Reshaping western Europe 1000–1150, by Chris Wickham
‘You are mine to do my will’, the Roman public world now replaced by cellular structure of de facto personal powers
Chris Wickham wrote:
Chapter Six
Reshaping western Europe, 1000–1150
[Earlier in this book] I proposed that there was a major difference between the public political world of the early middle ages in western Europe and a smaller-scale, more personalised, lordship-based politics which marked later centuries. The latter came in slowly from around 1000 onwards, starting in West Francia; by 1100 it dominated in many places. Although larger-scale political systems returned after that, local lordships did not go away; their presence is one of the key elements which mark out the second half of the middle ages in the west as different from the first half. How that new politics developed is the main theme of this chapter. For an idea of what I mean by it, however, let us start with a text, which gives us a sense of what the new political parameters of the period could look like.
In the 1020s, Hugh, lord of Lusignan in western France, had a long memorial written, which listed all the injustices done to him by his senior (lord), William V, count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine. William promised him wives which he then did not allow him to marry; he did not let Hugh inherit lands he was entitled to; he acted without Hugh’s advice; he did not help Hugh when others sought to take his lands (Hugh said to William ‘I never lose except because of my fidelity to you’; William was unsympathetic: ‘You are mine to do my will’); he did not stop castles being built to Hugh’s detriment; he had Hugh’s new castles burnt down. Hugh complained at every stage, and William promised his support at every stage, but never kept his promises. In the end Hugh ‘defied the count, in the hearing of all, except for his city and his own person’, and they fought a small war; only then did the count-duke agree to come to terms and give Hugh part of his withheld inheritance, in return for very solemn oaths, and Hugh’s oath of fidelity. We do not know how long it lasted, but at least Hugh was reassured enough to have his plangent text stop there.
Hugh poses himself as a victim in this memorial, but in reality was far from that; he was one of William’s most powerful and potentially dangerous aristocratic dependants, and there will have been another side to this story. But it is striking how far his whole text revolves around a personal bond, posed as one of trust and betrayal. It indeed resembles French verse epics of the twelfth century, such as that of the emblematically bad lord Raoul de Cambrai, who burned down a nunnery with his faithful vassal Bernier’s mother in it, and then in the end hit Bernier with a spear-shaft, before Bernier could bear formally to break his bond of fidelity. This was, then, a political structure dependent on personal relationships. It was also a very localised one, all taking place in Poitou, with other counts (such as the count of Anjou, 100km to the north) mentioned almost as foreign powers. William was in fact one of the most successful regional rulers of early-eleventh-century France, as Hugh’s memorial reluctantly testifies; but his territory was a network of the castles of others, even if he was active enough in trying to bring as many of them as possible under his control. And, although he claimed full power over his aristocratic dependants, when he did make peace with them he had to make promises back to them as well. Personal relationships of this kind had old roots, but they had never before characterised the whole of politics. Whatever this world was, it was not the world of Charlemagne or Otto I.
Western and southern Europe in 1000 had a fairly clear hierarchy of states. Al-Andalus and Byzantium were, as we saw in Chapter 3, easily the most powerful political systems, at the south-west and south-east corners of the continent, particularly as the force of the Francia of Charlemagne had become substantially diminished. Francia was by now indeed permanently divided; although nothing which we could call national consciousness existed in its two main successor-states, East and West Francia, we can by now call them Germany and France for convenience, and I shall do so henceforth. Of the two, Germany was clearly dominant, with king-emperors who ruled Germany and Italy; the French kings were by contrast very weak, and the only other polity in Latin Europe with a real political solidity was England, a kingdom not much larger than a German duchy. This hierarchy might have looked stable enough, but was far from that, as the next century showed. Already by 1030 al-Andalus had, after a twenty-year civil war, broken up into about thirty successor-states; in 1071, the large armies of the Seljuq Turks defeated the Byzantines, and the latter permanently lost control over the eastern third of the Byzantine empire, modern central Turkey. After 1077 the German empire, too, lapsed into civil war and Italy, in particular, went its separate way. England maintained its coherence, but had to face two violent conquests. The French kings did not become any more powerful, but France was a cockpit of ambitious and prickly lords like Hugh of Lusignan, and some of them, in particular those from Normandy, acting as mercenaries and freelance fighters, managed in the second half of the eleventh century to conquer southern Italy from its previous rulers, and by 1100 even Palestine, at the end of the First Crusade. Elsewhere in Europe, new kingdoms emerged from nowhere as strong political powers, notably Hungary and Castile. And, on top of all this, the western church, led by the popes of Rome for the first time, was beginning to pose itself as an independent moral authority to rival that of the traditional secular powers. These political developments, and their causes and contexts, frame the major social changes we need to discuss.
