for instance, shew great knowledge of the older law, a
constant
reference
to it and a grasp of its principles.
to it and a grasp of its principles.
Cambridge Medieval History - v3 - Germany and the Western Empire
Many other historians, apart from the
## p. vii (#13) #############################################
Preface
vii
contributors, to whom we owe so much, have been of great service in
various ways. And it is needless to say that to the staff of the University
Press, working under peculiar difficulties caused by the war, we owe much
for constant and unfailing help.
A general historical sketch has been added as an Introduction. It is
in no way meant, however, as an outline of the history or as a summary
of the particular chapters, but only as a general view of the period in its
special characteristics and in relation to the ages which follow. It will
also be seen that notes, short and significant, have been added as before
where necessary: they are possibly more numerous than in preceding
volumes, and two or three genealogical tables have also been given.
J. P. W.
July, 1921.
## p. viii (#14) ############################################
3
INTRODUCTION.
The volume before this brought us to the death of Charlemagne, with
whom in many senses a new age began. He, like no one either before or
after, summed up the imperishable memories of Roman rule and the new
force of the new races which were soon to form states of their own.
Although we are compelled to divide history into periods, in the truest
sense history never begins, just as it never ends. The Frankish Kingdom,
like the Carolingian Empire, is a testimony of this truth. It cannot be
rightly understood without a knowledge of the Roman past, with its
law, its unity, its civilisation, and its religion. But neither can it be
understood without a knowledge of the new conceptions and the new
elements of a new society, which the barbarian invaders of the Roman
West had brought with them. It was upon the many-sided foundation
of the Carolingian Empire that the new world of Europe was now to
grow up. Yet even in that new world we are continually confronted
with the massive relics and undying traces of the old. The statesman and
warrior Charles, the great English scholar Alcuin, typify some parts of
that great inheritance. But how much the Empire owed to the personal
force and character of Charlemagne himself was soon to be seen under
his weaker successors, even if their weakness has often been exaggerated.
Such is one side of the story with which this volume begins.
We of to-day, perhaps, are too much inclined to forget the moulding
force of institutions, of kingship, of law, of traditions of learning, and of
ideas handed down from the past. When we see the work of Charle-
magne seeming to crumble away as his strong hand fell powerless in
death, we are too apt to look only at the lawlessness, the confusion, and
the strife left behind. In face of such a picture it is needful to seek out
the great centres of unity, which were still left, and around which the
forms of politics and society were to crystallise slowly. Imperial tradi-
tions, exemplified, for instance, in the legal forms of diplomas, and finding
expression as much in personal loyalty to rulers of Carolingian descent as
in political institutions, gave one such centre. The Christian Church,
with its civilising force, had even a local centre in Rome, to which
St Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, had looked for guidance and
control. Other ancient cities, too, in which Roman civilisation and
## p. ix (#15) ##############################################
Introduction
ix
Christianity had remained, shaken but still strong, did much to keep up
that continuity with the past upon which the life of the future depended.
But beneath the general unity of its belief and its organisation, the
Church was always in close touch with local life, and therefore had its
local differences between place and place. It had still much to do in the
more settled territories which were growing up into France, Germany and
England. On the borders of the Empire it had further fresh ground to
break and new races to mould. Even within the Empire it was before
long to receive new invaders to educate and train : Normans and Danes
were to bear witness, before our period ends, to the spirit and the
strength in which it wrought. As is always the case when two powers
are attempting the same task in different ways and by different means,
there was inevitable rivalry and strife between Empire and Church as
they grew together within one common society. But such generalisations
give, after all, an imperfect picture. Beneath them the details of eccle-
siastical life, in Papacy, diocese, parish and monastery, are also part of
the common history, and have received the notice which they can there-
fore claim.
But if political history and ecclesiastical history present us with two
centres of unity in a tangled field, thought, literature, and art were no less
distinctly, though in other ways, guardians of unity and fosterers of future
life. They too brought down from the past seeds for the new world to tend.
So their story also, with its records of inheritance, plainer to read, espe-
cially in its Byzantine influences, than those of politics or ecclesiastical
matters, is an essential part of our task. Politics, Religion, and Thought
in all its many-sided fields, summed up for the future Western world all the
remnants of the past which were most essential and fruitful for genera-
tions to come. They were the three great forces that made for unity
and, with unity, for civilisation.
Taking all this for granted, then, we pass to the separate history of
the individual countries just growing into states. For a time, they grow
within the common mould of the Empire, and Carolingian traditions
bind them to the past. Dimly to begin with, but with growing plain-
ness, the realms of France, Germany, Italy, Lorraine, and Burgundy are
seen taking their later territorial and constitutional shapes. England lay
somewhat apart, insular, and therefore separated from the Empire, but by
this very insularity everywhere exposed to Northmen and Danes. Here,
too, as on the continent, statesman-like kings and far-sighted ecclesiastics
worked together. The growth of territorial unity is easiest of all to trace,
for it can be made plain in maps. But the growth of unity of thought and
interests, of constitutions and social forms, is harder to see and to express;
C. MED, HIST. VOL. III
b
## p. x (#16) ###############################################
х
Introduction
I
1
it is easier to estimate the work of Ecgbert, Edward the Elder, and
Aethelstan than the more many-sided achievements of Alfred and Dun-
stan, or the more pervasive influence of the great Northern school which
gave us Bede and Alcuin. But the peculiarity of England's position and
history is most significant for constitutional growths, and it is, therefore,
in connexion with English affairs that the origins of Feudalism are best
investigated and discussed. Scientific history begins with the observation
of resemblances and with classification by likeness. Then it passes on to
detect differences, and to note their significance. Nowhere is there more
need to remember these twin methods than in the study of Feudalism,
where the Cambridge scholar Maitland was our daring and yet cautious
guide. Processes and details which we notice in English history have
their parallels elsewhere. If the centuries we traverse here have a large
common inheritance, they also have at the same time, in spite of dif-
ferences in place and character, something of a common history. What
is said, therefore, as to the origins of English Feudalism also applies, with
due allowance for great local differences, to Germany, France, and Italy ;
even indeed to Spain, although there the presence and the conquests of
the Muslims impressed a peculiar stamp upon its institutions.
The period with which we have to deal is more than most periods
what is sometimes called transitional ; but this only means that it is more
difficult than other periods to treat by itself. History is always changing
and transitional, but keeps its own continuity even when we find it
hard to discern. Breaches of continuity are rare, although in this period
we have two of them: one, the establishment of the Moors in Spain, and
the other, more widely diffused and less restricted locally, the inroads of
the Northmen ending in the establishment of the Normans, whose con-
quest of England, as the beginning of a new era, is kept for a later
volume. In many other periods some histories of states or institutions
cease to be significant or else come to an end. Of this particular
can say that it is specially and peculiarly one of beginnings, one in which
older institutions and older forms of thought are gradually passing into
later stages, which sometimes seem to be altogether new. The true sig-
nificance, therefore, of the age can only be seen when we look ahead, and
bear in mind the outlines of what in coming volumes must be traced in
detail. This is specially true of the Feudalism which was everywhere
gradually growing up, and, therefore, to understand its growth it is well
to look ahead and picture for ourselves the system which forms the back-
ground for later history, although even here it is in process of growth
and its economic and military causes are at work.
The dissolution of the Carolingian Empire ends its first stage with
4
age
we
## p. xi (#17) ##############################################
Introduction
xi
a
the Treaty of Verdun, following the Oath of Strasbourg. The oath is
in itself a monument of the division between Romance and Teutonic
languages, a linguistic difference which soon joined itself to other
differences of race and circumstance. At Verdun Louis the German took
most of the imperial lands in which a Teutonic tongue was spoken :
Charles took mainly lands in which Romance prevailed. This difference
was to grow, to become more acute and to pass into rivalry as years went
by, and the rivalry was to make the old Austrasia into a debateable land;
so that, for the later France and Germany, the year 843 may be taken as a
convenient beginning in historic record of their separate national lives.
Henceforth we have to follow separate histories, although the process of
definite separation is gradual and slow.
At Tribur in 887 rebels deposed Charles the Fat, and next year the
Eastern Kingdom proclaimed Arnulf; when his son Louis the Child died
in 911, election and recognition by Frankish, Saxon, Alemannian (or
Swabian), and Bavarian leaders made Conrad the first of German kings.
In this process, unity, expressed by kingship, and disunion, expressed by
the great tribal duchies which shared in later elections, were combined.
And through many reigns, certainly throughout our period, the existence
of these tribal duchies is the pivot upon which German history turns.
To the king his subjects looked for defence against outside enemies: the
Empire had accepted this task, and Charlemagne had well achieved it.
