The Source:
Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350, Penguin 1994
CHAPTER 2
The Aristocratic Diaspora
[introduction]
One of the more striking aspects of the expansionary activity of the tenth to thirteenth centuries was the movement of western European aristocrats from their homelands into new areas where they settled and, if successful, augmented their fortunes.
The original homes of these immigrants lay mainly in the area of the former Carolingian empire. Men of Norman descent became lords in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, in southern Italy and Sicily, in Spain and Syria. Lotharingian knights came to Palestine, Burgundian knights to Castile, Saxon knights to Poland, Prussia and Livonia. Flemings, Picards, Poitevins, Provençals and Lombards took to the road or to the sea and, if they survived, could enjoy new power in unfamiliar and exotic countries. One Norman adventurer became lord of Tarragona. A Poitevin family attained the crown of Cyprus.
This period of aristocratic diaspora coincided with the great age of the crusades, and, for many, migration began with the taking of the cross. Nevertheless, this is not the whole story. In some places, notably the British Isles and the Christian kingdoms of eastern Europe, the settlement of aristocratic newcomers took place without a crusading umbrella.
In other areas, like Spain or the lands of the pagan Wends, crusading institutions and rhetoric were imported into a situation where land-grabbing by local military leaders was already under way.
In southern Italy the Normans did indeed sail to Sicily to oust the Muslims with a papal banner and papal blessing, but they had established themselves in their south Italian base by being ready to fight everyone – Latin, Greek or Muslim – not excluding the pope himself.
It is a difficult historical task to determine the relationship between the inflamed religiosity of the First Crusade and the acquisitive expansionism which the lay aristocracy of western Europe had already conspicuously displayed.
Many families engaged in more than one of these expansionary enterprises, crusading or non-crusading. The Joinvilles of Champagne are a well-known example. The name of the house is familiar because its head from 1233 to 1317 was John de Joinville, friend and biographer of St Louis (Louis IX of France). The family was long established in Champagne, first emerging into the historical record in the eleventh century. Based at their castle at Joinville on the river Marne, they were typical Frankish nobles, engaged in the endless small-scale warfare of the time, alternately plundering and endowing the local churches, serving and intermarrying with the great Champenois families such as Brienne, and slowly rising in wealth and prominence. Their story can stand for many. …
[MH: family tree and pages of detailed examples omitted here]
… The Joinville family are a perfect example of that adventurous, acquisitive and pious aristocracy on which the expansionary movements of the High Middle Ages were based.
Though they left their bones in Syria, Apulia and Ireland, these men were deeply rooted in the rich countryside of Champagne, and agricultural profits were the indispensable foundation for both their local position and their far-flung ventures.
As we move from the eleventh century to the twelfth and on into the thirteenth, we see them strengthening their position, endowing religious houses and founding towns, while being drawn ever closer to the great princes of the day — symptomatic is John de Joinville’s entry into St Louis’s service during the voyage to the East.
On the other hand, they retained a purely predatory side. In 1248 John de Joinville stood in the captured city of Damietta, hot in debate on how the Franks ‘should divide up what they had won in the city’. Some decades later and 2,500 miles away, his brother Geoffrey met with the magnates of Meath to agree ‘a judgement concerning prey taken in the marches’. It specified that horses and animals seized by those serving at Geoffrey’s expense should be divided equally between him and his men, unless the horses were actually taken from Irish enemies who had been felled by Geoffrey’s men with lances. Prisoners were to be at Geoffrey’s disposal.
Both John and Geoffrey were leaders of armed men who expected to live off loot.
The story of the Joinvilles clearly demonstrates the growing strength of the two most cohesive western European monarchies. Powerful kings such as St Louis and Henry III could draw the aspiring nobility of regions like Champagne to them, and competed to do so. Geoffrey de Joinville certainly did not fight his way to lordship in Ireland by his own wits and sword-arm, as Robert Guiscard had done in south Italy in the eleventh century or Strongbow in Ireland itself in the twelfth.
His path to power lay rather through the king’s ear and the marriage bed.
