The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

  THE AGE OF CHIVALRY

  THE AGE OF CHIVALRY

  THE STORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 1000 TO 1500

  HYWEL WILLIAMS

  New York • London

  © 2011 by Hywel Williams

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  ISBN 978-1-62365-276-0

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  A pastoral scene is shown in this image from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a 15th-century book of hours.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE OTTONIAN DYNASTY OF SAXON EMPERORS

  THE RISE OF THE CAPETIANS

  THE NORMANS IN ENGLAND

  THE BIRTH OF THE EUROPEAN CITY-STATE

  THE NORMANS IN SICILY

  THE FIRST CRUSADE

  THE INVESTITURE CONTEST

  THE STAUFER DYNASTY

  THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

  THE 12TH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE

  THE TRIUMPH OF THE CAPETIANS

  THE THIRD CRUSADE

  THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE

  THE GLORY OF ISLAMIC SPAIN

  THE KINGDOM OF NAPLES

  THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR

  AVIGNON AND THE SCHISM

  THE GOLDEN AGE OF FLORENCE

  THE RECONQUISTA

  SAINTS, RELICTS AND HERETICS

  MEDIEVAL SOCIETY

  MEDIEVAL CULTURE

  MEDIEVAL WARFARE

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  Three distinctive civilizations developed in western Eurasia and North Africa following the fifth century collapse of the Western Roman empire’s authority. The Greek empire of Byzantium was centered on the eastern Mediterranean while the civilization of Islam became predominant across North Africa and in the Middle East. European civilization incorporated the western Mediterranean territories but it also acquired a new axis which extended northwards to include areas that had been peripheral to classical Roman antiquity. These three cultures were the sibling civilizations of ancient Rome, and western Europe came to define itself as the bastion of Latin Christendom as opposed to the Greeks’ eastern Orthodoxy. Up until at least the year 1000 Europe’s level of cultural, intellectual and material development was clearly inferior to that attained by Byzantium and the Islamic states. During the central or “high” Middle Ages that extended from the 11th to the 13th centuries the continent started to rival its two neighboring powers in terms of political effectiveness, military success and cultural expansiveness. By the 15th century Europeans were asserting supremacy over their erstwhile rivals and superiors. The means by which this great transformation came to pass form the subject matter of this book.

  Social structures were reorganized at a profound level in western Europe from c.500 onward: the traditions of imperial Rome now yielded to those of the Germanic peoples, such as the Franks and the Lombards, who had migrated to the south and west. New kingdoms were thereby established in western Europe, and monarchy’s institutional authority turned former citizens into subjects. A process of Christianization was encouraged by missionaries, sponsored by rulers and often imposed on subjugated pagan peoples, and monasticism became the supreme expression of European religious life.

  “Europe” had been a geographical term since Graeco-Roman antiquity but the word acquired a cultural and political significance during Charlemagne’s reign as king of the Franks (768–814). The scale of his victories gave Charlemagne a dominion over most of the territories which had once comprised the Western Roman empire, and in the year 800 he was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III. Charlemagne’s heirs and successors however failed to maintain his expansionist momentum, and after the division of the former Carolingian empire (843) European kings found it difficult to raise the armies needed to enforce their authority. A century-long period of strain and danger followed with Magyar invasions from the east and Viking incursions from Scandinavia undermining Europe’s recovery and self-confidence.

  Hardened by these battles, European military and political leaders were able to regain the initiative by the late tenth century, and the papacy’s decision to grant an imperial crown to the German king Otto I in 962 marks the start of the institution which would later be termed the Holy Roman Empire. Demographic growth, urban development, and a burgeoning sense of national identity—as well as the papacy’s assertion of its own independent power—are the hallmarks of the central Middle Ages. From the 11th century onward the chivalric code, which inculcated the virtues of valor, courtesy, honor and loyalty, achieved a widespread diffusion among the European élites. Chivalry’s influence transcended the ethic’s military origins, and its celebration of the cult of love, both human and divine, had a profound impact on social conduct, religious idealism and aesthetic inspiration.