But his weaker successors had neglected it, and as they made default,
local rulers, and in Germany, the tribal dukes, above all, took the vacant
place. But the appearance on all hands of local rulers, which is so often
taken as a mere sign of disunion, as a mere process of decay, is, beneath
this superficial appearance, a sign of local life, a drawing together of
scattered elements of strength, under the pressure of local needs, and,
above all, for local defence. If on a wider field of disorder the appear-
ance of great kings and emperors made for strength and happiness,
precisely the same was afterwards the case in the smaller fields. Here
too the emergence of local dynasties also made for strength and happiness.
Local rulers, then, to begin with, accepted the leadership in common local
life. And they did so somewhat in the spirit with which Gregory the
Great, deserted by Imperial rulers, had in his day boldly taken upon
himself the care and defence of Rome against barbarians. So for Germany,
as for France, the national history is concerned as much with the story of
the smaller dynasties as with that of the central government.
But a distinction is to be noted between the course of this mingled
central and local history in Germany and France. In France the growth
of local order was older than it was in Germany; towns with Roman
a
62
## p. xii (#18) #############################################
xii
Introduction
traditions were more abundant and life generally was more settled. In
Germany a greater burden was, therefore, thrown upon the kings and,
as was so generally the case with men in those days, they rose to their
responsibilities. Accordingly the kingship grew in strength, and Otto the
First was so firmly seated at home as to be able to intervene with success
abroad. His Marches, as later history was to shew, served adequately
their purpose of defence, and German suzerainty over the neighbouring
lands became more real. The basis of his power was Saxony, less
feudalised than the other duchies and peopled mainly by freemen well
able to fight for their ruler. Otto understood, moreover, how neces-
sary for strength and order was close fellowship in work' between State
and Church. Throughout his land the Bishops, alike by duty and
tradition, were apostles of civilisation, and, on the outskirts of the king-
dom above all, the spread of Christianity meant the growth of German
influence, much as it had done under Charlemagne himself. To the
Bishops, already overburdened with their spiritual charge, were now
entrusted administrative duties. In England individual Bishops were
counsellors of the king: in France Bishops, although later to be con-
trolled by neighbouring nobles, had been a more coherent body than
elsewhere, and the legislative authority of synods had been so great that
the Episcopate had even striven to become the leading power in the realm.
But it was characteristic of Germany to make the Bishops, with large
territories and richly endowed, a part, and a great part, of the administra-
tion in its local control, working for the Crown and trusted by it, but with
the independent power of Counts or even more: thus there grew up in
Germany the great Prince-Bishoprics, as marked a feature of the political
life as the tribal Duchies but destined to endure still longer. And further-
more, because of this close alliance between German Crown and German
Episcopate, the later struggle between Church and King, which arose out
of forces already at work, was to shake with deeper movement the edifice
of royal power. Because of this special feature of German polity, the
eleventh century strife between Pope and German King meant more for
Germany than it did for other lands. And this was something quite
apart from the revival of the Western Roman Empire.
Otto's political revival, with its lasting influence on history, was in the
first place a bringing to life again of the Carolingian Empire. Like the
earlier Empire it arose out of the needs of the Church at Rome: Otto the
Great, like Charlemagne and his forerunners, had come into Italy, and
Rome with the Papacy was the centre, indeed the storm-point, of Italian
politics and strife. But Otto, unlike Charlemagne, was more a protector
than a ruler of the Church, and here too, as on the political side of the
a
## p. xiii (#19) ############################################
Introduction
xiii
a
Empire, he set out from a distinctively German rather than from a general
standpoint. His first care was rather with the German Church, needed
as an ally for his internal government, than with the Papacy representing
a general conception of wide importance. The new series of Emperors
are concerned with the Papacy more as it affected Germany and Italy
than under its aspect of a world-wide power built on a compact theory.
The future history of the Empire in its relations to the Papacy turns, then,
mainly upon the fortunes of the Church first in Germany and then in Italy:
conflict arises, when it does arise, out of actual working conditions and
not out of large conceptions and controversies. This is certainly true of
our present period and of the Imperial system under Otto. Upon the
Papal side things were very different. From it large statements and claims
came forth: Nicholas I presented to the world a compact and far-reaching
doctrine which only needed to be brought into action in later days;
although, as a matter of fact, even with the Papacy, actual jurisdiction
preceded theory. Ecclesiastics were naturally, more than laymen, con-
cerned with principles (embodied in the Canon Law), of which they were
the special guardians, and they remained so until Roman Law regained
in later centuries its old preeminence as a great system based on thought
and embodied in practice. Its triumph was to be under Frederick
Barbarossa and not under Otto the Great, although its study, quickened
through practical difficulties, began both in France and Lombardy during
the eleventh century. To begin with, churchmen led in the realm of
thought, and, when clash and controversy came, were first in the field.
Laymen, from kings to officials, were, on the other hand, slowly forging,
under pressure of actual need, a system that was strong, coherent, and
destined to grow because it was framed in practice more than in thought.
But for the moment we are concerned with the Empire and not with the
Feudal system, to which we shall return.
The exact extent of St Augustine's influence upon medieval thought
has been much discussed: to write of it here would be to anticipate what
must be said later on. But it came to reinforce, if not to suggest, the
medieval view of society, already held, though not expressed in the detail of
Aquinas or Dante. Life has fewer contradictions than has thought, and in
the work of daily life men reconcile oppositions which, if merely thought
over, might seem insuperable. To the man of practice in those days, as to
the student of St Augustine's City of God, Christian society was one great
whole, within which there were many needs, many ends to reach, and many
varied things to do. But the society itself was one, and Pope or Monarch,
churchman or layman, had to meet its needs and do its work as best he
could. This was something quite unlike the modern theories of Church
:
## p. xiv (#20) #############################################
XİV
Introduction
and State, and it is only by remembering this medieval conception, which
the late Dr Figgis so well expounded to us, that the course of medieval
history can be rightly understood. Under such a conception, with a
scheme arrived at by life rather than by thought, Pope or Bishop, Abbot
or Priest, did secular things with no thought of passing into an alien
domain. Emperor or King, Count or Sheriff, did not hesitate to under-
take, apart, of course, from sanctuary or worship, what would seem to us
specially the churchman's task. Here there were possibilities of concord
and fellowship in work, which the great rulers of our period, whether
clerical or lay, tried to realise. But there were also possibilities of strife,
to be all the sharper because it was a conflict within one society and not
a clash of two.
Only the preparation for this conflict, however, falls within our scope.
But this preparation is so often slurred over that its proper presentation
is essential. The medieval king, like Stuart sovereigns in England, was faced
by a tremendous and expensive task, and had scanty means for meeting it.
The royal demesne was constantly impoverished by frequent grants : to
keep up order as demanded by local needs, and to provide defence as
demanded by the realm at large, called not only for administrative care
but also for money which was not forthcoming. It was easy to use the
machinery of the Church to help towards order : it was easy to raise
something of an income and to provide for defence by laying a hand
upon church revenues and by making ecclesiastical vassals furnish soldiers.
Most of all, horse-soldiers were needed, although to be used with economy
and care, like the artillery of later days: their utility had been learnt
from the ravages of the Danes, able to cover quickly large areas because
of the horses they seized and used. Kings were quick to learn the lesson ;
knight-service grew up, and is recorded first for ecclesiastical lands in
England.
It is therefore first in the estates of the Church that the elements of
feudalism are noted in the double union of jurisdiction and knight-service
with ownership of lands. Thus, beginning with the equally urgent needs of
the crown and of localities, the elements of the Feudal system appeared
and gradually grew until they became the coherent whole of later days. But
its practical formation preceded its expression in theory. Its formation
brought many hardships and opened the way to many abuses. An in-
dividual often finds his greatest temptations linked closely to his special
capabilities and powers, and in the same way, out of this attempt to give
the world order and peace, made by able rulers who were also men of
devoted piety, sprang the abuses which called forth the general movement
of the eleventh century for church reform. This was partly due to a revival
## p. xv (#21) ##############################################
Introduction
XV
а
within the Church itself, a reform both in diocesan and monastic life,
beginning in Lorraine and Burgundy, and seen significantly in the rapid
Western growth of Canon Law. But it was complicated and conditioned
by politics, especially by those of Italy and Germany, imperfectly linked
together by the Empire. Its history in the earlier stages is indicated in
this volume, but must be discussed more fully along with the church policy
of the great Emperor Henry III. Because its history under him is so closely
joined to that of the wider period, reaching from the Synod of Sutri to
the Concordat of Worms, it is left over for a later volume, although the
purely political side of his reign is treated here.
To the German kingship, ruling the great German duchies, inevitably
entangled in Italian affairs and in touch with warlike neighbours as yet
heathen and uncivilised, fell the traditions of the Empire, so far as terri-
torial sway and protectorship of the Papacy was involved. But to the
growing kingdom of France there came naturally the guardianship of
Carolingian civilisation. Mayence, Salzburg, Ratisbon, and Cologne
to begin with, Hamburg and Bamberg at a later date, might be the
great missionary sees of the West, but Rheims and the kingdom to
which it belonged, together with the debateable and Austrasian land of
Lorraine, inherited more distinctly the traditions of thought and learning.
