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Philip Augustus at Acre.
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Children's Crusade.
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Europe's climate was warming, which helped in growing food, and more food was producing a growth in population. The years 1050 to 1300 have been described as Europe's "High Middle Ages." In Europe's northwest and England's southeast, people benefited from a topsoil in river valleys that was rich and deep. Forests in western Europe were being cleared. Towns were giving the countryside a new market for crops. Rural estates gained confidence that they could abandon economic self-sufficiency. There was a spurt in mechanization and trade. In northern Europe an advance in technology came with the use of water wheels. Northern Europe had rivers that continued to run throughout the summer, providing power to water wheels that drove shafts gears and cams. This power ground corn, sawed wood and operated bellows. Windmills also appeared. Winds were steadier than streams, which froze in winters. Windmills as a source of power appeared in Flanders and the Netherlands. And by now, Europeans were using cranks - one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind
The downside of population growth was that towns were often densely packed with people, with no sewers, rain turning dirt streets into mud, and diseases spreading more rapidly than it did where people were less densely distributed. With the spread of diseases, more people in towns died than were born, the town populations being continuously replenished by migrations from the countryside.
A part of the rising population and increase in trade was an increase in people moving around. Merchants were seeking customers in more distant places. Nobles were traveling more from one of their estates to another. Clerics wandered in search of learning or to a place to begin an ascetic life. Young men went to Reims to study philosophy and some to Spain to study math. The roads of Europe were also traveled by peasants looking for land on which to settle. And on the road might be refugees from war, part-time soldiers or part-time bandits.
In the towns was a seeking of order. Merchants sought a charter for their town - a guarantee of sorts - from great landowners or from monarchs. The monarchs offered towns protection from the jurisdiction of a nearby lord, and the towns offered monarchs a source of wealth, through taxation, that freed them from reliance on nobles - with whom there were in competition for power. Charters offered merchants guarantees of personal freedom and freedom from arbitrary seizure of property. Runaways from serfdom to a town might be considered free if they could elude capture while living in the town for a year, while fraternal and political clubs called guilds in a town helped create local regulations and government that suited the interests of its members. Some clubs built their own chapels and created their own schools. The craft guilds buried members who had died, and they cared for the widows and orphans of those who had been their members. And some towns hired military men for the sake of order.
In places where the trend toward freedom was blocked, attempts were made to establish it through violence. In 1070 the people of Le Mans formed a commune and rose against their lord - a rebellion that failed. In 1077 people of the town of Cambrai rebelled against an Episcopal overlord. And in 1112 a bishop in England who tried to suppress a commune was hacked to pieces.
Some towns were exceptionally successful in trade. Trade of the town of London extended to the European continent. The English town of York prospered. So too did Paris, Lyons, Marseille, Florence in Italy, Prague, Frankfort, Danzig, Cologne, Nuremburg and Krakow farther east, and Lisbon and Barcelona on the Iberian peninsula.
And merchant families with cash were marrying into the families of nobles, whose wealth was in land.
With the generally good times of the "High Middle Ages" was a religious revival. Monasteries led a reform movement. Popes had been appointed for to advance some wealthy family's political interests, and the office of pope had often been brought and sold. There had been licentiousness and debauchery at the papal court. Serious efforts at reform began with Pope Leo IX (1049-1054). Leo traveled and held councils across Europe. During his pontificate new ecclesiastical law was established. And the reforms continued with the popes who followed Leo.
Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085) was a fervent reformer, and a part of the reforms he supported was the freedom of church officials from powers outside the church. He wanted to end secular authorities deciding who would represent the church in their realm - lay investiture. Gregory decreed that anyone who accepted a church position offered by a layman would be deposed and any layman who gave a church position to anyone would be excommunicated. In England, William the Conqueror protested. So too did Philip I of France. The Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV (ruler of German and other lands), defied Gregory. William the Conqueror and Philip I were left alone, the papacy unwilling to take on three powerful opponents, but Gregory excommunicated and deposed Henry. Nobles felt liberated from Henry's dominance and supported the pope. In January 1077, Henry crossed the Alps to the pope's residence at Conossa - to be one of the most celebrated summit meetings in the history of Europe.
