CCD HISTORY 101 - History of Western Civilization 1

Western Civilization Class 5

Old Lecture Notes.
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Webster's Dictionary/Thesaurus Encyclopedia

Class 1 In the Beginning Ancient Near East
Class 2 The Greek Experience
Class 3 The Glory of Roman
Class 4 The Making of Europe and The Rise of Islam
Class 5 Middle Ages
Class 6 Renaissance
Class 7 Early Modern Emergence of Global Empires

Ancient

Resources

Class 5 Middle Ages

Chapter 12 Europe in the Early and Central Middle Ages

The Frankish Kingdom

Merovingian France

Time: ca 350 to 600 AD

Place: Gaul

Lat. Gallia, Roman designation for the land S and W of the Rhine, W of the Alps, and N of the Pyrenees.

The people the Romans called Gauls were Celts. The Celts were pushed out of Gaul by invading tribes of Germans. Surviving Celts are Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Breton.

Important People of Merovingian Era:

Merovech

the founder of the first Germanic-Frankish dynasty (c. A.D. 500–A.D. 751).

Clovis

c.466–511, Frankish king (481–511), founder of the Merovingian monarchy.

Originally little more than a tribal chieftain, he became sole leader of the Salian Franks by force of perseverance and by murdering a number of relatives.

Clotilda

Wife of Clovis, Burgundian princess, but a Catholic (not an Arian Christian like most Burgundians), with St. Remi, bishop of Reims, helped convert her husband to Catholicism.

Thereafter Clovis was the champion of orthodox Christianity against the Arian heretics: the Burgundians, and the Visigoths.

Map defeat of Huns at the battle of Chalons 451 AD

The Franks were marginalized people during the Roman era. They inhabited swamps - the delta lands at the mouths of the Rhine and Scheldt rivers. In about 350, they became Roman federati and were allowed to occupy lands south of the Rhine

Imap barbarian Migrations
In about 430 AD, Franks occupied the rich agricultural territory around the town of Soissons NE of Paris. Soissons was a Roman imperial arms factory manufacturing shields, swords, and spears.
The Franks could now equip many more fighting men than previously, and were an important part of the army with which the Roman commander Aetius defeated the Huns at the battle of Chalons in 451.

Languages 540 AD

Map of Europe after Invasion of Italy by the Lombards 600 AD

Gavelkind and Civil War
The only Frankish governmental institution was the chieftainship or kingship, and the Merovingians based their power upon lands.
The royal household traveled from royal estate to royal estate since no single estate produced enough to supply the royal household for more than a few days and nights.
The staff who provided for each household also had to manage the estates
These household servants -- the mayor of the palace, seneschal, tallator, pincerna, mareschal, condestable, botellarius, etc. -- became ministers of the realm
The rest of the Merovingian's kingdom - those households that were not the personal property of the chief or king - were left under local strong men (or women) paying tribute and military aid
Law was customary and based upon kinship and feuds. There was no concept of the responsibilities of the state. In fact there was not really any state.
Gavelkind, or the division of property equally among the children of the deceased property owner
There was competition among the heirs to gain a greater share of the patrimony, and a rivalry arose between Neustria, Austrasia, and Aquitaine -- the regions into which the realm was often split (see map page 334) to be passed on to the heirs.
There were constant civil wars and shifting alliances, murder and intrigue, but the Merovingian dynasty ruled for about three hundred years, and the Franks remained the strongest power in western Europe for much longer. How was this possible?

A. The Franks expanded, rather than migrating, into the empire. Their numbers were constantly increased by men and women from the old heartland of Frankish lands. They advanced relatively slowly and were never in a position to be threatened, as the Vandals and other tribes had been, by the great numbers of their Roman subjects.
B. They were protected by geography from the Muslims and eastern Romans. Neither the Muslims nor the Byzantines attempted to extend their power to the Frankish homeland far to the north.
C. Their opponents were generally weak or distracted. Neither Syagrius nor the Allemanni were particularly powerful, and the Visigoths and Burgundians were troubled by the unrest of their subjects, who welcome the Catholic Franks and worked against their Arian masters.
D. Their government was primitive

1. They did not try to preserve Roman institutions or the Roman system of taxation.
2. They allowed a form of local autonomy to any place where it worked.
3. They were pragmatic about things. Their governmental institutions were too crude to be repressive.

