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A SHORT HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES
This page intentionally left blank
A SHORT
HISTORY
OF THE
MIDDLE
AGES
volume ii: from c.900 to c.1500
BARBARA H. ROSENWEIN
FIFTH EDITION
Toronto Buffalo London

Copyright © University of Toronto Press 2018
utorontopress.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any
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Copyright (the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency) 320–56 Wellesley Street West, Toronto, Ontario,
m5s 2s3—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rosenwein, Barbara H., author

A short history of the Middle Ages / Barbara H. Rosenwein. — Fifth edition.
Also published together in one complete volume.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Contents: v. 2. From c.900 to c.1500.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
isbn 978-1-4426-3629-3 (v. 2: softcover).—isbn 978-1-4426-3630-9 (v. 2: pdf).—
isbn 978-1-4426-3631-6 (v. 2: html)
1. Middle Ages. 2. Europe—History—476-1492. I. Title.
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CONTENTS
List of Maps • x
List of Plates • xi
List of Genealogies • xiii
List of Figures • xiii
Abbreviations, Date Conventions, Website • xv
Acknowledgments • xvii
chapter four Political Communities Reordered (c.900–c.1050) • 113

material culture: the making of an
illuminated manuscript • 152
chapter five New Configurations (c.1050–c.1150) • 161
chapter six Institutionalizing Aspirations (c.1150–c.1250) • 207
chapter seven Tensions and Reconciliations (c.1250–c.1350) • 251
material culture: the development of
islamic ceramics • 294
chapter eight Catastrophe and Creativity (c.1350–c.1500) • 301
Sources • 345
Index • 349
MAPS
The Medieval World Today • vi
4.1 Constantinople, c.1100 • 114
4.2 The Byzantine Empire during the Reign of Basil II, 976–1025 • 118
4.3 Kievan Rus’, c.1050 • 120
4.4 Fragmentation of the Islamic World, c.1000 • 123
4.5 Viking, Muslim, and Hungarian Invasions, 9th and 10th cent. • 131
4.6 Europe, c.1050 • 141
4.7 Ottonian Empire, c.1000 • 144
5.1 The Byzantine and Seljuk Empires, c.1090 • 162
5.2 The Almoravid Empire, c.1115 • 169
5.3 Byzantium, 12th cent. • 171
5.4 Tours c.600 vs. Tours c.1100 • 172
5.5 Western Europe, c.1100 • 174
5.6 The First Crusade and Early Crusader States • 182
5.7 The Norman Invasion of England, 1066–1100 • 185
5.8 The Iberian Peninsula, c.1140 • 187
6.1 Saladin’s Empire, c.1200 • 211
6.2 The Almohad Empire, c.1172 • 212
6.3 The Latin Empire and Byzantine Successor States, 1204–c.1250 • 215
6.4 The Angevin and Capetian Realms in the Late 12th cent. • 218
6.5 Spain and Portugal, c.1275 • 220
6.6 Italy and Southern Germany in the Age of Frederick Barbarossa • 224
6.7 France, c.1230 • 245
6.8 German Settlement in the Baltic Sea Region, 12th to 14th cent. • 246
7.1 The Mongol Empire, c.1260–1350 • 252
7.2 The Mamluk Sultanate • 256
7.3a, b European and Eurasian Trade Routes, c.1300 • 258
7.4 Piacenza, Late 13th cent. • 262
7.6 East Central Europe, c.1300 • 273
7.7 The Village of Toury, 14th and 15th cent. • 292
8.1 Eurasia c.1400 • 302
8.2 The First Phase of the Hundred Years’ War, 1337–1360 • 312
8.3 English and Burgundian Hegemony in France, c.1430 • 314
8.4 The Duchy of Burgundy, 1363–1477 • 315
8.6 Long-Distance Sea Voyages of the 15th cent. • 340
x MAPS
PLATES
4.1 Emperor Basil II (1018) • 116
4.2 Golden Jug (985–998) • 122
4.3 The mihrab of al-Azhar Mosque (969/973) • 124
4.4 Fatimid Cemetery at Aswan (11th cent.) • 126
4.5 Oseberg Ship (834) • 132
4.6 The Raising of Lazarus, Egbert Codex (985–990) • 146
4.7 Christ Asleep, Hitda Gospels (c.1000–c.1020) • 148
4.8 Saint Luke, Gospel Book of Otto III (998–1001) • 149
material culture: the making of an illuminated manuscript
4.9 Hamburg Bible (1255) • 153
4.10Miniature of Saint Dunstan (12th cent.) • 154
4.11Codex Aureus (870) • 155
5.1 Isfahan Mosque Courtyard (11th–12th cent.) • 165
5.2 Isfahan Mosque North Dome (1088) • 166
5.3 Great Mosque Minaret at Siirt (1128/1129?) • 167
5.4 Great Mosque at Diyarbakir (1179/1180?) • 168
5.5 Almería Silk (first half of 12th cent.) • 170
5.6 Durham Cathedral, Interior (1093–1133) • 193
5.7 Sant Tomàs de Fluvià, The Last Supper, Painted Vault (early 12th cent.) • 194
5.8 Cathedral Complex, Pisa (11th–12th cent.) • 196
5.9 Saint-Lazare of Autun, Nave (1120–1146) • 197
5.10Autun, Cockfight (12th cent.) • 198
5.11Carthusian Diurnal from Lyon (12th cent.) • 200
5.12Sénanque Monastery Church, Interior (c.1160) • 201
5.13Jael, Humility, and Judith (c.1140) • 202
6.1 Frontispiece for the Book of Songs (1217–1219) • 208
6.2 Funerary Madrasa Complex of Nur al-Din at Damascus (1167–1168) • 209
6.3 Minaret at Rabat (c.1199) • 213
6.4 Bust of Frederick Barbarossa (1165) • 225
6.5 Notre Dame of Paris, Exterior (begun 1163) • 235
6.6 Notre Dame of Paris, Interior (begun 1163) • 236
6.7 San Francesco at Assisi (Upper Church; completed by 1253) • 238
6.8 Bamberg Cathedral, Tympanum of “The Princes’ Door,” (c.1230–1235) • 240
7.1 Great Mongol Shahnama, “The Death of Alexander” (1330s) • 255
7.2 Funerary Complex of Mamluk Emirs Salar and Sanjar al-Jawli, Cairo
(1302–1304) • 257
7.3 Jews in an English Exchequer Tax Receipt Roll (1233) • 264
7.4 Chalice (c.1300) • 277
7.5 A Shrine Madonna from the Rhineland (c.1300) • 278
PLATES xi
7.6 Page from a Book of Hours, Northern France or Flanders
(early 14th cent.) • 280
7.7 Tomb and Effigy of Robert d’Artois (1317) • 281
7.8 The Motet Le premier jor de mai (c.1280) • 283
7.9 Page from Giovanni d’Andrea, Summa on Engagements and Marriages and
Lecture on the Tree of Consanguinity and Affinity (c.1315) • 286
7.10 Sepulcher of Giovanni d’Andrea, Bologna (1348) • 287
7.11 Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (1304–1306) • 288
7.12 Giotto, Lamentation of Christ, Scrovegni Chapel (1304–1306) • 290
material culture: the development of islamic ceramics
7.13 Great Mosque mihrab, Kairouan, Tunisia (862–863) • 295
7.14 Rooster Ewer, Kashan, Iran (1200–1220) • 296
7.15 Bowl, Samarqand, Uzbekistan (c.1420–1450) • 297
8.1 Costanzo da Ferrara, Portrait Medallion of Mehmed II (1470s) • 305
8.2 Ushak Medallion Carpet, Anatolia (third quarter of 15th cent.) • 306
8.3 Building Complex, Edirne (1484–1488) • 308
8.4 Corpses Confront the Living (c.1441) • 310
8.5 Donatello, Judith and Holofernes (c.1420–1430) • 326
8.6 Piero di Cosimo, Venus, Cupid, and Mars (c.1495–1505) • 328
8.7 Filippo Brunelleschi, Florence Cathedral Dome (1418–1436) • 330
8.8 Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper (1494–1497) • 331
8.9 Jacopo de’ Barbari, Bird’s-Eye View of Venice (1500) • 332
8.10 History of Alexander the Great, Tapestry (c.1459) • 334
8.11 Rogier van der Weyden, Columba Altarpiece (1450s) • 336
8.12 Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Jan de Leeuw (1436) • 337
xii PLATES
GENEALOGIES
4.1 Alfred and His Progeny • 142
4.2 The Ottonians • 145
5.1 The Great Seljuk Sultans • 164
5.2 The Comnenian Dynasty • 171
5.3 The Salian Kings and Emperors • 178
5.4 The Norman Kings of England • 185
5.5 The Capetian Kings of France • 189
6.1 The Angevin Kings of England • 216
6.2 Rulers of Germany and Sicily • 223
7.1 The Mongol Khans • 253
7.2 Henry III and His Progeny • 266
7.3 Louis IX and His Progeny • 267
8.1 Kings of France and England and the Dukes of Burgundy during the Hundred
Years’ War • 313
8.2 Yorkist and Lancastrian (Tudor) Kings • 316
FIGURES
5.1 Saint-Germain of Auxerre (12th cent.) • 192
5.2 A Model Romanesque Church: Saint-Lazare of Autun • 195
5.3 Plan of Fountains Abbey (founded 1132) • 199
6.1 Elements of a Gothic Church • 234
7.1 Single Notes and Values of Franconian Notation • 284
GENEALOGIES xiii
ABBREVIATIONS, DATE CONVENTIONS,
WEBSITE
ABBREVIATIONS
c. circa. Used to indicate that dates or other numbers are approximate.
cent. century
d. date of death
emp. emperor
fl. flourished. This is given when even approximate birth and death dates are unknown.
pl. plural form of a word
r. dates of reign
sing. singular form of a word
DATE CONVENTIONS
All dates are ce/ad unless otherwise noted (the two systems are interchangeable). The
dates of popes are not preceded by r. because popes took their papal names upon acces-
sion to office, and the dates after those names apply only to their papacies.
The symbol / between dates indicates uncertainty: e.g., Boethius (d.524/526) means
that he died some time between 524 and 526.
WEBSITE
http://www.utphistorymatters.com = The website for this book, which has practice short-
answer and discussion questions (with sample answers provided), as well as maps, figures,
and genealogies.
ABBREVIATIONS, DATE CONVENTIONS, WEBSITE xv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all the readers, many anonymous, who made suggestions for
improving earlier editions of A Short History of the Middle Ages. While I hope I will be
forgiven for not naming everyone—a full list of names would begin to sound like a roll
call of medievalists, both American and European—I want to single out two who were
of special help for this edition: Dionysios Stathakopoulos and Julia Bray. Both sent me
enormously helpful and often annotated bibliographies (on Byzantium and the Islamic
world, respectively) for each chapter. I am indebted as always to Riccardo Cristiani for his
help with and advice on every part and phase of this entire book. In addition, he prepared
the inserts on Material Culture. Erik Goosmann was an exceptionally learned, creative,
and willing cartographer. I thank as well Esther Cohen, who alerted me to some new
interpretations; Albrecht Diem, who shared with me his classroom experiences with the
book; Judith Earnshaw, editor extraordinaire; Natalie Fingerhut; and Matthew Jubb at
Em Dash Design.
Finally, I thank my family, and I dedicate this book to my granddaughters Sophie and
Natalie.
NOTE FOR THE FIFTH EDITION