Gregory lifted the the sentence of excommunication and restored Henry to his kingship. In 1080 Gregory again excommunicated and deposed Henry. This time, Henry used a power that some kings had in greater amount than did the pope: Henry went to Italy with an army, and Henry took control of Rome, and he was in control of Rome at the time of Gregory's death in 1085.
In the year 1122 a summit meeting between Henry's successor, his son, Henry V, and Pope Calixtus II created a compromise settlement over the investiture issue that had troubled Henry and the papacy. The Church was to choose who would be a bishop within the Holy Roman Empire, but the Holy Roman Emperor was to have a veto power over this selection.
It was now more than 4,000 years since the high points of Sumerian and ancient Egyptian civilizations. Human and animal sacrifices had disappeared or declined. But the idea of collective punishment was still very much on people's minds, and people still responded to conflict with violence rather than institutional adjudication. The commandments of Moses - which one writer in the late twentieth century was to describe as having changed the world - had not really caught on, nor had the idea of turning one's cheek or surrendering one's interest in riches. Many people were still working as slaves - some owned by Christian monasteries. The Church remained unopposed to Christians trading in Christian slaves, but the Church did object to Jews owning Christian slaves, the Church afraid that the slaves of Jews might convert to Judaism.
What concerned Pope Urban II (1088-1099) was Muslim rule in the Holy Land, and he wished to see the Holy Land under Christian rule. Europe's revival helped the Pope and other European Christians feel more confident than did those of previous generations. To Christians, the Muslims appeared to be growing weaker. Christians had been expanding against Muslims since Charlemagne took Barcelona in 801. With aid from France, the small Christian kingdoms in northern Spain had been expanding against Islam, and the kingdom of Castile expanded southward to Toledo in 1085. In 1091, Normans conquered Sicily, ending Muslim rule there. In 1094 the kingdom of Aragon expanded southward to Valencia.
Success by Christians against the Muslims was not universal. In 1071 Constantinople had lost against a Turkish army that was in the pay of Arabs, at a great battle at Manzikert, and following this defeat the Turks took much of Constantinople's territory in Asia Minor. Alexius, the emperor at Constantinople, wanted to win back former empire, including Palestine - which had been lost to Islam in the 600s. Alexius appealed to the West for help. Then the Turks overran Jerusalem. And there was talk in Christendom about relics in the Holy Land having been profaned and of Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem having been mistreated or sold into slavery.
Pope Urban II responded to the call for help from the emperor at Constantinople and organized what was to become known as the First Crusade. Urban II said Christ would lead any army that went to rescue the Holy Land. He promised a cancellation of debts, exemption from taxes and eternal life to all participants. Those who died in the crusade, he announced, would go to heaven. He described going on the Crusade as a religious duty, and in preparing for the Crusade he ordered all feuding to stop and threatened to excommunicate those who did not. He hoped that warring for the cause of Christianity abroad would be a substitute for warring at home.
Enthusiasm for the Crusade spread to Scotland, England, Castile and Scandinavia, and among the enthused were common people. Before Urban II could organize his crusade, peasant mobs began to march in the direction of the Holy Land. Many had sold their land to pay their way. Mostly the peasants bought their food, but some pillaging took place. Many did not reach Constantinople - the major city on route to the Holy Land. And to prevent looting, officials at Constantinople rushed the crusaders out of town, on their way to the Holy Land through Asia Minor, where they were exposed to attack by the Turks, and many were butchered.
From five to ten thousand knights, mostly from France, volunteered for the First Crusade, along with twenty-five to fifty thousand additional soldiers. French and German nobility were in a mood for conquests and loot. For the knights the Crusade was an opportunity to emulate the great deeds of Charlemagne. Western Christendom was looking upon the Eastern Christian Church as not much better than paganism, and members of the Roman Church believed that conquering the Holy Land would elevate their church and end the schism between the Western Church and the Eastern Church by the Western Church absorbing the Eastern Church.
Crusaders passing through some European towns sought contributions from Jews. Jews were attacked and murdered. At Metz (in France) in early May some Jews who refused to be baptized were murdered. At Speyer (along the Rhine River) thirteen Jews were killed. There a Catholic bishop, John, gathered the Jews under his protection, and it is said that anyone he could catch who had killed Jews he punished by having their hands cut off. [note] Later that month at Worms (also on the Rhine) perhaps 500 or more Jews were killed after crusaders broke into the Episcopal palace where the Jews had taken refuge. Another massacre occurred along the Rhine at Mainz. And more were killed at Cologne.
