Chapter 8: Europe in The Early Middle Ages

The Spread of Islam

The Arabs

In Muhammad’s time Arabia was inhabited by various tribes, many of them Bedouins.
These nomadic peoples grazed goats and sheep on the sparse patches of grass that dotted the vast semiarid peninsula.
The wealth produced by business transactions led to luxurious living for many residents in the towns.
For all Arabs, the basic social unit was the clan— a group of blood relations connected through the male line.
Clans expected loyalty from their members and in turn provided support and protection.
For centuries before the rise of Islam, many Arabs prayed at the Ka’ba, a temple in Mecca containing a black stone thought to be the dwelling place of a god as well as objects connected to other gods.
Economic links also connected Arab peoples, but what eventually molded the diverse Arab tribes into a powerful political and social unity was a new religion based on the teachings of Muhammad.

The Prophet Muhammad

Except for a few vague remarks in the Qur’an, the sacred book of Islam, Muhammad (ca. 571–632) left no account of his life.
Arab tradition accepts some of the sacred stories that developed about him as historically true, but those accounts were not written down until about a century after his death.
The Qur’an reveals Muhammad to be an extremely devout man, ascetic, self-disciplined, and literate, but not formally educated.
Muhammad’s revelations were written down by his followers during his lifetime and organized into chapters, called sura, shortly after his death.
Muhammad’s visions ordered him to preach a message of a single God and to become God’s prophet, which he began to do in his hometown of Mecca.
In 622 he migrated with his followers to Medina, an event termed the hijra that marks the beginning of the Muslim calendar.
In 630 Muhammad returned to Mecca at the head of a large army, and he soon united the nomads of the desert and the merchants of the cities into an even larger umma of Muslims, a word meaning “those who comply with God’s will.”
By the time Muhammad died in 632, the crescent of Islam, the Muslim symbol, prevailed throughout the Arabian peninsula.

The Teachings and Expansion of Islam

Muhammad’s religion eventually attracted great numbers of people, partly because of the straightforward nature of its doctrines.
Because Allah is all-powerful, believers must submit themselves to him.
All Muslims have the obligation of the jihad (literally, “selfexertion”) to strive or struggle to lead a virtuous life and to spread God’s rule and law.
To merit the rewards of Heaven, a person must follow the strict code of moral behavior that Muhammad prescribed.
The believer must pray five times a day, fast and pray during the sacred month of Ramadan, and contribute alms to the poor and needy.
According to the Muslim shari’a (shuh-REE-uh), or sacred law, these five practices— the profession of faith, prayer, fasting, giving alms to the poor, and pilgrimage to Mecca—constitute the Five Pillars of Islam.
The Qur’an forbids alcoholic beverages and gambling, as well as a number of foods, such as pork, a dietary regulation adopted from the Mosaic law of the Hebrews.
Polygyny, the practice of men having more than one wife, was common in Arab society before Muhammad, though for economic reasons the custom was limited to the well-to-do.
The Qur’an sets forth a strict sexual morality and condemns immoral behavior on the part of men as well as women.
With respect to matters of property, Muslim women of the early Middle Ages had more rights than Western women.

Sunni and Shi'a Divisions

Every Muslim hoped that by observing the laws of the Qur’an, he or she could achieve salvation, and it was the tenets of Islam preached by Muhammad that bound all Arabs together.
In 632 a group of Muhammad’s closest followers chose Abu Bakr, who was a close friend of the Prophet’s and a member of a clan affiliated with the Prophet’s clan, as caliph, a word meaning “successor.”
Ali’s supporters began to assert that the Prophet had designated Ali as imam, or leader, and that he should rightly have been the first caliph; thus, any caliph who was not a descendant of Ali was a usurper.
These supporters of Ali— termed Shi’ites or Shi’a from Arabic terms meaning “supporters” or “partisans” of Ali— saw Ali and subsequent imams as the divinely inspired leaders of the community.
The larger body of Muslims who accepted the first elections— termed Sunnis, a word derived from Sunna, the practices of the community derived from Muhammad’s example— saw the caliphs as political leaders.
After the assassination of Ali, the caliphate passed to members of the Umayyad clan, who asserted control and brought stability to the growing Muslim empire.