Paris, the cradle of later France, had a preeminence in France greater
than had any city in its Eastern neighbour-land. So France with its
older and more settled life from Roman and Merovingian days had,
although with some drawbacks, a unity and coherence almost unique, just
as it had a history more continuous. Yet even so it had its great fiefs, with
a
their peculiarities of temperament and race, so that much of French
history lies in their gradual incorporation in the kingdom of which Paris
was the birthplace and the capital. And at Paris the varied story of
Scholasticism, that is, of medieval thought, may be said to begin.
Thus the lines upon which later histories were to run were already being
laid for France, Germany, and England, and for Italy something the same
may be said. There to the mixture of races and rule, already great, was
added now the Norman element, to be at first a further cause of discord,
and then, as in France and England, a centre of stability and strength.
The grasp of the Byzantine Emperors on Italy was becoming nominal
and weak: the Lombards, with scanty aspirations after unity, were by
this time settled. In Sicily, and for a time in the South, Saracens had
made a home for themselves, and, as in Spain, were causing locally the
terror which, in a form vaster and more undefined, was to form, later
on, a dark background for the history of Europe as a whole. Rome, for
all the West outside Italy a place of reverence and the seat of Papal
a
## p. xvi (#22) #############################################
xvi
Introduction
jurisdiction, sinking lower but never powerless, was itself the playground
of city factions and lawless nobles revelling in old traditions of civic pride.
But above all the distinction between Northern and Southern Italy was
becoming more pronounced. In the North, still subject to the Emperor,
growing feudalism ran, although with local variations, a normal but
short-lived course. The South, on the other hand, had drawn off into
a separate system of small principalities, where inchoate feudalism was
to be suddenly developed and made singularly durable by the Normans.
But in the North and, as yet, in the South thickly strewn cities were the
ruling factor in political life and social progress. For Italy, as for the other
great lands, the period was one of beginnings, of formations as yet in-
complete. Events on the surface were making national unity hopeless:
forces beneath the surface were slowly producing the civic independence
which was to be the special glory of later medieval Italy.
The fortunes of the Papacy in these centuries were strangely variable. It
is a vast descent from Nicholas I (858-867), who could speak as if “lord
of all the earth,” to Formosus (891–896), dug up from his grave, sen-
tenced by a synod, and Aung into the Tiber. But the repeated recoveries
of the Papacy would be hard to explain if we did not recall its advan-
tages in the traditions of administration, and in the handling of large affairs
in a temper mellowed by experience. Roman synods, as a rule, acted with
discretion, and long traditions, both administrative and diplomatic, en-
hanced the influence of the Western Apostolic See; Gregory VII could
rightly speak of the gravitas Romana. The Empire of Charlemagne
opened up new channels for its power, and the weakness of his successors
gave it much opportunity.
On the side of learning, as on that of Imperial rule, Rome had, how-
ever, ceased to be the capital. Not even the singular learning of Gerbert,
furthered by his experiences in many lands, could do more for Rome
than create a memory for future guidance. Before Gerbert's accession,
however, the Papacy had undergone one almost prophetic change, which
looked forward to Leo IX, while recalling Nicholas I. For a time under
Gregory V (996-999), cousin and chaplain to the Emperor, the first
German Pope, it had ceased to be purely Roman, in interests as in ruler.
It took up once again its old missionary enterprise and care for distant
lands. St Adalbert of Prague, who both as missionary and bishop
typified the unrest of his day, wavering between adventurous activity
and monastic meditation, had come to Rome and was spending some
time in a monastery. He was a Bohemian by birth and had become the
second bishop of Prague (983): besides working there he had taken part
in the conversion of Hungary, and is said to have baptized its great king
## p. xvii (#23) ############################################
Introduction
xvii
St Stephen. Commands from the Pope and Willigis of Mayence sent him
back to his see, but renewed wanderings brought him a martyr's death in
Prussia. He had also visited Poland and there, at Gnesen, he was buried.
Such a career reminds us of St Boniface, but there is a distinction between
the two to be noted. Boniface had always worked with the Frankish
rulers, and had depended greatly upon their help. Adalbert, on the
other hand, looked far more to Rome. Pope, German rulers, and even
German bishops like Pilgrim of Passau, had independent or even contra-
dictory plans of large organisation. In Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland,
the tenth century saw the beginning of national churches, looking to the
Papacy rather than to German kings. Thus were brought about later
complications in politics, Imperial and national, which were to be im-
portant both for general history and for the growth of Papal power.
But although Gregory was thus able to leave his mark on distant lands,
and to legislate for the churches of Germany and France, he could not
maintain himself in Rome itself: he was driven from the city (996), faced
by an anti-Pope John XVI (who has caused confusion in the Papal lists),
and was only restored by the Emperor for one short year of life and rule
before Gerbert succeeded him. The strength of the Papacy lay in its
great traditions and its distant control : its weakness came from factions
at Rome.
Gerbert, born in Auvergne, a monk at Aurillac, a scholar in Spain, at
Rheims added philosophy to his great skill in mathematics. As Abbot of
Bobbio he had unhappy experiences. For a time, through the favour of
Hugh Capet, he held the Archbishopric of Rheims, where he learnt the
strong local feeling of the French episcopate, in which his great predecessor
Hincmar had shared. Otto the Great admired his abilities: Otto II sent
him to Bobbio: Otto III, his devoted pupil, made him Archbishop of
Ravenna (998) and, a year later, Pope. Moulded in many lands, illus-
trating uniquely the unity of Western Christendom, the foremost thinker
of the day, yet on the Papacy he left no mark answering to his great
personality.
Not even insignificant Popes and civic strife lessened Papal power
as might have been supposed. Benedict VIII (1012-1024) came to
the throne after a struggle with the Crescentii: his father, Count
Gregory, of the Tusculan family, had been praefectus navalis under
Otto III, and had done much for the fortification of the city against the
Saracens who had once so greatly harassed John VIII (872–882). Benedict
himself was dependent upon the Emperor for help against Byzantines,
Saracens and factions in Rome itself. He could not be called a Pope of
spiritual influence, but he was an astute politician, and under him the
a
a
## p. xviii (#24) ###########################################
xviii
Introduction
!
ti
1
Papacy not only exercised without question its official power but also
moved a little in the direction of church reform. As a ruler with activity
and energy in days of darkness and degradation, he regained for the
Papacy something of the old international position.
This administrative tradition in papal Rome is often hidden beneath
the personal energy of the greater Popes and the growing strength
gradually gained by the conception of the Papacy as a whole. Already
we can see the effect of the union with the Empire, and of the entangle-
ment with political, and especially with Imperial, interests, upon
which
so much of later history was to turn. Already we can see the growing
influence of Canon Law, beginning, it must be remembered, in outlying
fields, and then slowly centring in Rome itself. The letters of Hincmar,
.
for instance, shew great knowledge of the older law, a constant reference
to it and a grasp of its principles. The rapid spread of the False De-
cretals, in themselves an expression of existing tendencies rather than an
impulse producing them, shew us the system in process of growth. Their
rapid circulation would have been impossible had they not fitted in with
the needs and aspirations of the age. They embodied the idea of the
Church's independence, and indeed of its moral sovereignty, two concep-
tions which, when the ecclesiastical and civil powers worked in alliance,
helped to mould the Christian West into a coherent society, firmly settled
in its older seats and also conquering newer lands. But when in a later
day the two powers came to clash, the same conceptions made the strife
more acute and carried it from the sphere of action into the region of
political literature.
One significant feature of this age of preparation demands special
notice. St Boniface, when he laid the foundation of Church organisation
in the Teutonic lands, had built up a coherent and united Episcopate.
Joined to older elements of ecclesiastical life, it became, under the weaker
Carolingians, strong enough to attempt control of the crown itself. Be-
fore the Papacy could establish its own dominion, it had to subjugate
the Bishops: before it could reform the Church and mould the world
after its own conceptions, it had further to reform an Episcopate, which,
if still powerful, had grown corrupt. Constantine had sought the alliance
of the Church for the welfare of the Empire because it was strong and
united, and both its strength and unity were based upon the Episcopate.
The Teutonic Emperors did the same for the same reasons, and now this
Episcopate had to reconcile for itself conflicting relations with Empire
and Papacy. And in establishing its complete control of the Bishops
the Papacy touched and shook not only the kingly power but the lower
and more local parts of a complicated political system.
## p. xix (#25) #############################################
Introduction
xix
>
-
Those results, however, belong to a later volume. For the present
we are in the period of formation, watching processes mostly beneath the
surface and sometimes tending towards, if not actually in, opposition
among themselves. Thus, the Imperial protection of the Church, working
superficially for its strength, tended, as a secondary result, to weaken and
secularise it, and therefore in the end, to produce a reaction. And, when
it came, that reaction was caused as much by the inner history of the
leading nations as by the central power of Rome and the Papacy itself.
.