The cry of the crusaders on their way to combat Islam and liberate the Holy Land was "God wills it!" The knight crusaders were more successful than the peasant armies at arriving in the Holy Land, and there the knights conquered. They seized gold, silver, horses and mules and invaded houses in search of loot. Convinced that they were fighting the devil they cut down all before them. Any Muslim who did not flee Jerusalem was among those who might be cut down. In the Holy Land were many Jews. Christian knights, exuberant in victory and in their sense of power, and entertaining the belief that the Jews had killed Christ, exercised a collective punishment and massacred Jews. Jews who took refuge in Jerusalem's main synagogue were burned to death. And some crusaders were sickened and shamed by the brutality.
A few were trying to spread knowledge by describing the past, but without much success. They saw the past as the present. Julius Caesar was depicted as a feudal king, and Alexander the Great was described as having lived in a feudal castle. King Arthur was described as a wise and valiant medieval man with medieval knights.
But more young men were attending universities. They were interested in reconciling their faith and logic, and an enthusiasm had developed for putting knowledge into a coherent whole - in a word, philosophy. A leader in reconciling faith with logic was an Italian named Anselm, who had become the Archbishop of Canterbury in England. He was to be known as one of the founders of the philosophical movement called scholasticism. Anselm held that believing in God on faith was not good enough, and in attempting to establish a reasoned basis for his belief in God he described God in terms of hierarchy and idea. God, he said, was the being beyond which there was no greater being.
In the centuries after the fall of Rome, concern with heresy almost died. Many rural people had maintained pagan beliefs in herbal magic, holy trees, holy springs, fairies and the like, but the Church did not feel threatened. If people had been baptized and attended church at least once a year they were considered Christian. It was ritual that the Church focused rather than ideas. But in the 1100s literacy was rising and new ideas were spreading, even among the poor, ideas that Church leadership was beginning to consider a threat to the Church's position as the arbiter of truth.
Aristotle's writings were now available to Europeans, and some churchmen were beginning to look with suspicion at Aristotle. They found his writing conflicting with the Church's belief in the creation described in the Old Testament, Aristotle having believed in the eternity of heaven and earth rather than a beginning. The Church accepted Plato rather than Aristotle, including Plato's doctrine that abstractions were "real" in the sense that they were not merely labels.
Countering Platonism was a French Dominican monk and university lecturer, Peter Abelard (b. 1079) who drew from Aristotle. Abelard gained fame across Europe. Students left other lecturers and came from afar to hear him. They were hungry for new insights and sensation.
Abelard held that something had to be understood before it could be believed. He was proposing a division between faith and knowledge, and for Abelard faith alone did not answer the question whether one should be a Christian, a Muslim or a Hindu. He claimed that doubting led to inquiry and inquiry led to wisdom, that by comparing arguments and choosing the best among the rival alternatives one could come to truth. Influenced by Europe's recent exposure to Aristotle, he believed in dialogue as the basis of logic - Aristotle having begun his study of logic as lessons in how to succeed in the kind of debates in Plato's writings.
Believing that spotting contradictions was fundamental to logic, to sharpen the minds of his students Abelard found contrary positions to each of 158 propositions drawn from scripture, which were published in a work he called Sic et Non (Thus and Otherwise) - for example the proposition that God can do all things against the limits of God's power suggested elsewhere in scripture.
Abelard rejected Plato's belief in abstractions. He saw abstract ideas as having been created from a resemblance among things rather than being things-in-themselves. Abelard was interested in matters more specific, and he was interested in individual humans, which set him against Church tradition. The Church saw interest in biography and autobiography as concern with vanities and conceits. But in Christendom biographies and autobiographies were making a comeback, and Abelard wrote an autobiography entitled The History of My Calamities, which helped rekindle interest in personality.
Abelard had fallen in love with one of his students, Heloise, the niece of a prominent Parisian clergyman, Fulbert, on the staff at the cathedral of Notre Dame. Abelard married Heloise. Marriage for the member of a religious order was a disgrace, and Abelard tried to keep it secret. Fulbert with a gang of men attacked Abelard and castrated him. Because of the castration Abelard was barred from the priesthood.