Life in Muslim Spain

In Europe, Muslim political and cultural influence was felt most strongly in the Iberian Peninsula.
In 711 a Muslim force crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and easily defeated the weak Visigothic kingdom.
Throughout the Islamic world, Muslims used the term al-Andalus to describe the part of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim control.
Today we often use the word Andalusia to refer especially to southern Spain, but eighth-century Christians throughout Europe called the peninsula “Moorish Spain” because the Muslims who invaded and conquered it were Moors— Berbers from northwest Africa.
The ethnic term Moorish can be misleading, however, because the peninsula was home to sizable numbers of Jews and Christians as well as Muslim Moors.
In business transactions and in much of daily life, all peoples used the Arabic language.
Some scholars believe that the eighth and ninth centuries in Andalusia were an era of remarkable interfaith harmony.
From the sophisticated centers of Muslim culture in Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo, al-Andalus seemed a provincial backwater, a frontier outpost with little significance in the wider context of Islamic civilization.
On the other hand, “northern barbarians,” as Muslims called the European peoples, acknowledged the splendor of Spanish culture.
In Spain, as elsewhere in the Arab world, the Muslims had an enormous impact on agricultural development.
They began the cultivation of rice, sugarcane, citrus fruits, dates, figs, eggplants, carrots, and, after the eleventh century, cotton.

Muslim-Christian Relations

Jesus is mentioned many times in the Qur’an, which affirms that he was born of Mary the Virgin.
He is described as a righteous prophet chosen by God who performed miracles and continued the work of Abraham and Moses, and he was a sign of the coming Day of Judgment.
Muslims esteemed the Judeo-Christian Scriptures as part of God’s revelation, although they believed that the Qur’an superseded them.
Muslims call Jews and Christians dhimmis, or “protected people,” because they were “people of the book,” that is, the Hebrew Scriptures.
Christians and Jews in the areas Muslims conquered were allowed to continue practicing their faith, although they did have to pay a special tax.
A Christian or Jew, however much assimilated, remained an infidel.
An infidel was an unbeliever, and the word carried a pejorative or disparaging connotation.
By about 950 Caliph Abd al-Rahman III (912–961) of the Umayyad Dynasty of Córdoba ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula from the Mediterranean in the south to the Ebro River in the north.
Christian doctrines, and interfaith contacts declined. Christians’ perception of Islam as a menace would help inspire the Crusades of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries.

Cross-Cultural Influences in Science and Medicine

Despite growing suspicions on both sides, the Islamic world profoundly shaped Christian European culture in Spain and elsewhere.
The Muslim mathematician al-Khwarizmi (d. 830) wrote the important treatise Algebra, the first work in which the word algebra is used mathematically.
Muslims also instructed Westerners in the use of the zero, which permitted the execution of complicated problems of multiplication and long division.
Middle Eastern Arabs translated and codified the scientific and philosophical learning of Greek and Persian antiquity.
Muslim medical knowledge far surpassed that of the West.
By the ninth century Arab physicians had translated most of the treatises of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and produced a number of important works of their own.
Arabic science reached its peak in the physician, philologist, philosopher, poet, and scientist ibn-Sina of Bukhara (980–1037), known in the West as Avicenna.
His Canon of Medicine codified all Greco-Arabic medical thought, described the contagious nature of tuberculosis and the spreading of diseases, and listed 760 pharmaceutical drugs.
Unfortunately, many of these treatises came to the West as translations from Greek to Arabic and then to Latin and inevitably lost a great deal in translation.