What happened to Byzantium … [and to] Hungary and Castile will appear [later]. In this chapter we will look at what happened in what had been Carolingian or Carolingian-influenced western Europe, Germany, Italy, France and England in particular, with a political narrative first and a structural discussion after, before ending with the changes in the western church and the Normans in the Mediterranean.
Germany was in 1000 by far the largest and militarily strongest western power, even if it was never as internally coherent as its Carolingian predecessor, let alone the tax-based states of the south. (Now that I am using modern country names, it is worth adding that the German kingdom/empire’ continued to include, throughout the middle ages, what we would now call the Low Countries, Switzerland and Austria.) The Ottonian king-emperors of the tenth century, based in Saxony in the German north, were rich as we have seen, with lands and silver-mining in Saxony, and landed bases also in the Rhineland and in northern Italy. Germany was hard to control in depth, given its forests and its few roads – the only real north–south route was along the Rhine – but these three linked the north and the south of the power of the Ottonians, at least. After 1024 they were succeeded by female-line heirs, the Salians, an aristocratic family from the Rhineland, and that area was further strengthened as a political focus for the king-emperors; they moved around Germany much as the Ottonians had, but by now went rarely either to Italy (except to be crowned emperor) or to most of Saxony. Italy stayed more or less loyal, although its powerful cities henceforth showed a greater tendency to revolt; Saxony, however, now that it was less of a royal power-centre, felt its distance from the rest of the kingdom and became more and more resistant to the tight royal control of the silver-mine area; by 1073 it too was in open revolt.
The first two Salian king-emperors, Conrad II and Henry III (1037–56), managed to keep their German hegemony solid. They did so by focusing its aristocracy on the great ceremonial assemblies around the king, by being generous with land-giving as far as they could, and by moving militarily to bring down disloyal dukes when necessary, all traditional procedures. But after 1056 Henry III’s heir Henry IV (his long reign lasted until 1106) was a child, and royal hegemony weakened fast. Henry IV as an adult, after 1065, moved quickly to revive it, but he was a heavy-handed operator, with an interest in innovation – as with the development (alongside other lords) of new methods of keeping control over his lands, which were increasingly entrusted to ministeriales, local figures of knightly but technically unfree status who would find it harder to break away. Not only the Saxons, but also the southern dukes, became opposed to him. When Henry fell out with Pope Gregory VII in 1075–76, the pope threatened Henry with deposition. Henry moved quickly to Italy, and in one of the famous images of the middle ages stood three days and nights in the snow outside the castle of Canossa in January 1077 until the pope, who was inside, accepted his penance; but the German dukes were not reconciled, and deposed him anyway in 1077, electing a rival. Civil war in Germany lasted for twenty years; after 1080, when relations with Gregory had finally broken down again, it began in Italy too. Henry won in Germany, where he was fighting rival claimants to kingship. In Italy, where he was fighting pro-papal cities and lords (notably the powerful marquise of Tuscany, Matilda, one of whose main castles was Canossa), there was more of a stand-off, and the result was that by 1100 there was no effective imperial presence at all; here the hegemony of the king-emperors, which had lasted even though they were so seldom south of the Alps, had virtually ended, and the cities began to fend for themselves, as we will see later. Under Henry’s weaker successors, Germany began to be more regionalised too, although imperial protagonism was still recognised, and under Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ (1152–90) could be temporarily revived.
