through luck and policy. For more than three hundred years, from 987 to 1316, each king left a son to succeed him. From Hugh Capet to Louis VII, each king had his eldest son crowned during his own lifetime, a practice called anticipatory association, so that the succession was settled before the old king died. The Capetians also accepted the rule of primogeniture, by which the kingdom passed undivided to the eldest son, which spared France the divisions that broke up the Carolingian Empire.

Philip II Augustus

Philip II (r. 1180–1223) transformed the monarchy. He exploited the quarrels within the Angevin family, supporting Henry II's sons against their father and then Arthur against John. In 1202 his court, as overlord, confiscated John's French fiefs, and in 1202–1204 Philip conquered Normandy, Anjou and Maine. At Bouvines on 27 July 1214 he defeated the coalition of John's allies, which confirmed his conquests and made the French monarchy the strongest in western Europe.

Philip also created a more effective administration. Before leaving on the Third Crusade in 1190 he appointed salaried officials called baillis to supervise justice and finance in the royal lands; unlike the older local officials, they could be moved and dismissed. Records were kept in a permanent archive. In The Government of Philip Augustus (1986), the historian John W. Baldwin used the surviving accounts of 1202–1203 to argue that Philip's ordinary revenue had risen sharply since the start of the reign, and that this administrative and financial growth, more than battlefield victory alone, explains his success. The conquests then multiplied the royal demesne several times over.

Religion and the later Capetians

The Capetians drew strength from the Church. The kings were anointed at Reims with oil believed to have come from heaven, and from the twelfth century they were believed to heal scrofula, a skin disease, by touch. Louis IX (r. 1226–1270), a deeply pious king who died on crusade at Tunis, was made a saint in 1297, which gave the dynasty unique prestige. His piety also had a harsh side: he had copies of the Talmud, the collection of Jewish law and commentary, burned in Paris in 1242. The Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics of the south (1209–1229) ended with the region of Toulouse under royal control.

Under Philip IV (r. 1285–1314), royal power came into open conflict with the papacy. When Philip taxed the clergy without papal permission, Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Unam Sanctam (1302), which declared "that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff". Philip's agents responded by seizing the pope at Anagni in 1303; Boniface died soon after. From 1309 the popes lived at Avignon, close to French influence. Philip also arrested the Knights Templar in 1307, using charges of heresy to seize their wealth, and expelled the Jews in 1306 to take their property.

The direct Capetian line ended because Philip IV's three sons all died without sons between 1316 and 1328. The French nobles excluded women and their descendants from the throne, so in 1328 the crown passed to Philip's nephew, Philip of Valois. Edward III of England, a grandson of Philip IV through his mother, also claimed the throne, and this dispute, combined with quarrels over Gascony and Flanders, led to the Hundred Years War in 1337. The end of the direct line therefore struck a strong monarchy by dynastic accident.

The Kingdom of Poland, 966–c. 1400

The Polish state emerged under the Piast dynasty in the tenth century among the Slav tribes between the Oder and the Vistula. Its first historical ruler, Mieszko I, accepted Christian baptism in 966, after marrying a Bohemian princess, Dobrawa. Baptism brought him alliances with Christian neighbours, the support of the clergy, and protection against the claim of German rulers to convert, and so to rule, the Slavs. In about 991 he placed his lands under the protection of the papacy.

His son Bolesław I the Brave (r. 992–1025) expanded the state by war, briefly holding Bohemia and capturing Kiev in 1018. In March 1000 Emperor Otto III came to Gniezno to visit the tomb of the missionary Adalbert of Prague, killed by the pagan Prussians in 997. The two rulers founded an archbishopric at Gniezno with bishoprics at Kraków, Wrocław and Kołobrzeg, which gave Poland a church independent of the German archbishops. Bolesław was crowned king in 1025, shortly before his death.

The kingdom proved fragile. A pagan reaction and a Bohemian invasion in the 1030s devastated Greater Poland, and the rulers moved their centre to Kraków. In 1138 the testament of Duke Bolesław III Wrymouth divided the lands among his sons, with the eldest as senior duke. The arrangement collapsed into nearly two centuries of fragmentation among rival duchies. In this period the Mongols invaded in 1241, burning Kraków and defeating the Polish and German knights at Legnica, and the Teutonic Knights, a German crusading order invited in 1226 to fight the pagan Prussians, built a powerful state on Poland's northern border.