Abelard retreated to a monastery in Breton, becoming its abbot, but he left after discovering that its monks were "thugs." He joined the monastery of St. Denis but was restless there. The Church was not happy with Abelard's writings, including a book he wrote on the Trinity, and in 1141 he was condemned as a heretic. His prosecutor was St. Bernard, an abbot from the monastery of Clairvaux, who accused him and others like him of being motivated by vanity. Abelard died the following year at the age of sixty-three, while on his way to Rome to appeal the Church's ruling.
Drawing partially from Abelard's contribution to philosophy was Peter Lombard (1100 to 1160, who wrote The Four Books of Sentences, a work that aimed at putting knowledge into a coherent whole (summa in Latin), and a work that was to be endorsed by the Church's Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, a work that summed up much of the Church's view of the world, while some churchmen verbally attacked Lombard for his rationalism and a few accused him of "Christological nihilism."
Most people were still farming people, and that would remain so in civilized societies until the 20th century. These were the peasants, and for them disease and sudden death were common. But the rising economy was changing the lives of many of these common folk. Most people were now using money at least in some transactions, and they were more likely to take a once in a lifetime pilgrimage - either across Europe or to Jerusalem. Those who labored at growing food were making it possible for European glory and expansion in the centuries to come - an expansion that depended upon more food and a denser population. Aristocrats, however, still treated the peasants with little respect. The heroes of the aristocrats continued to be the knights in shining armor, who were contributing little benefit society.
The rise in prosperity was accompanied by aristocrats buying smoother clothing such as quality woolens from Flanders, and for grand occasions they might wear silk from the East. Aristocrats had moved from wooden homes to houses of stone, usually with a great fireplace and tapestries for decoration. And with the money economy having come into existence, if they needed money they might seek out a moneylender.
Aristocrats continued to be aggressive, and little wars among Christendom's knights continued, the knights on horseback and heavily weighted with armor, able to ride because of stirrups. The knights were still throwing a metal tipped wooden lance in the manner of hunter-gatherers. But the knights were coming under the influence of the refinement that was accompanying the rise in prosperity. At royal courts a greater interest was taken in music, poetry and manners. The age of chivalry had appeared, and chivalry for the knights meant not attacking another knight who had not yet prepared himself with his armor and weapons. And the knights preferred to believe that their little wars were for honor rather than for profit such as their stealing horses or taking prisoners for ransom.
The Church discouraged warfare among the knights and denounced fighting for booty as a sin. The knights obliged and, in the place of reduced warfare, tournaments were created. The Church objected to the tournaments also, but these complaints the knights largely ignored. The tournaments became the favorite entertainment of the aristocracy. The tournaments were close to war, and occasionally tempers were lost and a participant was killed. Winners won horses and armor and losers were ransomed and allowed to go free when the ransom was paid.
Aristocratic women attended the tournaments, and the knights performed especially for them. During the 1100s courtly love had developed. Adventurous men, some of whom were married, carried on romantically with women other than their wives. Troubadours sang of love, and aristocrats ignored Church strictures on sexuality, believing that they were, after all, sinners. In these times prostitutes from the lower classes swarmed the castles. Nobles were little ashamed of their bastards. And occasionally a noble abandoned his wife for someone new.
The Church fought back, and at the end of the century the Church demanded that a man have its approval to divorce or to remarry. Rather than divorce, some men tried annulments, and if the wife protested the Church defended her. The increase in attention to women, meanwhile, had been accompanied by the Church increasing its veneration of the Virgin Mary and Saint Mary Magdalene, and in the 1100s many nunneries were founded.
In 1144, Muslims captured the city of Edessa in northern Mesopotamia (now southern Turkey), and a crusade from 1147 to 1149, led by the German emperor, Conrad II, and the French monarch, Louis VII, failed to retake the city for Christendom. In 1187 the Muslims, led by the great Saladin, reconquered Jerusalem, and from 1189 to 1191 a third crusade, led by Richard the Lionhearted of England and joined with the French and German monarchs, failed to retake the city. Then in 1193 the death of Saladin inspired hope among the Christians, and Pope Innocent III decided on a new crusade to retake Jerusalem.
In managing the new crusade, Innocent III demanded that the kings of western Christendom make peace with each other. Then managing the crusade escaped from the holy father's control. Venetian merchants, in competition with Constantinople for trade with the Muslims, offered transportation for the crusaders, and the crusaders accepted in exchange for fighting and capturing a port town, Zara, for the Venetians.