It was one side of the complicated processes which, in the period dealt
with here, moulded the Age of Feudalism.
It is well to recall the words of Maitland about Feudalism (Domesday
Book and beyond, pp. 223-5). “If we use the term in this wide sense
223–5
,
then (the barbarian conquests being given us as an unalterable fact)
feudalism means civilisation, the separation of employments, the division
of labour, the possibility of national defence, the possibility of art, science,
literature and learned leisure ; the cathedral, the scriptorium, the library,
are as truly the work of feudalism as is the baronial castle. When
therefore, we speak, as we shall have to speak, of forces which make for
the subjection of peasantry to seignorial justice and which substitute the
manor with its villeins for the free village, we shall—so at least it seems
to us—be speaking not of abnormal forces, not of retrogression, not of
disease, but in the main of normal and healthy growth. Far from us
indeed is the cheerful optimism which refuses to see that the process of
civilisation is often a cruel process; but the England of the eleventh
century is nearer to the England of the nineteenth than is the England
of the seventh, nearer by just four hundred years. ” And again he says:
“Now, no doubt, from one point of view, namely that of universal history,
we do see confusion and retrogression. Ideal possessions which have
.
been won for mankind by the thought of Roman lawyers are lost for a
long while and must be recovered painfully. ” And “it must be ad-
mitted that somehow or another a retrogression takes place, that the
best legal ideas of the ninth and tenth centuries are not so good, so
modern, as those of the third and fourth. ” Historians, he points out,
often begin at the wrong end and start with the earlier centuries, and
yet “if they began with the eleventh century and thence turned to the
earlier time', they might come to another opinion, to the opinion that in
the beginning all was very vague, and that such clearness and precision
as legal thought has attained in the days of the Norman Conquest has
been very gradually attained and is chiefly due to the influence which the
1 Maitland here refers to the Barbarian ideas and institutions, say from the
seventh century onwards.
## p. xx (#26) ##############################################
XX
Introduction
a
:
old heathen world working through the Roman church has exercised upon
the new.
The process that is started when barbarism is brought into
contact with civilisation is not simple. ”
Here the great historian is speaking mainly of legal ideas and legal
history which he taught us to understand. In a wider than a legal sense,
it is the same process which this volume tries to trace and sketch. The
steps and details of the process are to be read in the chapter on Feudalism
and in the chapters on England. But once again it is here the preparatory
stages with which we deal: the full process in English history, for instance,
belongs to a later volume where William the Conqueror and his Domes-
day Book give us firmer ground for a new starting-point. But if it is
more difficult, it is as essential, to study the stages of the more elusive
preparation. It is the meeting-ground of old and new: the history in
which the new, with toil and effort, with discipline and suffering, grows
stronger and richer as it masters the old and is mastered by it.
In these centuries, even more than in others, it is chiefly of kings, of
battles and great events, or of purely technical things like legal grants or
taxes, of which alone we can speak, because it is of them we are mostly
told. We know but little of the general life of the multitude on its social
and economic side. For that we must argue back from later conditions,
checked by the scanty facts we have. Large local variations were more
acute: economic differences between the great trading cities of the Rhine-
land and the neighbouring agricultural lands around Mayence, or again
the differences between the east and west of the German realm, had
greater political significance than they would have to-day. Contrasts
always quicken the flow of commerce and the tide of thought : travel
brought with it greater awakening then than now. Hence thought
moved most quickly along the lines of trade, which were, for the most
part, those of Roman rather than of later medieval days. We know
something of the depopulation due to wars, and of the misery due to
unchecked local tyranny, which drove men to welcome any fixity of rule
and to respect any precedent even if severe and rough. The same causes
made it easier for moral and religious laws to hold a stricter sway, even
if they were often disregarded by passion or caprice. Under the working
of all these forces a more settled life was slowly growing up, although
with many drawbacks and frequent retrogressions.
Under such conditions men were little ready to question anything
that made for fixity and peace. The reign of law, the control of prin-
ciples, were welcome, because they gave relief from the tumultuous
barbarism and violence that reigned around. The past had its legend
of peace: therefore men turned to memories of Roman law and of a rule
## p. xxi (#27) #############################################
Introduction
xxi
supposed to be stable: thus, too, we may explain the eager study of old
ecclesiastical legislation and the ready acceptance of Papal jurisdiction,
even when it was in conflict with local freedom. The future, on the other
hand, seemed full of dread, so men preferred precedent to revolution. In
a world abounding in contrasts and fearful of surprise, strong men trained
in a hard school were able to shape their own path and to lead others
with them. So dynasties, like precedents, had peculiar value. And
moreover from simple fear and pressing need, men were driven closer
together into towns and little villages capable of some defence. In
England some towns appear first, and others grow larger, under the
influence of the Danes: in France it is the time of the villes neuves ;
Italy was thickly sown with castelli, around which houses clustered; in
Germany, Nuremberg and Weissenburg, Rothenburg on the Taube with
other towns are mentioned for the first time now: it was a period of civic
growth in its beginnings. Socially too men were drawn into associations
with common interests and fellowship of various kinds, beginning another
great chapter of economic history. Thus in these centuries men were
beginning to realise, first in tendency and afterwards in process, the
power and attraction of the corporate life. This was to be, in later
centuries, one great feature of medieval society. The old tie of kinship,
with its resulting blood-feuds, was already weakening under the two
solvents of Christianity and of more settled local seats. The attempt to
combine in one society conflicting personal laws, Roman or barbarian at
the choice of individuals (expressed, for instance, in the Constitutio Romana
of Lothar in 824) was causing chaos. Hence, in our centuries, society was
seeking for a more stable foundation, and out of disorder comparative
order arose. Dynasties, precedents, traditions, and fellowships for pro-
tection and mutual help had already begun to shape the medieval world
as we shall see it later in active work.
This general view gives significance to the constitutional and eccle-
siastical side of the history, but it gives it perhaps even more to the
history of education, of learning and of art. The new races brought
new strength, and were to make great histories of their own.
see in our period how nearly all that brought high interests and ideals,
nearly all that made for beauty and for richness of life, came from the
old, although it was grasped with new strength and slowly worked out
into a many-sided life beneath the pressure of new conditions. We
have moved in a time of preparation, guided by the past but neverthe-
less working out a great and orderly life of its own.
But we
## p. xxii (#28) ############################################
xxii
CORRIGENDA,
VOL. II.
p. 279, par. 2, l. 4. For Kusistan read Khuzistan.
p. 369. For Zubair read Zuhair throughout except 'Abdallāh ibn Zubair.
p. 395, 11. 33 ff. The troops which became the theme of Obsequium were not the
palatine troops, but that portion of the scholae (imperial guards) which was
quartered in Asia.
p. 396, last line but one. For retreated read returned.
p. 402, 1. 36. For Eugenius read Martin, and dele note. Maximus was arrested in
653 (E. H. R. xxxi, 1916, p. 147).
p. 405, 11. 27 ff. The mutiny was not in 670, but in 681-2 after the two junior
prin s' deposition (E. H. R. xxx, 1915, p. 42).
p. 406. For 11. 8–11 read At the beginning of September 685 Constantine died of
dyse „tery and was succeeded by Justinian (E. H. R. xxx, 1915, pp. 50-51).
p. 525, 1. 2 from end. For Aethelreda read Aetheldreda.
p. 534, 1. 3. For Emmeran read Emmeram.
p. 541, 1. 12. For 752 read 751.
p. 715, last line (Gen. Bibl. ). For 1808 read 1908. New edn. 1915.
p. 791 (Bibl. Chap. xvi (A) $ 2, Plummer, A. For Library of Patristic Theology
read Library of Historic Theology.
p. 799 (Bibl. Chap. xvii), l. 4 from end. For Ibid. read TRHS.
p. 819 (Chronological Table). Under 636 omit “Issue of the Ekthesis," and insert it
under 638.
CORRECTIONS TO INDEX. VOL. II.
p. 822, col. 1, 11. 9-12. Read 'Abbās, son of Walid, military successes of, 412, 414 sq-
p. 825, col. 2. Under Amorium, for “ 396; . . . ib. ;" read taken by Arabs, 396;
recovered, 397;
p. 826, col. 2. After Anşār, the, insert 313.
Ibid. Under Antioch, dele 407.
p. 852, col. 2, 1. 6 from end. For Heraclius, son of the emperor, read Heraclius II.
p. 853, col. 1. For the two entries Hijaz read Hijaz, province, 334; opposes Yazid, 359.
p. 853, col. 2. Hishām, Caliph and Hisham, son of 'Abd-al-Malik are the same person.
p. 858, col. 2. For Kusistan read Khuzistan.
p. 868, col. 1. Othman, Caliph and Othman ibn 'Affan are the same person.
p. 871, col. 2. In list of Popes insert Donus.
p. 873, col. 1. Under Reggio, omit (Rhegium) and Maximus at, 403;
Ibid. Under Rhegium, omit “see Reggio,” and insert Maximus at, 403.
p. 874, col. 2. Insert Romuald, Duke of Benevento, 394.
p. 880, col. 1.