Here students and teachers will find a much-enhanced map and artistic program and
considerable expansion of the treatment of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds. To counter
the tendency of textbook readers to imagine that everything therein is a “fact,” I have
singled out in each chapter at least one issue on which historians explicitly differ. The
proponents of the various sides of those controversies are listed in the end-of-chapter
Further Reading offerings, which have also been updated to take into account the most
important new contributions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii
FOUR
POLITICAL COMMUNITIES REORDERED
(c.900–c.1050)
The large-scale centralized governments of the ninth century dissolved in the tenth. The
fission was least noticeable at Byzantium, where, although important landowning fami-
lies emerged as brokers of patronage and power, the primacy of the emperor was never
effectively challenged. In the Islamic world, however, new dynastic groups established
themselves as regional rulers. In Western Europe, Carolingian kings ceased to control
land and men, while new political entities—some extremely local and weak, others quite
strong and unified—emerged in their wake.
BYZANTIUM: THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF

CENTRALIZATION
By 1025 the Byzantine Empire once again touched the Danube and Euphrates Rivers.
Its emperors maintained the traditional cultural importance of Constantinople by care-
fully orchestrating the radiating power of the imperial court. At the same time, however,
powerful men in both town and countryside gobbled up land and dominated the peas-
antry, challenging the dominance of the center.
The Imperial Court

The Great Palace of Constantinople, a sprawling building complex begun under
Constantine, was expanded and beautified under his successors. (See Map 4.1.) Far more
than the symbolic emplacement of imperial power, it was the central command post of
the empire. Servants, slaves, and grooms; top courtiers and learned clergymen; cousins,
113
114 FOUR: POLITICAL COMMUNITIES REORDERED (c.900–c.1050)
siblings, and hangers-on of the emperor and empress lived within its walls. Other court- Map 4.1 (facing page)
iers—civil servants, officials, scholars, military men, advisers, and other dependents—lived Constantinople, c.1100
as near to the palace as they could manage. They were “on call” at every hour. The emperor
had only to give short notice and all assembled for impromptu but nevertheless highly
choreographed ceremonies. These were in themselves instruments of power; the emperors
manipulated courtly formalities to indicate new favorites or to signal displeasure.
The court was mainly a male preserve, but there were powerful women at the Great
Palace as well. Consider Zoe (d.1050), the daughter of Constantine VIII. Contemporaries
acknowledged her right to rule through her imperial blood, and through her marriages,
she “made” her husbands into legitimate emperors. She and her sister even ruled jointly
for one year (1042). But their biographer, Michael Psellus, a courtier who observed them
with a jaundiced eye, was happy only when Zoe married: “The country needed a man’s
supervision—a man at once strong-handed and very experienced in government, one
who not only understood the present situation, but also any mistakes that had been made
in the past, with their probable results.”1
There was also a “third gender” at the Great Palace: eunuchs—men who had been
castrated, normally as children, and raised to be teachers, doctors, or guardians of the
women at court. Their status began to rise in the tenth century. Originally foreigners,
they were increasingly recruited from the educated upper classes in the Byzantine Empire
itself, even from the imperial families. In addition to their duties in the women’s quarter of
the palace, some of them accompanied the emperor during his most sacred and vulnerable
moments—when he removed his crown; when he participated in religious ceremonies;
even when he dreamed, at night. They hovered by his throne, like the angels flanking
Christ in the apse of San Vitale. No one, it was thought, was as faithful, trustworthy, or
spiritually pure as a eunuch.
The imperial court assiduously cultivated the image of perfect, stable, eternal order.
The emperor wore the finest silks, decorated with gold. In artistic representations, he was
the largest figure. Sometimes he was shown seated on a high throne with admiring offi-
cials beneath him. At other times he stood, as in Plate 4.1, which depicts Emperor Basil II
(r.976–1025), broad of shoulder and well-armed, as figures grovel beneath his feet, and
Christ, helped by an archangel, places a crown on his head.
This sort of image of Basil—as Christian emperor—has led historians such as Paul
Magdalino to emphasize the Orthodox identity of Byzantium. Other historians, impressed
by the fact that the Byzantines spoke and wrote in Greek, see Byzantine culture as a distant
heir of Hellenism. Still others—Anthony Kaldellis is one—emphasize continuities with
Roman political forms. All of these identities (and a few others besides) are surveyed in
Averil Cameron’s recent book (see Further Reading, p. 157), which argues against seeking
a single Byzantine identity. She prefers to find it in constant dialogue with its own many
traditions and those of the other cultures—Persian, Slavic, European, Islamic—with whose
histories it was a part.
BYZANTIUM: THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF CENTRALIZATION 115