Nevertheless, the stage on which the Joinville brothers played their parts had been constructed not by monarchical power but by the earlier expansion of an international Frankish aristocracy. John and Geoffrey de Joinville were exemplary and well-rewarded servants of their respective royal masters, but were also in the tradition of that violent and self-directing warrior class which had, in the word of Joinville the biographer’s epitaph on his ancestors, ‘done great deeds both this side of the sea and that’.
Another aristocratic family involved in far-flung expansionary enterprises was the descendants of Robert of Grandmesnil (d. 1050), a landowner and warrior of the Calvados in Normandy. His family is chronicled by Orderic Vitalis, a monk of St Évroul, a monastery which had been founded by the Grandmesnil family and their relatives. Several of Robert’s descendants either voluntarily sought, or found it advisable to seek, the road south, to southern Italy, where Normans had been carving out lordships for themselves since the 1030s. They were well received and established marriage ties with the Hauteville brothers, the leaders of the Norman enterprise in Italy. One son of Robert de Grandmesnil, also called Robert, who had been abbot of St Évroul until William the Conqueror dispossessed him and threatened to hang him by his cowl from the nearest tree if he complained, had a new monastery founded for him at St Eufemia in Calabria; he was succeeded as its abbot by his sister’s son, William.
Other sons and grandsons of Robert of Grandmesnil acquired secular lordships in Italy. One of these, another William, married Guiscard’s daughter and was given extensive landed estates. The family does not seem to have been ready to acknowledge an effective superior, however, for William of Grandmesnil rebelled in the 1090s and had to seek refuge in Constantinople in the service of the Byzantine emperor. His son, Robert, restored to favour, quarrelled with Roger II of Sicily over the terms of his military service and was exiled in 1130. Various members of the family were on the First Crusade …
… [By] the late eleventh century, the grandsons of Robert de Grandmesnil could be found, as lords, lieutenants and warriors, in Wales, in southern Italy, in Constantinople, in Syria.
Their vistas were far vaster than those of their grandparent.
Such far-flung enterprises were characteristic of the period. …
… Knights and magnates from France were especially well represented in the crusades and not only participated in new conquests in southern Italy and the British Isles, but also contributed to the Reconquest in Spain. Some of them stayed there …
… Robert Burdet [aka Robert d’Aguiló] went to Spain in about 1110, fought at Tudela and became its castellan and then, in 1128, governor of Tarragona, which he and his descendants ruled for half a century.
His wife Sibyl, the daughter of William Capra, a Somersetshire tenant-in-chief, supposedly made the circuit of the walls of Tarragona in the absence of her husband, dressed in a mail coat and carrying a rod of office. A West Country Amazon patrolling a Catalan city was perhaps an unusual sight at any time, but less unusual in the twelfth century than at other periods.
These cases show how far afield French knights ranged. In contrast, the migration of German knights, while substantial and sustained, was more geographically concentrated. Certainly many went on crusade: the crusade historian Röhricht counted well over 500 individuals of whom we have explicit record going from Germany to Outremer in the first century alone of the crusading movement.
The presence of Germans could sometimes be decisive. Without the sailors of Cologne and Frisia, for example, the capture of Lisbon in 1147 or Damietta in 1219 would have been far more difficult, perhaps impossible. However, few if any Germans (except those from the half-French border duchies of Lotharingia) established aristocratic dynasties in the East. The vast majority went and returned — or left their bones rather than established their families in the Holy Land.
It was only members of the Teutonic Order, a crusading order founded in Acre in 1190, who maintained a permanent German presence in the Crusader States. They had landed possessions along the coast from Acre to Beirut and a headquarters (from 1228 to 1271) at the castle of Montfort or Starkenberg, seven miles inland from Acre. As a military force in the Holy Land, they were surpassed only by the Templars and Hospitallers. Being fighting monks, however, and vowed to celibacy, they did not found new dynasties.
The chief zone of German expansion in the High Middle Ages was eastern Europe. Here German aristocrats established themselves over an immense area. Knights from Saxony could be found in Estonia on the Gulf of Finland, in Silesia along the Oder and throughout Bohemia and Hungary. New family fortunes were made east of the Elbe.
