by Ian Mortimer
When reviewing the five changes identified above – population growth, the expansion of the monastic network, the intellectual renaissance, medical advances and the application of the law – there can be little doubt that the first underpinned all the others. It is true that the lives of ordinary men and women working the land in 1200 differed most obviously from those of their forebears in 1100 with regard to the codified nature of the law, and the rigour with which it was applied. Those who think of the mobile phone as one of the most significant changes in human history might like to reflect on whether it is as significant as the application of law and order. Given a choice between living in a lawless society and one with no mobile signal, which would you choose? But I think that even the matter of law and order has to take second place to population growth. On the most basic level, life in 1200 differed from 1100 because people had more land, more surpluses, and more chance that they and their children would be able to eat – and live – for another year.
The principal agent of change
No single individual can be credited with initiating the major changes of the twelfth century. Demographic growth was due to the weather and the spread of agricultural skills, not any one ruler’s policy. Henry I and Henry II both had a huge impact on the application of the law in England, but they were of limited significance when we consider all of Europe. Although Irnerius played a major role in the development of legal education and the reintroduction of jurisprudence, he was just the first of many such teachers. One can say much the same for the translators of the Arabic texts that ushered in the intellectual renaissance. Gerard of Cremona stands head and shoulders above the others on account of the importance and number of his translations, but ultimately he was just one of many performing this task; the intellectual developments of the twelfth century would still have taken place without him. Gratian was essentially a compiler: if he had not brought the canons together at that juncture, someone else’s collection would probably have been adopted by the Church. And while it is tempting to single out Aristotle as the principal agent of change, it would be somewhat disingenuous. If twelfth-century scholars had not picked up his writings and realised their value, then they would have languished in Arabic libraries and had none of the impact they did.
The foremost candidates for the principal agent of change are the two great rivals of the early part of the twelfth century. Bernard of Clairvaux inspired thousands of people to take up the cross and join the Second Crusade. He led thousands more to join the Cistercian order, influenced the election of popes, and assisted the development of what I have called the ‘monastic network’. But ultimately the Second Crusade came to nothing, and many kings refused to accept his endorsement of Pope Innocent II. In his attempt to defeat the rationalism of Peter Abelard, he proved himself to be the very opposite of an agent of change – a determined brake on intellectual and social development. Thus the limelight falls on the brilliant but irascible, difficult and arrogant Peter Abelard. His rationality was novel and it is hard to believe that someone else would have come up with the same ideas. The real effects of his theology – which Bernard of Clairvaux called ‘stupidology’ – were to be felt in the next century, when Thomas Aquinas took rationalism still further, but even in the twelfth century Abelard had a powerful impact. Gratian adopted his dialectical method in his Decretum. Every university now established a faculty of theology, embracing Abelard’s reasoning rather than Bernard’s advocacy of unquestioning faith. Imagine if universities today followed Bernard’s example and did not question received wisdom even when it was self-contradictory. For his influence in making Aristotle the pre-eminent philosopher for twelfth-century scholars, for his development of theology, for his ethics, for his critical method of thinking, and for his indirect impact on the moral law of the whole of Christendom through his influence on the Decretum, Peter Abelard seems to me to be the century’s principal agent of change.
1201–1300
The Thirteenth Century
In 1227, Ulrich von Lichtenstein, a knight from Styria (in modern Austria), set off on a jousting tour dressed up as the goddess Venus, complete with two long plaits of golden hair. Wherever he went, from Italy to Bohemia, he challenged everyone to joust with him. He promised all his potential opponents that he would give them a gold ring if they rode against him three times; if he defeated them, they were to bow to the four corners of the Earth in honour of his lady. According to his own account, he ‘broke lances’ 307 times in a month. He had some mishaps along the way, such as falling from a great height when the basket in which he was being hauled up to the window of his lady’s tower broke. Nevertheless, such incidents did not put him off repeating the whole adventure 13 years later. In 1240, then aged 40, he dressed up as King Arthur and took himself and six companions off on another jousting quest, allowing those who ‘broke lances’ with them to join their company of the Round Table. Later in life he also wrote a tale lamenting the decline of courtly love. There could hardly be a greater contrast between his jaunty tale, almost poking fun at the predilections of his own time, and the bitter life-and-death struggles of twelfth-century knights, accustomed to the sound of their own teeth shattering under the blow of an opponent’s mace on their helmet.