  The phrase “medium aevum” was coined during the early 17th century by French and English historians of jurisprudence, and its vernacular equivalents, “moyen age,” “Middle Ages” and “medieval,” were adopted subsequently. These authors also popularized the notion that “feudalism”—another word they invented—was the universal form of social life in western Europe by the 11th century and that it lasted for at least another 300 years. The terms feudum (or “fief”) and feodalitas (services connected with the feudum) refer to a form of property holding which was especially common in France and England. But the way in which European societies changed in the post-Roman and medieval centuries inevitably assumed many different guises, and an uniform “feudal system” did not exist at any stage in the history of medieval Europe. An assertion of lordship however did become widespread and its exercise showed how power at local, regional and national levels could be established by a mutual exchange of vows between superiors and inferiors. Obligations of service might then be incurred by those sometimes called “vassals” and promises of protection would be made by the relevant lord.

  During the 14th century Europeans had to cope with a series of both natural and man-made disasters: widespread famines, the Black Death of 1348 and subsequent years, as well as the mid-century collapse of Italian banks. Technological change meant that warfare became both more expensive financially and increasingly devastating in its human impact. Expansion and development halted in both the towns and the countryside, and Europe’s population, which had stood at some 70 million in 1300, was almost halved. European resilience is nonetheless the key feature of this renewed time of trial with first the rural areas and then the urban centers being rapidly repopulated. The intellectual, political and social changes associated with an initially Italian renaissance evolved out of late medieval society, and are inconceivable outside that context. Personal enterprise, intellectual curiosity, and institutional responsiveness to change: these defining characteristics of European civilization were formed during the medieval centuries and it was that legacy from it
s past which enabled the culture to survive, evolve and flourish.

  Hywel Williams

  THE OTTONIAN DYNASTY OF SAXON EMPERORS

  919–1024

  The creation of the German people’s first reich dominates the history of tenth-century Europe. Charlemagne, king of the Franks, revived the imperial title for the first time since the collapse of the Western Roman empire in the fifth century, and on Christmas Day 800 he was crowned emperor by the pope in Rome. However, his dynastic successors failed to maintain the empire’s territorial unity. By c.900 the ancestral core of Charlemagne’s empire had been split into a kingdom of the Eastern Franks, corresponding to much of modern Germany, and a kingdom of the Western Franks, whose boundaries anticipated those of France. The duchy of Saxony became the eastern kingdom’s power base.

  The Saxons had been tenaciously pagan before Charlemagne conquered them in a series of fierce late-eighth-century military campaigns. Now a thoroughly Christianized territory, the duchy of Saxony was key to Germany’s evolution into a power that embraced ancient Roman notions of empire and was the dominant partner in its alliance with the papacy. At the beginning of the tenth century Europe was still threatened from the north by the Vikings, and the danger of invasion from the east by the Magyars, a pagan and nomadic warrior race, posed major challenges until the 950s. However, the armies of the German reich, later to be termed the Holy Roman Empire, held the line against these threats and set the scene for the evolution of medieval European civilization.