A Wide Embrace and Its Tensions Plate 4.1 (facing page)
Emperor Basil II (1018).
Commissioned by Basil II
The artist who painted the image of Basil at the start of a Psalter was imagining him as a to celebrate his final victory
sort of King David, the presumed author of the psalms. Like the biblical slayer of Goliath, over the Bulgarians in 1018,
Basil liked to present himself as a giant-slayer: a tireless warrior. Certainly his epitaph this picture, painted on shiny
gold leaf, shows the emperor
reads that way: triumphant over cowering
Bulgarians. Beneath his armor,
nobody saw my spear at rest, … Basil wears a long-sleeved
but I kept vigilant through the whole span of my life … purple tunic trimmed with gold.
Medallions of saints flank his
marching bravely to the West, sides and two archangels hover
and as far as the very frontiers of the East.2 above. Gabriel, on the left, gives
Basil a lance, while Michael, on
the right, transmits to him the
Ruling longer than any other Byzantine emperor, Basil built on the achievements of his crown offered by Christ. The
predecessors. Nicephorus II Phocas (r.963–969) and John I Tzimisces (r.969–976) pushed emperor grasps a sword in one
the Byzantine frontiers north to the Danube (taking half of the Bulgarian Empire), east hand, while in the other he holds
a staff that touches the neck of
beyond the Euphrates, and south to Antioch, Crete, and Cyprus (see Map 4.2). Basil thus one of the semi-prone figures
inherited a fairly secure empire except for the threat from Rus’ further to the north. This beneath his feet.
he defanged through a diplomatic and religious alliance, as we shall see (p. 119). (Rus’ is
used for the polity; Rus, without the apostrophe, for the peoples.)
But if his borders were secure, Basil’s position was not. It was challenged by powerful
landowning families from whose ranks his two predecessors had come. Members of the
provincial elite—military and government officers, bishops, abbots, and others—bene-
fitted from a general quickening of the economy and the rise of new urban centers. They
took advantage of their ascendency, buying land from still impoverished peasants as yet
untouched by the economic upswing. No wonder they were called dynatoi (sing. dynatos),
“powerful men.” Already, some forty years before Basil came to the throne, Emperor
Romanus I Lecapenus (r.920–944) had bewailed in his Novel (New Law) of 934 the “intru-
sion” of the rich
into a village or hamlet for the sake of a sale, gift, or inheritance.… For the domi-
nation of these persons has increased the great hardship of the poor … [and] will
cause no little harm to the commonwealth unless the present legislation puts an
end to it first.3
The dynatoi made military men their clients (even if they were not themselves military
men) and, as in the case of Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces, sometimes seized the
imperial throne itself.
Basil had two main political goals: to stifle the rebellions of the dynatoi, and to swell
the borders of his empire. When the powerful Phocas and Scleros families of Anatolia,
along with much of the Byzantine army, rebelled against him in 987, he created his own
personal Varangian Guard, made up of troops from Rus’. Once victorious, Basil moved
to enervate the dynatoi as a group. He reinforced the provisions of Romanus’s Novel and

Serdica (Sofia)
Philippopolis
Naples
Kars
Constantinople
Manzikert
Caesarea
Dalassa
Empire at Basil’s accession (976)

Empire at Basil’s death (1025)
Map 4.2 The Byzantine Empire others like it by threatening to confiscate and destroy the villas of those who transgressed
during the Reign of Basil II, the rules. He changed the system of taxation so that the burden fell on large landowners
976–1025
rather than on the peasants. He relieved the peasants and others of local military duty in
the themes by asking for money payments instead. This allowed him to shower wealth
on the Varangian Guard and other mercenary troops.
At the same time, Basil launched attacks beyond his borders: south to Syria and beyond;
east all the way to Georgia and Armenia; southwest to southern Italy; and west to the
Balkans, where he conquered the whole of the Bulgarian empire and reached the Adriatic
coast. Basil’s victory over the Bulgarians, celebrated on the psalter page shown in Plate
4.1, used to be considered his defining feat, and in the fourteenth century he was given
the epithet “Bulgar-Slayer.” But historians such as Michael Angold see Basil as an auto-
crat, ruling by whim and undermining hallowed Byzantine traditions. He never married
or groomed a successor, which is one reason why Zoe and her sister could take the impe-
rial throne after his death.
By the time of Basil’s death in 1025, the Byzantine Empire was no longer the tight
fist centered on Anatolia that it had been in the dark days of the eighth century. On the
contrary, it was an open hand: sprawling, multi-ethnic, and multilingual. (See Map 4.2.)
To the east it embraced Armenians, Syrians, and Arabs; to the north it included Slavs
and Bulgarians (by now themselves Slavic speaking) as well as Pechenegs, a Turkic group
that had served as allies of Bulgaria; to the west, in the Byzantine toe of Italy, it included

Lombards, Italians, and Greeks. There must have been Muslims right in the middle of
Constantinople: a mosque there, built in the eighth century, was restored and reopened
in the eleventh century. The Rus Varangian Guard served as the empire’s elite troops,
and by the mid-eleventh century, Byzantine mercenaries included “Franks” (mainly from
Normandy), Arabs, and Bulgarians as well. In spite of ingrained prejudices, Byzantine
princesses had occasionally been married to foreigners before the tenth century, but in
Basil’s reign this happened to a sister of the emperor himself.
All this openness went only so far, however. Toward the middle of the eleventh century,
the Jews of Constantinople were expelled and resettled in a walled quarter in Pera, on the
other side of the Golden Horn (see Map 4.1 on p. 114). Even though they did not expel Jews
so dramatically, many other Byzantine cities forbade Jews from mixing with Christians.
Around the same time, the rights of Jews as “Roman citizens” were denied; henceforth, in
law at least, they had only servile status. The Jewish religion was condemned as a heresy.
Ethnic diversity and the emergence of the dynatoi were responsible for regional polit-
ical movements that threatened centralized imperial control. In southern Italy, where the
Byzantines ruled through an official called a catapan, Norman mercenaries hired them-
selves out to Lombard rebels, Muslim emirs, and others with local interests. In the second
half of the eleventh century, the Normans began their own conquest of the region. On
Byzantium’s eastern flank, dynatoi families rose to high positions in government. The
Dalasseni family was fairly typical of this group. Its founder, who took the family name
from Dalassa, a city near Caesarea in Anatolia, was an army leader and governor of
Antioch at the end of the tenth century. One of his sons, Theophylact, became governor
of “Iberia”—not Spain but rather a theme on the very eastern edge of the empire. Another,
Constantine, inherited his father’s position at Antioch. With estates scattered throughout
Anatolia and a network of connections to other powerful families, the Dalasseni some-
times defied the emperor and even coordinated rebellions against him. From the end of the
tenth century, imperial control had to contend with the decentralizing forces of provin-
cial dynatoi such as these. But the emperors were not dethroned, and Basil II triumphed
over the families that challenged his reign to emerge even stronger than before.
The Formation of Rus’