Frankish Rulers and Their Territories

The Merovingians

Clovis established the Merovingian dynasty in about 481, and under him the Frankish kingdom included much of what is now France and a large section of southwestern Germany.
Merovingian rulers also developed diverse sources of income.
These included revenues from the royal estates and the “gifts” of subject peoples, such as plunder and tribute paid by peoples east of the Rhine River.
The Franks also based some aspects of their government on Roman principles.
For example, the basis of the administrative system in the Frankish kingdom was the civitas — Latin for a city and surrounding territory— similar to the political organization of the Roman Empire.
A comites— a senior official or royal companion, later called a count— presided over the civitas, as had governors in Rome.
Within the royal household, Merovingian politics provided women with opportunities, and some queens not only influenced but occasionally also dominated events.
Queen Brunhilda (543?–613), for example, married first one Frankish king and at his death another.
When her second husband died, Brunhilda overcame the objections of the nobles and became regent, ruling on behalf of her son until he came of age.
Merovingian rulers and their successors led peripatetic lives, traveling constantly to check up on local administrators and peoples.
Merovingian kings also relied on the comites and bishops to gather and send local information to them
Mayors were usually from one of the great aristocratic families, which increasingly through intermarriage blended Frankish and Roman elites.
These families possessed landed wealth— villas over which they exercised lordship, dispensing local customary, not royal, law— and they often had rich and lavish lifestyles.

The Rise of The Carolingians

From this aristocracy one family gradually emerged to replace the Merovingian dynasty.
The rise of the Carolingians— whose name comes from the Latin Carolus, or Charles, the name of several important members of the family— rests on several factors.
First, the Carolingian Pippin I (d. 640) acquired the powerful position of mayor of the palace and passed the title on to his heirs.
Second, a series of advantageous marriage alliances brought the family estates and influence in different parts of the Frankish world, and provided the Carolingians with landed wealth and treasure with which to reward their allies and followers.
Third, military victories over supporters of the Merovingians gave the Carolingians a reputation for strength and ensured their dominance.
The Battle of Poitiers helped the Carolingians acquire the support of the church, perhaps their most important asset.
Charles Martel and his son Pippin III (r. 751–768) further strengthened their ties to the church by supporting the work of Christian missionaries.
As mayor of the palace, Charles Martel had exercised the power of king of the Franks.
His son Pippin III aspired to the title as well as the powers it entailed.
Because of his anointment, Pippin’s kingship took on a special spiritual and moral character.
Prior to Pippin only priests and bishops had received anointment.
Pippin became the first to be anointed with the sacred oils and acknowledged as rex et sacerdos, meaning king and priest.
When Pippin died, his son Charles, generally known as Charlemagne, succeeded him.

The Warrior-Ruler Charlemagne

Charlemagne’s adviser and friend Alcuin (ca. 735–804) wrote that “a king should be strong against his enemies, humble to Christians, feared by pagans, loved by the poor and judicious in counsel and maintaining justice.”
Charlemagne worked to realize that ideal in all its aspects.
Through brutal military expeditions that brought wealth—lands, booty, slaves, and tribute—and by peaceful travel, personal appearances, and the sheer force of his personality, Charlemagne sought to awe newly conquered peoples and rebellious domestic enemies.
If an ideal king was “strong against his enemies” and “feared by pagans,” Charlemagne more than met the standard.
Charlemagne fought more than fifty campaigns and became the greatest warrior of the early Middle Ages.
Charlemagne also achieved spectacular results in the south, incorporating Lombardy into the Frankish kingdom.
He ended Bavarian independence and defeated the nomadic Avars, opening eastern Germany for later settlement by Franks.

Carolignian Government and Society

Charlemagne’s empire was not a state as people today understand that term; it was a collection of peoples and clans.
For administrative purposes, Charlemagne divided his entire kingdom into counties based closely on the old Merovingian civitas.
Counts were originally sent out from the royal court; later a person native to the region was appointed.
As a link between local authorities and the central government, Charlemagne appointed officials called missi dominici, “agents of the lord king,” who checked up on the counts and held courts to handle judicial and financial issues.
Considering the size of Charlemagne’s empire, the counts and royal agents were few and far between, and the authority of the central government was weak.
Family alliances were often cemented by sexual relations, including those of Charlemagne himself.
Charlemagne had a total of four legal wives, most from other Frankish tribes, and six concubines.
In terms of social changes, the Carolingian period witnessed moderate population growth.
The highest aristocrats and church officials lived well, with fine clothing and at least a few rooms heated by firewood.
The modest economic expansion benefited townspeople and nobles, but it did not significantly alter the lives of most people, who continued to live in a vast rural world dotted with isolated estates and small villages.
Work varied by the season, but at all times of the year it was physically demanding and yielded relatively little.
What little there was had to be shared with landowners, who demanded their taxes and rents in the form of crops, animals, or labor

