Political-religious evolutions 800-1000 CE: in ‘Medieval Europe’, by Chris Wickham
Handy snapshots: post-Roman public power, weak rulership in small units, and common trends
Chris Wickham wrote:
The Carolingian experiment, 750–1000
[End of CHAPTER 4]
Ottonian power, particularly after 962, is … easily the best comparator to that of the Carolingians, and the way it worked allows us to see what had by now changed. The Ottonians still ruled through assemblies, for a start; lay and ecclesiastical magnates now came to Saxony rather than the Frankish heartland, but they certainly came. The kings were closely connected to the church; their court chaplains routinely became bishops, and they presided over church councils just as Louis the German and his sons had, councils whose acts often cited Carolingian conciliar decisions. They went so far as to depose popes in Rome and to appoint their own, which the Carolingians, however much they may have been tempted, never did. Their army was the largest in the west, by far. The Ottonians were also wealthy: they had access to the old Carolingian royal lands around Aachen and around Frankfurt, to which they added those around Milan and Pavia when they took Italy, and the Ottonian family power-block in south-east Saxony – and also the profits from the rich silver mines found south of Goslar in their Saxon heartland in the 960s, which furnished silver for the coins of the whole of the west. They had the capacity to attract loyalty and service, therefore, and they did. But they did not rule with the density of the Carolingian kings. After all, they were based in the old East Francia, the kingdom which was already less tied into the Carolingian project under Louis the German; the Carolingian heartland around Aachen was by now just another duchy. It is significant that they moved around their kingdom much more than the Carolingians had needed to, simply to make their presence felt directly, to the extent that, when Otto I spent some years in Italy in the 960s to gain control of it properly, there were hostile reactions back in Saxony. Conversely, they shifted aristocrats around far less, except Ottonian family members, and the local societies of the great duchies in Italy and Francia by now had relatively few interconnections.
This fits with the fact that … the Ottonians did not fully revive the Carolingian moral project. They patronised intellectuals … The Ottonians hardly legislated, even if their church councils did. The court in Saxony had courtiers who wrote history, poetry and even … plays, which show considerable sophistication and classical inspiration … but not political theology. This is quite a lot in itself; the Ottonians deserve a respectable place in the history of intellectual culture. But no kingdom, by now, could simply resurrect the ambition of the early ninth century; too much had happened since.
The next time a religious revival had political overtones, under Pope Gregory VII and his successors, it was by no means closely associated with kingdoms, and indeed it became increasingly hostile to kings taking on the religious leadership role of rulers like Charlemagne at all.
One thing had not changed in the tenth century, however: public political culture. Defined territories dominated by local lordship, based on personal ties of loyalty and dependence, hardly existed in East Francia and Italy, and were only beginning in West Francia. East Francia was certainly decentralised; all the same, as in earlier centuries, Ottonian politics revolved around assemblies, national and regional/local, and the manoeuvres that were possible inside them. Much work has been done on the way these manoeuvres worked: in particular, on how formalised public behaviour in the Ottonian period and after created the appearance of concord, which both resolved disagreement and covered it up when it continued. Its Carolingian antecedents have not always been recognised, because by now, even when such public acts used ecclesiastical ritual, they were not attached to the penitential imagery of the ninth century; but they represent a continuation of the public world which we have seen operating in Francia since the sixth, and which derived from the powerful governmental structures of the Roman empire before it.
This is important. It marks a fundamental difference between the political systems of the early middle ages and those of later centuries, in which the public sphere had to be recreated, and always coexisted with a cellular structure of locally based powers.
Slowly, however, the sense of the public did become weaker in the Frankish world. This development happened first in parts of West Francia, where the force of the public power was hollowed out from inside in a much more fragmented political world, and local lordships became much more important as a result. The decades around 1000 have often been posed as a tipping point here; although this date (and the tipping point itself) has been hotly debated, and anyway varied from region to region, the rough timescale still works for me. Thereafter, in the eleventh century, the political world of the tenth … seemed to many by now almost meaningless, for the parameters of politics had changed so fast, and it was quickly forgotten; even if Carolingian theological debates were remembered and reused, their political context was lost.
In Italy, local lordships were beginning by 1000 too, but the culture of the public survived much better in the network of cities, where large and well-organised judicial assemblies still met, until an abrupt crisis in the civil wars of the later eleventh century. In East Francia, assemblies and a collective commitment continued longest … in the regions where kings held on to substantial powers; here, however, the public world was also backed up by a continuing relative incoherence of local power-structures, and would not be fully undermined until that changed, sometimes as the eleventh century moved into the twelfth, sometimes later still. These processes were not universal, but they were quite generalised. Some of them, indeed, had roots in the Carolingian experiment itself, for the Carolingians were interested in making rules for everything, and the boundedness of local societies under the control of lords, which was in general a very eleventh-century development, had a relationship with these rules. But the end of the public and collective legitimacy which the Merovingians, Carolingians and Ottonians all took for granted, and which the Carolingian urge for grand moral solutions elevated for a while into a political art form, marked a radical change for all that.