Reunification came under Władysław I the Short, crowned king in Kraków in 1320. His son Casimir III the Great (r. 1333–1370) made peace with Bohemia and the Teutonic Knights, giving up claims to Silesia and Pomerania, and expanded east into Red Ruthenia, around Lwów. He codified the law of his provinces in the Statutes of Wiślica and Piotrków (around 1346–1347), founded the University of Kraków in 1364, and built castles and walled towns; a popular saying, of uncertain origin, holds that he found Poland built of wood and left it built of brick. Casimir confirmed and extended the privileges of Polish Jews from 1334, and many Jews fleeing persecution in Germany at the time of the Black Death settled in Poland.

Casimir had no legitimate son, and the crown passed to his nephew, Louis of Hungary, who bought the nobles' acceptance of his daughters' succession with the Privilege of Koszyce (1374), which largely freed the nobility from taxation. In 1384 Louis's daughter Jadwiga was crowned "king" of Poland, and in 1386 she married Jogaila, Grand Duke of Lithuania, who was baptised as Władysław II Jagiełło. The Union of Krewo (1385) began a union of Poland and Lithuania that lasted for four centuries. Poland's path shows a kingdom that declined through division and recovered through dynastic reunion, at the price of concessions that strengthened the nobility.

Why kingdoms and empires emerged and expanded

Across the six states the same four kinds of factor appear, though in different combinations. The diagram of factors groups them; the important skill is to show how they worked together in the state chosen.

Economic factors

In the early Middle Ages, wealth came mainly from land and from war. Kings expanded to gain plunder, tribute and land with which to reward followers: the Avar treasure for Charlemagne, Danegeld for Sweyn and Cnut, the confiscated estates of the English for William I. Expansion paid for itself while it lasted, but when conquest stopped, kings had to give away their own lands, which weakened them.

From about 1000 to 1300 Europe's economy grew. The population of western Europe perhaps doubled or more, more land was cleared and farmed, and trade and towns grew. Several technologies spread together: the heavy plough, which could turn the damp clay soils of northern Europe; the three-field rotation, which left only a third of the land fallow each year instead of half; the horse collar, which let horses pull ploughs and carts efficiently; and the watermill, of which Domesday Book records about 5,600 in England alone in 1086. Growth gave rulers new sources of income: tolls, town charters sold for money, taxes on movable goods and loans from merchants and Jewish moneylenders.

States that could tap this growth had an advantage. Philip II's revenues grew with the trade of Paris and the conquered lands of Normandy; English kings could tax movable goods from 1188, starting with the "Saladin tithe" for the crusade. By contrast, the Carolingians ruled an economy with little coin and few towns, which made plunder and land the main currency of power.

Political and dynastic factors

Dynasties built states. The Carolingians rose by turning a hereditary office into a crown; the Angevins united their lands through inheritance (Normandy and Anjou) and marriage (Aquitaine in 1152); Cnut married his predecessor's widow; Poland was reunited and later joined to Lithuania by marriage. Weak or divided neighbours created opportunities: the Lombards were isolated in 774, England was exhausted by Viking wars before 1016, and John's quarrels with his barons let Philip II take Normandy. Papal support could turn power into a right to rule, as in 751, 800, 962 and 1066.

Social and cultural factors

A warrior aristocracy that expected land and plunder pushed rulers to expand, and rulers who could not satisfy it faced revolt. Christianity was a powerful force for state-building. It brought literate clergy who could keep records and write laws, a common religious culture across peoples, and the idea of a Christian king chosen by God. For the rulers of new states on the edge of Christendom, such as Poland and Denmark, conversion was also a political decision that brought alliances and a church organisation of their own.

Conflict and settlement

Most of the states were born or enlarged in war: Charlemagne's campaigns, the conquests of 1016 and 1066, Philip II's conquest of Normandy. Settlement mattered as well. Scandinavians settled in eastern England (the Danelaw) and in Normandy from 911, creating the populations and the rulers who later shaped England. Defence against invaders could also make a ruler: Otto I's victory at the Lechfeld in 955 made him the obvious candidate for the imperial crown.

Legitimising and maintaining authority

Medieval rulers needed both legitimacy, the belief that they had a right to rule, and the practical means to make their will obeyed. They had no police and few paid officials, so they relied on a mixture of law, personal bonds, wealth and force. The comparative table shows how each of the main states combined them.