E. They enjoyed the support of the Church.

1. They were not divided from the local population by religious differences.
2. The Church provided them with the skilled personnel they needed.

If you want to get a feeling for what these people were like I suggest you look at the earliest English epic poem, Beowulf. It was written by an Angle, not a Frank but it shows the world view of these German tribes at the transition point from paganism to Christianity. I include on the web site both notes on reading Beowulf and a copy of the poem itself.

The Empire of Charlemagne - the Revolt of the West

Time Period: 650 - 850

Place: Holy Roman Empire

Important People of the Carolingian Era:

Pepin of Landen

d. 639?, mayor of the palace of the Frankish kingdom of Austrasia.

Charles Martel

Great grandson of Pepin of Landen and grandfather of Charlemagne. Began the military campaigns that reestablished the Franks as the rulers of Gaul. Although he never assumed the title of king, he divided the Frankish lands, like a king, between his sons Pepin the Short and Carloman.

Charlemagne

[O.Fr.,=Charles the great], 742?–814, emperor of the West (800–814), Carolingian king of the Franks (768–814).

Alcuin

735?–804, English churchman and educator. Charlemagne invited him (781?) to court at Aachen to set up a school. For 15 years Alcuin was the moving spirit of the Carolingian renaissance

Pope Leo III

pope (795–816), a Roman. On Christmas day, 800, Leo crowned Charlemagne emperor, the event that traditionally marks the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire.

Leo’s successor, Stephen IV, crowned Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, and thus was established the papal claim to the right to consecrate the emperor.

Map of Charlemagne's Empire

The Byzantine empire was so much wealthier, more populous, stronger, and better organized than the West that the peoples of the West still looked to Constantinople as a model, even after the Muslims had seized control of the Mediterranean and made communication between the East and West much more difficult.

That situation began to change in 751, with three important developments. Know these:

Let's start with what happened with the Muslims.

In 751, Islam had split into two contending parties. The Abbasids and the Umayyads. The Umayyad's capital was in Damascus, The Abbasids, by contrast were centered to the east --at Baghdad. In a significant way, the triumph of the Abbasids reflected the revival of Persian culture, but within Islam rather than in opposition to it.

What was going on in the Byzantine empire?

Byzantium also became much more interested in continental affairs due to the various peoples threatening their European frontiers - Persians, Arabs, Turks and Vikings. After turning away from the sea the lands of the empire were reorganized in a quasi-feudal manner, and the navy was allowed to decay.

What was happening with the Franks.

The Franks never had any naval power and their attention was always inland.

So the three Mediterranean powers simultaneously, and for reasons that we do not really understand, disengaged and turned their attention away from the struggle to control the Mediterranean.

Map Europe 800 AD

Charlemagne's kingdom (the Carolingian kingdom) lacked many of the things that we normally associate with a "state."

Its population was not homogenous. There were the descendants of Romans, Visigoths, Burgundians, and other Germanic tribes.

There was no set of common laws, weights and measures, currency, civil service, and the like.

Infrastructure was falling apart

Trade and commerce decayed. There had once been a steady trade between Baltic lands and the Eastern empire coming down the coast of the North Sea, up the Seine or Loire Rivers, and down the Rhone.

The route was shut down, and some of the Scandinavians began to open an eastern "Varangian" route along the Volga, Don and Dneiper ( Russian) rivers, while others began to raid England to get in the form of plunder what they were not longer able to acquire through trade.

It seems that Charlemagne was not content with a subordinate position. He wanted to recreate the power, prestige, and culture of the Western Roman Empire.

The Carolingian Intellectual Revival

How did he do this?

By trying to strengthen the central government.

- Charlemagne appointed officials such as counts, and dukes to place some limits on local leaders.

- He also encouraged the growth of a local land-owning aristocracy, .

- Having emerged from the Merovingian "civil service," the Carolingians had a philosophy of government based upon the king as the steward of the people of the realm.

- Charlemagne used capitularies to send orders and set standards throughout the realm,

- He set up Missi Dominici to determine whether his orders were being observed .