## p. vii (#13) #############################################
Preface
vii
contributors, to whom we owe so much, have been of great service in
various ways. And it is needless to say that to the staff of the University
Press, working under peculiar difficulties caused by the war, we owe much
for constant and unfailing help.
A general historical sketch has been added as an Introduction. It is
in no way meant, however, as an outline of the history or as a summary
of the particular chapters, but only as a general view of the period in its
special characteristics and in relation to the ages which follow. It will
also be seen that notes, short and significant, have been added as before
where necessary: they are possibly more numerous than in preceding
volumes, and two or three genealogical tables have also been given.
J. P. W.
July, 1921.
## p. viii (#14) ############################################
3
INTRODUCTION.
The volume before this brought us to the death of Charlemagne, with
whom in many senses a new age began. He, like no one either before or
after, summed up the imperishable memories of Roman rule and the new
force of the new races which were soon to form states of their own.
Although we are compelled to divide history into periods, in the truest
sense history never begins, just as it never ends. The Frankish Kingdom,
like the Carolingian Empire, is a testimony of this truth. It cannot be
rightly understood without a knowledge of the Roman past, with its
law, its unity, its civilisation, and its religion. But neither can it be
understood without a knowledge of the new conceptions and the new
elements of a new society, which the barbarian invaders of the Roman
West had brought with them. It was upon the many-sided foundation
of the Carolingian Empire that the new world of Europe was now to
grow up. Yet even in that new world we are continually confronted
with the massive relics and undying traces of the old. The statesman and
warrior Charles, the great English scholar Alcuin, typify some parts of
that great inheritance. But how much the Empire owed to the personal
force and character of Charlemagne himself was soon to be seen under
his weaker successors, even if their weakness has often been exaggerated.
Such is one side of the story with which this volume begins.
We of to-day, perhaps, are too much inclined to forget the moulding
force of institutions, of kingship, of law, of traditions of learning, and of
ideas handed down from the past. When we see the work of Charle-
magne seeming to crumble away as his strong hand fell powerless in
death, we are too apt to look only at the lawlessness, the confusion, and
the strife left behind. In face of such a picture it is needful to seek out
the great centres of unity, which were still left, and around which the
forms of politics and society were to crystallise slowly. Imperial tradi-
tions, exemplified, for instance, in the legal forms of diplomas, and finding
expression as much in personal loyalty to rulers of Carolingian descent as
in political institutions, gave one such centre. The Christian Church,
with its civilising force, had even a local centre in Rome, to which
St Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, had looked for guidance and
control. Other ancient cities, too, in which Roman civilisation and
## p. ix (#15) ##############################################
Introduction
ix
Christianity had remained, shaken but still strong, did much to keep up
that continuity with the past upon which the life of the future depended.
But beneath the general unity of its belief and its organisation, the
Church was always in close touch with local life, and therefore had its
local differences between place and place. It had still much to do in the
more settled territories which were growing up into France, Germany and
England. On the borders of the Empire it had further fresh ground to
break and new races to mould. Even within the Empire it was before
long to receive new invaders to educate and train : Normans and Danes
were to bear witness, before our period ends, to the spirit and the
strength in which it wrought. As is always the case when two powers
are attempting the same task in different ways and by different means,
there was inevitable rivalry and strife between Empire and Church as
they grew together within one common society. But such generalisations
give, after all, an imperfect picture. Beneath them the details of eccle-
siastical life, in Papacy, diocese, parish and monastery, are also part of
the common history, and have received the notice which they can there-
fore claim.
But if political history and ecclesiastical history present us with two
centres of unity in a tangled field, thought, literature, and art were no less
distinctly, though in other ways, guardians of unity and fosterers of future
life. They too brought down from the past seeds for the new world to tend.
So their story also, with its records of inheritance, plainer to read, espe-
cially in its Byzantine influences, than those of politics or ecclesiastical
matters, is an essential part of our task. Politics, Religion, and Thought
in all its many-sided fields, summed up for the future Western world all the
remnants of the past which were most essential and fruitful for genera-
tions to come. They were the three great forces that made for unity
and, with unity, for civilisation.
Taking all this for granted, then, we pass to the separate history of
the individual countries just growing into states. For a time, they grow
within the common mould of the Empire, and Carolingian traditions
bind them to the past. Dimly to begin with, but with growing plain-
ness, the realms of France, Germany, Italy, Lorraine, and Burgundy are
seen taking their later territorial and constitutional shapes. England lay
somewhat apart, insular, and therefore separated from the Empire, but by
this very insularity everywhere exposed to Northmen and Danes. Here,
too, as on the continent, statesman-like kings and far-sighted ecclesiastics
worked together. The growth of territorial unity is easiest of all to trace,
for it can be made plain in maps. But the growth of unity of thought and
interests, of constitutions and social forms, is harder to see and to express;
C. MED, HIST. VOL. III
b
## p. x (#16) ###############################################
х
Introduction
I
1
it is easier to estimate the work of Ecgbert, Edward the Elder, and
Aethelstan than the more many-sided achievements of Alfred and Dun-
stan, or the more pervasive influence of the great Northern school which
gave us Bede and Alcuin. But the peculiarity of England's position and
history is most significant for constitutional growths, and it is, therefore,
in connexion with English affairs that the origins of Feudalism are best
investigated and discussed. Scientific history begins with the observation
of resemblances and with classification by likeness. Then it passes on to
detect differences, and to note their significance. Nowhere is there more
need to remember these twin methods than in the study of Feudalism,
where the Cambridge scholar Maitland was our daring and yet cautious
guide. Processes and details which we notice in English history have
their parallels elsewhere. If the centuries we traverse here have a large
common inheritance, they also have at the same time, in spite of dif-
ferences in place and character, something of a common history. What
is said, therefore, as to the origins of English Feudalism also applies, with
due allowance for great local differences, to Germany, France, and Italy ;
even indeed to Spain, although there the presence and the conquests of
the Muslims impressed a peculiar stamp upon its institutions.
The period with which we have to deal is more than most periods
what is sometimes called transitional ; but this only means that it is more
difficult than other periods to treat by itself. History is always changing
and transitional, but keeps its own continuity even when we find it
hard to discern. Breaches of continuity are rare, although in this period
we have two of them: one, the establishment of the Moors in Spain, and
the other, more widely diffused and less restricted locally, the inroads of
the Northmen ending in the establishment of the Normans, whose con-
quest of England, as the beginning of a new era, is kept for a later
volume. In many other periods some histories of states or institutions
cease to be significant or else come to an end. Of this particular
can say that it is specially and peculiarly one of beginnings, one in which
older institutions and older forms of thought are gradually passing into
later stages, which sometimes seem to be altogether new. The true sig-
nificance, therefore, of the age can only be seen when we look ahead, and
bear in mind the outlines of what in coming volumes must be traced in
detail. This is specially true of the Feudalism which was everywhere
gradually growing up, and, therefore, to understand its growth it is well
to look ahead and picture for ourselves the system which forms the back-
ground for later history, although even here it is in process of growth
and its economic and military causes are at work.
The dissolution of the Carolingian Empire ends its first stage with
4
age
we
## p. xi (#17) ##############################################
Introduction
xi
a
the Treaty of Verdun, following the Oath of Strasbourg. The oath is
in itself a monument of the division between Romance and Teutonic
languages, a linguistic difference which soon joined itself to other
differences of race and circumstance. At Verdun Louis the German took
most of the imperial lands in which a Teutonic tongue was spoken :
Charles took mainly lands in which Romance prevailed. This difference
was to grow, to become more acute and to pass into rivalry as years went
by, and the rivalry was to make the old Austrasia into a debateable land;
so that, for the later France and Germany, the year 843 may be taken as a
convenient beginning in historic record of their separate national lives.
Henceforth we have to follow separate histories, although the process of
definite separation is gradual and slow.
At Tribur in 887 rebels deposed Charles the Fat, and next year the
Eastern Kingdom proclaimed Arnulf; when his son Louis the Child died
in 911, election and recognition by Frankish, Saxon, Alemannian (or
Swabian), and Bavarian leaders made Conrad the first of German kings.
In this process, unity, expressed by kingship, and disunion, expressed by
the great tribal duchies which shared in later elections, were combined.
And through many reigns, certainly throughout our period, the existence
of these tribal duchies is the pivot upon which German history turns.
To the king his subjects looked for defence against outside enemies: the
Empire had accepted this task, and Charlemagne had well achieved it.
But his weaker successors had neglected it, and as they made default,
local rulers, and in Germany, the tribal dukes, above all, took the vacant
place. But the appearance on all hands of local rulers, which is so often
taken as a mere sign of disunion, as a mere process of decay, is, beneath
this superficial appearance, a sign of local life, a drawing together of
scattered elements of strength, under the pressure of local needs, and,
above all, for local defence. If on a wider field of disorder the appear-
ance of great kings and emperors made for strength and happiness,
precisely the same was afterwards the case in the smaller fields. Here
too the emergence of local dynasties also made for strength and happiness.