On one level, France had a less difficult history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, for it had a single line of uncontested kings, the Capetians, who ruled in unbroken father-to-son succession from 987 to 1316 – and even after that, it managed a sequence of male-line heirs who provided kings until 1848, a unique achievement for Europe, and only surpassed in the world by the succession in Japan. But these kings, in this period, were reduced to a royal heartland which stretched 120km from Paris to Orléans on the Loire, plus the rights of appointment over bishops in a wider area of northern France. The rest of the kingdom was in effect autonomous, with dukes and counts, such as William V of Aquitaine whom we met at the start of this chapter, establishing their own rule with almost no reference to the king. Twelfth-century kings could occasionally call out an army from nearly the whole kingdom, as Louis VI (1108–37) did against a threatened German invasion in 1124, or else be recognised as judges well outside their power-base, as Louis VII (d. 1180) did in his well-attended royal court of 1155. The bonds of loyalty to the king were steadily being recognised as stronger again by the twelfth century, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, Louis VII exploited with great effect against Henry II of England, by now ruler of much of France by marriage and inheritance, in Toulouse in 1159. But it would not be until the wealth of fast-expanding Paris became a real royal resource in the late twelfth century, that Louis VII’s son Philip II ‘Augustus’ could move against Henry II’s son John and conquer the core of his French lands in 1202–04, which established the king of France as the major player in his own kingdom for the first time in nearly 300 years. The history of France in the period of this chapter is thus the separate histories of its duchies and counties. Some of these – such as Flanders, Normandy, Anjou and Toulouse, joined by the royal heartland in the twelfth century – remained relatively coherent political units: their rulers were sufficiently fearsome, and managed to keep strategic control of enough castles and lands, to remain at the centre of the system of landed rewards. As a result, lesser lords like Hugh of Lusignan were kept, however unwillingly, onside. Others – Champagne, Burgundy, and, after William V, much of Aquitaine too – fragmented, sometimes quite rapidly at the start of the eleventh century, into steadily smaller and smaller territories, ending up in some cases as no more than clusters of autonomous lordships ruled by lords who had a handful of castles each.
Only England kept its coherence in this period. Renewed Scandinavian attacks between 990 and the 1010s did, it is true, lead to the temporary expulsion of King Æthelred II (d. 1016), another king who was heavy-handed in unpopular and often unsuccessful ways, and some social breakdown; but by 1016 the Danish kings had conquered the country outright, creating a combined English and Danish kingdom under Cnut (d. 1035), as we saw in the last chapter. Cnut established himself as an effective English-style king in England, creating his own aristocracy out of a mix of English and Danish families. After 1042, there was a return to tradition under Edward ‘the Confessor’, Æthelred’s son, but he had to fight his corner against Cnut’s aristocrats, and at his death in 1066 one of them succeeded him as Harold II. The tension around that allowed William ‘the Bastard’, duke of Normandy, who had no serious claim to the throne at all, to invade and defeat Harold at Hastings later in the same year. William, by now ‘the Conqueror’ to historians (d. 1087), after the end of the 1060s dispossessed almost the entire English aristocracy, replacing them with French families: perhaps the most complete destruction of a ruling class there has ever been in Europe, up to 1917.
The interesting thing is, however, that throughout all this the English state remained organised and the king hegemonic. William I inherited what was by western standards a tight political system, based on large-scale royal landowning, and a land tax (originally instituted by Æthelred to pay off the Danes, and carried on by Cnut), which William re-established. As its ruling class became French in genealogy, language and values, state effectiveness was not changed; William indeed engaged in some very specific and demonstrative political acts, not least the huge Domesday survey of 1085–86, again without parallel in Latin Europe, to record the agricultural and landholding detail of nearly the whole country, which impressed and appalled contemporaries and has absorbed historians ever since. Royal wealth and ruthlessness during two generations of Norman kings, and the fragmentation of royal grants to the new aristocracy (which meant that few of them had a single local power-base), plus the coherence of a county-based system which still involved local judicial assemblies in an early medieval tradition, allowed the state also to remain effective during a civil war between two grandchildren of William I in the 1140s. The heir of one of them, Henry II, count of Anjou (1154–89), emerged victorious; he ruled England, and a large collection of French duchies and counties as we have seen, fairly tightly for thirty-five years, an achievement not lessened by our knowledge that his son would lose half of them only fifteen years later.
This is, for the most part, a history of political breakdown. The power of French historiography in the second half of the twentieth century meant that the French experience was taken very widely to be normal. Although, as this brief survey shows, it was not, there has as a result been a substantial debate since 1990 as to the significance of that French experience. This has been seen by many as the ‘feudal revolution’, with a sharp increase in violence and a privatisation of political power, and by a few even as the real end of the ancient world; but such views have been attacked by a second group of historians, who argue that the changes around 1000 (or at later dates in the eleventh century) were a marginal shift, since the basic structures of political power remained the same, even though on a smaller scale, as also did aristocratic values such as loyalty to lords and honour, which hardly changed across the early and central middle ages.