Just as the British Isles, the southern part of the Italian peninsula and the eastern Mediterranean witnessed the arrival of aristocrats from the kingdom of France (and Lotharingia, the French-speaking region in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire) in these centuries, so eastern Europe saw knights and magnates pushing eastward from the German kingdom. …
… German knights like John of Appeldorn, Frederick of Ramstedt and Conrad of Schönwalde were drawn into the retinues of the Pomeranian [Germanic] princes, transforming the culture of the princely court and imprinting themselves upon their new estates. Further up the Oder, Silesia had been open to peaceful German aristocratic penetration since the reign of Boleslaw I (1163–1201), a prince of the Piast family, which had ruled in Poland since the tenth century. Boleslaw had spent seventeen years in exile in Thuringia and brought German Cistercians to found a family monastery on his return.
As a thirteenth-century source puts it:
“in those parts any duke or prince who wished to retain German knights or others in his service granted them as fiefs lands in his lordship.”
In this way the landed ruling class of the regions east of the Elbe was gradually Germanized. It may even be true to say that, while French aristocratic emigration was more spectacular to contemporaries, that of the Germans had greater long-term consequences for European history.
Thus one must make important geographical distinctions when talking about this expansionary movement of European aristocrats. The line of the Rhine and Danube marked an approximate division between the area of French and German settlement. From Normandy and Poitou, from Saxony and Lotharingia, emigrants streamed outwards to Wales or Apulia, to Livonia and Silesia. There, in their new homes, they had to construct a new future.
CONQUEST LORDSHIPS
The paths for this incoming aristocracy were various. Their entry could be more or less bloody; it could be encouraged or resisted; it could be into a wholly alien or a partly familiar society. At one extreme of this spectrum, there were the invited aristocracies of Scotland, Pomerania and Silesia. At the other extreme, and one of the clearest forms of innovation which arose as a consequence of aristocratic expansion, was the conquest principality of the High Middle Ages, represented by lordships like Brandenburg and Ulster. The origins of both are traditionally associated with powerful founding figures, but they must also be placed in the general context of frontier conquest and colonization.
Colonial ventures are often chain reactions. They bring together unstable and aggressive elements in a situation where all hope to profit and some do so. Splinter expeditions, like that of Cortes in Mexico in the sixteenth century, are common. The Anglo-Norman lordship of Ulster was created by such a tangential freelance movement. …
… John de Courcy established his power in Ulster between his first conquests in 1177 and his dramatic fall at the hands of Anglo-Norman rivals in 1205 by constant warfare, the construction of castles and the implantation of a body of vassals. In this first respect, endless fighting, his life as lord of Ulidia was not dissimilar to that of any Irish king. He undertook annual raids against various Irish rulers, but was also embroiled with other Anglo-Norman settlers. His allies were heterogeneous. …
… This world of large-scale cattle raiding is also clearly reflected in grants de Courcy made to St Patrick’s, Down, of a tithe of all the animals he captured by raiding or hunting. Nevertheless, the lordship of Ulster was more than a mounted commando. Within Ulidia itself local power had a rather solid and enduring aspect. The Anglo-Norman military hold on the region was secured by the same kind of castles as had enabled the Normans to dominate England a century earlier: a scattering of motte-and-bailey castles of wood and earth, supplemented by stone keeps at the most important centres. …
… De Courcy had a seigneurial administration, of chamberlain, seneschal and constable, a body of vassals, many recruited from north-west England and south-west Scotland, and a penumbra of clerks. He organized and endowed six monasteries in his lordship, founded from or dependencies of English religious houses. He minted silver halfpennies, with his name on one side and that of his adopted patron, St Patrick, on the other. John de Courcy could be described by contemporaries as ‘lord of Ulster’ (dominus de Ulvestire) or even ‘prince of the realm of Ulster’ (princeps regni de Ulvestir).
The term regnum did not, in medieval usage, imply that its ruler was a rex (‘king’), but it did suggest an extensive territorial unit whose lord possessed great honour and substantial autonomy.
By the time of his fall in 1205 John de Courcy had thus established a new territorial unit in Ireland, a lordship which long survived his disappearance.
