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

The Capetians were aided in their ambitions by three factors. Their family lands, centred on the Ile de France, were among the richest in western Europe and straddled the main trade routes: the Seine, Marne, Loire river systems, which linked eastwards to the Rhine, Meuse and Low Countries, west to the Atlantic, north to the English Channel and south to the Saône-Rhône corridor and the Mediterranean. The church lent the Capetians ideological support and material assistance. The king was patron to wealthy monasteries and controlled appointments to important bishoprics and archbishoprics outside his own lands. The final advantage possessed by the Capetians lay in the role of kingship itself. Although few of the great princes in France bothered to pay the king homage and fealty (some counts of Anjou were happy to), the office of king legitimized those of the counts. A king, however feeble, was needed, as the events of 987 recognized. When, as rarely occurred, a foreign invasion was threatened, as in 1124, the counts rallied round. The potential for the king, as legal overlord, to interfere in the affairs of any county in the realm was undeniable but only enforceable in political circumstances that did not regularly occur until the late twelfth century.

On the other hand, the political cohesion of France was undermined by another three facts of political life. For the vast majority of Frenchmen, their spheres of economic, public and private life operated entirely beyond the reach or necessity of royal influence or power, a matter of geography, communications and the absence of national institutions. This was reflected and exacerbated in the years around 1000 in an ever more local search for protection and arbitration. Even the authority of counts was challenged and ignored as provincial gangsters and racketeers commandeered lands, markets, churches, monasteries and fighting men to impose a rough order on localities often centred on the construction of castles. Although this devolution of power has been regarded by some as a sign of a collapse of social order and its replacement by anarchy, the networks linking these petty lordships with the regional counts, bishops and local monasteries suggest a structure, however undisciplined in places. The period of supposed anarchy was accompanied, perhaps not coincidentally, by the establishment of new strength by a number of active comital dynasties, such as in Normandy, Anjou, Flanders, Blois and Champagne. Yet in valleys distant from Paris, dominated by a castle and a local boss with a posse of armed thugs (later known as knights), royal power and national sentiment were for stories and romances of a glamorous Carolingian past not daily life.

The third impediment to French royal authority lay in the loose legal concept of sovereignty, which tended to be explained and conceived in personal not institutional terms. Thus a landowner, knight, lord or count could take as his overlord anyone from whom he held land, leading to a cat’s cradle of overlapping lordships. In time, centripetal legal and political forces could turn this fluid system to the king’s benefit, but not until the thirteenth century. This personal system of lordship also ignored the boundaries of kingdoms. The count of Flanders held lands from Artois to the river Scheldt; for those which lay in the kingdom of France, the count was a subject of the king of France; for those in the empire, the emperor was his overlord. Two masters; one count; one count, two sets of subjects with wholly different technical allegiances, the king of France or Germany; a political and legal minefield. Viewed from Capetian Paris, the most dramatic and potentially dangerous of these personal international lordships concerned that of the kings of England. In 1066, the duke of Normandy, William the Bastard, invaded England and succeeded in establishing himself as king of the English. As a consequence, from 1066, with a few brief interruptions (1087–96; 1100–1106; 1138–54), the duke or regent of Normandy was also king of England. As a result of dynastic inheritance and a military and political victory in a long English civil war, in 1154 the situation was further complicated when Henry, count of Anjou, also duke of Normandy by inheritance from his mother and duke by marriage of Aquitaine, became king of England. Henry II, the first of the Angevin (i.e. Anjou was his partrimony) kings of England, was overlord to far more of France than his supposed French sovereign Louis VII: Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Brittany, Poitou, the duchy of Aquitaine, the Limousin, Gascony and parts of the Auvergne, with unachieved claims to parts of Languedoc. These French lands were passed on more or less intact to Henry’s son Richard I, a fact that made his relations with his crusading partner Philip II of France during the Third Crusade (1190–91) awkward, to say the least. Only after Philip II’s conquest from John of all the Angevin lands north of the Loire in 1202–4 could the Capetians begin to assert practical sovereignty over their whole kingdom.

Neither the Angevins nor their Norman predecessors as kings of England were in any meaningful sense English. It is wholly wrong to imagine that the lands they held in France were English lands. They were the personal dynastic inheritance of the rulers. In that sense, they typified a Europe that contained no nation states in the manner understood in modern Europe, although cultivating a sense of shared national identity was a feature of the kingdoms that emerged across Europe after the tenth century. The histories of France, Germany, Italy and Spain – and indeed of all the regions discussed including the Near East in this period – underline that the later political organization of Europe or western Asia was not inevitable; frontiers, traditions and nationalities were mutable, even accidental, certainly not innate.

This applied even to the most centralized state of western Europe, the kingdom of the English. Formed through the tenth-century conquest by the kings of Wessex of their northern neighbours, England developed a distinctive system of government in which public justice, coinage, markets, taxation and defence rested with the royal authority, as did control of the church. The king’s authority was mediated through local officials, a relatively efficient and sophisticated bureaucracy and a dense pattern of aristocratic and noble patronage. In Christian Europe, only in Byzantium had the techniques and institutions of government reached a more complicated and comprehensive form. Yet England’s northern and western frontiers remained uncertain, and the kingdom itself was repeatedly invaded and, in the eleventh century, twice conquered, by the Danes (1013–16) and the Normans (1066–70). The very efficiency of the English government’s capacity to tap the kingdom’s wealth made England an inviting target; the centralization of institutions and power facilitated successful conquest. France could not be conquered by a battle. With only a little exaggeration, England could, a sign of relative strength not, paradoxically, weakness. The European significance of the Norman Conquest can be found in the reorientation of English and hence British Isles politics towards north-west Europe rather than Scandinavia. English money transfused the economy of northern France. Continental habits of religious observance, styles of art and architecture and institutions of scholarship were now open to England and the English. In some instances the confrontation was painful, the imposition of foreign ways on a reluctant and far from culturally inferior conquest. In others, contact was as benign as the millennia of peaceful trade across the English Channel. Along with English wool to feed the cloth factories of Flanders and English scholars attending the new continental universities, notably Paris, the ease of assimilation into the continental European community was recognized by the enthusiastic participation by those who regarded themselves as English, as well as the descendants of their conquerors, in the crusades.