Local rulers, then, to begin with, accepted the leadership in common local
life. And they did so somewhat in the spirit with which Gregory the
Great, deserted by Imperial rulers, had in his day boldly taken upon
himself the care and defence of Rome against barbarians. So for Germany,
as for France, the national history is concerned as much with the story of
the smaller dynasties as with that of the central government.
But a distinction is to be noted between the course of this mingled
central and local history in Germany and France. In France the growth
of local order was older than it was in Germany; towns with Roman
a
62
## p. xii (#18) #############################################
xii
Introduction
traditions were more abundant and life generally was more settled. In
Germany a greater burden was, therefore, thrown upon the kings and,
as was so generally the case with men in those days, they rose to their
responsibilities. Accordingly the kingship grew in strength, and Otto the
First was so firmly seated at home as to be able to intervene with success
abroad. His Marches, as later history was to shew, served adequately
their purpose of defence, and German suzerainty over the neighbouring
lands became more real. The basis of his power was Saxony, less
feudalised than the other duchies and peopled mainly by freemen well
able to fight for their ruler. Otto understood, moreover, how neces-
sary for strength and order was close fellowship in work' between State
and Church. Throughout his land the Bishops, alike by duty and
tradition, were apostles of civilisation, and, on the outskirts of the king-
dom above all, the spread of Christianity meant the growth of German
influence, much as it had done under Charlemagne himself. To the
Bishops, already overburdened with their spiritual charge, were now
entrusted administrative duties. In England individual Bishops were
counsellors of the king: in France Bishops, although later to be con-
trolled by neighbouring nobles, had been a more coherent body than
elsewhere, and the legislative authority of synods had been so great that
the Episcopate had even striven to become the leading power in the realm.
But it was characteristic of Germany to make the Bishops, with large
territories and richly endowed, a part, and a great part, of the administra-
tion in its local control, working for the Crown and trusted by it, but with
the independent power of Counts or even more: thus there grew up in
Germany the great Prince-Bishoprics, as marked a feature of the political
life as the tribal Duchies but destined to endure still longer. And further-
more, because of this close alliance between German Crown and German
Episcopate, the later struggle between Church and King, which arose out
of forces already at work, was to shake with deeper movement the edifice
of royal power. Because of this special feature of German polity, the
eleventh century strife between Pope and German King meant more for
Germany than it did for other lands. And this was something quite
apart from the revival of the Western Roman Empire.
Otto's political revival, with its lasting influence on history, was in the
first place a bringing to life again of the Carolingian Empire. Like the
earlier Empire it arose out of the needs of the Church at Rome: Otto the
Great, like Charlemagne and his forerunners, had come into Italy, and
Rome with the Papacy was the centre, indeed the storm-point, of Italian
politics and strife. But Otto, unlike Charlemagne, was more a protector
than a ruler of the Church, and here too, as on the political side of the
a
## p. xiii (#19) ############################################
Introduction
xiii
a
Empire, he set out from a distinctively German rather than from a general
standpoint. His first care was rather with the German Church, needed
as an ally for his internal government, than with the Papacy representing
a general conception of wide importance. The new series of Emperors
are concerned with the Papacy more as it affected Germany and Italy
than under its aspect of a world-wide power built on a compact theory.
The future history of the Empire in its relations to the Papacy turns, then,
mainly upon the fortunes of the Church first in Germany and then in Italy:
conflict arises, when it does arise, out of actual working conditions and
not out of large conceptions and controversies. This is certainly true of
our present period and of the Imperial system under Otto. Upon the
Papal side things were very different. From it large statements and claims
came forth: Nicholas I presented to the world a compact and far-reaching
doctrine which only needed to be brought into action in later days;
although, as a matter of fact, even with the Papacy, actual jurisdiction
preceded theory. Ecclesiastics were naturally, more than laymen, con-
cerned with principles (embodied in the Canon Law), of which they were
the special guardians, and they remained so until Roman Law regained
in later centuries its old preeminence as a great system based on thought
and embodied in practice. Its triumph was to be under Frederick
Barbarossa and not under Otto the Great, although its study, quickened
through practical difficulties, began both in France and Lombardy during
the eleventh century. To begin with, churchmen led in the realm of
thought, and, when clash and controversy came, were first in the field.
Laymen, from kings to officials, were, on the other hand, slowly forging,
under pressure of actual need, a system that was strong, coherent, and
destined to grow because it was framed in practice more than in thought.
But for the moment we are concerned with the Empire and not with the
Feudal system, to which we shall return.
The exact extent of St Augustine's influence upon medieval thought
has been much discussed: to write of it here would be to anticipate what
must be said later on. But it came to reinforce, if not to suggest, the
medieval view of society, already held, though not expressed in the detail of
Aquinas or Dante. Life has fewer contradictions than has thought, and in
the work of daily life men reconcile oppositions which, if merely thought
over, might seem insuperable. To the man of practice in those days, as to
the student of St Augustine's City of God, Christian society was one great
whole, within which there were many needs, many ends to reach, and many
varied things to do. But the society itself was one, and Pope or Monarch,
churchman or layman, had to meet its needs and do its work as best he
could. This was something quite unlike the modern theories of Church
:
## p. xiv (#20) #############################################
XİV
Introduction
and State, and it is only by remembering this medieval conception, which
the late Dr Figgis so well expounded to us, that the course of medieval
history can be rightly understood. Under such a conception, with a
scheme arrived at by life rather than by thought, Pope or Bishop, Abbot
or Priest, did secular things with no thought of passing into an alien
domain. Emperor or King, Count or Sheriff, did not hesitate to under-
take, apart, of course, from sanctuary or worship, what would seem to us
specially the churchman's task. Here there were possibilities of concord
and fellowship in work, which the great rulers of our period, whether
clerical or lay, tried to realise. But there were also possibilities of strife,
to be all the sharper because it was a conflict within one society and not
a clash of two.
Only the preparation for this conflict, however, falls within our scope.
But this preparation is so often slurred over that its proper presentation
is essential. The medieval king, like Stuart sovereigns in England, was faced
by a tremendous and expensive task, and had scanty means for meeting it.
The royal demesne was constantly impoverished by frequent grants : to
keep up order as demanded by local needs, and to provide defence as
demanded by the realm at large, called not only for administrative care
but also for money which was not forthcoming. It was easy to use the
machinery of the Church to help towards order : it was easy to raise
something of an income and to provide for defence by laying a hand
upon church revenues and by making ecclesiastical vassals furnish soldiers.
Most of all, horse-soldiers were needed, although to be used with economy
and care, like the artillery of later days: their utility had been learnt
from the ravages of the Danes, able to cover quickly large areas because
of the horses they seized and used. Kings were quick to learn the lesson ;
knight-service grew up, and is recorded first for ecclesiastical lands in
England.
It is therefore first in the estates of the Church that the elements of
feudalism are noted in the double union of jurisdiction and knight-service
with ownership of lands. Thus, beginning with the equally urgent needs of
the crown and of localities, the elements of the Feudal system appeared
and gradually grew until they became the coherent whole of later days. But
its practical formation preceded its expression in theory. Its formation
brought many hardships and opened the way to many abuses. An in-
dividual often finds his greatest temptations linked closely to his special
capabilities and powers, and in the same way, out of this attempt to give
the world order and peace, made by able rulers who were also men of
devoted piety, sprang the abuses which called forth the general movement
of the eleventh century for church reform. This was partly due to a revival
## p. xv (#21) ##############################################
Introduction
XV
а
within the Church itself, a reform both in diocesan and monastic life,
beginning in Lorraine and Burgundy, and seen significantly in the rapid
Western growth of Canon Law. But it was complicated and conditioned
by politics, especially by those of Italy and Germany, imperfectly linked
together by the Empire. Its history in the earlier stages is indicated in
this volume, but must be discussed more fully along with the church policy
of the great Emperor Henry III. Because its history under him is so closely
joined to that of the wider period, reaching from the Synod of Sutri to
the Concordat of Worms, it is left over for a later volume, although the
purely political side of his reign is treated here.
To the German kingship, ruling the great German duchies, inevitably
entangled in Italian affairs and in touch with warlike neighbours as yet
heathen and uncivilised, fell the traditions of the Empire, so far as terri-
torial sway and protectorship of the Papacy was involved. But to the
growing kingdom of France there came naturally the guardianship of
Carolingian civilisation. Mayence, Salzburg, Ratisbon, and Cologne
to begin with, Hamburg and Bamberg at a later date, might be the
great missionary sees of the West, but Rheims and the kingdom to
which it belonged, together with the debateable and Austrasian land of
Lorraine, inherited more distinctly the traditions of thought and learning.