- He established a common currency, the silver penny, and matched it with the values of Muslim coinage to encourage trade.

- Finally, he strengthened the military power of the Franks

Apart from these institutional measures, Charlemagne did a number of things to give his kingdom an aura of the Roman empire as he imagined it to have been at its height.

He established his capital at Aachen, an old rest and rehabilitation base for the Roman army on the Rhine.

He modeled his palace on Roman palaces

Finally, he built his palace church, the Chapel, on the model of the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, the imperial church when the Roman capital was located in that city

He also established a palace school at Aachen and placed it under the direction of his counselor, the famous English churchman, Alcuin. Alcuin gathered a number of fine Latin scholars there and was responsible for the Carolingian Renaissance.

A literary revival was begun, and the scholars of the school developed a new and legible form of script called Carolingian miniscule,

Holy Roman Empire

Then came the big event that historians are still arguing about - the proclamation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor.

Voltaire remarked that the realm was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, but it lasted for over a thousand years and was one of the most important forces in the politics of medieval Europe

. What were the consequences of Charlemagne's coronation?

The theoretical power of the Byzantine Emperor over the West was finally ended.
Western rulers could now claim their right to rule involved a descent of sovereignty from the Emperor Augustus Caesar.
The popes could act independently of the Eastern Emperor.
The Western church had denied the validity of caesaropapism.

This was the Revolt of the West.

Charlemagne had not eliminated the basic limitations inherent in the Frankish state.

They failed to address the basic problems of the West: the decay of the economic infrastructure (roads, bridges) and the loss of the manufacturing and monetary subsidy that the West had obtained from the East

Most important, however, they failed to address the problem caused by the division of the state among the king's heirs according to the traditional inheritance practice of gavelkind.

Aristocratic Resurgence

The Rise of Feudalism, ca. 850-1000 AD
feudalism is not completely foreign to American society.
Feudalism is a decentralized organization that arises when central authority cannot perform its functions and when it cannot prevent the rise of local powers.
In a feudal society, civil and military powers at the local level are assumed by great landowners or other people of similar wealth and prestige.
In a feudal society the local leaders and their retinues begin to form a warrior class distinct from the people of their territory.
Under the feudal system, the distinction between private rights and public authority disappears, and local control tends to become a personal and even hereditary matter.
The feudal leaders often took over responsibility for the economic security of their territories, and dictate how resources were to be used, while at the same time they established monopolies over some activities. This strengthened their presence at the local level and also made their possessions even more valuable.
The feudal aristocracies were usually organized on the basis of private agreements, contracts between individuals

HOMAGE AND FEALTY

Under feudalism, the private agreements that formed the network of mutual services were called contracts of homage and fealty, "homage" because one of the contractants agreed to become the servant (homme, or "man" of the other, and fealty, because he promised to be "feal, faithful" to him. Homage and fealty became formalized, romanticized, and overlaid with symbolism, but it is most easily understood as a simple contract.

This was a powerful bond. Many of the medieval legends and tales turned upon the relationship between the lord and vassal; Lancelot's tragedy was that his love for Guenevere conflicted with his love for Arthur, while king Alfonso, El Cid's lord, consistently failed to keep his promises to love, respect and protect his outstanding vassal.

Many people think of feudalism as a primitive and inefficient system, but it did not appear to be so. Organized in this fashion, the Western Europeans succeeded in holding off the raiders and restoring a measure of peace that permitted a revival of trade and commerce around AD 1000.

Great Invasion of the Ninth Century

Assaults on Western Europe Map Viking Routes
The Vikings were Germanic people from Scandinavia - what later became Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. They were pagans longer than the continental Germanic tribes - only converting to Christianity around 1000 AD. We tend to think of them as warriors because they raided the coasts of Europe and the British Isles from the 9th cent. to the 11th cent. but they were first first farmers, fishermen, hunters and traders and did not turn to raiding until the goods they had been used to receiving from the Franks dried up with the civil wars after Charlemagne.
Viking Law

The Althing the oldest parliament in Europe. It met at Thingvellir, SW Iceland, in 930 and met continuously till 1800. It was revived in 1845 and has met since.