The Imperial Coronation of Charlemagne

In autumn of the year 800, Charlemagne paid a momentous visit to Rome.
For centuries scholars have debated the reasons for the imperial coronation of Charlemagne.
Though definitive answers will probably never be found, several things seem certain.
First, after the coronation Charlemagne considered himself an emperor ruling a Christian people.
Second, Leo’s ideas about gender and rule undoubtedly influenced his decision to crown Charlemagne.
Third, both parties gained: the Carolingian family received official recognition from the leading spiritual power in Europe, and the papacy gained a military protector.
Not surprisingly, the Byzantines regarded the papal acts as rebellious and Charlemagne as a usurper.
The coronation of Charlemagne, whether planned by the Carolingian court or by the papacy, was to have a profound effect on the course of German history and on the later history of Europe.
Ecclesiastical authorities, on the other hand, continually cited the event as proof that the dignity of the imperial crown could be granted only by the pope.

Early Medieval Culture

The Carolingian Renaissance

In Roman Gaul through the fifth century, the culture of members of the elite rested on an education that stressed grammar, Greco-Roman works of literature and history, and the legal and medical treatises of the Roman world.
Beginning in the seventh and eighth centuries, a new cultural tradition common to Gaul, Italy, the British Isles, and to some extent Spain emerged.
Charlemagne directed that every monastery in his kingdom should cultivate learning and educate the monks and secular clergy so that they would have a better understanding of the Christian writings.
Women shared with men the work of evangelization and the new Christian learning.
Rulers, noblemen, and noblewomen founded monasteries for nuns, each governed by an abbess.
Monks provided protection from attack and did the heavy work on the land in double monasteries, but nuns handled everything else.
In monasteries and cathedral schools, monks, nuns, and scribes copied books and manuscripts and built up libraries.
The most important scholar at Charlemagne’s court was Alcuin, who came from Northumbria, one of the kingdoms in England.
He was the leader of a palace school at Aachen, where Charlemagne assembled learned men from all over Europe.
Through monastic and cathedral schools, basic literacy in Latin was established among some of the clergy and even among some of the nobility, a change from Merovingian times.
Despite the advances at Salerno, however, physicians were few in the early Middle Ages, and only the rich could afford them.
Local folk medicine practiced by nonprofessionals provided help for commoners, with treatments made from herbs, bark, and other natural ingredients.
Infants and children were especially susceptible to a range of illnesses, and about half of the children born died before age five.

Northumbrian Learning and Writing

Charlemagne’s court at Aachen was not the only center of learning in early medieval Christian Europe.
Another was the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, situated at the northernmost tip of the old Roman world.
Northumbrian creativity owed a great deal to the intellectual curiosity and collecting zeal of Saint Benet Biscop (ca. 628–689), who brought manuscripts and other treasures back from Italy.
Northumbrian monasteries produced scores of books: missals, psalters, commentaries on the Scriptures, illuminated manuscripts, law codes, and collections of letters and sermons.
As in Charlemagne’s empire, women were important participants in Northumbrian Christian culture.
At about the time the monks at Lindisfarne were producing their Gospel book, another author was probably at work on a nonreligious epic poem, Beowulf.
The poem tells the story of the hero Beowulf’s progress from valiant warrior to wise ruler.
In contrast to most writings of this era, which were in Latin, Beowulf was written in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon.
The movements of people and ideas that allowed a work like Beowulf to be written only increased in the ninth century, when the North Sea became even more of a highway.

