PROOF Contents Preface ix Introduction: Approaches to the Twelfth Century and Its ‘Renaissance’ 1 1 Varieties of Political Order in the Latin West 14 The German Empire, the Papacy, and Northern Italy 20 Multicultural Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World: Sicily and Iberia 34 Competing Monarchies in France and England 49 Christianization and the Kingdoms of Northern and Eastern Europe 72 2 People, Economy, and Social Relations 80 Population 81 Peasants, Lords, and Patterns of Settlement 84 Towns and Cities 92 Trade, Commerce, and Economic Growth 99 3 Spirituality and Its Discontents 107 Patterns of Religious Experience 109 The Church and Its Religious Orders 120 Heretics and Friars in the Urban Context 136 Order, Exclusion, and the Fourth Lateran Council 143 4 Intellectual Syntheses 151 The Intellectual World: Contexts, Institutions, and Personnel 152 Varieties of Latin Culture 167 The Uses of Vernacular Literature 173 vii PROOF viii CONTENTS 5 The Crusades and the Idea of Christendom 183 The Conception and Meaning of the Crusades 185 Popular Piety and the First Crusade 188 The Crusader States and the Crusading Movement to 1229 190 The Travails of the Crusading Ideal 194 Christendom and the Wider World 197 Conclusion 199 Notes 202 Suggestions for Further Reading 227 Index 234 PROOF Chapter 1: Varieties of Political Order in the Latin West On November 27, 1095, according to several contemporaries, Pope Urban II addressed a Church council at the French town of Clermont. The historian Fulcher of Chartres insisted that a grim spiritual cli- mate prevailed across Christendom: ‘With Henry reigning as so-called emperor, and with Philip as king in France, manifold evils were grow- ing in all parts of Europe because of wavering faith’. Christianity in the west lay in disarray, unscrupulous knights pillaged at will, and ‘no one was spared of any suffering’.1 Violence, disorder, and slack piety threatened the physical and spiritual well-being of everyone— other chroniclers share at least the perception that the carnage had reached unprecedented levels.2 Having already held several synods throughout France, Urban II convened this council to deal with some immediate problems, including disputes between local bishops, the recent, scandalous marriage of the king of France to the wife of the count of Anjou, the moral reform of the clergy, and the need to free bishops from the control of secular rulers.3 Unfortunately, his speech survives only in second-hand (at best) accounts, and the various chroniclers who recorded it differed on many details; they reconstructed his words according to what happened next, which shaped what they thought he ought to have said. During the two decades that the speech percolated in the minds of assorted writers, it took on new layers of meaning, but there can be no doubt that what- ever Urban II said, it struck a chord and reveals a great deal about the Christian world order as he and his contemporaries conceived of it. According to Fulcher’s version, Urban II began with local issues, and he exhorted the knights of France to stop destroying church property and to put aside their private warfare. He chided the clergy 14 PROOF VARIETIES OF POLITICAL ORDER IN THE LATIN WEST 15 for their worldliness and asked them to be true shepherds rather than mercenaries and so to restore the world to its proper order. After he had addressed Western Europe’s endemic violence, he turned his attention to the wider geopolitical and religious scene: For, as most of you have been told, the Turks, a race of Persians, who have penetrated within the boundaries of Romania [the Eastern Roman or ‘Byzantine’ Empire] [ ...] in occupying more and more of the lands of the Christians, have overcome them, already victims of several battles, and have killed and captured them, have overthrown churches, and have laid waste God’s kingdom.4 Muslim armies from the East had recently assaulted the Byzantine frontiers with increased vigor, and so had threatened the very exis- tence of the empire. After the Seljuk Turks annihilated their army at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the emperors had struggled to keep the invaders from the gates of their capital at Constantinople. A desperate Alexius I Comnenus appealed to the pope for some kind of military aid, though no extant source explains precisely what sort of aid he requested (most scholars assume that he had in mind a small mercenary strike force5). In response, Urban II exhorted the knights and clergy assembled at Clermont ‘to strive to help expel that wicked race from our Christian lands before it is too late’. And there was something else: ‘remission of sins will be granted for those going thither, if they end a shackled life either on land or in crossing the sea, or in struggling against the heathen’.6 Those who fought the Turks would help their own bids for salvation; that is, it would help cure some of Western Christendom’s own ailments. It