Basil must have needed troops very badly to have married his sister to Vladimir (r.980–1015),
ruler of Rus’, in return for the Varangian Guard and Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity.
Known as Vikings in the West, the Rus originally came from Scandinavia. Well before
the ninth century they had traveled eastward, to the regions of Lake Ladoga and Lake
Ilmen (see Map 4.3 on p. 120). Mainly interested in trapping animals for furs and capturing
people as slaves, they took advantage of river networks and other trade routes that led
as far south as Iraq and as far west as Austria, exchanging their human and animal cargos
for silks and silver. Other long-distance traders in the region were the Khazars, a Turkic-
speaking people, whose powerful state, straddling the Black and Caspian Seas, dominated

Legend
Boundary of the German Empire
Boundary of the former Khazar Empire
Gulf of F in la nd
Novgorod
Ilme n
’
LITHUANIANS
PRUSSIANS
ga
Vo l
Bohe mi a Don
PECHENEGS
Aral
Sea
PECHENEGS
Caspian Sea
Ragusa
(Dubrovnik)
Dyrrhachion
Map 4.3 Kievan Rus’, c.1050 part of the silk road in the ninth century. The Khazars were ruled by a khagan (meaning
khan of khans), much like the Avars, and, like other nomads of the Eurasian steppes, they
were tempted and courted by the religions of neighboring states. Unusually, their elites
opted for Judaism. The Rus were influenced enough by Khazar culture to adopt the title
of khagan for the ruler of their own fledgling ninth-century state at Novgorod, the first
Rus polity, but they did not embrace Judaism.
Soon northern Rus’ had an affiliate in the south—in the region of Kiev. This was very
close to the Khazars, to whom it is likely that the Kievan Rus at first paid tribute. While on
occasion attacking both Khazars and Byzantines, Rus rulers saw their greatest advantage
in good relations with the Byzantines, who wanted their fine furs, wax, honey, and—
especially—slaves. In the course of the tenth century, with the blessing of the Byzantines,
the Rus brought the Khazar Empire to its knees.
Nurtured through trade and military agreements, good relations between Rus’ and
Byzantium were sealed through religious conversion. In the mid-tenth century, quite a few
Christians lived in Rus’. But the official conversion of the Rus to Christianity came under
Vladimir. Ruler of Rus’ by force of conquest (though from a princely family), Vladimir

was anxious to court the elites of both Novgorod and Kiev. He did so through wars with
surrounding peoples that brought him and his troops plunder and tribute. Strengthening
his position still further, in 988 he adopted the Byzantine form of Christianity, took
the name “Basil” in honor of Emperor Basil II, and married Anna, the emperor’s sister.
Christianization of the general population seems to have followed quickly. In any event,
the Russian Primary Chronicle, a twelfth-century text based in part on earlier materials,
reported that under Vladimir’s son Yaroslav the Wise (r.1019–1054), “the Christian faith
was fruitful and multiplied, while the number of monks increased, and new monasteries
came into being.”4
Vladimir’s conversion was part of a larger process of state formation and Christianization
taking place around the year 1000. In Scandinavia and the new states of East Central
Europe, as we shall see, the process resulted in Catholic kingships rather than the Orthodox
principality that Rus’ became. Given its geographic location, it was anyone’s guess how
Rus’ would go: it might have converted to the Roman form of Christianity of its western
neighbors. Or it might have turned to Judaism under the influence of the Khazars. Or,
indeed, it might have adopted Islam, given that the Volga Bulgars had converted to Islam in
the early tenth century. It is likely that Vladimir chose the Byzantine form of Christianity
because of the prestige of the empire under Basil.
That momentary decision, it used to be argued, left lasting consequences: Rus’, ancestor
of Russia, became the heir of Byzantium and its many tensions with the West. Recently,
however, some historians—Christian Raffensperger is one—have stressed the many inter-
relationships between Rus’ and Europe. All shared the Christian religion, albeit in different
forms; all were interconnected via traders and trade routes; and all were literally bound
together through marriages. In that last sense, in particular, women were the bearers of
cultural integration as they moved from one court to another.
DIVISION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD

While at Byzantium the forces of decentralization were relatively feeble, they carried
the day in the Islamic world. Where once the caliph at Baghdad or Samarra could boast
collecting taxes from Kabul (today in Afghanistan) to Benghazi (today in Libya), in the
eleventh century a bewildering profusion of regional groups and dynasties divided the
Islamic world. Yet this was in general a period of prosperity and intellectual blossoming.
The Emergence of Regional Powers

The Muslim conquest had not eliminated, but rather papered over, local powers and
regional affiliations. While the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates remained strong, they
imposed their rule through their governors and army. But when the caliphate became
DIVISION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD 121

weak, as it did in the tenth and eleventh centuries, old and new regional interests came
to the fore.
A glance at a map of the Islamic world c.1000 (Map 4.4) shows, from east to west, the
main new groups that emerged: the Samanids, Buyids, Hamdanids, Fatimids, and Zirids.
But the map hides the many territories dominated by smaller independent rulers. North
of the Fatimid Caliphate, al-Andalus had a parallel history. Its Umayyad ruler took the
title of caliph in 929, but in the eleventh century he too was unable to stave off political
fragmentation.
The key cause of the weakness of the Abbasid caliphate was lack of revenue. When
Plate 4.2 Golden Jug (985–998). landowners, governors, or recalcitrant military leaders in the various regions of the Islamic
Four ribbons of angular kufic world refused to pay taxes into the treasury, the caliphs had to rely on the rich farmland
script praise the emir, probably
the jug’s owner. Complementing of Iraq, long a stable source of income. But a deadly revolt lasting from 869 to 883 by the
them are two large bands of Zanj—black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa who had been put to work to turn marshes
interlaced medallions; those into farmland—devastated the Iraqi economy. Although the revolt was put down and the
on the neck enclose what
are probably griffons, while
head of its leader was “displayed on a spear mounted in front of [the winning general]
those on the body boast birds, on a barge,” there was no chance for the caliphate to recover.5 In the tenth century the
perhaps peacocks. Qaramita (sometimes called “Carmathians”), a sect of Shi‘ites based in Arabia, found Iraq
easy prey. The result was decisive: the caliphs could not pay
their troops. New men—military leaders with their own
armies and titles like “commander of commanders”—
took the reins of power. They preserved the Abbasid
line, but they reduced the caliph’s political authority
to nothing.
The new rulers represented groups that had long
awaited their ascendency. The Buyids, for example,
belonged to ancient warrior tribes from the mountains
of Iran. Even in the tenth century, most were rela-
tively new converts to Islam. Bolstered by long-festering
local discontent, one of them became “commander of
commanders” in 945. Thereafter, the Buyids, with help
from their own Turkish mercenaries, dominated the region
south of the Caspian Sea, including Baghdad. For a time
they presided over a glittering culture that supported
(and was in turn celebrated by) scholars, poets, artists, and
craftsman. Small wonder that the inscription decorating
the golden jug in Plate 4.2 praises Emir Samsam al-Dawla
(r.985–998) as “the image of the full moon at night, the first
gleam of sun on the horizon of the morning.”6 Yet already
in al-Dawla’s day, other local men were challenging Buyid rule
in a political process—the progressive regionalization and frag-
mentation of power—echoed elsewhere in the Islamic world and in
much of Western Europe as well.