The second group has brought much-needed nuance to our understanding of what really changed in the eleventh century; all the same, I remain, broadly, with the first. Smaller-scale political structures, especially if they are based on militarised foci such as castles, do tend to produce more capillary violence everywhere, even if it is (as it usually was) quite carefully targeted. The heavily personalised political relationships shown in the complaint of Hugh of Lusignan are also only possible when power is so localised that every actor is known to every other, as was far from the case in the Carolingian world, even if (as we saw earlier) personal relationships – and also violence – certainly existed then too.
The sort of political power shown by our eleventh-century sources for France, even when exercised by dukes and counts directly, was heavily based on the establishment of sets of increasingly specific aristocratic rights over small territories, including powers of justice, and rights to tolls and dues of all kinds, which are called by French historians the ‘seigneurie banale’; these were under their private control and could even be bought and sold separately, as well as fought over. Their holders were frequently small-scale lords, called in our sources milites, ‘knights’, who held one or two castles each: very unlike the great aristocrats of the Carolingian period, who could have dozens of estates.
And, as an overarching and crucial development, this power, as its parameters became more local, became more clearly bounded and formalised. From now on, it mattered where the edge of a lordship was, for outside it a lord could not so easily claim dues, or rights to judge; and the rights involved in lordship themselves became more defined.
For the same reason, if a lord claimed lordship over a village, it increasingly mattered how far the territory of that village extended; village territories, and also parishes, thus became more clearly marked out on the ground too. Castles, which were more common by the eleventh century, became the new points of power in a landscape, of a type which no Carolingian aristocrat had needed, for he had so many estates and so seldom used them as a local power-base – as opposed, that is, to using their rents to allow him to pay for political action at a regional or royal level. The French peasantry were increasingly caged inside the cellular structure of local power, and subjected, on top of rents, to lordly exactions which were often heavy, sometimes arbitrary, and always designed to underpin direct domination. Such exactions could also increase, as the agricultural economy produced more surplus in an age of population increase and the clearance of land: at least until peasants resisted this collectively, as we shall see in the next chapter.
These were major changes, for they all privileged the local. Up to the eleventh century, kings – and also regional rulers, dukes, counts and bishops – could rule from the top down, using the old Roman imagery of public power and the early medieval collective legitimation which was assembly politics, without considering in a very organised way what was going on locally, unless it involved disloyalty, or an injustice which was so clamorous that it actually reached their ears. The small-scale lordships of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries in France could not afford to be so detached; exactly whom they controlled, and how, mattered much more. It is important to recognise that this shift was the result of two separate processes, for the weakening of the public world of kings and assemblies, and the growth of local lordships, had distinct histories. On the other hand, each of course affected the other: the slow development of local power structures meant that the public world was not the only possible location for political action, which especially mattered if rulers faced difficulties; conversely, the weakening of the public framing for politics forced local powers to become better defined, creating the cellular structure of the future. And both of these developments fit what Marc Bloch meant by the ‘fragmentation of powers’: they were an always-possible consequence of the politics of land, in a world where the state was not separately supported by taxation. A localised world was far from an inevitable consequence of the politics of land; but the possibilities were always there if rulers were not secure, and watchful. Although its development was very variable in both dating and intensity – here, as elsewhere in this book, we cannot deal with all its complexities – a cellular structure for politics can henceforth be tracked even in relatively strong regional units in France such as the counties of Toulouse and Flanders, or again with William V of Aquitaine in his dealings with Hugh of Lusignan; rulers of all kinds had to recognise lordships as the building blocks of their political authority.
This was the French pattern, which we can easily see as an extreme; but how far did it extend elsewhere? Some of it did. There were castles all over western Europe by 1100, for example – although not Byzantium, which had a very different development. They were rare until the end of the ninth century (Merovingian and Carolingian aristocratic residences were mostly unfortified), but from then on the fortification habit spread slowly and steadily everywhere, even, particularly after 1066, in perennially strong polities such as England: initially as the foci for royal power for the most part (as with the well-excavated Ottonian palace site of Tilleda), but increasingly as the must-have for every local lord, large or small, in Germany, Italy, Christian Spain, as in France. But the breakdown of political power elsewhere did not happen as it did in France.