Law and government

Law was the main way kings showed their authority in peacetime. Doing justice was a royal duty, and a king who offered better justice than his barons drew people to his courts. Written instruments allowed government at a distance: Carolingian capitularies, English writs and the records of the Exchequer and of Philip II's archive. Surveys such as the polyptychs and Domesday Book told rulers what they owned and what they were owed.

Nobles, officials and the elite

Every medieval ruler governed with and through the nobility. Kings rewarded loyal nobles with land, offices and marriages to heiresses, and consulted them in assemblies and councils. The danger was that offices became hereditary and loyalty turned local, as with the Carolingian counts. Successful kings developed officials who depended on them: the churchmen of the Ottonian court, the sheriffs and justices of Angevin England, the baillis of Philip II and the ministeriales of the German emperors, unfree knights who served as administrators and castle-keepers.

Taxation and income

Income determined what a ruler could do. Early medieval kings lived largely off their own lands, plunder and dues. The English kings were unusual in having a national land tax from before 1066, the geld, and the Angevins developed a range of new revenues. Taxation also created resistance: the Angevin demands lay behind Magna Carta, and its clause 12 introduced the principle that extraordinary taxes needed the consent of the kingdom, which led in the thirteenth century to the summoning of parliaments in England and, under Philip IV, of the Estates-General in France (1302).

Force

Force won kingdoms and put down revolts. Castles, which spread across Europe from the tenth century, gave whoever held them control of the surrounding land; they were tools of royal control in Norman England, but in the Anarchy and in tenth-century France, castles held by local lords undermined royal power. Rulers increasingly hired paid soldiers, financed by scutage and taxes. Force alone, however, could not maintain a kingdom for long: William I combined it with the inherited English administration, and Charlemagne with the oath and the Church.

The impact of religion

Religion and the legitimacy of rulers

Christianity gave kings their most important claim to rule. Anointing made them sacred persons; coronation oaths bound them to protect the Church and do justice; and the support of the pope could decide disputed claims, as in 751, 800 and 1066. Royal saints such as Edward the Confessor (canonised 1161) and Louis IX added prestige to their dynasties, and the belief that French and English kings could heal by touch expressed the idea that God worked through them.

The same ideas could be turned against kings. A king who broke his oath or harmed the Church could be excommunicated, and if the pope released his subjects from their oaths, as Gregory VII did to Henry IV in 1076, rebels gained a religious justification. The Interdict on John's England (1208–1214) shows how the papacy could put pressure on a whole kingdom.

Religious institutions

The period saw a series of movements to reform the Church and to live the Christian life more strictly. The monastery of Cluny in Burgundy, founded in 910 with the right to be free of control by local lords and bishops, became the head of hundreds of dependent houses. The Cistercian order, founded at Cîteaux in 1098 and led by Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), stressed simplicity and manual labour and cleared new land across Europe. In the thirteenth century the mendicant orders of friars, the Franciscans (approved in 1209–1210) and the Dominicans (1216), lived by begging and preached in the growing towns.

Church law (canon law) was collected and systematised, above all in Gratian's Decretum (about 1140), and church courts dealt with marriage, wills and the clergy. Universities grew out of cathedral schools and teachers' guilds: Bologna (law, from about 1088), Paris (theology, recognised around 1200) and Oxford (late twelfth century). They trained the clergy and lawyers who staffed both Church and royal government.

The social impact of religion

The Church shaped everyday life through the parish, the sacraments and the calendar of feasts and fasts. The tithe took a tenth of peasants' produce. In the late tenth and eleventh centuries, councils of bishops in France proclaimed the Peace and Truce of God, which tried to protect churches, clergy and peasants from the violence of knights and to forbid fighting on certain days. Pilgrimage, to Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Canterbury after 1170 and Jerusalem, linked distant regions.

The crusades, which began when Pope Urban II preached at Clermont in November 1095, were the most dramatic expression of religious energy directed into war. Their course is treated from the Islamic side in the regional study of North Africa and the Middle East; for the states of this study they mattered as a drain on royal resources (Richard I's ransom), as a cause of violence against Jews (1096 in the Rhineland, 1189–1190 in England) and as a source of royal prestige (Louis IX).