The bloody and exhausting business of conquest and settlement required determined and selfish leaders. Such figures cropped up in every part of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They were sometimes men of no great background, but were often, too, already magnates in their own country – already equipped with the resources that so often make further expansion likely. …
… Brandenburg was a much larger and even more enduring creation than the lordship of Ulster and built on older foundations. In the tenth century the region east of the Elbe and Saale rivers, which formed the boundary of Carolingian Saxony, was divided into several ‘marks’, frontier regions under the authority of a margrave (‘border count’), with unusually extensive military and territorial powers. …
… It was this ghostly framework that was revitalized in the twelfth century. In the middle decades of the century German authority was decisively reestablished in the area east of the middle Elbe; the bishops of Brandenburg and Havelberg were able to recover their official seats and begin the planning of new cathedrals. A key figure in this story was Albert the Bear. Albert came from among the highest ranks of the Saxon nobility. His father, Count Otto of Ballenstedt, was richly endowed in north Thuringia and eastern Saxony. He was an experienced fighter in the border wars against the Slavs and had defeated a large raiding party from across the Elbe at Köthen in 1115. Albert’s mother, Eilica, was of even more exalted stock, being the daughter of Magnus Billung, duke of Saxony. Albert thus grew up among a powerful aristocratic kindred accustomed to frontier warfare. His early political career was headlong, headstrong and uneasy. He made an alliance with Lothar of Süpplingenburg, successor to the Billungs as duke of Saxony; and, thanks to Lothar’s support and in defiance of the Holy Roman Emperor, he gained control of Lausitz, the German frontier region east of the middle Elbe. He was also, because of his maternal descent, himself prepared to put forward a claim to be duke of Saxony. …
Effigy on Albert the Bear's seal
… Unlike John de Courcy, Albert the Bear was able to establish his dynasty in his new conquests. His family, the Ascanians, were margraves of Brandenburg for seven generations and by the time of the extinction of the line in 1319 had extended their principality almost 200 miles east of the Elbe. If we look at the methods employed by the Ascanians to extend their family power in the lands to the Oder and beyond, we see similarities to those employed by John de Courcy in Ireland. This is not surprising.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there were some universal requirements for the successful exercise of lordship: castles and vassals were among the most basic.
The creation of a feudal military framework was then followed by the conscious development of the area through the encouragement of rural and urban settlement. …
The success of the Ascanians hinged on their ability to recruit and reward vassals. Their family became powerful by being able to offer power to other families. families. One knightly house that followed the Ascanians and won fortune in doing so was that of von Wedel, and a closer look at its members will reveal something of the dynamics of an expansionary aristocracy in a conquest principality. … [parts of story omitted here]
… The way to make a fortune was not, of course, to launch out into the void. A young and ambitious knight would offer his services to a likely looking prince and hope that his lord would have success and be willing to share some of its profits. The von Wedels appear to have come east to join the service of the dukes of Pomerania …
… The von Wedels were simply one group among many German retainers drawn to the Pomeranian court. The original estates of the Wedels in the valley of the Ihna lay in a region of thin settlement whose overlordship was a matter of continual dispute. Polish, Pomeranian and Brandenburg claims competed here. Eventual victory lay with the house of Albert the Bear. The lands along the upper stretches of the Ihna fell into the margraves’ hands in the second half of the thirteenth century. One of the things that ensured their success was their ability to recruit retainers, even from their enemies. …
… Multiple vassalage was a commonplace of the period. It could, indeed, be advantageous in that it did not tie the family’s destiny to a single lord. …
… As the [Wedel] family built up its estates in the Neumark, the ‘land beyond the Oder’ (terra transoderana) of the Ascanians, it faced the same problems as the princely dynasty itself. The only way to secure and exploit new acquisitions was to develop them in an energetic and systematic way. The fundamental task was that of settling the land. The Neumark saw a crop of new villages arise, many of them proudly bearing the names of their owners and creators … Just as the margraves delegated the details of settlement to families like the Wedels, so they, in their turn, sought vassals to aid them.
In 1313 Ludolf von Wedel sold to the brothers Dietrich and Otto von Elbe a village south of Schivelbein with the further incentive that ‘in addition, if they decide to settle and cultivate the uninhabited woodlands, we promise to them sixty-four mansi [peasant farms] with full rights’. The figure of sixty-four mansi represents the usual extent of a newly planted village in the Neumark, and hence the arrangement … envisaged the creation of entirely new villages in the wilderness that formed part of the grant.