has been customary to associate Urban II’s speech with the ‘call- ing of the First Crusade’, but properly speaking he could have called anything of the sort. He had no word for ‘crusade’, and, although previous popes had toyed with the idea of sending military aid to the East, the concept was not fully articulated or even understood. Urban II and the chroniclers who re-remembered his speech were talking about very novel things. The speech at Clermont, and subsequent retellings of it, came at a turning point in a series of negotiations about the just war, the role of penance in Christian life, the need to quell violence within Western Europe, and the Latin Church’s proper relationship with its Greek counterpart in the East.7 Rather than any antecedent of the modern term ‘crusade’, he used the Latin peregrinatio, ‘pilgrimage’. Subsequent versions, written at ever further PROOF 16 EUROPE’S LONG TWELFTH CENTURY remove from the actual speech, introduced new elements, includ- ing sensational charges that Muslims coercively circumcised Christian infants and let the blood run into baptismal fonts.8 Despite the dif- ferent accounts of Urban II’s speech, it is clear that he and those who followed him tried to solve several of Europe’s most pressing problems through an armed pilgrimage to the center of the Christian world. The solution was to mobilize a fragmented political order to action by appealing to their spiritual anxieties and engendering a sense of apocalyptic fervor. As pope, Urban II held considerable secular authority in a politi- cally divided Italy, where he fought for precedence with the German ‘Roman’ emperor, the urban aristocracy of Rome, the king of Sicily, and the nobles of wealthy northern cities. But he also represented the unity of Christendom, an ideal of a unified West trying to heal itself through the repatriation of Jerusalem. By appealing to this idealized unity, he managed to inspire a successful expedition to Asia Minor, and ultimately, Jerusalem itself, led by powerful magnates like the duke of Normandy (son of the King of England), the counts of Blois, Flanders, and Toulouse, and many other warriors from the high and low nobility of France, the Rhineland, and southern Italy. At consider- able expense and inconvenience to themselves, these feudal lords put aside local warfare and headed, through a number of routes, toward Constantinople and the Holy Land, where they in fact conquered Jerusalem and massacred its inhabitants in 1099. With the benefit of hindsight, we can detect in Urban II’s speech tensions between the local and the universal, the ideal and the real, the secular and ecclesiastical that would characterize Western Europe throughout the long twelfth century. These tensions were on display 134 years later, when a penitent Count Raymond VII of Toulouse, a descendant of one of the pilgrim-warriors of the First Crusade, humbled himself at Notre Dame in Paris to finalize the Treaty of Paris. Representatives of the papacy looked on. Count Raymond and his immediate ancestors had been the primary political targets of another series of military campaigns launched by a pope. In 1208 Pope Innocent III, by scholarly consensus the most important pon- tiff of the High Middle Ages, had called for armed intervention in the south of France, which was thought to be infected by heretics. The local nobles had failed Christendom by allowing these dissidents to flourish. The kings of France prosecuted the conflict, now known as the Albigensian Crusade, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, often through commanders taken from the northern French nobility, and Louis VIII had more or less settled the issue when he occupied PROOF VARIETIES OF POLITICAL ORDER IN THE LATIN WEST 17 Avignon (nominally allied to Raymond) in 1226. Three years later his widow Blanche of Castille (acting as regent for the 14-year-old Louis IX) presided over the end of the conflict. It addressed the alleged root cause of the struggle—the so-called Cathar or Albigensian heresy— by requiring Raymond to promise obedience to the papacy, to expel heretics from his territories, pay indemnities to bolster the insti- tutional church and especially its monasteries, and to establish a university at Toulouse where leading theologians could promulgate orthodox doctrine.9 Given that the precise nature of the heresy and the actual threat it posed has been questioned by recent scholarship, it is fair to say that the most significant consequences of the settle- ment were geopolitical. The kings of France had previously ruled over much of southern France as distant and sometimes nominal over- lords, and the southerners resisted them culturally, politically, and during the crusade, militarily. The destruction of Raymond’s main fortresses, combined with previous French conquests in Gascony and Provence, effectively made Louis IX the true ruler over a region cor- responding more clearly than ever before to the modern borders of France.