The most important of the new regional rulers were the Fatimids. They, like the Map 4.4 Fragmentation of the
Qaramita (and, increasingly in the course of time, the Buyids), were Shi‘ites, taking their Islamic World, c.1000
name from Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, wife of Ali. The Fatimids professed a partic-
ular form of Shi‘ism called Isma‘ilism. The Fatimid leader claimed not only to be the
true imam, descendant of Ali, but also the mahdi, the “divinely guided” messiah, come to
bring justice on earth. Because of this, the Fatimids were proclaimed “caliphs” by their
followers—the true “successors” of the Prophet. Allying with the Berbers in North Africa,
by 910 the Fatimids had established themselves as rulers in what is today Tunisia and Libya.
Within a half-century they had moved eastward (largely abandoning the Maghreb to the
Zirids), to rule Egypt, southern Syria, and the western edge of the Arabian Peninsula.
They cultivated contacts far beyond their borders: across the Mediterranean to Europe
and Byzantium and beyond, to India and China. Jewish traders often served as the human
links among these regions, as did Islamic religious scholars, who financed their many
voyages to noted centers of learning by acting as merchants or mercantile agents. A flour-
ishing textile industry kept Egypt’s economy buoyant: farmers produced flax (not only
for Egypt but for Tunisia and Sicily as well); industrial laborers turned the flax into linen;
tailors cut and sewed garments; and traders exported the products of each phase or sold
them at home. Public and private investment in both the agricultural and industrial side
of this product guaranteed its success.

Plate 4.3 The mihrab of
al-Azhar Mosque, Cairo
(969/973). Two marble
columns taken from older
buildings frame the mihrab,
which is decorated with
carved stucco. As befits the
purpose of the mihrab, the
inscription quotes the Qur’an
on prayer and the relationship
between man and God.

Wealthy and cosmopolitan, the Fatimids created a new capital city, Cairo, filling it with
palaces, libraries, shops, pavilions, gardens, private houses, and mosques. The al-Azhar
mosque was built right after they conquered Egypt as a major gathering place and school.
In its original form, it had a five-aisle prayer hall and a courtyard probably surrounded
by arcades. Built in brick, its walls were covered with stucco carved with vegetal forms
outlined by bands of Qur’anic inscriptions. The decoration was probably painted in bright
colors. The mihrab (the niche pointing in the direction of Mecca) at al-Azhar was topped
by a dome. (See Plate 4.3.) But the building had no minaret, following the Shi‘ite practice
of calling the congregation to prayer from the mosque door or roof.
The Shi‘ites also emphasized commemoration of the dead (though Sunni Muslims
often did so as well); a Fatimid cemetery at Aswan (see Plate 4.4) is filled with mudbrick
tombs and mausolea (buildings for burials), each one originally containing one or more
tombstones. Muhammad had prohibited ostentatious burials, but this ban was skirted as
long as the tombs were open to the elements. That explains the many windows in the
mausolea at Aswan.
The Fatimids achieved the height of their power before the mid-eleventh century.
But during the rule of al-Mustansir (1036–1094), economic and climatic woes, factional
fighting within the army, and a rebellion by Turkish troops weakened the regime, and by
the 1070s, the Fatimid caliphate had lost most of Syria and North Africa to other rulers.
The Umayyad rulers at Córdoba experienced a similar rise and fall. Abd al-Rahman
III (r.912–961) took the title caliph in 929 to rival the Fatimids and to assume the luster of
the ruler of Baghdad. “He bore [signs of ] piety on his forehead and religious and secular
authority upon his right hand,” wrote a court poet of the new caliph.7 An active mili-
tary man backed by an army made up mainly of Slavic slaves, Abd al-Rahman defeated
his rivals and imposed his rule on all of al-Andalus. Under the new caliph and his imme-
diate successors, Islamic Iberia became a powerful centralized state. Even so, regional elites
sought to carve out their own polities. Between 1009 and 1031 bitter civil war undid the
dynasty’s power. After 1031, al-Andalus was split into small emirates called taifas, ruled
by local strongmen.
Thus, in the Islamic world, far more decisively than at Byzantium, newly powerful
regional rulers came to the fore. Nor did the fragmentation of power end at the regional
level. To pay their armies, Islamic rulers often resorted to granting their commanders iqta—
lands and villages—from which the iqta-holder was expected to gather revenues and pay
their troops. As we shall see, this was a bit like the Western European institution of the
fief. It meant that even minor commanders could act as local governors, tax-collectors, and
military leaders. But there was a major difference between this institution and the system
of fiefs and vassals in the West: while vassals were generally tied to one region and one
lord, the troops under Islamic local commanders were often foreigners and former slaves,
unconnected to any particular place and easily wooed by rival commanders.

Plate 4.4 Fatimid Cemetery at
Aswan (11th cent.). Outside of
Cairo, an exuberant architectural
imagination held sway. In this
cemetery at Aswan, a series
of mausolea with cubic bases
topped by domes are particularly
inventive in composing the zone
that bridges dome and base: note
here the octagonal structures
with wing-like projections.
THE WEST: FRAGMENTATION AND RESILIENCE 127

Cultural Unity, Religious Polarization
The emergence of local strongmen meant not the end of Arab court culture but a multi-
plicity of courts, each attempting to out-do one another in brilliant artistic, scientific,
theological, and literary productions. We have already seen what the Fatimids achieved
in Egypt. Even more impressive was the Umayyad court at Córdoba, the wealthiest and
showiest city of the West. It boasted seventy public libraries in addition to the caliph’s
private library of perhaps 400,000 books. The Córdoban Great Mosque was a center for
scholars from the rest of the Islamic world (the caliphs paid their salaries), while nearly
thirty free schools were set up throughout the city.
Córdoba was noteworthy not only because of the brilliance of its intellectual life but
also because of the role women played in it. Elsewhere in the Islamic world there were
certainly a few unusual women associated with cultural and scholarly life. But at Córdoba
this was a general phenomenon: women were not only doctors, teachers, and librarians
but also worked as copyists for the many books widely in demand.
Male scholars were, however, everywhere the norm. They moved easily from court
to court. The Fatimid scholar-merchants are barely known, but Ibn Sina (980–1037), who
began his career serving the ruler at Bukhara in Central Asia, is famous. In the West, his
name was Latinized as Avicenna. From Bukhara he traveled westward to Gurganj, Rayy,
and Hamadan before ending up for thirteen years at the court of Isfahan in Iran. Sometimes
in favor and sometimes decidedly not so (he was even briefly imprisoned), he neverthe-
less managed to study and practice medicine and to write numerous books on the natural
sciences and philosophy. His pioneering systematization of Aristotle laid the foundations
of future philosophical thought in the field of logic.
Despite its political disunity, then, the Islamic world of the tenth and eleventh centu-
ries remained in many ways an integrated culture. This was partly due to the model of
intellectual life fostered by the Abbasids, which even in decline was copied by the new
regional rulers. It was also due to the common Arabic language, the glue that bound the
astronomer at Córdoba to the merchant at Cairo.
Writing in Arabic, Islamic authors could count on a large reading public. Manuscripts
were churned out quickly via a well-honed division of labor: scribes, illustrators, page
cutters, and book-binders specialized in each task. Children were sent to school to learn
the Qur’an; listening, reciting, reading, and writing were taught in elementary schools
along with good manners and religious obligations. Although a conservative like al-Qabisi
(d.1012) warned that “[a girl] being taught letter-writing or poetry is a cause for fear,”
he also insisted that parents send their children to school to learn “vocalization, spelling,
good handwriting, [and] good reading.” He even admitted that learning about “famous
men and of chivalrous knights” might be acceptable.8
Educated in similar texts across the whole Islamic world, speaking a common language,
Muslims could easily communicate, and this facilitated open networks of trade. With no
national barriers to commerce and few regulations, merchants regularly moved from one
region to another. Consider paper. The sheets manufactured in Baghdad and Damascus