The Neumark was won and held by the sword, and the value of the Wedels to the margraves lay not only in their active exploitation of the agricultural potential of the land but in their ability to supply armed force. Indeed, at the height of their power in the later fourteenth century the family was able to promise to serve ‘with a hundred well-armed knights and squires and another hundred armoured crossbowmen’.
And in an epoch when the Brandenburg aristocracy came to be legally differentiated by the possession of castles or the lack of them, the Wedels were preeminently ‘encastled’ (schlossgesessene). … They naturally built or acquired castles in the centres of their lordships. These were the nails that hammered down their new possessions.
The scope and extent of the power of the von Wedels are shown by the independent role they undertook in the foundation of towns. They created no less than four … All can be dated, with some probability, to the first part of the fourteenth century. … Such towns were not only symbols of status and witnesses to magnate resources, but also providers of the readiest supply of cash to which a lord could have access.
When the von Wedels granted Brandenburg law and various fiscal and jurisdictional privileges to their town of Freienwalde in 1338, they also arranged to receive 100 pounds per annum from the town. Such revenues enabled the Wedels to take the boldest step in their acquisition of land and authority. In 1319 Wedego von Wedel was partner to the purchase of the Land Schivelbein from Waldemar, the last of the Ascanian margraves, for 11,000 marks.
It was bought as a job lot: ‘the castle and town of Schivelbein, with its people, land, estates, high and low justice, coinage, timber, bridges’, etc.
It gave the von Wedel family a ‘quasi-princely position’. Within a few generations, the descendants of a knightly family from Holstein had seized the chances offered by the eastern frontier. By moving a few hundred miles eastwards and attaching their fortunes to the rising powers of the area, be they Slav or German in origin, the family had established itself as landed, dominant and indispensable. Its members climbed from among the dependent members of a comital retinue [relating to a count or earl] to become leaders of retinues, founders of towns, lords of the land.
NEW CROWNS
[Lots of fascinating detail but I only quote some summary conclusions.]
The von Wedels were ‘quasi-princely’; John de Courcy was a princeps regni. There was a step even beyond this. The highest prize was a crown. The eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time when new kingdoms were in the making: Castile, Portugal, Bohemia, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Sicily, Thessalonica.
New kingdoms needed new royal dynasties, and it was the restless nobility of western Europe that provided them.
German expansion, under the loose umbrella of the Empire, produced new political units, Brandenburg, for example, or the Wettin lands later to coalesce as Saxony, but no new crowned heads. This is significant for an understanding of the nature of expansion in eastern Europe, where Germans more commonly settled in Christian Slav or Magyar realms than in new German lordships.
The map shows that most ruling families of later medieval Europe traced their ancestry back to Frankish roots … a consequence of the high political manoeuvring of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries … The crucial context for these new dynasties is the dominant political position of the kingdom of France … The other instances of immigrant Frankish dynasties, however, arose from that Frankish aristocratic diaspora of the eleventh and twelfth centuries which we have already discussed …
… The king of Scots in 1350 was the descendant of a Norman family which had benefited from the conquest of England in 1066. The same event, the conquest of 1066, indirectly created the situation which made it possible for Plantagenets to rule at Westminster. …
The royal dynasties of Portugal and León-Castile descended from … the dukes of Burgundy … the counts of Burgundy, who had come to the peninsula during that period of intense Frankish, especially Burgundian, influence … [Two] Frankish aristocrats had done well over the Pyrenees. Yet another Frankish family, the Lusignans, not only accumulated lands and power in Poitou and England, but also obtained a kingdom in the Mediterranean – to be precise, two kingdoms, Jerusalem and Cyprus. It was Cyprus that they held longest and most securely. They acquired it from Richard the Lionheart, who had conquered it from the Greeks while on his way to Palestine in 1191, and ruled it until 1267, when it passed by marriage to the house of Antioch-Lusignan, a dynasty also of Poitevin descent, which ruled the kingdom for the rest of the Middle Ages.