In England, as also in twelfth-century Castile, castle-holding lords remained fully part of a king-centred political structure, for kings were so rich that cutting oneself off from their patronage remained a losing option, even if one survived royal wrath and armed attack. There, either private seigneuries were internally divided and interspersed with the lands of the king (as in Castile), or they did not develop at all. This was above all the case in England, where, apart from during the civil wars of the 1140s, kings kept control of justice over the free, and left lords to claim judicial rights only over the unfree – even if that left them with substantial powers, for the unfree were numerous in England, and became more numerous in the late twelfth century as the free–unfree boundary moved. England, indeed, kept most of the Carolingian-style public political structure it had developed in the later tenth century, with greater success than anywhere else, although royal assemblies were no longer the legitimating venues they had been before the Norman conquest.
Germany did not develop quite as France did, either. The king-emperors were, for a start, powerful at least some of the time and in some parts of the country, up to the 1240s, and had to be reckoned with, for their army remained substantial; an assembly politics centred on the kings also persisted, and assemblies were major loci for political acts of all kinds. They had a relatively restricted administrative infrastructure beyond that; but German dukes were not, as far as we can see, much better-rooted in their large duchies, and, under them, counts in many cases did not have unitary counties, but, rather, fragmented sets of rights. For the most part, then, neither dukes nor counts could have easily constructed strong territorial power-bases in the absence of kings in the way William V of Aquitaine did. Nor were other aristocratic and ecclesiastical landowners any more focused; they usually had widely scattered lands. When the power of kings faltered, as at the beginning and then the end of Henry IV’s reign, or in the 1140s, or above all from the 1240s onwards, local powers took some time to consolidate; and when they did, they tended not to develop territorialised seigneuries banales of a French type. We find instead intersecting accumulations of hereditary land (perhaps focused on a family monastery), royal castles held in fief, rights to take market tolls, and – a German speciality – strong local power derived from holding the ‘advocacy’ over ecclesiastical land, the right to run justice on these properties, which German bishops and abbots routinely ceded to hereditary lay advocates. A well-studied example is the Zähringen power network which took shape in the twelfth century around the Black Forest and in what is now northern Switzerland; it was an ad hoc collection of rights by a local lordly family (including the title of duke), but it was solid, right up to 1218, when the Zähringen family died out. Already-existing dukes and counts were beginning to do the same themselves. All the same, developments such as this certainly represented political localisation. There has been little work comparing Germany and France, but there are more parallels between the two than are always recognised. German local power consisted of more of a network of overlapping authorities, from the ever more distant king down to local lords and advocates, rather than the relative boundedness of many French lordships, but the effect was otherwise similar. In the late middle ages, German local lordship became more bounded too, and then we find hundreds of autonomous rural (and also urban) powers inside the confines of the overarching and increasingly theoretical kingdom of Germany.
Northern Italy, finally, was partially different again. Local lordships slowly developed there too, in the eleventh century in particular, inside the Lombard and Carolingian network of counties, and marches such as Tuscany (which maintained a political structure of a Carolingian type without a break right up to the of the 1080s and 1090s); such lordships were based on collections of private property (including castles), hereditary fiefs, and rights to take the tithes of rural parishes. It was not until those wars, however, that public power went into crisis, and, in reaction, such lordships began to turn themselves into coherent and bounded territories, based on judicial rights over all the inhabitants, owners and tenants alike, which were called in Latin dominatus loci, ‘domination over a locality’, and which were a close Italian equivalent to the French seigneurie banale. This happened up to a century after their appearance in France, but the similarity of development is here clear, even if such lordships tended to be weaker and to make lighter demands than in France. What made Italy different was that cities were here large and powerful, because most rural lords lived inside their walls – which in itself lessened substantially the autonomy of lordships; from 1100 urban centres were also expanding because the economy was rapidly becoming more complex. When the kingdom of Italy lost its force, it was above all the cities which took over local ruling.