were in demand across the entire Islamic world and beyond. Though scorned in Byzantium,
paper was appreciated in peripheral regions of the Empire such as Armenia and Georgia.
Indeed, Islamic merchants dealt in far-flung, various, and sometimes exotic goods. From
England came tin, while salt, ivory, and gold were imported from Timbuktu in west-
central Africa. From Russia came amber, gold, and copper; slaves were wrested from
sub-Saharan Africa, the Eurasian steppes, and Slavic regions. Arab merchants set up perma-
nent headquarters in China and South-East Asia, where traders brought wares from the
Islamic world: flax and linen from Egypt (as we have seen), pearls from the Persian Gulf,
ceramics from Iraq. Much of this trade was financed by enterprising government officials
and other elites, whose investments in land at home paid off handsomely.
Although Muslims dominated these trade networks, other groups were involved in
commerce as well. Thanks to the abundance of paper for everyday transactions, we know
a good deal about one Jewish community living at Fustat, about two miles south of Cairo.
It observed the then-common custom of depositing for eventual ritual burial all worn-
out papers containing the name of God. For good measure, the Jews in this community
included everything written in Hebrew letters: legal documents, fragments of sacred
works, marriage contracts, doctors’ prescriptions, and so on. By chance, the materials that
they left in their geniza (depository) at Fustat were preserved rather than buried. They
reveal a cosmopolitan, middle-class society. Many were traders, for Fustat was the center
of a vast and predominately Jewish trade network that stretched from al-Andalus to India.
The Tustari brothers, Jewish merchants from southern Iran, offer a telling example. By
the early eleventh century, the brothers had established a flourishing business in Egypt.
Informal family networks offered them many of the same advantages as branch offices:
friends and family in Iran shipped the Tustaris’s fine textiles to sell in Egypt, while they
exported Egyptian fabrics back to Iran.
Only Islam itself, ironically, pulled Islamic culture apart. In the tenth century the split
between the Sunnis and Shi‘ites widened to a chasm. At Baghdad, al-Mufid (d.1022) and
others turned Shi‘ism into a partisan ideology that insisted on publicly cursing the first two
caliphs, turning the tombs of Ali and his family into objects of veneration, and creating
an Alid caliph. Small wonder that the Abbasid caliphs soon became ardent spokesmen for
Sunni Islam, which developed in turn its own public symbols. Many of the new dynas-
ties—the Fatimids and the Qaramita especially—took advantage of the newly polarized
faith to bolster their power.
THE WEST: FRAGMENTATION AND RESILIENCE

Fragmentation was the watchword in Western Europe in many parts of the shattered
Carolingian Empire. Historians speak of “France,” “Germany,” and “Italy” in this period
as a shorthand for designating broad geographical areas (as will be the case in this book).
But there were no national states, only regions with more or less clear borders and rulers

Map 4.5 (facing page) with more or less authority. In some places—in parts of “France,” for example—regions as
Viking, Muslim, and Hungarian small as a few square miles were under the control of different lords who acted, in effect, as
Invasions, 9th and 10th cent.
independent rulers. Yet this same period saw consolidated European kingdoms beginning
to emerge. To the north were England, Scotland, and two relatively unified Scandinavian
states—Denmark and Norway; toward the east Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary. In the
center of Europe, a powerful royal dynasty from Saxony, the Ottonians, came to rule an
empire stretching from the North Sea to Rome.
The Last Invaders of the West

Three groups invaded Western Europe during the ninth and tenth centuries: the Vikings,
the Muslims, and the Magyars (called Hungarians by the rest of Europe). (See Map 4.5.) In
the short run, they wreaked havoc on land and people. In the long run, they were absorbed
into the European population and became constituents of a newly prosperous and aggres-
sive European civilization.
vikings
Around the same time as they made forays eastward toward Novgorod, some Scandinavians
were traveling to western shores. Their peregrinations were largely the result of the compe-
tition for power and wealth by kings and chieftains back home. In Egil’s Saga, the core
of which was composed in the Viking age though it was given written form only in the
thirteenth century, King Harald Fairhair gave the chieftains “the options of entering his
service or leaving the country, or a third choice of suffering hardship or paying with their
lives.”9 Egil’s family eventually fled to Iceland.
Wealth was obtained through plunder and gifts. The most precious and sought-after
gifts were beautifully crafted and decorated jewelry made of gold and silver; weapons, too,
well forged and ornamented, were highly prized. Chieftains fed their warrior followers’
hunger for gifts by controlling nearby agricultural production, indigenous crafts, and long-
distance trade. Some left home to fight for foreign kings; for example, Egil and his brother
worked for English King Æthelstan (r.924–939) and shared in the fruits of his victories.
Others raided under Viking leaders. This was the background to the “Viking invasions
of Europe.” Traveling in long, narrow, and shallow ships powered by wind and sails (see
Plate 4.5 on pp. 132–33), the Vikings sailed down the coasts and rivers of France, England,
Scotland, and Ireland, terrorizing not only the inhabitants but also the armies mustered
to fight them: “Many a time an army was assembled to oppose them, but as soon as they
were to join battle, always for some cause it was agreed to disperse, and always in the end
[the Vikings] had the victory,” wrote a chronicler in southern England.10
Some Vikings, like Egil’s family, crossed the Atlantic, making themselves at home in
Iceland or continuing on to Greenland or, in about 1000, touching on the coast of the North

Greenland
Legend
Viking settlements
Viking-raided areas
Viking invasions
Iceland
Hungarian invasions
Reykjavik Muslim invasions
Faroe Is. Trondheim
ay
w Ladoga
Shetland
r
Atlantic Is. No Novgorod Volga
Sweden
Ocean Orkney
Is. NORSE
SWEDES
Birka
Vistula
a
DANES Se
tic
Bal
Da Trelleborg
Ireland ne
l N o r t h Denmark
Dublin
S e a
aw
Hedeby
Saxony SLAVS Kiev

D ni ep er
Normandy
Rouen
Sei
ne
Paris
Burgundy
Bavaria HUNGARIANS
Loire Lechfeld
Black Sea
Cremona be
D anu
Genoa A Bulgaria
dr
ia
Marseille ti
c Byz Constantinople
Se
a antine Empire
al-Andalus Rome
Barcelona
Lisbon
Aegean
Tyr rhenian
Sea Sea
Seville
Sicily
S e a
M e d i t e r r a n e a n
Zirids
Fatimid Caliphate