Constantinople revolted against the presence of the crusaders, and the Crusaders retaliated, seizing the city for themselves in a three-day orgy of rape and the plundering of palaces and Eastern Orthodox convents and churches. Fire destroyed much of the city and the crusaders set up their own king in Constantinople. In accordance with an agreement made before the sacking of Constantinople, half the booty taken there went to the Venetians.
Pope Innocent III was delighted by the news of the fall of Constantinople to Roman Christianity. When he heard of the atrocities that had attended the victory he was shocked, but he continued to approve of the conquest. And soon in Constantinople, Latin (Roman) prelates would replace Greek (Eastern Orthodox) prelates.
Unity by conquest would remain the aim of rulers into the 20th century, but it was not a good formula. Eastern Orthodox Christians would cling to their faith despite rule by Latin Christians. The dream in Rome of uniting Christendom would remain just a dream. Roman Catholic rule in Constantinople and its empire would last only to 1261. Meanwhile, a weakened Constantinople gave opportunity to neighbors to grab territory at its expense.
Innocent III had become pope when a number of dissident movements had been spreading among the Christians, mainly in the economically advanced areas, where people were more inclined to question and to exercise independent thinking - areas such as the Rhineland, Italy and southern France. These movements came with many names, among them were the Waldenses, Beguines, the Humiliati and the Albigenses (Albigensia). All of them were concerned with what they saw as the growing greed and corruption of public life, and they tended to be interested in a literal interpretation of scripture and a return to "true" Christianity.
In 1207, Pope Innocent III launched a crusade against the Albigenses (or Cathars), believing that the Albigenses were in error concerning the nature of Jesus Christ. He associated heretics with treason, disease and filth. He rallied to his cause the French monarch, Philip Augustus, who was eager to extend his authority into southern France against nobles who had adopted the Albigensian heresy.
People devoted to the Church joined the crusade - to be known as the Cathar Crusade. Innocent III had already declared heresy as a capital offense, and some of the crusaders took it upon themselves to be executioners. The leader of the crusade at Beziers is said to have responded to the question of how they should know who was a heretic and who was not with the call of "Kill them all, God will know His own." But a Catholic encyclopedia denies that such words were uttered. [note]
According to a Church report, 20,000 men, women and children were massacred at Beziers. At Minerve, hundreds received more lenient treatment: they had their ears and noses cut off. After all the killing and looting the Albigenses remained, clinging to their beliefs as had other persecuted believers. It would take persistent effort by the Church to wipe them out as a recognizable group - which was not accomplished until the late 1300s.
During the crusade against heretics in southern France and northern Italy, children whose emotions were fired by the cause of Christianity and the preaching against heretics decided to do their bit by trying to retake the Holy Land. In 1212, thousands of children, with a sprinkling of adults and a few clerics, started for Jerusalem. They were deficient in money and organization but they believed that as children they were favored by God and could work miracles that adults could not.
The Children's Crusade did not have the blessing of the Church and technically was not a Church crusade. But neither ecclesiastical nor secular authorities bothered to disperse the children, except for the king of France, Philip Augustus, who, persuaded a large group of them to return home.
Children left the Rhineland in early July,1212, and crossed the Alps. About 7,000 of them arrived at the port city of Genoa in late August - thousands having died along the way. And at Genoa the miracle they expected failed to happen: God did not part the sea for them or allow them to walk on water as they had expected. In November, exhausted and disappointed, many went back home. Two merchants from Marseilles provided seven ships for the remaining children. Two of these ships were wrecked off the coast of Sardinia, and the children aboard the other five ships were sold on slave markets in North Africa and Egypt.
In the wake of the failures of the Children's crusade, people came to decide that the whole enterprise was the work of the devil. Success was still the work of God and the devil was still responsible for failures. But Pope Innocent III would summon Europe to another crusade, saying of the children, "They put us to shame. While they rush to recover the Holy Land, we sleep." [note]
In 1215, the Church's Fourth Lateran Council met in Rome to enact legislation as to what was heresy and what was not. And the Council took up other issues. The Council decided that all Catholics would be required to confess their sins at least once a year. It decided that the clergy was to remain celibate, sober and was to refrain from gambling, hunting, engaging in trade, going to taverns or wearing bright or ornate clothing. The Council ended the Germanic custom of marriage by a couple simply cohabiting and exchanging rings. From then on marriage was to be performed by the Church. And with Church marriages would come the Church's involvement in divorce.