This self-mocking, quixotic and martial but romantic figure seems to symbolise a new direction in European culture. We are reminded of the sweet harps and flutes of thirteenth-century minstrels, the jocular humour of the Play of Daniel (a sort of religious musical written at Beauvais Cathedral), and the playful gargoyles and misericords that decorated churches across Europe. There is something provocatively subversive in Ulrich’s cross-dressing too, even though he is well known from other records to have been a responsible and effective regional administrator. Just for a moment, it is possible to see the thirteenth century as a bright summer of pleasure, with all the optimism of the famous English folk songs from the period, ‘Miri it is while summer y-last’ and ‘Sumer is i-coming in’. But then we have to remind ourselves that the early years of the century saw the power of the papacy at its zenith, in the uncompromising person of Innocent III, pope from 1198 to 1216. The same century witnessed no fewer than six Crusades, including the infamous Fourth Crusade, preached by Innocent III but directed by the money-hungry Venetians against the Christian city of Constantinople. Following Innocent’s call for renewed fighting in Spain, the kingdoms of Aragon, Navarre, Castile and Portugal united to defeat the Almohad dynasty at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. Córdoba fell to Christian armies in 1236 and Seville in 1248; by 1294, all of the Iberian peninsula except Granada was in Christian hands. Innocent III also issued a bull sanctifying the Livonian Crusade, when German and Danish troops were sent into Livonia and Estonia in order to convert Europe’s last pagans by force. The same pope was behind the Albigensian Crusade, in which Simon de Montfort led the armies of Christian righteousness in massacring thousands of ‘heretic’ Cathars in south-western France. When at Béziers in 1209 de Montfort butchered the entire population, it was reported that the papal legate accompanying him told him not to trouble distinguishing between the Cathar heretics and innocent Catholics but to slay everyone. ‘God will recognise his own,’ the cleric advised him. Last but certainly not least, this century also saw Genghis Khan’s Mongol armies commit horrific atrocities that collectively rank as the worst act of genocide the world has ever known. We do not know how many people he slaughtered, but there are estimates of 30 million – at a time when the entire world population was no more than 400 million.
Even the recreational pursuits of this century were bloody affairs. Tournaments might have been glamorous, with heraldically resplendent knights jousting for honour, but they could still be fatal. Analogies with modern rugby and American football, which some historians suggest, are frankly inappropriate. Just look at what happened to the ruling house of Holland. In 1223, the count of Holland was killed in a tournament. His son and successor died the same way in 1234, and a younger son, the regent during t
he minority of his grandson, was killed in a tournament in 1238. If three generations of a European ruling house were killed on the rugby field, then the comparison might be valid, but the dangers of thirteenth-century jousting far exceeded those of any modern pastime. In 1241, the year after Ulrich’s jaunt as King Arthur, a single tournament at Neuss in Germany saw more than 80 knights killed.1 The more you think about the thirteenth century, therefore, the harder it is to reconcile the bloodshed with the frivolity of chivalric romances, happy songs about the arrival of summer, and duelling in drag.
