Developments in Europe 1200-1450 — Study Notes

The Fall of the Carolingian World

• Charlemagne (Charles the Great) rose to power as king of the Franks; a determined, strong statesman beholden to God.
• Through a series of military campaigns, he greatly expanded his kingdom to include parts of Spain, Britain, Italy, Germany, and more; at its height, the empire covered most of western and central Europe.
• The empire began to decline in the 9th and 10th centuries due to invasions:
  • The Magyars from Western Asia moved into Central Europe; after defeat at the Battle of Lechfeld, they converted to Christianity and established the kingdom of Hungary.
  • The Norsemen (Vikings) from Scandinavia raided villages, destroyed churches, and defeated local armies; they eventually established winter settlements across Europe and, after conversion to Christianity, were incorporated into European civilization.

Development of Feudalism

• With the disintegration of the Carolingian world, centralized authority was no longer the ideal form of government.
• Invasions by Muslims, Magyars, and Vikings exposed the inability of governments to protect all subjects; people sought protection from powerful lords in exchange for service.
• Feudalism emerged:
  • Lords granted land called fiefs; the lord became a king’s vassal, owing service to someone of higher status.
  • Lords granted portions of their fiefs to knights, who pledged to fight for their lord and, by extension, the king.
  • Lords provided lands and protection to peasants, who farmed the lord’s land and paid taxes in crops and livestock.

The Manorial System

• The landholding class (nobles and knights) owed military duties and needed time for warfare; landed estates (manors) on fiefs provided the economic basis for this.
• The manor was the agricultural estate worked on by peasants.
  • There were free peasants, but most became serfs: bound to the land, required to provide labor, pay rent, and be subject to the lord’s jurisdiction.
  • Serfs were legally bound to the lord’s lands.

The Decline of the Byzantine Empire

• The Byzantine Empire was long the most sophisticated and powerful Christian empire.
• A growing division between the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church intensified as the Eastern Orthodox Church refused to accept the pope as the sole head of the Christian Church.
• This ideological conflict escalated until Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael Cerularius excommunicated each other, creating a schism that persists to this day.

An Islamic Threat

• The Byzantine Empire faced external threats beyond the Normans in Italy; the larger threat came from Islam.
• The Seljuk Turks, originally nomadic from Central Asia, overthrew the Abbasid Caliphate and converted to Islam; they advanced into Asia Minor, the heartland of the Byzantine Empire, pressuring Byzantine resources.
• The Turks defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert.
• The aftermath led to internal struggles over the imperial throne; Alexius I Comnenus seized control.
  • Under Alexius I, Byzantines held off further Turkish advances and defeated Normans along the Adriatic coast.
  • This period saw a cultural revival, economic prosperity, and commercial expansion.

The Crusades

• Emperor Alexius I Comnenus sought military aid from the pope against the Turkish threat.
• Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade, viewing it as an opportunity to aid Byzantium while also addressing broader religious goals.
• Alexius attempted to have crusaders pledge loyalty to him and place conquered territories under Byzantine control, but crusaders largely ignored this, forming independent crusader states at Edessa, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Tripoli.
• Byzantium became concerned about both Turkish threats in Anatolia and the rising western crusader states.

The Crusades (Fourth Crusade and Sack of Constantinople)

• After Saladin’s death, Pope Innocent III launched the Fourth Crusade.
• En route to Palestine, the crusaders became entangled in Byzantium’s imperial succession disputes.
• They diverted to Constantinople and sacked the city, weakening the Byzantine Empire into a patchwork of petty states.
• A later revival occurred when Michael VIII (Paleologus) led a Byzantine army to recapture Constantinople, achieving it temporarily but never restoring the empire to its former magnitude.

The Ottoman Turks and the Fall of Constantinople

• The Ottoman Turks expanded rapidly, seizing lands previously held by the Seljuks and Byzantines; by securing territories in Bulgaria and Kosovo, they surrounded the Byzantine core.
• Sultan Mehmed II (Mehmet II) sought the capture of Constantinople and its demise as a Christian stronghold.
• Mehmed II breached the city walls; Emperor Constantine IX was among the first casualties as the city fell.
• Mehmet II entered Constantinople, proclaimed Islam from the Hagia Sophia, and ordered the cathedral rebuilt as a mosque, signaling the end of the Byzantine Empire.

Society in Western Europe

• In the East, Ottoman and Rus territories expanded; Western and Central Europe experienced accelerated economic and social changes during the High Middle Ages.
• Population growth: from about $35\,\text{million}$ to $80\,\text{million}$ people.
• Lords and religious figures organized villages, creating opportunities for peasants to move away from serfdom to survive.
• The trend away from feudalism was accelerated by the Black Death, which caused a dramatic labor shortage; surviving serfs could demand lower rents, higher wages, and better living/working conditions.

Technology in Western Europe

• Agricultural breakthroughs increased lands under cultivation:
  • The heavy wheeled plow allowed cultivation of dense northern soils.
  • Adoption of horses, not oxen, to pull the plow.
• The three-field system of crop rotation allowed much more land to be planted at any given time.
• These innovations supported a larger population but exacted an environmental toll:
  • Deforestation and tilling (soil turning) accelerated erosion and nutrient loss.
  • Overfishing, human waste, and the construction of water mills damaged freshwater ecosystems.

Commercial Bonds

• Production was revolutionized as muscle power (both animal and human labor) was augmented by new mechanisms:
  • Cranks, flywheels, camshafts, and complex gearing.
  • When combined with windmills and watermills, these powered grinding grain, sieving flour, tanning hides, brewing beer, sawing wood, manufacturing iron, and papermaking.
• These new energy sources promoted closer and more extended commercial networks between settlements near and far.

Societal Changes

• Economic growth altered the lives of men and women, opening new opportunities:
  • Early on, women worked in weaving, brewing, milling grain, midwifery, small-scale retailing, laundering, spinning, and prostitution.
  • By the 15th century, economic and technological changes increasingly restricted or banned women from many trades.
• An alternative path emerged for some women, especially from aristocratic families: monastic life in convents.
  • Convents offered a degree of freedom from male control and provided education and leadership opportunities for abbesses and nuns.
  • By about 1300, however, male control tightened as misogynistic ideas around female intellectual inferiority and moral impurity resurfaced to justify female subordination.

Intellectual Life

• Intellectual life rose as population grew, commerce expanded, towns and cities emerged, and contact with Islamic learning increased.
• A legal framework developed that granted some independence to towns and cities, guilds, professional associations, and universities.
• Universities in Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, and Salamanca became zones of intellectual autonomy, where scholars pursued studies with some freedom from religious or political authorities.
• In university settings, there was a focus on human reason in relation to divine mysteries and the natural order, with rational thought first applied to theology, then to law, medicine, optics, magnetism, astronomy, and alchemy.

Intellectual Life (Continued)

• Natural philosophy gradually separated from the church; rational inquiry led scholars to seek original Greek texts, especially Aristotle.
• Translations from Greek and Arabic into Latin, aided by Spain’s reconquest as a Christian state, broadened access to classical and Arab scholarship.
• European scholars gained direct access to works of Ancient Greece and Arab scholars in astronomy, optics, medicine, pharmacology, and more.