  In 919 Henry I, duke of Saxony and founder of the Ottonian dynasty, was elected “king of the Germans” by an assembly of aristocrats meeting at Fritzlar. The Eastern Frankish duchies of Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria and Lotharingia soon acknowledged his kingship. Henry’s heirs would rule as his lineal successors, and the practice of election to the throne, although retained, became a formality. The new king, dubbed “the Fowler” because of his fondness for hunting wild birds, subdued the Danish Vikings, and in 924 he agreed a ten-year truce with the Magyars whom he then defeated at the Battle of Riade in 933. Henry’s refusal to be made king was a major break with the traditions of “sacral kingship.” But he was determined to exercise power on his own terms and to avoid any suggestion of indebtedness to the Church. However, Henry’s son, Otto I (“the Great”), chose to be anointed and consecrated a king when he was crowned at Aachen’s Palatine Chapel in 936. The bishops and abbots of the German kingdom became his vassals, and these royal appointees identified strongly with Otto’s system of government and supported the consolidation of his command over an often fractious nobility. This German reichskirche or imperial church was also instrumental in the eastward expansion of the Ottonian dynasty. The sees established in Poland, Bohemia, Moravia and Hungary operated as outposts of the ecclesiastical centers at Mainz and Magdeburg, Salzburg and Passau, and the new bishoprics were pivotal in trying to impose German culture and enforce political assimilation on the conquered Slavic peoples. The scale of new building projects, together with the demands for military hardware, made this an expensive policy, but the discovery of silver in Saxony’s Harz region during the early tenth century had enriched the Ottonian kings and helped to subsidize their imperial ventures.

  RIGHT A 1903 German mosaic of Otto I (“the Great”), who was crowned an emperor by the pope in 962.

  CAMPAIGNS IN THE SOUTH AND EAST

  Otto’s ambitions extended south as well as east. In 950 he launched a major campaign across the Alps in support of Queen Adelheid of Italy who was being threatened by the rebellion of Berengar, margrave of Ivrea in the peninsula’s northwest. Success in battle led to Otto’s recognition as “king of the Lombards” by the Italian nobility. The decisive defeat he inflicted on the Magyars at the Battle of the Lechfeld on August 10, 955 entrenched his authority over the German aristocracy. The king’s war machine gained another crushing victory on October 16, 955 when it defeated the Obodrites, a Slavic tribe established in the region of Mecklenburg on the Baltic coast. This gave the kingdom a 30-year period of peace on its eastern frontier, during which time a tight system of lordship was imposed on the Slavs by their German rulers.

  BELOW A pen and watercolor manuscript illustration (c.1450) from the workshop of Diebold Lauber shows Emperor Otto I meeting Pope John XII.

  Berengar remained ambitious and in c.960 he occupied the papal states of central Italy. Otto responded by marching his army into Rome to safeguard the position of the young pope, John XII, who, on February 2, 962, crowned the German king an emperor. The Diplomata Ottonianum, an imperial-papal agreement issued later that same month, gave Otto the right to confirm elections to the papacy. Pope John swiftly repented of this one-sided pact, and after making peace overtures to Berengar he was deposed in 963 by the Church council summoned by the emperor. For the remainder of his reign Otto was preoccupied with the Italian south, where a number of local princes retained their Lombard identity as descendants of the Germanic tribe that had invaded the region in the seventh century. Pandulf Ironhead, prince of Benevento and Capua, was one such ruler, and Otto enlisted him as his ally in the campaign to expel the Byzantines from the peninsula’s south. Otto also engineered Pandulf’s succession as prince of Salerno and granted him the duchy of Spoleto, a fiefdom (the territorial domain of a feudal lord) whose territories extended to the east of the papal states. A major anti-Byzantine power block was thereby created as the new German reich confronted the Greek empire.

  * * *

  THE OTTONIAN DYNASTY

  800 Charlemagne, king of the Franks and of the Lombards, is crowned emperor by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day.

  919 Henry I (“the Fowler”), duke of Saxony, is elected king of the Germans.

  933 King Henry I defeats the Magyars at the Battle of Riade.

  936 Otto I (“the Great”), founds Quedlinburg Abbey.

  962 Otto I is crowned emperor by Pope John XII.

  982 The army of Arab Sicily defeats Otto II’s forces at the Battle of Stilo, Calabria. A rebellion of Slavic tribes settled between the Oder and Elbe endangers the German kingdom’s eastern frontier.

  996 Otto III, German king and emperor, begins to rule in his own right.

  c.1000 Coronation of Stephen I, Hungary’s first king, as a Christian monarch.