In this … category, then, one sees the consequences not of the power of the French kingdom, but of the vigour of the Frankish aristocracy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
The penetration of the British Isles by French knights, the participation of the Burgundian aristocracy in the wars of the Reconquest and the dominance of Franks in the crusading ventures of the eastern Mediterranean had resulted in the establishment of new Frankish dynasties from Scotland to Cyprus. In some cases, we see the creation of new kingdoms by conquest; in others, the grafting of Frankish aristocratic dynasties on to older native ruling families. Dynastic diffusion is one crude measure of the impact of Frankish aristocratic expansionism in the High Middle Ages.
THE NATURE OF ARISTOCRATIC EXPANSIONISM
After the Frankish and Venetian forces sacked Constantinople in 1204, they began to spread out into the surrounding parts of the Byzantine empire, establishing new lordships and squabbling among themselves. Among the peoples they encountered were the Vlachs, living dispersed in the Balkans and, at this time, enjoying a period of particular political success.
On one occasion there was a parley between the leaders of the Vlachs and the French knight Peter of Bracheux. ‘Lord, we wonder greatly at your good chivalry’, they are reported to have said, ‘and we wonder greatly what you are seeking in this land, and why you came here to conquer lands from such a distant country. Have you no lands in your own country to support you?’
The modern historian may well echo the perplexity of the Vlachs and, like them, seek the drive or motor of the aristocratic expansion in the land-grabbing of the landless. Obviously, the aristocracy of the aristocratic diaspora varied very widely in wealth, power and status. There was a gulf between the counts of Montferrat, negotiating with emperors and marrying into the royal family of the crusader kingdom, and the landless fighters who flocked to William the Conqueror in 1066, and explanation of the behaviour and motives of the former need not necessarily be identical with that for the latter.
Clearly, however, many of these men had no land or possessed very little in their own country, and the appeal of expansionary enterprise does seem to be in part the opportunity for the landless to become landed. The historians of the Norman enterprise in southern Italy paint a vivid picture of the successful cycle of recruitment and conquest:
“A vast crowd of kinsmen, fellow countrymen and also men from the surrounding regions followed them in the hope of gain and they received them as brothers, with a willing generosity, and endowed them with horses, arms, clothes and various gifts. To some they offered broad lands, putting the maintenance of brave knights before all the riches of this world. Because of this none of their undertakings failed. Whence the gospel saying seemed to apply to them: ‘Give and it shall be given unto you.’ For the more they bestowed the greater their gain.”
In the 1040s Richard of Aversa was drawing knights to him by this sort of generosity – ‘What he could carry off he gave and did not keep… in this way the whole land around about was plundered and his knights multiplied… he had had sixty horsemen and now he had a hundred’. It has been argued that the absence of surnames of European origin among the Frankish settlers in Outremer suggests ‘that these settlers were of modest origin and had no reason to retain surnames drawn from their European possessions’; and the point is reechoed by a chronicler of the First Crusade: ‘Who was poor over there, God makes rich here… he who didn’t have a village there has a town here’.
In every corner of Europe the language and images were the same. The first German nobles to establish themselves in Livonia
“were able to acquire honour and property without shame; their satisfaction was so good that they made the journey… for their property there became so great and their heirs are still happy with it.”
Their contemporaries who carved out lordships and fiefs in Ireland were drawn by similar expectations …
The evidence for a dynamic cycle of plunder, gift-giving, recruitment and further plunder, with crucial breakthroughs to knightly status and landed endowment, is ubiquitous. The military retinue was one of the basic social organisms of medieval Europe. It consisted of a group of fighting men led by a lord, men who were held together by oaths, camaraderie and self-interest. It had a long ancestry in the Germanic war-band, whose members received gifts as part of ‘the heavy traffic in necessary generosity’, and, if lucky, land in return for service to their lord.
Even if we do not wish to delve as far back as Tacitus’s description of lord–follower relations based on the ‘fame and glory which stems from having the most numerous and bravest retinue’ and the ‘means of generosity won from war and rapine’, the reciprocity of reward and service is explicit in these words of Beowulf: ‘So it was given to me to repay in battle with my bright sword the treasures which he [Beowulf’s lord] had granted me; he had given me land, a hereditary estate.’
Land, however, was a special kind of reward and the least common, the scarcest resource and the most highly prized.