The Fourth Lateran Council decreed that Jews should wear a yellow label so they could easily be distinguished as outcasts. Mustering his capacity for compassion, Innocent III forbade attempts to convert Jews to Christianity by force. Also he advocated ghettoization of the Jews - isolation into segregated communities - which was welcomed by some rabbis because it inhibited assimilation and helped protect Jews from hostile Christians.
It was to be another rough century for Jews. Occasionally they were attacked by mobs. The Talmud was frequently confiscated and burned. In 1240 at Paris, twenty-four wagon loads of Talmudic manuscripts were burned. Jews were not allowed to own land. At the end of the century, King Edward I of England banished Jews from England, and Philip IV of France banished them from France, both seeking to satisfy public outpourings of hatred and to enrich themselves with the property that the expelled left behind. And many expelled Jews would settle in Germany.
A new Church order called the Franciscans arose, in part in response to what the Franciscans saw as the evils of trade, profit and the new money economy - an attitude not unlike the Confucian dislike for commerce. The Franciscans devoted themselves to poverty, to a nearness to God and the care of the poor and the sick. The order's leader, Francis, and his followers took a cue from the Gospels and went about barefoot - rather than live like monks in well endowed monasteries. They went about preaching, begging for bread and lodging. They helped peasants work in the fields, without universal acclaim, some peasants seeing them as absurd and pelting them with mud. But they gained adherents and they gained some popularity, their belief in sharing remaining a counterpoint to greed. And the papacy hoped that the spirit of Franciscans would bring laity closer to the Church.
Another order was the Dominicans, founded by an intellectual Spanish priest, Dominic, who had been sent by Innocent III to preach to the Albigenses. Dominic had decided that the best way to combat heresy was to have learned men both teaching and leading a life of poverty. Unlike the Franciscans, the Dominicans saw knowledge as essential, but they were also dedicated to doing good for the poor and the sick, and they earned the respect of pious bourgeoisie who had a respect for duty, discipline, learning and frugality.
In 1215 in England a frustrated nobility forced King John of England to sign a document called the Magna Carta, a document they hoped would protect them from imprisonment or loss of property without trial by a jury of their peers. It was a product of the increased power of kings and the desire by nobles to mitigate an arbitrary use of that power. Pope Innocent III opposed the Magna Carta. He was not inclined to favor any demand for rights. Rights, he believed, belonged only to those with authority. He complained that the Magna Carta impaired King John's rights and dignity, and he annulled it partly on the grounds that John had signed the document under duress.
Across Christendom, Church law remained more significant than secular law, and in 1233 the Church began exercising justice through a new ecclesiastical court - the Inquisition. The inquisitors were normally well trained canon lawyers and frequently Dominicans. The Inquisition was held away from public view, drawing from informers, and sometimes confessions were elicited by torture. A dissatisfaction with truth through ordeal had arisen, and Roman law was being used, which had sanctioned torture.
The testimony of an eyewitness might also be used in determining guilt, and a defendant had no warning of what might be presented and no weapon as defense other than to charge an accuser with malice - if he knew the accuser's identity, which he or she often did not.
The Inquisition was lenient in punishing crimes of injury to others - more so at any rate than had ancient Rome and some other pagan societies. Heresy offended the Church more. Regarding heresy the purpose of the Inquisition was to persuade the defendant to confess and recant, and those who confessed and recanted suffered only a mild penalty. Second offenders might be subjected to a ritualized public humiliation, imprisonment or loss of property. Mostly it was only persistent heretics who were burned at the stake.
During the 1200s, the Church founded universities in England (at Oxford), in Portugal, Spain, Paris, and in Germany - and a growing national consciousness and pride was contributing to a sense of competition in education. Scholars wandered from town to town. They and students from across Christendom were able to communicate in a common language - Latin. Curiosity and a desire to know had grown from the time of Abelard, fed by translations of ancient writings on medicine, in the natural sciences and mathematics.