Paris, the cradle of later France, had a preeminence in France greater
than had any city in its Eastern neighbour-land. So France with its
older and more settled life from Roman and Merovingian days had,
although with some drawbacks, a unity and coherence almost unique, just
as it had a history more continuous. Yet even so it had its great fiefs, with
a
their peculiarities of temperament and race, so that much of French
history lies in their gradual incorporation in the kingdom of which Paris
was the birthplace and the capital. And at Paris the varied story of
Scholasticism, that is, of medieval thought, may be said to begin.
Thus the lines upon which later histories were to run were already being
laid for France, Germany, and England, and for Italy something the same
may be said. There to the mixture of races and rule, already great, was
added now the Norman element, to be at first a further cause of discord,
and then, as in France and England, a centre of stability and strength.
The grasp of the Byzantine Emperors on Italy was becoming nominal
and weak: the Lombards, with scanty aspirations after unity, were by
this time settled. In Sicily, and for a time in the South, Saracens had
made a home for themselves, and, as in Spain, were causing locally the
terror which, in a form vaster and more undefined, was to form, later
on, a dark background for the history of Europe as a whole. Rome, for
all the West outside Italy a place of reverence and the seat of Papal
a
## p. xvi (#22) #############################################
xvi
Introduction
jurisdiction, sinking lower but never powerless, was itself the playground
of city factions and lawless nobles revelling in old traditions of civic pride.
But above all the distinction between Northern and Southern Italy was
becoming more pronounced. In the North, still subject to the Emperor,
growing feudalism ran, although with local variations, a normal but
short-lived course. The South, on the other hand, had drawn off into
a separate system of small principalities, where inchoate feudalism was
to be suddenly developed and made singularly durable by the Normans.
But in the North and, as yet, in the South thickly strewn cities were the
ruling factor in political life and social progress. For Italy, as for the other
great lands, the period was one of beginnings, of formations as yet in-
complete. Events on the surface were making national unity hopeless:
forces beneath the surface were slowly producing the civic independence
which was to be the special glory of later medieval Italy.
The fortunes of the Papacy in these centuries were strangely variable. It
is a vast descent from Nicholas I (858-867), who could speak as if “lord
of all the earth,” to Formosus (891–896), dug up from his grave, sen-
tenced by a synod, and Aung into the Tiber. But the repeated recoveries
of the Papacy would be hard to explain if we did not recall its advan-
tages in the traditions of administration, and in the handling of large affairs
in a temper mellowed by experience. Roman synods, as a rule, acted with
discretion, and long traditions, both administrative and diplomatic, en-
hanced the influence of the Western Apostolic See; Gregory VII could
rightly speak of the gravitas Romana. The Empire of Charlemagne
opened up new channels for its power, and the weakness of his successors
gave it much opportunity.
On the side of learning, as on that of Imperial rule, Rome had, how-
ever, ceased to be the capital. Not even the singular learning of Gerbert,
furthered by his experiences in many lands, could do more for Rome
than create a memory for future guidance. Before Gerbert's accession,
however, the Papacy had undergone one almost prophetic change, which
looked forward to Leo IX, while recalling Nicholas I. For a time under
Gregory V (996-999), cousin and chaplain to the Emperor, the first
German Pope, it had ceased to be purely Roman, in interests as in ruler.
It took up once again its old missionary enterprise and care for distant
lands. St Adalbert of Prague, who both as missionary and bishop
typified the unrest of his day, wavering between adventurous activity
and monastic meditation, had come to Rome and was spending some
time in a monastery. He was a Bohemian by birth and had become the
second bishop of Prague (983): besides working there he had taken part
in the conversion of Hungary, and is said to have baptized its great king
## p. xvii (#23) ############################################
Introduction
xvii
St Stephen. Commands from the Pope and Willigis of Mayence sent him
back to his see, but renewed wanderings brought him a martyr's death in
Prussia. He had also visited Poland and there, at Gnesen, he was buried.
Such a career reminds us of St Boniface, but there is a distinction between
the two to be noted. Boniface had always worked with the Frankish
rulers, and had depended greatly upon their help. Adalbert, on the
other hand, looked far more to Rome. Pope, German rulers, and even
German bishops like Pilgrim of Passau, had independent or even contra-
dictory plans of large organisation. In Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland,
the tenth century saw the beginning of national churches, looking to the
Papacy rather than to German kings. Thus were brought about later
complications in politics, Imperial and national, which were to be im-
portant both for general history and for the growth of Papal power.
But although Gregory was thus able to leave his mark on distant lands,
and to legislate for the churches of Germany and France, he could not
maintain himself in Rome itself: he was driven from the city (996), faced
by an anti-Pope John XVI (who has caused confusion in the Papal lists),
and was only restored by the Emperor for one short year of life and rule
before Gerbert succeeded him. The strength of the Papacy lay in its
great traditions and its distant control : its weakness came from factions
at Rome.
Gerbert, born in Auvergne, a monk at Aurillac, a scholar in Spain, at
Rheims added philosophy to his great skill in mathematics. As Abbot of
Bobbio he had unhappy experiences. For a time, through the favour of
Hugh Capet, he held the Archbishopric of Rheims, where he learnt the
strong local feeling of the French episcopate, in which his great predecessor
Hincmar had shared. Otto the Great admired his abilities: Otto II sent
him to Bobbio: Otto III, his devoted pupil, made him Archbishop of
Ravenna (998) and, a year later, Pope. Moulded in many lands, illus-
trating uniquely the unity of Western Christendom, the foremost thinker
of the day, yet on the Papacy he left no mark answering to his great
personality.
Not even insignificant Popes and civic strife lessened Papal power
as might have been supposed. Benedict VIII (1012-1024) came to
the throne after a struggle with the Crescentii: his father, Count
Gregory, of the Tusculan family, had been praefectus navalis under
Otto III, and had done much for the fortification of the city against the
Saracens who had once so greatly harassed John VIII (872–882). Benedict
himself was dependent upon the Emperor for help against Byzantines,
Saracens and factions in Rome itself. He could not be called a Pope of
spiritual influence, but he was an astute politician, and under him the
a
a
## p. xviii (#24) ###########################################
xviii
Introduction
!
ti
1
Papacy not only exercised without question its official power but also
moved a little in the direction of church reform. As a ruler with activity
and energy in days of darkness and degradation, he regained for the
Papacy something of the old international position.
This administrative tradition in papal Rome is often hidden beneath
the personal energy of the greater Popes and the growing strength
gradually gained by the conception of the Papacy as a whole. Already
we can see the effect of the union with the Empire, and of the entangle-
ment with political, and especially with Imperial, interests, upon
which
so much of later history was to turn. Already we can see the growing
influence of Canon Law, beginning, it must be remembered, in outlying
fields, and then slowly centring in Rome itself. The letters of Hincmar,
.
for instance, shew great knowledge of the older law, a constant reference
to it and a grasp of its principles. The rapid spread of the False De-
cretals, in themselves an expression of existing tendencies rather than an
impulse producing them, shew us the system in process of growth. Their
rapid circulation would have been impossible had they not fitted in with
the needs and aspirations of the age. They embodied the idea of the
Church's independence, and indeed of its moral sovereignty, two concep-
tions which, when the ecclesiastical and civil powers worked in alliance,
helped to mould the Christian West into a coherent society, firmly settled
in its older seats and also conquering newer lands. But when in a later
day the two powers came to clash, the same conceptions made the strife
more acute and carried it from the sphere of action into the region of
political literature.
One significant feature of this age of preparation demands special
notice. St Boniface, when he laid the foundation of Church organisation
in the Teutonic lands, had built up a coherent and united Episcopate.
Joined to older elements of ecclesiastical life, it became, under the weaker
Carolingians, strong enough to attempt control of the crown itself. Be-
fore the Papacy could establish its own dominion, it had to subjugate
the Bishops: before it could reform the Church and mould the world
after its own conceptions, it had further to reform an Episcopate, which,
if still powerful, had grown corrupt. Constantine had sought the alliance
of the Church for the welfare of the Empire because it was strong and
united, and both its strength and unity were based upon the Episcopate.
The Teutonic Emperors did the same for the same reasons, and now this
Episcopate had to reconcile for itself conflicting relations with Empire
and Papacy. And in establishing its complete control of the Bishops
the Papacy touched and shook not only the kingly power but the lower
and more local parts of a complicated political system.
## p. xix (#25) #############################################
Introduction
xix
>
-
Those results, however, belong to a later volume. For the present
we are in the period of formation, watching processes mostly beneath the
surface and sometimes tending towards, if not actually in, opposition
among themselves. Thus, the Imperial protection of the Church, working
superficially for its strength, tended, as a secondary result, to weaken and
secularise it, and therefore in the end, to produce a reaction. And, when
it came, that reaction was caused as much by the inner history of the
leading nations as by the central power of Rome and the Papacy itself.
.
It was one side of the complicated processes which, in the period dealt
with here, moulded the Age of Feudalism.