The role of the papacy

The papacy's power grew greatly between 1050 and 1300. The reform movement named after Gregory VII, the Gregorian reform, fought simony and clerical marriage and claimed that the Church should be free from lay control. Popes developed a central government with legates, courts and a chancery. Under Innocent III (1198–1216) papal authority reached its height: he placed England and France under interdict, called the Fourth Crusade and the Albigensian Crusade, and summoned the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which required every Christian to confess and take communion at least once a year and ordered Jews and Muslims to wear distinctive dress.

Papal claims met growing resistance from kings in the late thirteenth century. Philip IV's attack on Boniface VIII in 1303 showed that a strong king could defy the pope. From 1309 to 1377 the popes lived at Avignon, where they were seen, especially in England, as under French influence. In 1378 a disputed election produced two rival popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon, beginning the Great Schism, which lasted until 1417. Its effects on the later Church and on the Reformation are examined in the regional study of Renaissance and Reformation.

Cultural and social developments

Technology

Agricultural technology (the plough, rotation and mill) was the most important change for most people. Military technology changed the way war was fought and the way power was held: armoured cavalry with lances, the crossbow, and castles, which developed from wooden mottes into great stone fortresses such as Château Gaillard and, after the crusades, concentric castles with several rings of walls. Building technology made possible the Gothic cathedrals, whose pointed arches, rib vaults and flying buttresses allowed tall walls filled with stained glass, first seen in Suger's choir at Saint-Denis in the 1140s.

Historians have debated how far technology drove political change. In Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), Lynn White argued that the stirrup, which let a rider charge with a lance without being knocked from his horse, led Charles Martel to create an army of mounted knights paid with land, and so produced feudalism. Critics such as Bernard Bachrach replied that the evidence for a cavalry revolution in the eighth century is weak and that Frankish armies still relied heavily on infantry. Most historians now reject White's single-cause explanation, while accepting that cavalry and castles shaped medieval warfare.

The arts

Art and literature served rulers and the Church. The Carolingian court produced illuminated gospel books and the Palatine Chapel; the Ottonian monastery of Reichenau produced some of the finest manuscripts of the period; Romanesque churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with round arches and thick walls, were built across Europe, including the Norman cathedrals of England. Gothic architecture spread from the Île-de-France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Louis IX's Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (1248) was built to house relics he had bought from the Latin emperor of Constantinople.

Literature in the spoken languages (the vernacular) grew alongside Latin. The Song of Roland, an Old French epic written around 1100, turned the defeat of Charlemagne's rearguard at Roncesvalles in 778 into a holy war against Muslims. Courtly literature flourished at the courts of Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter Marie of Champagne. By the fourteenth century writers such as Dante Alighieri in Italian (Divine Comedy, completed about 1320) and Geoffrey Chaucer in English (The Canterbury Tales, about 1387–1400) showed the vernacular as a language of high literature.

Experiences of women

Women's experience depended above all on their social rank. Royal and noble women could exercise great power as wives, mothers and widows: Empress Theophanu, a Byzantine princess, governed the Holy Roman Empire as regent for her young son Otto III from 985 to 991; Blanche of Castile ruled France as regent for Louis IX (1226–1234 and again in 1248–1252); Jadwiga was crowned "king" of Poland in 1384. Queens managed households and estates, mediated between kings and nobles and patronised religion and literature, as Emma and Eleanor did.

Religious life offered educated women some independence. Abbesses ruled large communities and estates. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), abbess of a community in the Rhineland, wrote works of theology, medicine and natural science, composed music and corresponded with popes and emperors. The canoness Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim wrote Latin plays in the tenth century. From the thirteenth century, women in the towns of the Low Countries formed communities of beguines, who lived religious lives without taking permanent vows.

Most women were peasants or townswomen, whose lives appear mainly in estate and court records. They worked in the fields, in brewing, spinning and weaving and in markets, and widows often held land in their own right. Law subordinated married women to their husbands, and the Church taught that women should obey men. Marriage was increasingly defined by the Church as requiring the consent of both partners, which gave women some legal protection. After the Black Death, labour shortages briefly improved the wages and opportunities of some working women. The writer Christine de Pizan, whose Book of the City of Ladies (1405) defended women against misogynist writers, worked at the French court just after the end of the period.