When you stand back, however, you realise that these irreconcilable extremes are like bookends enclosing a wider range of social phenomena. The cult of the knight, chivalry, had been on a rising trajectory since the invention of heraldry in the third quarter of the previous century. Ulrich’s style of composition follows the genre of courtly romances in the Arthurian tradition, but it also has something in common with the autobiographical troubadour poetry pioneered by William, count of Aquitaine, which reached its apogee in the work of Bernart de Ventadorn at the end of the twelfth century. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, the power of the Church to command Christians to fight against Muslims was on the wane. When the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II led the Sixth Crusade in 1228, he did not look on it as an opportunity to kill members of another faith. The emperor had entertained Muslim intellectuals at his court all his life; in fact he had a higher opinion of them than he did of the pope. He simply negotiated the return of Jerusalem to Christian control, bribing the Muslims rather than fighting them. Thus the Sixth Crusade was the only other expedition to the Holy Land, after the First Crusade, to reach its goal of returning Jerusalem into Christian hands. It remained Christian until 1244 – and, in marked contrast to the First Crusade, no blood was shed. The Ninth Crusade of 1271–2 was the West’s final military push to reclaim the Crusader states. After the loss of the last Christian stronghold, Acre, in 1291, the crusading spirit was little more than a figure of speech. Ulrich was therefore writing at a time when the rise of secular romances and the popularity of travel intersected with the decline of crusading zeal and the weakening of the feudal system. While the frivolity of his account stands out, and his long blond plaits distinguish him as unique, what is really striking is that he was a free man, choosing his own destiny, and expressing the fulfilment of his dreams in his own words.
Commerce
We saw in the last chapter how the population of Europe rose consistently from 1050: by the end of the thirteenth century it stood in excess of 110 million. Widespread famines in 1225–6, 1243, 1258 and 1270–71 did not significantly reduce the overall growth. In England, the figures indicate that the population rose at its fastest rate around the year 1200, at 0.83 per cent per year. This continued until the 1220s, when it reached four million. Thereafter it rose more slowly, at an annual average of about 0.25 per cent, reaching a peak of about 4.5 million in 1290. In some parts of the country we can confirm this level of growth using independent evidence. The bishop of Winchester levied a customary poll tax of one penny on males over the age of 12 on his manor of Taunton in Somerset: this shows an increase from 612 males in 1209 to 1,488 males in 1311 (an increment of 0.85 per cent per year).2
It all sounds very positive: more children surviving and having families of their own. However, the population of England was nearing its maximum potential. After two centuries of clearances, all the available land had been claimed. Lords could hardly allow all their forests to be turned into farmland, particularly when houses were predominantly made of timber. The lack of land started to have a braking effect on population growth. Once again the poor did not have enough food to feed a large number of children. As their numbers grew, the per capita wealth of the poor declined. The meat-eating wealthy added to the problem as animal husbandry is a very inefficient use of land if you are trying to sustain a large population. Land that might have been turned over to crops was retained as grassland for cattle or flocks of sheep. The inevitable result was a curtailment of how much the population could grow in rural areas and a migration of landless peasants to the market towns, where they hoped to make a living for themselves.
With their guilds and markets, schools, merchants’ houses, Gothic-arched churches, high town walls and great gatehouses, towns were the big news story of the thirteenth century. In both northern Italy and Flanders about 18 per cent of the population lived in communities of 10,000 people or more by 1300. However, the proportion of French people who lived in towns was much smaller and there were only four or five towns of this size in the whole of England – and none in Scotland, Wales or Scandinavia. Indeed, the vast majority of the market towns founded across northern Europe in the thirteenth century were small: they were little more than villages laid out around a market square by lords hopeful of attracting business. However, these too have to be considered in the picture of urbanisation, for the importance of a town as a commercial centre is not solely dependent on the number of its inhabitants but also on the number of people who visit to buy and sell things in the market.
In the thirteenth century about 1,400 new markets were founded in England, in addition to the 300 that already existed. Not all of these new foundations took root; in fact, the majority failed. But 345 of them were still going strong in 1600, when they accounted for over half of the 675 markets then in existence.3 The thirteenth century was thus the time when England shifted permanently to becoming a market-based economy. Similar processes of urbanisation were under way all across Europe. In Westphalia, for instance, where only six towns existed before 1180, the number had grown to 138 by 1300.4 Overall, the number of towns in Europe increased from about 100 in the tenth century (half of which were in Italy) to about 5,000 by 1300.5 Whereas European lords had founded monasteries in the twelfth century for the benefit of their souls, in the thirteenth century they established markets for the benefit of their purses.