Much learning was needed. Medicine was still crude and brutal. Bleeding was one remedy, and wounds were being treated with boiling oil. People did not know the difference between heart attacks, appendicitis and poisoning, and still they often suspected that their illness was the work of witchcraft. People suffered from poor hygiene, polluted water, tainted meat and periodic epidemics of typhus, cholera and small pox. Infant mortality was still high, and women were rarely fertile past the age of thirty. People were describing their ills as "the lord put it to me, and the lord will remove it when it pleases him." And booze for breakfast was common among ordinary people, their beer having an alcoholic content three to four times higher than today's beer.
The chief increase in knowledge issued from the works of Aristotle - the old practitioner of observation, classification and logic. When Aristotle was introduced, the Church saw his works as incompatible with Christianity and banned those works. But suppression failed. Scholars debated between Aristotle and Plato's claim that abstract universals had a reality apart from particulars. In an attempt to give rationality to his faith, as had Anselm, a Dominican scholar at the university of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, tried synthesizing what he saw as the realities reflected in Aristotle's work and his Christianity.
Aquinas believed that God was not self-evident as some had claimed, but he believed that God could be proven through reason. As had Aristotle, Aquinas believed that one could start with a truth and build from it logically to truths beyond sense experience, to a god at the top of a hierarchical order, to the being beyond which there was no greater being. He accepted Aristotle's claim that everything had a cause except for God - God being the unmoved mover.
Aquinas transposed Aristotle's view of happiness as the purpose of life - a view coupled with well being, moderation, virtue and fulfillment (rather than fun). For Aquinas all of these good things were realized by knowing God and acquired by practice and infused into believers by the grace of God mediated by Church sacraments.
Aquinas believed that not all people had the intellectual capacity to reason to an awareness of God through logic. Those people who could not, he reasoned, did best for themselves by clinging to the authority of those more capable than they. The wisest of men, Aquinas believed, had faith in the authority of God as revealed in scripture.
Aquinas' work was applauded by some scholars but it was not welcomed by the Church. In 1277 the archbishop of Paris declared Aquinas' views as heresy, and this was repeated in England by the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Church doctrine regarding philosophical complexities was changing, and soon the Church began to accept Aquinas' work, and to accept Aristotle. In 1323, Pope John XXII would canonize Aquinas. In 1567, Pope Pius V would declare Aquinas a doctor of the Church, and Aquinas' works would be required reading for anyone studying philosophy.
Advances continued in machinery and weaponry. Clocks and eyeglasses were coming into use. Buttons were being sewn onto clothing. Western Europeans were doing more measuring and beginning to use navigational charts. Advances were made in the smelting of ore. More iron was being used in tool making. The use of water power was still increasing. Spinning wheels and treadles for looms were being used in the fabric industry. Trade was spreading over a greater distance. Western Europe was enjoying a long period of boom in commerce.
Castles of wood had been replaced by castles of stone, with thicker and higher walls. Great Gothic cathedrals were being built - a huge investment of time and money, reflecting economic vitality, civic pride and religious faith. Grand Cathedrals contributed to community. There people gathered for prayer, funerals and festivities. Marriages were performed there - daughters commonly being married at ages fourteen or fifteen. Local guilds met at the cathedral, as did magistrates and municipal officials. The cathedrals were not only churches but town halls, places where actors staged plays, where couples courted and homeless pilgrims slept.
Farming had expanded onto lands with soil that was of lower quality than that of the river valleys previously farmed. With improved farming methods and more acreage being farmed surplus of food was being produced, lowering its price for consumers but making it harder for people make a living on marginal land. The reclamation of land was coming to an end and people who had farmed were moving to the towns in search of work, and work was harder to find. The economy was not keeping up with the rise in population, and at the end of the1200s an economic recession was developing and the confidence that characterized the 1200s was on the wane.
The church was at its all time high in influence and power in the 1200s. It was Europe's greatest institution and its only unifying force. Only a few small pockets of paganism remained, in Scandinavia and among the Lithuanians. The church remained at the center of people's lives. It controlled education, including the universities, with all teachers being members of the clergy. With scholastic thought it dominated Europe intellectually. Princes frequently went to the papacy to settle their disputes.
But many were ignoring church law. The church condemned the killing of newborn babies, but this continued to be widely practiced, especially the exposure of infant daughters - exposure preferred over abortion. And the church's position was being threatened by the growing power of kings.