Experiences of marginalised groups

In his book The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987), R. I. Moore argued that between about 950 and 1250 Latin Christian society became persecuting: Jews, heretics, lepers and people accused of homosexual acts were increasingly defined as dangers and excluded. Moore argued that this was driven less by popular prejudice than by the clerical and royal elites, who used persecution to assert their own authority. The evidence from the states of this study supports much of his case.

The table of groups shows a pattern: protection and persecution often came from the same rulers, depending on their needs. The persecutions of the Black Death years, when Jews were accused of poisoning wells and massacred in many German and Swiss towns in 1348–1349, are examined in the study of cause and consequence. Many survivors fled east to Poland.

Reasons for decline

"Decline" can mean the break-up of a state (the Carolingian and North Sea empires), a lasting loss of royal power to nobles or princes (the Holy Roman Empire), the loss of territory (the Angevin lands in France) or a temporary crisis (Poland after 1138, England in 1135–1153 and 1215–1217). The four cases differ, so each state needs its own definition of what decline meant for it.

Internal challenges and rebellion

The most common internal threat came from within the ruling family and the high nobility. Louis the Pious faced revolts by his sons; Henry II by his wife and sons; Henry IV by the Saxon nobles and princes; John by his barons. Rebellions succeeded when rebels had a rival claimant to support and a grievance shared by many nobles. Popular revolts came later: the Jacquerie in northern France in 1358 and the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 were responses to war, taxation and the labour laws passed after the Black Death.

Economic and social challenges

States built on conquest faced a crisis when conquest ended, as the Carolingians did after about 800. In the fourteenth century the whole of Europe faced economic and social shocks. The Great Famine of 1315–1317, caused by years of heavy rain and failed harvests, killed perhaps 10 to 15 per cent of the population in parts of northern Europe, and up to a quarter in some towns. The Black Death of 1347–1351 killed somewhere between a third and well over half of Europe's population; its causes, mortality and consequences are examined in depth in the study of cause and consequence. Labour shortages after the plague weakened the lords' hold over serfs and led governments to try to freeze wages, which fed popular anger.

Political challenges: succession and rivalry

Succession was the weakest point of most medieval states. The Frankish custom of partible inheritance divided the Carolingian Empire; the lack of a surviving male heir caused the Anarchy in England (1135) and the end of the direct Capetian line (1328), and Bolesław III's division of Poland among his sons led to fragmentation (1138); the elective monarchy of the Holy Roman Empire forced each new emperor to buy the princes' support. Primogeniture, inheritance by the eldest son, was a source of strength where it took hold, as in Capetian France. Rivalry between kingdoms, above all between the Capetians and the Angevins and later between England and France in the Hundred Years War, drained resources and could destroy a ruler's position, as Bouvines did for John.

External threats

Invaders struck repeatedly: Vikings, Magyars and Saracens in the ninth and tenth centuries, Mongols in Poland and Hungary in 1241. External attack rarely destroyed a united state on its own. The Viking attacks exposed the weakness of the divided Carolingian kingdoms, but in England they led Alfred the Great and his successors to build a stronger kingdom; the Magyar raids led to Otto I's victory and the revival of the empire.

The role and importance of one leader

The role of one leader can be judged by four questions: what the leader inherited, what he or she changed, what depended on his or her personal qualities, and what survived after his or her death. A leader whose achievements lasted had built institutions or alliances that worked without them; a leader whose state collapsed at his death had probably held it together by personal authority.

Perspectives and debates

Was there such a thing as feudalism?

For much of the twentieth century historians used "feudalism" to describe medieval society, but in two different senses. Marc Bloch, in Feudal Society (1939–1940), used it for a whole social system: a warrior aristocracy, dependent peasants, fragmented public power and personal bonds of dependence at every level. F. L. Ganshof, in Feudalism (first published in French in 1944), used it in a narrow legal sense: the relationship between lord and vassal and the fief that linked them.

From the 1970s the term itself came under attack. Elizabeth A. R. Brown, in "The Tyranny of a Construct" (American Historical Review, 1974), argued that it forced very different arrangements into one misleading model. Susan Reynolds, in Fiefs and Vassals (1994), went further: she argued that the classic model of fiefs and vassals was largely created by academic lawyers from the twelfth century onwards and read back into earlier periods, and that early medieval relationships between lords and followers were more varied and less legal than the model suggests. Many historians now avoid the word or define it carefully, preferring to describe lordship, landholding and service in a particular place and time.

