Christopher Tyerman - God's War - A New History of the Crusades

In central areas of this Afro-Eurasian region, those of Christian and Muslim observance and rule, the religious and political structures rested on settled agrarian economies and populations. Byzantium and the Islamic states shared a flourishing commercial system that supported gold currencies and towns, while in Christian western Europe, by 1000 urbanization – or, in the perspective of the Roman empire, reurbanization – had only recently begun to accelerate along the major trade routes north of the Alps: the North Sea and north-west Mediterranean coasts, the Rhine, Rhône, Seine, Loire, Thames. In Italy towns and cities had survived more robustly since the collapse of the late Roman economy and civilization, even if on a far smaller scale than further east. The economic imbalance was reflected in the size of cities in the eleventh century. In the eastern Mediterranean, the great metropolis cities boasted populations of hundreds of thousands – Baghdad perhaps half a million; Old Cairo slightly less; Constantinople perhaps 600,000 at most. In Muslim Spain, 100,000 people may have lived in Cordoba, although some estimates make it much more. By contrast, the largest western Christian cities – Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, Cologne – hovered around 30–40,000. Paris and London in 1100, sustained by a largely rural hinterland, probably counted about 20,000 each, the equivalent of rather third-rate cities in the Near East or less. Elsewhere in northern Europe, cities were even smaller, while some important towns could muster only a very few thousand inhabitants. One of the striking features of the following two centuries lay in the massive growth in western urban populations, but even by 1300 cities such as Paris, pushing towards 100,000, still barely competed with the great entrepôts of the eastern Mediterranean.

Even with heightened economic and commercial activity in western Europe, the imbalance of trade remained evident, the west having to rely on an often limited silver coinage as the wealth flowed eastward and southward, gold, much of it from west Africa, never reaching or staying in large enough quantities to sustain currencies beyond the Pyrenees, Alps or Danube. International trade revolved around luxury items, notably spices and finished textiles such as silk from the east and slaves, fur, timber and some metals from the west and north. Local exchange, primarily of foodstuffs but also certain basic living materials, such as wool and woollen cloth, provided the main engine of regional commerce in the rural economies. The mosaic of local economies varied widely across the region: cereals, wheat in the more southerly areas, rye and oats further north; wine in the south, beer in the north; sugar cane in Syria; olives around the Mediterranean; fishing everywhere along the enormously long shores of Afro-Eurasia. The growth of towns in Europe between the Alps and the Atlantic indicated an acceleration in such commercialization, a process that acted as a liberating dimension for large sections of the peasant communities who were mainly tied to the land by law, hierarchy, custom, coercion and economic necessity. In market places, transactions may have been taxed and regulated but they tended to operate outside bonds of tenure. Slavery, once ubiquitous in Roman and post-Roman Afro-Eurasia, persisted in the Arab world, but was gradually dying out in Christian lands, whether through moral distaste driven by the church or economic prudence.

Rather different demographic and economic patterns survived outside the heartlands of settled communities, around the geographic margins of the region – the Atlantic seaboard, the fringes of the Sahara, the plains, forests, steppes and tundra north of the Black Sea and Carpathian mountains, north and east of the Elbe towards the Arctic Circle – as well as in the areas within the settled regions on the edge of cultivatable land – deserts, mountains, marshes and islands. Many places on the periphery of the region harboured nomadic tribes, shifting Turkish alliances in the Eurasia steppes; Bedouin in the deserts of the Near East; seasonal herdsmen such as the Lapps near and beyond the Arctic Circle. These groups depended on varying degrees of intimacy with their settled neighbours; most of the Bedouin and many of the Turkish nomads had accepted Islam; waves of Turkish invasions from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries into the Balkans and Near East, followed by the Mongols from the Far East in the thirteenth century, highlighted this relationship. Similar mechanisms of exchange between the central lands and the geographic fringes applied to the non-nomadic peoples of northern Europe, Basques, Irish and the Scandinavians commonly known as the Vikings. In northern and north-eastern Europe, paganism flourished and resisted the cultural penetration of Christianity unenforced by commerce or conquest. Christianity (or Islam) was not necessary for the creation of stable cultural and political institutions. The eastern Baltic only began to be converted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Lithuania remained staunchly pagan until the late fourteenth century and then converted on its own terms for political reasons.

The oldest institution in western Europe in the eleventh century, selfconsciously tracing an uninterrupted history back a thousand years, was the papacy. Originally one of five patriarchs of the early church (Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria being the others), the bishop of Rome claimed primacy as the successor to SS Peter and Paul, the guardian of these founding saints’ bones (supposedly buried beneath St Peter’s basilica) and the diocesan of the seat of empire, from the Emperor Constantine (306–37) and the fourth century, a Christian empire. After the Arab invasions of the seventh century, only Rome and Constantinople remained in Christian hands; Jerusalem had fallen to the Muslims in 638. The absence of a western Roman emperor after 476 drew the pope and the eastern, Byzantine, emperor closer together, if in an uneasy relationship. The absence of effective imperial power in Italy had propelled the papacy into a position of temporal authority over the city of Rome and, in theory at least, parts of the central peninsula. Papal spiritual authority was enhanced by its sponsorship of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century and of the Frisians and continental Saxons in the eighth.

In the early eighth century, the Byzantine emperors’ flirtation with Iconoclasm (rejecting the religious efficacy of images, icons, etc.) and their inability to protect Rome and the pope from the Lombard rulers of northern Italy persuaded Popes Gregory III (731–41), Zacharias (741–52) and Stephen II (752–7) to enter into alliances with the Franks, the rulers of a large kingdom that stretched from modern south-west France to the Rhineland and the Low Countries. As part of this new orientation of policy, the papal court (or Curia) concocted the so-called Donation of Constantine, one of the most powerful forgeries in world history only properly exposed in the fifteenth century. This claimed that, on becoming a Christian, the Emperor Constantine surrendered his imperial authority to Pope Sylvester I (314–35), who returned it while retaining pre-eminence over the other patriarchates, theoretical temporal jurisdiction over the western empire and direct rule of Rome, its surrounding region and Italy in general. This forgery formed one basis for the later papal insistence on its claims to a state in central Italy and its wider assertion of primacy over imperial authority in western Europe.

The papal–Frankish alliance proved mutually advantageous. The papacy gained effective protection in Italy; the Franks legitimacy for their mid- to late-eighth-century conquests in Lombardy, Gascony, Bavaria and Saxony between the Rhine and Elbe. The culmination of the alliance came on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III (795–816) crowned the king of the Franks, Charles the Great or Charlemagne (768–814), as the new Roman emperor in the west, inaugurating what came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire, which survived, with various interruptions and changes of fortune, nature and substance, until abolished in 1806 on the insistence of Napoleon. While the Frankish, or Carolingian (i.e. family of Charles), empire lasted, until the 880s, the papacy remained rather overshadowed. Thereafter the throne of St Peter tended to be the preserve of a dim succession of Roman nobles, some youthful, dissolute, even irreligious. Yet the reputation of their office remained high, especially in northern Europe, where papal authority still appeared as a final arbiter of ecclesiastical and spiritual issues; the newly converted King Miesco I of Poland sought papal protection in 991. In 962, the king of Germany, Otto I, who had recently conquered northern Italy, revived the western empire by being crowned in Rome by Pope John XII (955–64), a notoriously debauched twenty-five-year-old nobleman and libertine who apparently met his death, still only about twenty-seven, after a stroke suffered during intercourse with a married woman.