Invasions and Migrations

Charlemagne left his vast empire to his sole surviving son, Louis the Pious (r. 814–840), who attempted to keep the empire intact.
r. In 843, shortly after Louis’s death, his sons agreed to the Treaty of Verdun, which divided the empire into three parts: Charles the Bald received the western part; Lothair the middle part and the title of emperor; and Louis the eastern part, from which he acquired the title “the German.”
After the Treaty of Verdun, continental Europe was fractured politically. All three kingdoms controlled by the sons of Louis the Pious were torn by domestic dissension and disorder.
The frontier and coastal defenses erected by Charlemagne and maintained by Louis the Pious were neglected.

Vikings in Western Europe

The feared Northmen were Germanic peoples from the area of modern-day Norway, Sweden, and Denmark who had remained beyond the sway of the Christianizing influences of the Carolingian Empire.
They began to make overseas expeditions, which they themselves called vikings, a word that probably derives from a unit of maritime distance.
Viking came to be used both for the activity (“to go a-viking”) and for the people who went on such expeditions.
The Carolingian Empire, with no navy, was helpless.
The Vikings moved swiftly, attacked, and escaped to return again.
Scholars disagree about the reasons for Viking attacks and migrations.
Whatever the motivations, Viking attacks were savage.
The Vikings burned, looted, and did extensive property damage, although there is little evidence that they caused long-term physical destruction.
The slave trade represented an important part of Viking plunder and commerce.
Slaves, known as thralls, were common in Scandinavian society, and Vikings took people from the British Isles and territories along the Baltic Sea as part of their booty.
In the early tenth century Danish Vikings besieged Paris with fleets of more than a hundred highly maneuverable ships, and the Frankish king Charles the Simple bought them off in 911 by giving them a large part of northern France.
The Vikings made positive contributions to the areas they settled.
They carried their unrivaled knowledge of shipbuilding and seamanship everywhere.
Exports from Ireland included iron tools and weapons manufactured there by Viking metal-smiths.

Slavs and Vikings in Eastern Europe

With the start of the mass migrations of the late Roman Empire, the Slavs moved in different directions and split into what historians later identified as three groups: West, South, and East Slavs.
The group labeled the West Slavs included the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Wends.
The South Slavs, comprising peoples who became the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, and Bosnians, migrated southward into the Balkans.
Between the fifth and ninth centuries the eastern Slavs moved into the vast areas of present-day European Russia and Ukraine.
In the ninth century the Vikings appeared in the lands of the eastern Slavs.
Called “Varangians” in the old Russian chronicles, the Vikings were interested primarily in gaining wealth through plunder and trade, and the opportunities were good.
In order to increase and protect their international commerce and growing wealth, the Vikings declared themselves the rulers of the eastern Slavs.
In any event, the Varangian ruler Oleg (r. 878–912) established his residence at Kiev in modern-day Ukraine.
Oleg and his clansmen quickly became assimilated into the Slavic population, taking local wives and emerging as the noble class.
Thus the rapidly Slavified Vikings left two important legacies for the future: in about 900 they created a loose unification of Slavic territories, Kievan Rus, under a single ruling prince and dynasty, and they imposed a basic religious unity by accepting Orthodox Christianity, as opposed to Roman Catholicism, for themselves and the eastern Slavs.
Even at its height under Great Prince Iaroslav the Wise (r. 1019–1054), the unity of Kievan Rus was extremely tenuous.
The princes divided their land like private property because they thought of it as private property.
A prince owned a certain number of farms or landed estates and had them worked directly by his people, mainly slaves, called kholops in Russian.
The boyars were descendants of the original Viking warriors, and they also held their lands as free and clear private property.