Monarchs were building centralized bureaucracies and extending their rule across territory that had been dominated by nobles - the English monarchy, for example, completing its conquest of the English countryside in 1284. In 1294, King Edward I of England and Philip IV of France went to war against each other over a fishing conflict. Edward and Philip laid taxes upon the clergy in order to pay for their war. Pope Boniface VIII objected. He insisted that all Christians were subject to him and that kings must submit to papal authority. Boniface proclaimed that the clergy was not to pay taxes to secular rulers. King Edward resisted, and King Philip maintained that he was completely sovereign and responsible to God alone. Philip stopped the flow of money from France to the Vatican. Pope Boniface had no substantial military power of his own. Philip charged Boniface with heresy and in 1303 sent troops to Italy to arrested the pope. Pope Boniface was rescued by friends, but, old at sixty-nine, he died a month later.
In 1305, French influence in the College of Cardinals resulted in the election of the Biship of Bordeaux as the new pope, who became Clement V. Romans rioted, and at the request of Philip IV of France, Pope Clement moved his court away from hostile Rome to the fortress town Avignon,in southeastern France, but technically not French. Avignon was the fief of a vassal of Rome. Pope Clement appointed cardinals from French clergy. Against a weakened papacy, the monarchies in England and France took taxes and other payments from bishops and lower clergy. Papal prestige suffered. English, Germans and Italians accused the pope and cardinals at Avignon of being the tools of the French monarchy. And pious Christians called the Avignon papacy the Babylonian Captivity.
Royal families in Scotland and England had intermarried. With help from the Church, Scotland had become Anglicized, but with the border between Scotland and England not clearly defined, from the late 1000s through the 1100s wars over border territories erupted. The 1200s were more peaceful, until the death of Scotland's king Alexander III, which was followed by conflicts over succession and intervention by England's Edward I, who was busy also trying to extend his rule over North Wales.
Rising to prominence at this time was William Wallace, from Renfrew, who led the resistance to the English and whom the Scots were to celebrate as one of their great national heroes. According to sources used by the English, Wallace had been wanted for killing an Englishman in response to an insult, and he had gathered around him some other desperate men who took to rebellion against the English. Soon Wallace was joined by various Scottish nobles. The rebels burned down the quarters for English soldiers at Barns of Ayr and performed other exploits. Edward sent an army against Wallace. Wallace was defeated, and, in mid-1297, Scottish nobels signed a submission to Edward. Wallace and his army fled north, and he gathered more men for his army. More battles followed, Wallace defeating the English army at Stirling in September, 1297, and Wallace was able to drive Edward's army back to England.
The Scots were by now suffering from famine, and to relieve the suffering Wallace organized raids into England and devastated lands to the gates of Newcastle. A hero among the Scots he was elected guardian of the kingdom. Then in 1298 Edward came with a great army. Wallace retreated. Because of the famine, the English started to pull back. Wallace pursued them to Falkirk, where Edward's army defeated him. Again Wallace retreated north, this time with only a remnant of his army. He was captured on August 5, 1305 and taken in chains to London.
Edward chose to charge Wallace with treason, although Wallace had never sworn allegiance to Edward. But the charge of treason brought an execution worse than would otherwise have been suffered by Wallace. Wallace was hanged, but cut down while still conscious. He was drawn, emasculated, his belly cut opened and his intestines, heart, liver and lungs were thrown upon a fire. He was decapitated for his outlawry. His head was placed on a pole on London Bridge. His body was hacked into four pieces, one quarter exhibited above a sewer at Newcastle for the enjoyment of the people there who recalled Wallace's invasion of their district. Another quarter was sent to the town of Berwick and a third to the Scottish town of Perth. What happened to the fourth quarter of Wallace's body is unknown or in dispute.
Additional Online Reading
The murder of Thomas Becket,
a conflict between church and state, in the year 1170,
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/becket.htm
Worthwhile DVD
Empires: Holy Warriors (Saladin and Richard the Lionhearted) by Public Broadcasting (PBS)
Recommended Books
A History of Western Society, Volume One, Chapter Nine, "Revival, Recovery and Reform," by John P. McKay, Bennet D. Hill and John Buckler.
Warriors of God: Richard the Lionhearted and Saladin in the Third Crusade, by James Reston Jr, Doubleday, 2001
A History of Christianity in the World, by Clyde L Manshreek, Second Edition, Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1985
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6th-15th centuries
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in the Terrible 1300s
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