Plate 4.5 Oseberg Ship (834).
This large ceremonial ship was
found buried in a grave mound
near the Oslo fjord in 1904.
Within were the skeletons of
two women, one more than
eighty years old, the other in
her early fifties. They were
accompanied by high-quality
artifacts, delicate foods (such as
fruits, berries, and walnuts), and
many animals and birds. Wooden
carvings, including those of
the ship’s prow and stern-
post, attest to the intricacy and
finesse of Viking workmanship,
characterized by interlaced
animal motifs. Compare this
interlace with the more abstract
forms of the Lindisfarne Gospels
in Plates 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7.
American mainland. While the elites came largely for booty, lesser men, eager for land,
traveled with their wives and children to live after conquests in Ireland, Scotland, England,
and Normandy (giving their name to the region: Norman = Northman, or Viking).
In Ireland, where their settlements were in the east and south, the newcomers added
their own claims to rule an island already fragmented among several competing dynasties.
In Scotland, however, in the face of Norse settlements in the north and west, the natives
drew together under kings who allied themselves with churchmen and other powerful
local leaders. Cináed mac Ailpín (Kenneth I MacAlpin) (d.858) established a hereditary
dynasty of kings that ruled over two hitherto independent native peoples. By c.900, the
separate identities were gone, and most people in Alba, the nucleus of the future Scotland,
shared a common sense of being Scottish.
England underwent a similar process of unification. Initially divided into small
competing kingdoms, it was weak prey in the face of invasion. By the end of the ninth
century, the Vikings were plowing fields in northeastern England and living in accordance
with their own laws, giving the region the name Danelaw. In Wessex, the southernmost
English kingdom, King Alfred the Great (r.871–899) bought time and peace by paying
tribute to the invaders with the income from a new tax, later called the Danegeld. (It
eventually became the basis of a relatively lucrative taxation system in England.) In 878
he led a series of raids against the Vikings settled in his kingdom, inspired the previously
cowed Anglo-Saxons to follow him, and camped outside the Viking stronghold until their
leaders surrendered and accepted baptism. Soon the Vikings left Wessex.
Thereafter the pressure of invasion eased somewhat as Alfred reorganized his army,
set up strongholds of his own (called burhs), and created a fleet of ships—a real navy. An
uneasy stability was achieved, with the Vikings dominating the east of England and Alfred
and his successors gaining control over most of the rest. Even so, the impact of the Vikings
on the formation of Anglo-Saxon England has recently been downplayed, and Alfred’s
role has been somewhat minimized by historians such as George Molyneaux, who sees the
real unification of England taking place via the administrative structures put into place in
the second half of the tenth century.
On the Continent, the invaders were absorbed above all in Normandy, where in 911
their leader Rollo converted to Christianity and received Normandy as a duchy from the
Frankish king Charles the Simple. Although many of the Normans adopted sedentary ways,
some of their descendants in the early eleventh century ventured to the Mediterranean,
where they established themselves as rulers of petty principalities in southern Italy. From
there, in 1061, the Normans began the conquest of Sicily.
muslims
Sicily, once Byzantine, was the rich and fertile plum of the conquests achieved by the
Muslim invaders of the ninth and tenth centuries. That they took the island attests to
the power of a new Muslim navy developed by the dynasty that preceded the Fatimids

in Ifriqiya. Briefly held by the Fatimids, by mid-century Sicily was under the control of
independent Islamic princes, and Muslim immigrants were swelling the population.
Elsewhere the Muslim presence in Western Europe was more ephemeral. In the first
half of the tenth century, Muslim raiders pillaged southern France, northern Italy, and the
Alpine passes. But these were quick expeditions, largely attacks on churches and monas-
teries. Some Muslims established themselves at La Garde-Freinet, in Provence, becoming
landowners in the region and lords of Christian serfs. They even hired themselves out as
occasional fighters for the wars that local Christian aristocrats were waging against one
another. But they made the mistake of capturing for ransom the holiest man of his era,
Abbot Majolus of Cluny (c.906–994). Outraged, the local aristocracy finally came together
and ousted the Muslims from their midst.
magyars (hungarians)
By contrast, the Magyars remained. “Magyar” was and remains their name for themselves,
though the rest of Europe called them “Hungarians,” from the Slavonic for “Onogurs,”
a people already settled in the Danube basin in the eighth and ninth centuries. Originally
nomads who raised (and rode) horses, the Magyars spoke a language unrelated to any other
in Europe (except Finnish). Known as effective warriors, they were employed by Arnulf,
king of the East Franks (r.887–899), when he fought the Moravians and by the Byzantine
emperor Leo VI (r.886–912) during his struggle against the Bulgars. In 894, taking advan-
tage of their position, the Hungarians, as we may now call them, conquered much of the
Danube basin for themselves.
From there, for over fifty years, they raided into Germany, Italy, and even southern
France. At the same time, however, the Hungarians worked for various western rulers.
Until 937 they spared Bavaria, for example, because they were allies of its duke. Gradually
they made the transition from nomads to farmers, and their polity coalesced into the
Kingdom of Hungary. This is no doubt a major reason for the end of their attacks. At the
time, however, the cessation of their raids was widely credited to the German king Otto
I (r.936–973), who won a major victory over a Hungarian marauding party at the battle
of Lechfeld in 955.
Public Power and Private Relationships

The invasions left new political arrangements in their wake. Unlike the Byzantines and
Muslims, European rulers had no mercenaries and no salaried officials. They commanded
others by ensuring personal loyalty. The Carolingian kings had had their fideles—their
faithful men. Tenth-century rulers were even more dependent on ties of dependency: they
needed their “men” (homines), their “vassals” (vassalli). Whatever the term, all were armed
retainers who fought for a lord. Sometimes these subordinates held land from their lord,
either as a reward for their military service or as an inheritance for which services were

due. The term for such an estate, fief ( feodum), gave historians the word “feudalism” to
describe the social and economic system created by the relationships among lords, vassals,
and fiefs. During the last forty years or so, however, the term has provoked great contro-
versy. Some historians argue that it has been used in too many different and contradictory
ways to mean anything at all. Was it a mode of exploiting the land that involved lords and
serfs? A condition of anarchy and lawlessness? Or a political system of ordered gradations
of power, from the king on down? Historians have used all of these definitions. Another
area of contention is the date for the emergence of feudal institutions. At the beginning
of the 1970s, the French historian Georges Duby assigned an early date: around the year
1000. His view prevailed for two decades, but in the 1990s it was forcefully challenged
by Dominique Barthélemy, who argued that the major transformation took place in the
twelfth century. In this book the word feudalism is avoided, but the institutions that histo-
rians associate with that term cannot be ignored. Their origins (where they took hold) are
to be found in the break-up of the Carolingian order—the tenth and eleventh centuries.
lords and vassals

The key to tenth- and eleventh-century society was personal dependency. This took many
forms. Of the three traditional “orders” recognized by writers in the ninth through elev-
enth centuries—those who pray (the oratores), those who fight (the bellatores), and those who
work (the laboratores)—the top two were free. The pray-ers (the monks) and the fighters
(the nobles and their lower-class counterparts, the knights) participated in prestigious
kinds of subordination, whether as vassals, lords, or both. Indeed, they were usually both:
a typical warrior was lord of several vassals and the vassal of another lord. Monasteries
normally had vassals to fight for them, while their abbots in turn were vassals of a king
or other lord. At the low end of the social scale, poor vassals looked to their lords to feed,
clothe, house, and arm them. At the upper end, vassals looked to their lords to enrich
them with still more fiefs.
Some women were vassals, and some were lords (or, rather, “ladies,” the female version).
Many upper-class laywomen participated in the society of warriors and monks as wives
and mothers of vassals and lords and as landowners in their own right. Others entered
convents and became oratores themselves. Through its abbess or a man standing in for her,
a convent was itself often the “lord” of vassals.
Vassalage was voluntary and public. The personal fidelity that the Carolingian kings
required of the Frankish elites became more general, as all lords wanted the same assur-
ance. Over time a ceremony of deference came increasingly to mark the occasion: a man
kneeled and placed his hands together (in a position we associate with prayer) within the
hands of another who stood: this was the act of homage. It generally included an oath:
“I promise to be your man.” The vassal-to-be then rose and promised “fealty”—fidelity,
trust, and service—which he swore with his hand on relics or a Bible. Then the vassal
and the lord kissed. In an age when many people could not read, a public moment such
as this represented a visual and verbal contract, binding the vassal and lord together with

mutual obligations to help each other. On the other hand, these obligations were rarely
spelled out, and a lord with many vassals, or a vassal with many lords, needed to satisfy
numerous conflicting claims. “I am a loser only because of my loyalty to you,” Hugh
of Lusignan told his lord, William of Aquitaine, after his expectations for reward were
continually disappointed.11
lords and peasants