Retainers and household knights regarded the grant of estate or fief as a goal, and much of the pressure for enfeoffment (the granting of a fief) came from these men, who felt that landed endowment was a necessary prerequisite for marrying and having a family. As early as the eighth century Bede complained that ‘there is a general lack of places where sons of nobles or eminent warriors could have property, and so, after they reach the age of puberty landless and unmarried, they are unable to endure celibacy and go beyond the seas, leaving the land which they ought to be defending’. From some centuries later we have a lively account of the household knights (tirones) of the French king attempting to persuade their king to enfeoff them at the expense of the Normans:
“O lord king, we have served you unceasingly and have never received enough, except of food and drink. We beg you, drive out and destroy these alien Normans and give us their fiefs and grant us wives.”
Such passages illustrate the enduring structural reasons why enfeoffment was practised. Household knights and retainers grew old and they obviously preferred to envisage old age on their own estates, surrounded by wife and sons, rather than one scrounging scraps in the mead-hall.
The fief as defined in the increasingly technical language of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century law books was new (almost by definition), but the estate given as reward for military service was not.
That exchange, not some set of legal characteristics, is what gave dynamism to the world of retinues. The general scarcity of fiefs can be seen in the provisions of such a work as the Sachsenspiegel, a German law book written in the 1220s.
Between the lines we can sense the existence of continual pressure from the unenfeoffed: there are complex rules about the grant of reversions of fiefs, often multiple reversions; prescriptions about how to treat competing claims to a fief; and a persistent moral thread insisting that the lord should grant fiefs and that his men have the right to look elsewhere if he disappoints them.
It is a world whose anxious and competitive atmosphere makes clear the relief and joy which would be felt when a fief was finally obtained. ‘I have my fief, everyone, I have my fief!’ – in the famous words of Walther von der Vogelweide, who was not only one of the great German lyric poets but also an anxious cultivator of patrons.
The scramble for vassals and new fiefs which is so evident in the eleventh century may thus suggest itself as an explanation for the surge of aristocratic expansionism that began in that period.
Even as careful and meticulous a scholar as John Le Patourel was willing, in his analysis of ‘the Norman Empire’, to suggest that ‘It may not be necessary to look further for the dynamic which produced the conquests in Britain and in northern France… [than] the need for expansion inherent in a developing feudal society.’ And again: ‘One source, perhaps the main source, of the dynamic’ which produced the Anglo-Norman empire ‘was the pressure created by feudalism in the early stages of its development’. The ‘pressure’ or ‘need’ which Le Patourel mentions would seem to consist of two main elements: the demand of vassals for fiefs and the desire of lords for fighting men.
There was a circularity to this system. The more land one had, the more knights one could enfeoff, and the more knights one had, the easier it was to conquer new lands. The fact that lords of mounted retinues were in competition with each other does not, however, explain why the whole aristocracy should be on the move outwards.
The world of Germanic war-bands and that of the feudal retinue or mesnie had losers as well as winners, old men without heirs, families with their backs to the wall, lords whose followers grew fewer year by year. The ‘need’ for ‘expansion’ felt by one lord or retinue could surely be met by the absorption or defeat of another. The extinction rate of European aristocracies in the Middle Ages seems, at first glance, to leave plenty of room for newcomers. …
… Certainly, nothing is more plausible than that under-provided military aristocrats would seek fortune abroad. If this is the case, however, there is difficulty explaining why Norman adventurers raised kingdoms in southern Italy while south Italian knights did not make similar inroads into France. At this period parts of the kingdom of France were as politically fragmented as southern Italy and would seem to offer easy pickings – if there were takers. If we do not choose to argue that the Frankish aristocracy was particularly prolific, then we must look again at the idea that opportunities for individual aristocrats at home became increasingly limited.
If it is to be convincing, our search for an explanation must isolate something distinctive about the knightly class of post-Carolingian Europe, something that stirred and moved the aristocracy of France and, later, Germany, in a way it had not been stirred and moved before.
Recent work by German and French historians has suggested that the structure of the aristocratic family itself underwent a transformation in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Loosely linked kindreds, for whom maternal and paternal relations might be equally important, and who possessed no enduring genealogical or territorial centre, were, it has been argued, replaced by clearly defined lineages, in which patrimony and primogeniture became ever more important. A single line of male descent, excluding, as far as possible, younger siblings, cousins and women, came to dominate at the expense of the wider, more amorphous kindred of the earlier period. If this picture is credible, it is possible that the expansionism of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries was one result. The decline in opportunities for some members of the military aristocracy – notoriously, of course, younger sons – may have been the impetus to emigration.