These new markets did not just further enrich the wealthy lords, they also had a wider social benefit. By the end of the thirteenth century almost everywhere in England was within seven miles of a market town; the only exceptions were sparsely populated areas. The average distance was three miles, about an hour’s journey on foot each way. Whether the market was held once a week, twice a week or every day, people could come into town and sell their surpluses, or buy fresh produce. Cattle, goats and sheep were brought into the market square on the hoof; chickens, geese and other birds were transported in wooden cages on packhorses; and flitches of bacon were conveyed on carts. Here people could also buy things that were difficult to make or simply uneconomical to manufacture in small quantities, such as belt buckles, leather purses, knives, ladles, pots, kettles, nails, riding harnesses, horseshoes and stirrups. They could obtain fish and cheeses – important sources of protein when there were ecclesiastical rules against eating meat on three days of the week and over the whole of both Advent and Lent. Some men became rich carting a single commodity like eggs or eels to market. Others trapped squirrels, hares, rabbits, cats and foxes and sold their pelts to merchants, who resold them at markets to townsmen and women for fur trimmings on their robes. Some people hoarded their grain all year to sell late in the season when the price was high, along with their carefully stored apples, pears and nuts. Markets encouraged every community across Europe to pool the resources of its region and offer them to those who needed them – albeit at a price.
Foundation of new towns in Central Europe and grants of new markets in England, 20-year periods, 1200–15006
It should not surprise us that most of the 1,400 new markets in England failed. Towns that had no nearby competitors and were supported by large hinterlands attracted more produce and commodities and drew in more customers, thus dominating a region’s trade. However, towns that were in close proximity could not similarly grow large because they were drawing from the same hinterland. As the historian Fernand Braudel observed in his ‘ground rules’ for world economies, ‘a dominant capitalist city alwa
ys lies at the centre’.7 Thus successful market towns emerged at the centres of their hinterlands, roughly 13 miles apart from their nearest neighbours. The same principle applied to large towns and cities. Places that provided a wide range of commodities and services, including administrative functions and professional expertise, such as courts and lawyers, drew in people from much further afield. The largest and most prosperous cities were those that served the widest possible hinterland, extending for 30 or 40 miles in each direction. If the said city was a port, then it still observed Braudel’s rule because it was at the centre of both its inland trade (on the landward side) and its international trade (on the maritime side). It was not just on account of its English geography that London grew to be so strong economically; it was also because it was at the centre of trade with the emerging region of the Low Countries (especially Flanders), and provided a major port for the merchants of the Hanseatic League, which linked it with the trading towns of the Baltic States and those of the Rhine and the North Sea.
The main product that powered northern European international commerce was wool. Huge quantities were sent from England to the cities of Flanders, such as Bruges and Ghent. This wool-trading network in the north was mirrored in the south by the flourishing northern Italian trading cities of Genoa, Venice and Florence. Their main commodities were silks and spices, bought in Constantinople or obtained directly by Italian merchants travelling in Asia, and traded all round the Mediterranean. Venice was the dominant city for this Oriental-Mediterranean commerce, just as London and Bruges were the major centres for wool and cloth. From the Mediterranean, spices and silks were carried to Genoa and then transported north into France, where the county of Champagne provided the great nexus of business. Six fairs in the four towns of Lagny-sur-Marne, Bar-sur-Aube, Provins and Troyes, each lasting two months, facilitated a permanent cycle of international trade between northern and southern Europe. Goods arrived at these fairs from places as far away as Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, Valencia on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, Santiago de Compostela on the Atlantic, and Augsburg in southern Germany. Even merchants from Rome and Palestine made the journey.8