Magyars and Muslims

Groups of central European steppe peoples known as Magyars also raided villages in the late ninth century, taking plunder and captives, and forcing leaders to pay tribute in an effort to prevent further looting and destruction.
Because of their skill with horses and their Eastern origins, the Magyars were often identified with the earlier Huns by those they conquered, though they are probably unrelated ethnically.
Magyar forces were defeated by a combined army of Frankish and other Germanic troops at the Battle of Lechfeld near Augsburg in southern Germany in 955, and the Magyars settled in the area that is now Hungary in eastern Europe.
The ninth century also saw invasions into Europe from the south. In many ways these were a continuation of the earlier Muslim conquests in the Iberian Peninsula, but now they focused on Sicily and mainland Italy.
From the perspective of those living in what had been Charlemagne’s empire, Viking, Magyar, and Muslim attacks contributed to increasing disorder and violence.
A Viking point of view might be the most positive, for by 1100 descendants of the Vikings not only ruled their homelands in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, but also ruled Normandy, England, Sicily, Iceland, and Kievan Rus, with an outpost in Greenland and occasional voyages to North America.

Political and Economic Decentralization

Decentralization and the Origins of “Feudalism”

The political power of the Carolingian rulers had long rested on the cooperation of the dominant social class, the Frankish aristocracy.
Charlemagne and his predecessors relied on the nobles to help wage wars of expansion and suppress rebellions, and in return these families were given a share of the lands and riches confiscated by the ruler.
The most powerful nobles were those able to gain the allegiance of warriors, often symbolized in an oath-swearing ceremony of homage and fealty that grew out of earlier Germanic oaths of loyalty.
In this ceremony a warrior (knight) swore his loyalty as a vassal— from a Celtic term meaning “servant”— to the more powerful individual, who became his lord.
In return for the vassal’s loyalty, aid, and military assistance, the lord promised him protection and material support.
This support might be a place in the lord’s household, but was more likely a piece of land called a feudum or fief (feef).
Most legal scholars and historians have seen these personal ties of loyalty cemented by grants of land rather than allegiance to an abstract state as a political and social system they term feudalism.
In the last several decades, increasing numbers of medieval historians have found the idea of a “feudal system” problematic.
Whether one chooses to use the word feudalism or not, these relationships provided some degree of cohesiveness in a society that lacked an adequate government bureaucracy or method of taxation.
Along with granting land to knights, lords gave land to the clergy for spiritual services or promises of allegiance.
Some of the problems associated with the word feudal come from the fact that it is sometimes used by nonhistorians as a synonym for “medieval,” or to describe relations between landholders and the peasants who lived and worked on their estates.
Medieval historians on all sides of the debate about feudalism agree, however, that peasants did not swear oaths of vassalage; if there was a feudal system, peasants were not part of it.

Manorialism, Serfdom, and the Slave Trade

In feudal relationships, the “lord” was the individual or institution that had authority over a vassal, but the word lord was also used to describe the person or institution that had economic and political authority over peasants who lived in villages and farmed the land.
Residents of manors worked for the lord in exchange for protection, a system that was later referred to as manorialism.
Local custom determined precisely what services villagers would provide to their lord, but certain practices became common throughout Europe.
The peasant was obliged to give the lord a percentage of the annual harvest, usually in produce, sometimes in cash.
In entering into a relationship with a manorial lord, free farmers lost status.
Their position became servile, and they became serfs.
That is, they were bound to the land and could not leave it without the lord’s permission.
Serfdom was not the same as slavery in that lords did not own the person of the serf, but serfs were subject to the jurisdiction of the lord’s court in any dispute over property and in any case of suspected criminal behavior.
The transition from freedom to serfdom was slow.
Within the legal category of serfdom there were many economic levels, ranging from the highly prosperous to the desperately poor.
The ninth-century Viking assaults on Europe created extremely unstable conditions and individual insecurity, increasing the need for protection, accelerating the transition to serfdom, and leading to additional loss of personal freedom.
Though serfdom was not slavery, the Carolingian trade in actual slaves was extensive, generally involving persons captured in war or raids.
For Europeans and Arabs alike, selling captives and other slaves was standard procedure.
Christian moralists sometimes complained about the sale of Christians to nonChristians, but they did not object to slavery itself.