Indeed, one distinguished historian has seen the appeal of Scotland for immigrant knights in the twelfth century in the fact that it was ‘a land for younger sons’; while a leading historian of the Crusader States describes the knightly immigration to Outremer as ‘the work of younger sons or of young men’. The issue is not simply one of too many sons, as in the Hauteville example, but of a constriction in family structure creating new disabilities.
Certainly the aristocratic dynasties of the thirteenth century had some features that made them more identifiable, more insistent on paternal descent and more restrictive of wider kin-claims than their counterparts of the tenth. They had surnames, drawn from their properties or their castles, that identified them over time. They had heraldic insignia, with increasingly elaborate rules, that identified their family origins, visibly distinguished older and cadet branches and gave preference to male descent. The involvement of the wider kindred in such crucial issues as vendetta and the transmission of property diminished. In twelfth-century England if the deceased were a knight, ‘then according to the law of the realm of England, the eldest son succeeds to his father in everything’.
In 1185 the duke, bishops and barons of Brittany agreed ‘that henceforth in baronies and knights’ fees there shall be no division, but the oldest by birth shall have the lordship in its entirety’. It was indeed a practice which brought forth criticism. ‘Who made brothers unequal?’ asked one twelfth-century author. ‘They yield to the singular fortune of one rich son. One has abundance and acquires the whole paternal property, the other laments his empty and impoverished share of the rich paternal inheritance’.
In this way the ‘house’ in the narrow sense – a line of fathers and sons extending through time and focused on hereditary family properties – came into being. The ‘narrowing and tightening of the family around the male line’ seems well attested. Whether this ‘narrowing’ can be empirically linked with the dramatic spread of western European aristocrats into the surrounding regions in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries is a more difficult question. …
… Perhaps the key to the aristocratic expansionism of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries lies neither in the dynamics of war-bands alone, nor in the structures of kindred alone, but in a fateful conjuncture between the two.
The argument has been made that feudal structures demand a more secure territorial basis for the aristocracy and produce a military class ‘more firmly rooted in their landed estates’, while the eleventh century has been described as a period of ‘the reorganization of the Norman knightly class on a territorial basis’.
It has also been argued that the transmission of resources intact from generation to generation was a prerequisite for the permanent establishment of feudal military institutions.
More important still is the possibility that the landed knightly class of the eleventh century represented not simply new personnel, but a new kind of aristocracy. One can see in the documents of the period the creation of mounted warriors from peasants, as in the Limburg document of 1035 which allows the lord to make his unmarried peasant tenants kitchen-hands or grooms and his married tenants foresters or mounted warriors (milites).
Even an extinction rate of 50 per cent per century in an expanding economy would not be enough if there were an increasing number of candidates for aristocratic standing.
The rise of a class of knights, originally fairly lowly and often without land, combined with the impact of primogeniture and dynasticism, may have overloaded the system to such an extent that expansionary movement abroad was a natural response. …
… It may have been the younger sons, lamenting their ‘empty and impoverished share of the rich paternal inheritance’, who took to the roads and the sea-lanes in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We cannot be certain; but perhaps, by the eleventh century, the Frankish aristocracy, a relatively small military élite organized into strongly patrilineal or dynastic houses and rooted firmly in landed estate, contrasted sharply with the aristocratic kin structures of the surrounding world into which it was beginning to expand.
[End section]
CHAPTER 11
The Europeanization of Europe
[final paragraph]
By 1300 Europe existed as an identifiable cultural entity. It could be described in more than one way, but some common features of its cultural face are the saints, names, coins, charters and educational practices touched upon in this chapter. By the late medieval period Europe’s names and cults were more uniform than they had ever been; Europe’s rulers everywhere minted coins and depended upon chanceries; Europe’s bureaucrats shared a common experience of higher education. This is the Europeanization of Europe.
[MH: I will exhibit separately a few pages from final chapter ‘The Political Sociology of Europe after the Expansion’ for which there is insufficient space here.]
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