  1002 Duke Henry of Bavaria is elected king of the Germans and reigns as Henry II.

  1004 Henry II defeats Arduin, Margrave of Ivrea, who has proclaimed himself “king of Italy.”

  1024 Henry II, the last Saxon emperor, dies.

  * * *

  MAINTAINING OTTO’S DYNASTY

  Otto’s dynastic ambitions were endorsed when an assembly, meeting in Worms in 961, elected his son king of the Germans. The future Otto II was crowned joint-emperor with his father by the pope six years later and was thoroughly trained in the business of imperial war and government. His first major challenge came in 978 when Lothair, king of West Francia, launched an invasion and occupied Aachen. Otto retaliated in the autumn by leading his army over the frontier and inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. A peace agreement was arrived at in 980, and with his western boundaries secured Otto could plan an Italian campaign. He crossed the Alps with his army, and on Easter Day 981, accompanied by a retinue of courtiers and senior churchmen, Otto entered Rome. Here he held a magnificent court attended by nobles drawn from across the imperial territories. Otto’s ambitions, however, lay further south.

  DEFEATED BY THE ARABS

  The Arab pirates known as Saracens operated from bases on the north African coast, and they had been disrupting the Mediterranean sea lanes for over a century. An alliance with Arab-ruled Sicily was now enabling the Saracens to attack the southern Italian regions of Puglia and Calabria, and the German army advanced from Rome bent on confrontation. Pandulf Ironhead’s heirs had fallen out with each other, but Otto managed to secure their recognition of his imperial authority and proceeded to annex Puglia—a region still controlled by the Byzantines. Military catastrophe followed. In July 982, at Stilo in
Calabria, Otto’s army was destroyed by the Arab army of Sicily whose emir, Abu al-Kasim, had declared a jihad or holy war against the Germans. The emperor managed to escape incognito on a Greek ship and return to Rome. At an imperial assembly held in Verona he secured recognition of his infant son as king of the Germans, and then started to plan a resumption of the southern campaign.

  Emboldened by the news of imperial defeat, the Slavic tribes settled between the Elbe and the Oder on Germany’s eastern frontier now seized the chance to rebel. This massive and prolonged insurrection was a major setback for the empire, and its active eastward expansion would not be resumed until the 12th century. Otto learned of the rebellion just before his death in Rome in December 983—and the event was to have long-term ramifications for his three-year-old heir, Otto III.

  OTTO III—AN ENLIGHTENED AND PRAGMATIC RULER

  As soon as Otto III started to reign in 996 he demonstrated a deep conviction that Europe formed a unity and that the strength of his reich should therefore lie in its acknowledgment of diversity rather than in the imposition of a rigid uniformity. His keen sense of a common European culture was reflected in his veneration for Charlemagne’s memory, and it also owed much to his Greek mother, Theophanu. The emperor made Rome his capital, and Pope Sylvester II, his former tutor the French intellectual Gerbert of Aurillac, became a reliable ally in the process of reforming the notoriously nepotistic late-tenth-century Church.

  Otto grasped that his forebears’ eastern ambitions were beyond the resources of his empire’s German core. He also thought it strategically foolish, since the subjugated but hostile peoples might well turn to Byzantium for support. He therefore developed a federal policy for the eastern territories. The rulers of these lands were still expected to honor the imperial title, but they now enjoyed an internal autonomy within a looser structure than Otto I’s tight model of subjugation. In Poland, therefore, Otto created an autonomous archbishopric at Gniezno as well as its three suffragan sees at Kolberg, Cracow and Breslau, and he also remitted the tribute payments previously made by Polish rulers to the emperors. These changes demonstrated to the Poles that they could remain part of the religious community of the Latin West without also having to become culturally German. Hungary’s ruler, Stephen, was deeply influenced by this example and, encouraged by Otto, he opted for loyalty to the see of Rome when it came to the Christianization of his recently pagan country. Accordingly, he was crowned in about December 1000 as Stephen I, the first king of Hungary, with a crown sent him by the pope.