It is well to recall the words of Maitland about Feudalism (Domesday
Book and beyond, pp. 223-5). “If we use the term in this wide sense
223–5
,
then (the barbarian conquests being given us as an unalterable fact)
feudalism means civilisation, the separation of employments, the division
of labour, the possibility of national defence, the possibility of art, science,
literature and learned leisure ; the cathedral, the scriptorium, the library,
are as truly the work of feudalism as is the baronial castle. When
therefore, we speak, as we shall have to speak, of forces which make for
the subjection of peasantry to seignorial justice and which substitute the
manor with its villeins for the free village, we shall—so at least it seems
to us—be speaking not of abnormal forces, not of retrogression, not of
disease, but in the main of normal and healthy growth. Far from us
indeed is the cheerful optimism which refuses to see that the process of
civilisation is often a cruel process; but the England of the eleventh
century is nearer to the England of the nineteenth than is the England
of the seventh, nearer by just four hundred years. ” And again he says:
“Now, no doubt, from one point of view, namely that of universal history,
we do see confusion and retrogression. Ideal possessions which have
.
been won for mankind by the thought of Roman lawyers are lost for a
long while and must be recovered painfully. ” And “it must be ad-
mitted that somehow or another a retrogression takes place, that the
best legal ideas of the ninth and tenth centuries are not so good, so
modern, as those of the third and fourth. ” Historians, he points out,
often begin at the wrong end and start with the earlier centuries, and
yet “if they began with the eleventh century and thence turned to the
earlier time', they might come to another opinion, to the opinion that in
the beginning all was very vague, and that such clearness and precision
as legal thought has attained in the days of the Norman Conquest has
been very gradually attained and is chiefly due to the influence which the
1 Maitland here refers to the Barbarian ideas and institutions, say from the
seventh century onwards.
## p. xx (#26) ##############################################
XX
Introduction
a
:
old heathen world working through the Roman church has exercised upon
the new.
The process that is started when barbarism is brought into
contact with civilisation is not simple. ”
Here the great historian is speaking mainly of legal ideas and legal
history which he taught us to understand. In a wider than a legal sense,
it is the same process which this volume tries to trace and sketch. The
steps and details of the process are to be read in the chapter on Feudalism
and in the chapters on England. But once again it is here the preparatory
stages with which we deal: the full process in English history, for instance,
belongs to a later volume where William the Conqueror and his Domes-
day Book give us firmer ground for a new starting-point. But if it is
more difficult, it is as essential, to study the stages of the more elusive
preparation. It is the meeting-ground of old and new: the history in
which the new, with toil and effort, with discipline and suffering, grows
stronger and richer as it masters the old and is mastered by it.
In these centuries, even more than in others, it is chiefly of kings, of
battles and great events, or of purely technical things like legal grants or
taxes, of which alone we can speak, because it is of them we are mostly
told. We know but little of the general life of the multitude on its social
and economic side. For that we must argue back from later conditions,
checked by the scanty facts we have. Large local variations were more
acute: economic differences between the great trading cities of the Rhine-
land and the neighbouring agricultural lands around Mayence, or again
the differences between the east and west of the German realm, had
greater political significance than they would have to-day. Contrasts
always quicken the flow of commerce and the tide of thought : travel
brought with it greater awakening then than now. Hence thought
moved most quickly along the lines of trade, which were, for the most
part, those of Roman rather than of later medieval days. We know
something of the depopulation due to wars, and of the misery due to
unchecked local tyranny, which drove men to welcome any fixity of rule
and to respect any precedent even if severe and rough. The same causes
made it easier for moral and religious laws to hold a stricter sway, even
if they were often disregarded by passion or caprice. Under the working
of all these forces a more settled life was slowly growing up, although
with many drawbacks and frequent retrogressions.
Under such conditions men were little ready to question anything
that made for fixity and peace. The reign of law, the control of prin-
ciples, were welcome, because they gave relief from the tumultuous
barbarism and violence that reigned around. The past had its legend
of peace: therefore men turned to memories of Roman law and of a rule
## p. xxi (#27) #############################################
Introduction
xxi
supposed to be stable: thus, too, we may explain the eager study of old
ecclesiastical legislation and the ready acceptance of Papal jurisdiction,
even when it was in conflict with local freedom. The future, on the other
hand, seemed full of dread, so men preferred precedent to revolution. In
a world abounding in contrasts and fearful of surprise, strong men trained
in a hard school were able to shape their own path and to lead others
with them. So dynasties, like precedents, had peculiar value. And
moreover from simple fear and pressing need, men were driven closer
together into towns and little villages capable of some defence. In
England some towns appear first, and others grow larger, under the
influence of the Danes: in France it is the time of the villes neuves ;
Italy was thickly sown with castelli, around which houses clustered; in
Germany, Nuremberg and Weissenburg, Rothenburg on the Taube with
other towns are mentioned for the first time now: it was a period of civic
growth in its beginnings. Socially too men were drawn into associations
with common interests and fellowship of various kinds, beginning another
great chapter of economic history. Thus in these centuries men were
beginning to realise, first in tendency and afterwards in process, the
power and attraction of the corporate life. This was to be, in later
centuries, one great feature of medieval society. The old tie of kinship,
with its resulting blood-feuds, was already weakening under the two
solvents of Christianity and of more settled local seats. The attempt to
combine in one society conflicting personal laws, Roman or barbarian at
the choice of individuals (expressed, for instance, in the Constitutio Romana
of Lothar in 824) was causing chaos. Hence, in our centuries, society was
seeking for a more stable foundation, and out of disorder comparative
order arose. Dynasties, precedents, traditions, and fellowships for pro-
tection and mutual help had already begun to shape the medieval world
as we shall see it later in active work.
This general view gives significance to the constitutional and eccle-
siastical side of the history, but it gives it perhaps even more to the
history of education, of learning and of art. The new races brought
new strength, and were to make great histories of their own.
see in our period how nearly all that brought high interests and ideals,
nearly all that made for beauty and for richness of life, came from the
old, although it was grasped with new strength and slowly worked out
into a many-sided life beneath the pressure of new conditions. We
have moved in a time of preparation, guided by the past but neverthe-
less working out a great and orderly life of its own.
But we
## p. xxii (#28) ############################################
xxii
CORRIGENDA,
VOL. II.
p. 279, par. 2, l. 4. For Kusistan read Khuzistan.
p. 369. For Zubair read Zuhair throughout except 'Abdallāh ibn Zubair.
p. 395, 11. 33 ff. The troops which became the theme of Obsequium were not the
palatine troops, but that portion of the scholae (imperial guards) which was
quartered in Asia.
p. 396, last line but one. For retreated read returned.
p. 402, 1. 36. For Eugenius read Martin, and dele note. Maximus was arrested in
653 (E. H. R. xxxi, 1916, p. 147).
p. 405, 11. 27 ff. The mutiny was not in 670, but in 681-2 after the two junior
prin s' deposition (E. H. R. xxx, 1915, p. 42).
p. 406. For 11. 8–11 read At the beginning of September 685 Constantine died of
dyse „tery and was succeeded by Justinian (E. H. R. xxx, 1915, pp. 50-51).
p. 525, 1. 2 from end. For Aethelreda read Aetheldreda.
p. 534, 1. 3. For Emmeran read Emmeram.
p. 541, 1. 12. For 752 read 751.
p. 715, last line (Gen. Bibl. ). For 1808 read 1908. New edn. 1915.
p. 791 (Bibl. Chap. xvi (A) $ 2, Plummer, A. For Library of Patristic Theology
read Library of Historic Theology.
p. 799 (Bibl. Chap. xvii), l. 4 from end. For Ibid. read TRHS.
p. 819 (Chronological Table). Under 636 omit “Issue of the Ekthesis," and insert it
under 638.
CORRECTIONS TO INDEX. VOL. II.
p. 822, col. 1, 11. 9-12. Read 'Abbās, son of Walid, military successes of, 412, 414 sq-
p. 825, col. 2. Under Amorium, for “ 396; . . . ib. ;" read taken by Arabs, 396;
recovered, 397;
p. 826, col. 2. After Anşār, the, insert 313.
Ibid. Under Antioch, dele 407.
p. 852, col. 2, 1. 6 from end. For Heraclius, son of the emperor, read Heraclius II.
p. 853, col. 1. For the two entries Hijaz read Hijaz, province, 334; opposes Yazid, 359.
p. 853, col. 2. Hishām, Caliph and Hisham, son of 'Abd-al-Malik are the same person.
p. 858, col. 2. For Kusistan read Khuzistan.
p. 868, col. 1. Othman, Caliph and Othman ibn 'Affan are the same person.
p. 871, col. 2. In list of Popes insert Donus.
p. 873, col. 1. Under Reggio, omit (Rhegium) and Maximus at, 403;
Ibid. Under Rhegium, omit “see Reggio,” and insert Maximus at, 403.
p. 874, col. 2. Insert Romuald, Duke of Benevento, 394.
p. 880, col. 1.