Mohammed and Charlemagne: the origins of the Carolingian world

In Mohammed and Charlemagne (published in 1937, after his death), the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne argued that the Roman Mediterranean world survived the Germanic invasions and ended only when the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries closed the Mediterranean to trade. Cut off from the south, the Franks turned inward to a rural, land-based economy, and power shifted north to the Carolingians; in his view, the empire of Charlemagne would have been impossible without the rise of Islam.

Archaeologists and economic historians have since rejected much of the thesis. Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse (Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe, 1983) used archaeological evidence to argue that the Roman economy had already declined before the Arab conquests, and that the Carolingian economy revived in part through North Sea trade. Michael McCormick, in Origins of the European Economy (2001), traced continuing contact and trade across the Mediterranean, in which European slaves were a major export to the Islamic world. Pirenne's idea that the Carolingian world must be understood in a Mediterranean and Islamic context remains influential, even though his explanation is not accepted.

How effective was Carolingian government?

Older historians judged Carolingian government by the standards of a modern state and found it wanting: the capitularies ordered much that was never done, and Ganshof, in essays from the 1940s onwards, saw signs of disorder and decline in Charlemagne's last years. More recent historians stress how the system worked on its own terms. Rosamond McKitterick, in Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (2008), emphasises the use of writing, the itinerant court and the consensus built in the assemblies. Janet L. Nelson, in King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (2019), presents a ruler working through family, friendship and networks of loyalty, whose power depended on cooperation with the aristocracy more than on institutions.

How much did the Norman Conquest change England?

This debate began in the nineteenth century and was coloured by national feeling. E. A. Freeman, in his History of the Norman Conquest (1867–1879), stressed the continuity of English institutions and liberties, which he saw surviving the conquest. J. H. Round, in Feudal England (1895), argued that the Normans introduced knight service and a new feudal order. Frank Stenton, in Anglo-Saxon England (1943), showed how sophisticated the late Anglo-Saxon state had been, which explained how the Normans could govern it so effectively.

Recent historians combine both views. Hugh M. Thomas, in The English and the Normans (2003), traces how the two peoples mixed and how, by around 1200, the descendants of the conquerors thought of themselves as English. Marc Morris, in The Norman Conquest (2012), stresses the violence of the conquest and the near-total replacement of the English elite, while accepting that the machinery of government continued. Historians now ask for whom the conquest meant change: for the English aristocracy the conquest was a catastrophe, while for peasants and for the structures of local government there was much continuity.

These debates can be weighed by asking what kind of evidence each historian relies on. Legal and administrative sources, such as capitularies and Domesday Book, make governments look orderly and powerful; chronicles written by monks stress violence and moral failure; archaeology shows economic patterns that written sources miss. A strong answer uses a historian's view as one perspective among several and tests it against specific evidence.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

The questions that follow cover the main kinds of claim: about factors in expansion, about legitimacy and the Church, about decline, about marginalised groups and about one leader. Each markscheme gives indicative content for more than one state.

Paper 3: emergence and expansion

Paper 3: legitimacy and the Church (with a full essay plan)

Paper 3: decline

Paper 3: marginalised groups

Paper 3: the role of one leader

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain the key terms of medieval government and society: kingdom, empire, translatio imperii, anointing, lordship, vassal, fief, manorialism and the debate over "feudalism".

• To do:

  I can explain how the Carolingians rose to power between 714 and 768, including the alliance with the papacy in 751–756.

• To do:

  I can explain the reasons for Charlemagne's conquests and the significance of the coronation of 800.

• To do:

  I can describe how Charlemagne governed (counts, missi, capitularies, oaths, coinage) and evaluate how effective it was.

• To do:

  I can explain the Carolingian Renaissance and the role of religion in Carolingian rule.

• To do:

  I can describe the experiences of women, peasants, slaves, Saxons and Jews in the Carolingian world.

• To do:

  I can explain why the Carolingian Empire divided in 843 and broke up in 888, and weigh internal against external causes.

• To do:

  I can explain how William I conquered and consolidated England, using force, land, castles, Domesday and the Church.

• To do:

  I can explain the development of royal government under Henry I and Henry II, including the Exchequer, the assizes and the common law.

• To do:

  I can explain the conflict between Henry II and Becket and the causes and terms of Magna Carta.

• To do:

  I can describe the experiences of women, Jews and the unfree in Norman and Angevin England.