Assaults on Eastern Europe and the Byzantines

The Vikings were known as Varangians to the Slavs and the Byzantines. They were also known as Rus or Rhos. From the North they made their way down the Dnieper River and settled around Kiev. They established a great trade route from Kiev to Byzantium, to Asia and north to Scandinavia. They gradually merged with the Slavs, adopting Slavic culture. By some accounts they were the founders of the Kievian Russian State.

Khazars

Map Europe 800 AD

Map defeat of Huns at the battle of Chalons 451 AD

Map of Islam

Map of Mongol empire 2

Maygars

Revival and Recovery

The Restoration of Order
Population, Climate and Mechanization

Revival and Reform in the Christian Church

Monastic Revival
Reform of the Papacy
The Controversy over Lay Investiture

Investiture

An "investiture ceremony" is when someone gets inducted into a new office organization and is given some thing as a sign that he or she now holds that office or belongs to that organization.

The Investiture Controversy was about the ceremony by which a man became a bishop or an archbishop.

During the investiture, the bishop or archbishop- elect was given a signet ring, a crozier (Shepard's crook), a lump of dirt (glebe), and a pallium (representing apostolic succession).

Since bishops and archbishops appointed and directed all the clerics below them, either directly or indirectly, the investiture ceremony was the most important single factor in selecting church personnel and setting the structure of authority within the Church as a whole.

So what was the argument?

If the layman had the right to invest a bishop- elect, he also could refuse to invest someone. It gave laymen a veto power over the selection of church officials.

The Church argued that its authority came directly from God and not from a bunch of secular lords.

The Church argued that it, the Church, was established by Jesus and given to the disciple Peter and his successors. Of course, Peter was the first bishop of Rome, so the popes are his successors. the Petrine Doctrine

If the churchmen felt that way, why did they let laymen take part in the investiture ceremony in the first place?

In the 10th and 11th C the Church was controlled by laymen, and all of the important Church offices were filled by secular appointees.

How did the Church get to the point where it was able to challenge the Holy Roman Empire about this sort of thing?

Not all laymen were happy with the situation. They felt that European society lacked moral guidance

One of the responses was the establishment of Cluny.

Cluny sponsored all sorts of reform movements, The Peace of God and The Truce of God, the crusades. They encouraged monasteries and cathedrals to become centers of learning.

In the mid 11th century, Pope Leo IX held office from 1049 to 1054 took on Cluny's reform movement and made it his own. He also established the College of Cardinals

Nicholas II (p 1059-1061), passed a decree that, from then on, popes would be selected by the College of Cardinals, and, second, he made an alliance with the Norman Kingdom of Sicily.

In 1122, when it became clear that both the Church and the Empire were on the point of wrecking each other, they reached a compromise with the Concordat of Worms

As a result of the agreement the emperors gave up the right of investing the bishops with the crozier and ring.

So did the Church win?

Investiture Controversy had some far-reaching effects. The Church was now under the control of a professional elite and had established the principle that non-professionals shouldn't have any say in how the Church ran its affairs.

In Germany, the authority of the emperors had been damaged to the point that the region didn't develop a national government until 1870 with a war against France.

Crudsades

The First Crusade, 1095-1100
Western Europe came into direct contact with the great trade routes that united the civilizations of Eurasia

Causes

A. Basic Causes

1. European society had survived the raids of the Magyars, Vikings, and Saracens, and its economy and society were recovering quickly. There was a new spirit of adventure apparent in the art, literature, an actions of the western Europeans.
2. Europe was already in a period of expansion, and its capacity for war and conquest had grown during the years of fending off raiders from all direction.
3. The spirit of religious reform that had led to the Investiture Controversy had been accompanied by an increase in popular spirituality.

B.Intermediate Causes

Despite their growth, European society and economy were in a state of transition, and were unstable.