The expansion of Christian Europe, 500–1100
[Beginning and end of CHAPTER FIVE]
Christianisation was … a means for kings to introduce at least some of the techniques of ruling which were used by the two great European powers of the early middle ages, Francia and Byzantium; indeed, in some cases the possibility of a greater openness to southern European influence and political procedures was virtually the only reason why rulers changed religion, and virtually the only change which Christianity brought.
All the same, Christianity did not in itself produce a more homogeneous Europe; just a Europe in which there was a rather more widespread interest in more ambitious, but still-distinct, forms of political power. How the new religion affected each region in the north operates, above all, as a sort of barium meal, which in each case shows us, not homogeneity, but difference.
Christianity spread across northern Europe more or less from west to east, slowly, but with greater speed after 950 or so. Ireland was first, in the fifth and sixth centuries; there followed Pictish Scotland, England and central Germany in the seventh century, Saxony – by force as we have seen – after Charlemagne’s conquests in the eighth, Bulgaria, Croatia and Moravia in the ninth, Bohemia in the tenth, Poland, Rus’ (covering parts of European Russia and Ukraine) and Denmark in the late tenth, Norway, Iceland and Hungary in the years around 1000, Sweden more slowly across the eleventh century.3 Only the far north-east of Europe was left out of this, the Baltic- and Finnish-speaking lands, the former of which would eventually, in the thirteenth century, turn into the only large and powerful pagan polity in medieval Europe, Lithuania, before its grand dukes went Christian as late as 1386–87. …
… [Let] us look at some of the common elements in the societies of northern Europe before they converted, as far as we can tell from our scanty sources, and from what we can read back from later evidence. What was not in common was language; the northern Europeans spoke nearly every one of the language groups of modern Europe. Nor was religion; the paganism of the north was at least as variegated as that of the Roman empire, with – as it seems – pantheons of gods in some places, single high gods in others, more generalised nature cults or shamanism elsewhere, probably overlapping; and also ritual run by specialist priesthoods in some places, and by local political leaders in others.
But two basic features do seem to be common to every northern society: the relative weakness of rulership, and the relative independence of peasantries. As to the first: northern political units were in general very small indeed, and unstable, for a long time. Ireland had up to 150 kingdoms in 800; Anglo-Saxon England had, as it seems, dozens before some consolidation can be seen around 600, and even then over ten; Norway probably one political unit per valley up to the tenth century; in what is now Poland, or the Sclavenian areas of the Balkans, Frankish and Byzantine sources of the seventh to tenth centuries list large numbers of ill-defined peoples.
Even what to call such units is hard, for, although some had rulers, titled in different ways, whom we might call ‘kings’, others did not have clearly defined or permanent rulership at all. ‘Kingdom’ is therefore not a word we can easily use for some of these small units. We could use ‘tribe’, and I shall do so sometimes, while rejecting the idea that this implies that such groups are in some way ‘primitive’; but ‘peoples’ and ‘polities’ are probably the most usefully vague terms when generalising over the whole of the north.
Assembly politics was a crucial feature of most of them, as we have seen for the post-Roman kingdoms of the west; kings where they existed deferred to assemblies quite often (here our clearest evidence is from Sweden and Norway); and in some places, as with Iceland, newly settled from Norway in the decades around 900, and the Slavic-speaking Liutizi of the Oder valley around 1000, all political decisions were taken by assemblies, and no single person dominated, at least in theory. When such peoples did have rulers, then, there is rarely any sign that they had unmediated power. Such rulers certainly had armed entourages, and used them for small-scale domination as well as inter-community warfare, but it is hard to find many early examples of detailed top-down political interventions, and it is likely that most rulers had to collaborate and consult with smaller or larger collective groups in each community.
This was linked to the fact that the northern half of Europe appears to have had a largely independent peasantry, that is to say a peasantry who did not have to deal, to a major extent, with landlords. This does not mean that society was egalitarian; unfree people existed everywhere, working for élites in largish numbers, and in ones and twos even for some peasant families, as household and farm servants. There were also everywhere, as just implied, élites, who were richer and/or of higher status; rulers normally came from élite strata too. But these strata did not directly control more than restricted quantities of land; even in later periods, by which time élite landowning (not least by churches) had substantially increased, we have in some cases – particularly in Scandinavia – evidence that such landowning was not always dominant. This means that non-élites, i.e. peasants, must have controlled the rest; and in general the economy of most of the north is likely to have followed the logic of peasant, not aristocratic, choices and needs for a long time. This is supported by the rarity of large concentrations of wealth in the early medieval archaeology of the north, with the significant exception of Denmark, until the Viking period …
The power of élite individuals was probably sometimes unstable, making them what anthropologists call ‘big men’, who might move back into the peasantry in a later generation if they were not effective local dealers, or if they had too many children and had to divide their wealth. Conversely, however, their position was sometimes buttressed, as in Ireland, by quite elaborate legal hierarchies, and sometimes, as in Scandinavia, they had local religious and political roles which were inherited.
