Church, Monasticism, and European Society

Battle of the Faiths

With the migrations and invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries, trade networks were disrupted around the Mediterranean. By the end of the 7th century, African products were no longer found in Western Europe.

This was especially felt in northern Gaul or Britain.

Christianity was a major unifying factor between Eastern and Western Europe, but the conquest of North Africa by the Arabs severed the maritime connections between those areas. This, in time, created gaps in language, practices, and liturgy between the Byzantine (Eastern) Church and the Western Church.

The Eastern Church used Greek instead of Western Latin. Theological and political differences emerged, and by the early and middle 8th century, issues such as iconoclasm, clerical marriage, and state control of the Church had widened to the extent that the cultural and religious differences were greater than the similarities.

The formal break, known as the East-West Schism, occurred in 1054 when the papacy and the patriarchy of Constantinople clashed over papal supremacy and excommunicated each other.

The Western Church became the Roman Catholic Church, while the Eastern branch became the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The monastic division gave rise to a political division between what was known as Carolingian Europe and the ByzantineEurope. The Carolingian dynasty, as the successors of Charles Martel are known, officially took control of the Gaul kingdoms of Austrasia and Neustria in a coup of 753.

Charles Martel, more often known as Charles the Great or Charlemagne, embarked upon a programme of systematic expansion that unified a large portion of Europe, eventually controlling modern-day France, northern Italy, and Saxony. Charlemagne conquered the Lombards in 774, freeing the papacy from the fear of Lombard conquest and marking the beginnings of the Papal States.

The coronation of Charlemagne as emperor on Christmas Day 800 is regarded as a turning point in medieval history, marking a return of the Western Roman Empire, since the new emperor ruled over much of the area previously controlled by the Western emperors. Also, it overturned the feeling of supremacy that the Byzantine Empire had over the Western Roman Empire, as the assumption of the imperial title by the Carolingians asserted their equivalence to the Byzantine state. However, the newly established Carolingian Empire was not quite like the older Western Roman Empire.

The Frankish lands were rural in character, with only a few small cities. Most of the people were peasants settled on small farms. Little trade existed and much of that was with the British Isles and Scandinavia, in contrast to the older Roman Empire with its trading networks centered on the Mediterranean.

During the High Middle Ages, Europe’s population grew from 35 to 80 million between 1000 and 1347. This growth was attributed to improved agricultural techniques, the decline of slaveholding, a more clement climate, and the absence of invasion.

As much as 90 percent of this population remained rural peasants. Many were no longer settled in isolated farms but had gathered into small communities, usually known as manors or villages.

These peasants were often subject to noble overlords and owed the lords rents and other services, in a system known as manorialism. There remained a few free peasants throughout this period and beyond, with more of them in the regions of Southern Europe than in the north.

The practice of assarting, or bringing new lands into production by offering incentives to the peasants who settled on them, was also believed to have contributed to the growth in population.

Other sections of the European society, besides peasants, included the nobility, clergy, and townsmen. Nobles, both the titled nobility and simple knights, exploited the manors and the peasants, although they did not own lands outright.

They were granted rights to the income from a manor or other lands, by an overlord through the system of feudalism.

During the 11th and 12th centuries, these lands, or fiefs, came to be considered hereditary, and in most areas, they were no longer divisible between all the heirs as had been the case in the early medieval period. Instead, most fiefs and lands went to the eldest son.

The European nobility derived dominance from its control of the land, military service such as heavy cavalry, control of castles which offered protection from invaders, and various immunities from taxes or other impositions, Control of the castles also allowed the nobles to defy kings or other overlords.

The clergy was two-fold: the secular clergy, who lived out in the world, and the regular clergy, who lived isolated under religious rule and usually consisted of monks.

Townsmen — male residents in the cities who did not belong to any village — were floating, as they did not fit into the traditional three-fold division of society into nobles, clergy, and peasants.

During the 12th and 13th centuries, however, the ranks of the townsmen were to expand greatly, as existing towns grew and new population centers were founded.

Most Jews were confined to the cities, as they were not allowed to own land or be peasants. Besides the Jews, there were other non-Christians on the edges of Europe — pagan Slavs in Eastern Europe and Muslims in Southern Europe.

Women in the middle ages were officially required to be subordinate to some male, whether their father, husband, or other kinsmen.

Widows, who were often allowed much control over their own lives, were still restricted legally. Women’s work generally consisted of household or other domestically inclined tasks.

Battle of the Faiths

Roman city life and culture changed greatly in the early Middle Ages. Roman temples were converted into Christian churches and city walls remained in use. In Northern Europe, cities also shrank in population.

After the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, the Jews suffered periods of persecution, and they were encouraged to settle in new areas.

Judaism was an active proselytizing faith, and some Arab leaders even converted to it.

Zoroastrianism, a multi-faceted belief in a dualistic cosmology of good and evil, and predicting the ultimate conquest of evil, was actively practiced in Persia, and this faith was in competition, for converts, with Christianity, especially among residents of the Arabian Peninsula.

The forces of the faiths were to come together when Islam emerged in Arabia during the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad (d. 632).

After the death of Prophet Muhammad, Islamic forces conquered much of the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia, starting with Syria in 634–635, continuing with Persia between 637 and 642, reaching Egypt in 640–641, North Africa in the later seventh century, and the Iberian Peninsula in 711. By 714, Islamic forces controlled much of the peninsula in a region they called Al-Andalus. The victory of Islam came to a peak in the mid-eighth century.

At the Battle of Tours in 732, the Muslim forces had been defeated, southern France was re-conquered by the Franks, and the Umayyad Caliphate was overthrown and replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate.

The Abbasids moved their capital to Bagdad and were more concerned with the Middle East than Europe, losing control of sections of the Muslim lands. Umayyad descendants took over the Iberian Peninsula, the Aghlabids controlled North Africa, and the Tulunids became rulers of Egypt.

By the middle of the 8th century, new trading patterns were emerging in the Mediterranean; trade between the Franks and the Arabs replaced the old Roman economy. Franks traded timber, furs, swords, and slaves in return for silks and other fabrics, spices, and precious metals from the Arabs.

Crusades

In the 11th century, the Seljuk Turks took over much of the Middle East, occupying Persia during the 1040s, Armenia in the 1060s, and Jerusalem in 1070. In 1071, the Turkish army defeated the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert and captured the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV.

Through the invasion of Asia Minor, the Turks dealt a dangerous blow to the Byzantine Empire by seizing a large part of its population and its economic heartland. The Turks also were to lose control of Jerusalem to the Fatimids of Egypt. A revived Bulgaria, which in the late 12th and 13th centuries spread throughout the Balkans, also threatened the Byzantines.

The crusades were staged to seize Jerusalem from Muslim control. The First Crusade was proclaimed by Pope Urban II (pope 1088–99) at the Council of Clermont in 1095 in response to a request from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081–1118) for aid against further Muslim advances.

Tens of thousands of people from all levels of society mobilized across Europe and captured Jerusalem in 1099. One feature of the crusades was the pogroms against local Jews that often took place as the crusaders left their countries for the East. These were especially brutal during the First Crusade, when the Jewish communities in Cologne, Mainz, and Worms were destroyed, as well as other communities in cities between the rivers the Seine and the Rhine.

Popes called for crusades to take place elsewhere besides the Holy Land: in Spain, southern France, and along the Baltic. The Spanish crusades became fused with the Reconquista of Spain from the Muslims.

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