At the lowest end of the social scale were those who worked: the peasants. In many regions
of Europe, as power fell into the hands of local rulers, the distinction between “free” and
“unfree” peasants began to blur; many peasants simply became “serfs,” dependents of
lords. This was a heavy dependency, without prestige or honor. It was hereditary rather
than voluntary: no serf did homage or fealty to his lord; no serf and lord kissed each other.
Indeed, the upper classes barely noticed the peasants—except as sources of labor and
revenue. In the tenth century, the three-field system became more prevalent, and the heavy
moldboard plows that could turn wet, clayey northern soils came into wider use. Such
plows could not work around fences, and they were hard to turn: thus was produced the
characteristic “look” of medieval agriculture—long, furrowed strips in broad, open fields.
Peasants knew very well which strips were “theirs” and which belonged to their neigh-
bors. A team of oxen was normally used to pull the plow, but horses (more efficient than
oxen) were sometimes substituted. The result was surplus food and a better standard of
living for nearly everyone.
In search of still greater profits, some lords lightened the dues and services of peas-
ants temporarily to allow them to open up new lands by draining marshes and cutting
down forests. Other lords converted dues and labor services into money payments,
providing themselves with ready cash. Peasants, too, benefited from these rents because
their payments were fixed despite inflation. As the prices of agricultural products went
up, peasants became small-scale entrepreneurs, selling their chickens and eggs at local
markets and reaping a profit.
In the eleventh century, and increasingly so in the twelfth, peasant settlements gained
boundaries and focus: they became real villages. The parish church often formed the
center, next to which was the cemetery. Then, normally crowded right onto the ceme-
tery itself, were the houses, barns, animals, and tools of the living peasants. Boundary
markers—sometimes simple stones, at other times real fortifications—announced not only
the physical limit of the village but also its sense of community. This derived from very
practical concerns: peasants needed to share oxen or horses to pull their plows; they were
all dependent on the village craftsmen to fix their wheels or shoe their horses.
Variety was the hallmark of peasant society. In Saxony and other parts of Germany
free peasants prevailed. In France and England most were serfs. In Italy peasants ranged
from small independent landowners to leaseholders; most were both, owning a parcel in
one place and leasing another nearby.

Where the power of kings was weak, peasant obligations became part of a larger system
of local rule. As landlords consolidated their power over their manors, they collected not
only dues and services but also fees for the use of their flour mills, bake houses, and brew-
eries. In some regions—parts of France and in Catalonia, for example—some lords built
castles and exercised the power of the “ban”: the right to collect taxes, hear court cases,
levy fines, and muster men for defense. These lords were “castellans.”
warriors and bishops

Although the developments described here did not occur everywhere simultaneously
(and in some places hardly at all), in the end the social, political, and cultural life of the
West came to be dominated by landowners who styled themselves both military men and
regional leaders. These men and their armed retainers shared a common lifestyle, living
together, eating in the lord’s great hall, listening to bards sing of military exploits, hunting
for recreation, competing with one another in military games. They fought in groups as
well—as cavalry. In the month of May, when the grasses were high enough for their horses
to forage, the war season began. To be sure, there were powerful vassals who lived on their
own fiefs and hardly ever saw their lord—except for perhaps forty days out of the year,
when they owed him military service. But they themselves were lords of knightly vassals
who were not married and who lived and ate and hunted with them.
The marriage bed, so important to the medieval aristocracy from the start, now took
on new meaning. In the seventh and eighth centuries, aristocratic families had thought of
themselves as large and loosely organized kin groups. They were not tied to any partic-
ular estate, for they had numerous estates, scattered all about. With wealth enough to go
around, the rich practiced partible inheritance, giving land (though not in equal amounts)
to all of their sons and daughters. The Carolingians “politicized” these family relations.
As some men were elevated to positions of dazzling power, they took the opportunity to
pick and choose their “family members,” narrowing the family circle. They also became
more conscious of their male line, favoring sons over daughters. In the eleventh century,
family definitions tightened even further. The claims of one son, often the eldest, over-
rode all else; to him went the family inheritance. (This is called “primogeniture”; but
there were regions in which the youngest son was privileged, and there were also areas
in which more equitable inheritance practices continued in place.) The heir in the new
system traced his lineage only through the male line, backward through his father and
forward through his own eldest son.
What happened to the other sons? Some of them became knights, others monks. Nor
should we forget that many became bishops. In many ways, the interests of bishops and lay
nobles were similar: bishops were men of property, lords of vassals, and faithful to patrons,
such as kings, who often were the ones to appoint them to their posts. In some places,
bishops wielded the powers of a count or duke. Some bishops ruled cities. Nevertheless,
bishops were also “pastors,” spiritual leaders charged with shepherding their flock, which

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Ebook A Short History of The Middle Ages Volume Ii From C 900 To C 1500 5Th Edition Rosenwein Online PDF All Chapter

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A Short History of the Middle Ages

Volume II From c 900 to c 1500 5th

A Short History of the Middle Ages Volume I From c 300

A Short History of the Middle Ages Volume I From c 300

A Short History of the Middle Ages 5th Edition Barbara

A Short History of the Middle Ages Volume 2 c900 c1500

Rewriting History in the Central Middle Ages 900 1300

The Pre Christian Religions of the North Research and

Writing Welsh History: From the Early Middle Ages to

A Cultural History of Hair in the Middle Ages 1st

Toronto Buffalo London

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Rosenwein, Barbara H., author

Also published together in one complete volume.

1. Middle Ages. 2. Europe—History—476-1492. I. Title.

d117.r 67 2018b 940.1 c2018-901197-1

North America UK, Ireland, and continental Europe

2250 Military Road orders phone : 44 (0) 1752 202301

Funded by the Financé par le

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10° 20° 30° Mecca 40° 50°

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chapter four Political Communities Reordered (c.900–c.1050) • 113

ABBREVIATIONS, DATE CONVENTIONS, WEBSITE xv

NOTE FOR THE FIFTH EDITION

BYZANTIUM: THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF

The Imperial Court

BYZANTIUM: THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF CENTRALIZATION 115

BYZANTIUM: THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF CENTRALIZATION 117

Empire at Basil’s accession (976)

118 FOUR: POLITICAL COMMUNITIES REORDERED (c.900–c.1050)

The Formation of Rus’

BYZANTIUM: THE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF CENTRALIZATION 119

120 FOUR: POLITICAL COMMUNITIES REORDERED (c.900–c.1050)

DIVISION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD

The Emergence of Regional Powers

DIVISION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD 121

122 FOUR: POLITICAL COMMUNITIES REORDERED (c.900–c.1050)

DIVISION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD 123

124 FOUR: POLITICAL COMMUNITIES REORDERED (c.900–c.1050)

DIVISION AND DEVELOPMENT IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD 125

THE WEST: FRAGMENTATION AND RESILIENCE 127

128 FOUR: POLITICAL COMMUNITIES REORDERED (c.900–c.1050)

THE WEST: FRAGMENTATION AND RESILIENCE

THE WEST: FRAGMENTATION AND RESILIENCE 129

The Last Invaders of the West

130 FOUR: POLITICAL COMMUNITIES REORDERED (c.900–c.1050)

Faroe Is. Trondheim

Saxony SLAVS Kiev