Autonomous Italian cities developed their own forms of collective and deliberative assembly. These were different from the judicial assemblies of the Carolingian and post-Carolingian past, but they made the same assumptions about the close link between political legitimacy and large gatherings of people. In the early twelfth century we find, more and more, that these assemblies, and cities as a whole, were being ruled over by annually changing collectives of ruling officials called ‘consuls’: in Genoa and Pisa by 1110, in Milan and the other cities of Lombardy by the 1130s, in the Veneto by the 1140s. Such men came from the richest civic élites, of landowners and sometimes merchants, usually including some castle-owning lords; they were not a new social group. But their collective activity was new, and by the mid-twelfth century they called themselves ‘communes’, a word which explicitly marks that collectivity. Such communes claimed powers over the old Carolingian county network, which in Italy was city-based, and by 1200 most of them had re-established their power over the rural lordships of their territory. Only a handful of rural lords stood out, in less urbanised areas. These communes look very different from the rural lordships of France or Germany or, indeed, Italy itself, and they certainly came to feel they were; by the 1130s they were beginning to use the word ‘public’ to describe their power, and they were beginning to legislate on their own behalf. But it is worth also stressing that they were, like any rural lordship, the result of an initially highly ad hoc and informal, indeed insecure and uneasy, localisation of power, which became more formalised in the context of royal weakness, and that their growing concern for judicial rights located inside political boundaries (which they were keen to fight over, often bloodily) matched that of seigneuries banales as well.
So western Europe was not all like France; but, equally, it can be seen that, across a long eleventh century, everywhere except England experienced a set of developments which at least parallel those of France. Why did it happen then? As I have argued, the crisis of public power itself made local solutions more attractive; but it is also the case that they were by now in themselves more stable. In part, this is simply because the checks and balances of the Carolingian world were now less in evidence, and local power-bases could be created more easily. But there were also by now social changes within the aristocratic strata which made ever-smaller lordships possible. In the Carolingian world, ‘real’ aristocratic status was regarded as belonging to a relative few, essentially the families which might be appointed as counts; smaller-scale military figures would probably hold a couple of estates and have a local prosperity, but their status was tightly bound up with their membership of comital or episcopal entourages, and they had no chance of going it alone. By the eleventh century, however, if you had a castle you did have a local military status which was largely your own. Your ancestors were very often members of Carolingian entourages, and occasionally even rich peasants made good more recently; the social group which we can call ‘aristocratic’ had widened as a result. Your own lord, a count or a duke, could still hope to dominate you, but had to deal with you, as with William V and Hugh of Lusignan. Indeed, if your lord was insufficiently feared or insufficiently successful, you might well start to act increasingly autonomously, to go for your own local power, however small-scale: to create your own local lordship, that is to say, with its own rules and demands. This was new; there had been plenty of periods of weak or chaotic rule in earlier centuries without autonomous lordships developing, to more than a small extent. Nor did they always do so now; a determined count or duke, and indeed king, could hold this process off, or reverse it – William the Bastard managed it for example after the civil wars which marked his accession as a child in Normandy in 1035, and in England the 1140s civil war could also be recovered from, quite easily in fact. But from now on this process was a possible development; a weak ruler, or a civil war, could set it off anywhere, and there were a good few of these. When this happened, the process was very often not reversed, and formalised units of local power appeared as a result, making up a cellular structure which later rulers would have to deal with in new ways, if they wished to rebuild their own polities.
Local concerns and creative power-building also marked out two of the particular novelties of the eleventh century, which go beyond the country-by-country sociopolitical discussions which this chapter has focused on up to now; both fit well into, and add to, the general picture which I have just set out. They are the ecclesiastical ‘reform’ movement and the Norman/French expansion into southern Italy and Palestine. …
[MGH: these ‘novelties’ are omitted, and we skip to the chapter’s conclusion]
To summarise. In the eleventh century, political power became more localised, and more carefully bounded. Its holders were often smaller figures than any Carolingian aristocrat would have recognised as an equal. Lords could be creative in its construction, as indeed could cities, grabbing rights in a way that was initially illegal, but, once accepted, defined a new legality. This power structure was new; it maintained plenty of continuities with the past (particularly in a network of aristocratic values which hardly changed), but from now on this sort of practical power depended on a knowledge of, and a concern for, detailed rights and relationships on the ground. Powerful kingship would, certainly, be reconstructed, and often quite soon: by Roger II of Sicily in the 1120s–1140s, by Henry II of England in the 1150s–1160s, by Frederick Barbarossa in Germany and (with less success) in northern Italy in the 1150s–1170s, by popes from Innocent II to Innocent III across the second half of the same century, and then by Philip II of France in the 1200s–1210s. But when that power was reconstructed by such rulers, and others, it would be based on this cellular structure of de facto powers, and not – or only to a small extent – on the practices and royal ideologies of the past. The public world which the Carolingians and Ottonians had inherited from the Roman empire was gone almost everywhere, and had to be rebuilt, on different bases. This is why this set of developments mark a turning point, in western Europe at least: later medieval political processes all presupposed it.
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.