Which means: although peasantries were in economic terms largely independent, we need to recognise that they had to deal with élites everywhere. They did so in many different ways. In Ireland, they engaged in elaborate relationships of clientship with aristocrats, based on gifts of cattle by a lord (not – unlike in most of Europe – land), in return for hospitality and political and military services. In England up to the eighth century, kings and aristocrats seem to have dominated large defined tracts of land on which peasantries lived, but they did not do so as landowners; peasants owed small-scale tributes to lords, perhaps on an occasional basis, rather than paying rent (except for the unfree, who can be seen already as subject tenants). In Iceland, and perhaps the rest of Scandinavia, free peasants were all part of the followings of local leaders at assemblies, and paid a fee if they did not go; later, local leaders also benefited from controlling church tithes.
In what became Poland, more-or-less independent peasants owed tribute to local rulers as in England, but, as it seems, without defined territories. In the wide forested lands that became Russia, peasant agriculturalists and fur-trappers owed similar tribute to often quite distant lords, such as the khagans of the Bulgars on the Volga, and, later, the Scandinavian (Rus) princes of Kiev and Novgorod; the political systems of Russia were very large in geographical area, and more clearly based on domination by rulers and armed entourages than elsewhere, but local control was not intense for centuries, and tribute may have been for long intermittent – the peasantry of Russia did not fully lose its landowning autonomy until the early modern period.
These different political and economic patterns each contained potential levers which élites could use to increase their power and wealth, but this did not as yet by any means automatically happen: it did in England but not in Ireland, it did in Denmark but not in Sweden, and so on. Indeed, as late as 1100 aristocratic and royal control was only fully developed, among these northern peoples, in England. …
It was, then, a set of small-scale polities, without elaborate socioeconomic hierarchies, which slowly went Christian across six centuries. But, as I said earlier, the consequences of Christianisation were very different from place to place. …
… Clearly, by 800 England (or at least Mercia) was much more like Francia than it had been in 600, or even 700. This was a result partially of borrowing, and partially of developments which had their own internal logic. Both were facilitated, even though not always caused, by Christianisation. This was backed up by what was perhaps the most significant socioeconomic change in the English kingdoms, which probably began under the Mercian hegemony and moved further on in the ninth century: the slow development of private landowning, by kings and aristocrats, out of the large tribute-rendering territories of the past. It was more or less complete in the mid-tenth century … and, when it was, it transformed the English economic environment; for, from here onwards, village structures crystallised in half the country, peasant autonomy ended virtually everywhere, and kings, who took over the largest landholdings, became even more dominant than before – including over an aristocracy which stayed close to the kings, for it benefited from this development almost as much. …
England was thus the part of northern Europe in which the changes that began with Christianisation were most total – together with Saxony, which was forced to Christianise by the Franks. …
… Are there common trends in these regions? … the answer has to be yes; in fact there were several. One was, as noted at the start of the chapter, a great increase in our information, with the introduction of a more systematic writing habit along with Christianisation into every one of these political systems. …
… A second trend, less linked to Christianity and the church, was the steady weakening of peasant autonomy all over the northern lands; even where political power was fragmented, as in Poland and Ireland, peasants were increasingly subjected to local lords. This was not a uniform process by any means; in England it was pretty much complete by 1000, but in Norway (still more so Sweden) there were plenty of autonomous peasants into the end of the middle ages and beyond; but it was generalised. This is one of the major changes of the whole of the middle ages in the north. One consequence was an increase in concentrations of surplus available to élites, and with that the extension of trading connections. More of England became integrated into the trading networks of the west after 900. …
… The other general trend … was connected quite directly with the other consequence of Christianisation. This was the gradual opening of each polity which adopted the new religion (even Ireland and Norway) to the Frankish and post-Frankish world of western Europe and its political-cultural practices, including a trend towards common assumptions about political action. …and also the increasingly generalised use of charters as documentation and coins as a means of exchange. In the arena of aristocratic behaviour, too, northern élites slowly began to adopt Franco-German practices like seals, the ritual of homage, castles … and, later, coats of arms and the imagery and literature of chivalry … [and] new political claims of parliaments.
It is tempting to see this as a generalised homogenisation: it might, that is, be seen as the creation of a common European history, with only differences in detail between the different polities of the continent. This would, however, be an illusion; the very distinct histories sketched out here continued to underlie distinct developments for the rest of the middle ages and well beyond.
The Source:
Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe, Yale University Press 2016
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.