1. The aristocracy found themselves at relative peace, and were losing the importance. Their numbers were growing. They needed more land with which to endow their children
2. The kings were now working to reverse the decentralization that had been characteristic of the feudal age.
3. The Church had split into eastern and western organizations in 1054, and the pope's wanted somehow to heal that split.
4. Churchmen generally recognized the new spirituality of the age and wished that there were some way that the Church could build upon this and assume the moral leadership of Europe and the Europeans.
5. The middle classes were now aware of the profits of the eastern trade, a
6. There were frequent local famines. At the same time, agriculture was improving so greatly in productivity that many people no longer had work. The peasants needed more food and more land to cultivate. In 1095, a famine and epidemic in northern France and the Lowlands was causing widespread misery and the lower classes were some miracle to deliver them.
7. Pilgrims returning from the Holy Land were bringing home stories of the atrocities being committed by the Seljuk Turks, against pilgrims,

C. Immediate Causes

Since their victory at the Battle of Manzikert (1071), the Seljuk Turks had been pressing towards Constantinople and were now actually within sight of the city.

Alexius Comnenus, the eastern emperor, needed reinforcement. He sent his request to Pope Urban II.

Urban gave an impassioned speech on the mission to free the Holy Land. He promised them the Church's blessing, the aid of god, and the certainly of being taking immediately into heaven for those who fell in the attempt.

The crowd was swept up in the call, and the cry of Deus vult! ("Gods wills it!") spread far and wide. Almost all classes and nationalities of Europeans responded in a movement far greater and more varied than Urban may have expected.

3. Consequences

Against all odds, the first armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land was successful, and the Christians captured Jerusalem in 1100. They benefited from the disunity among the Muslims and set up the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Although it was only ninety years before the Muslims had reorganized and taken back most of what they had lost, the effect of the crusaders' success was great.

A heightened sense of confidence animated the Europeans and, with new influences from the East, culture and intellectual life flourished. Western Europe, so some historians hold, came of age.

Individual in Society: The Jews of Speyer: A Collective Biography

The Expansion of Latin Christendom

Northern and Eastern Europe
Spain
Toward a Christian Society

Medieval Origins of the Modern State

Unification and Communication
Law and Justice

Economic Revival

The Rise of Towns
Town Liberties and Town Life
The Revival of Long-Distance Trade
The Commercial Revolution

Listening to the Past: An Arab View of the Crusades

IX. Chapter 13 Creativity and Crisis in the Central and Later Middle Ages

Medieval Universities
From Romanesque Gloom to "Uninterrupted Light"
Troubadour Poetry
Life in Christian Europe in the Central Middle Ages
- Those Who Work
- Those Who Fight
- Those Who Pray
- Individual in Society: Jean Mouflet of Sens
Crises of the Later Middle Ages
- A Challenge to Religious Authority
- The Black Death
- The Hundred Years War
- Religious Crisis
Marriage and the Parish in the Later Middle Ages
Peasant Revolts
Race and Ethnicity on the Frontiers
Vernacular literature
Listening to the Past: Christine de Pisan (1363-1434)

Middle Ages

Final collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian 483-565.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire, Christianity became the standard-bearer of Western civilization.

Rise of the Franks - Merovingian Monarchy 350 to 600 AD

Carolingian Renaissance 650 - 850
Charlemagne's attempt to recover the glory of the western Roman Empire.

High Middle Ages 900 - 1300

Invasions by Vikings, Magyars and Saracens 800 - 1100

Feudalism, Manoralism, Monasticism

The Paupers

Church Reform under Pope Innocent III 1196-1216

The Gothic Age - 1100 - 1500 gothic architecture (largely cathedrals and churches) and works of art first created in France in the 12th cent. that spread throughout Western Europe through the 15th cent., and in some locations into the 16th cent.

Great Famine            1311-1317 and 1321 over 10% of the population had died of starvation
Hundred Years War 1337-1453
Plague                       1347 - 1352   30-50% if the population died
Great Schism of the West 1378
Peasant Uprising      1381 - hundreds of thousands slaughtered

Estimated population of Europe from 1000 to 1352.

1000 38 M
1100 48 M
1200 59 M
1300 70 M
1347 75 M
1352 50 M

25 to 35 M killed by the plague

Five Contributions of the Middle Ages
Renaissance

Italian Renaissance 1250 - 1520

Northern Renaissance 1450 - 1550

Reconquista the end of the Middle Ages 1492

Reformation 1517 - present

Absolutism and Constitutionalism 1589 – 1725

Ancient

Middle Ages

Early Modern