). Western Christian Civilization in the Early Middle Ages

Western Europeans in the early Middle Ages (the period between about 600 and 1050) were backward in comparison to their Byzantine and Islamic neighbors Material conditions throughout this period were so primitive. Yet new and promising patterns were definitely taking shape. Above all, a new center of civilization was emerging in the North Atlantic regions. Around 800 the Frankish monarchy managed to create a western European empire in alliance with the Western Christian Church. Although this empire did not last long, it still managed to hew out a new Western cultural unity that was to be an important building block for the future.

The founder of the Frankish state was the brutal and wily chieftain Clovis, who conquered most of modern-day France and Belgium around 500 and cleverly converted to Western Catholic Christianity. Clovis founded the Merovingian dynasty. He did not, however, pass on a united realm but followed the typical barbarian custom of dividing up his kingdom among his sons. It took about two centuries before the Frankish rulers began to exercise their full hegemony. Throughout this era, one of the darkest in the recorded history of Europe, trade contracted, towns declined, literacy was almost forgotten, and violence was endemic.

The architect of a new western European religious policy that was based on an alliance between the institutions of the Roman papacy and Benedictine monasticism was Pope Gregory I (reigned 590-604), known as St. Gregory the Great. Gregory sought to create a more autonomous Western-oriented Latin Church. This he tried to do in many ways. As a theologian – the fourth great “Latin father” of the Church – he built upon the work of his three predecessors, Jerome, Ambrose, and especially Augustine, in articulating a theology that had its own distinct characteristics. Among these were emphasis on the idea of penance and the concept of purgatory as a place for purification before admission into heaven. Gregory pioneered in the writing of a simplified unadorned Latin prose that corresponded to the actual spoken language of his contemporaries, and presided over the creation of a powerful Latin liturgy. All of these innovations helped to make the Christian West religiously and culturally more independent of the Greek-speaking East than it had ever been before.

Gregory the Great was as much a statesman as he was a theologian and shaper of Latin. Within Italy he assured the physical survival of the papacy by clever diplomacy and expert management of papal landed estates. He also began to reemphasize earlier claims of papal primacy. He patronized the order of Benedictine monks and used them to help evangelize new Western territories. His patronage helped the order to survive and later to become for centuries the only monastic order in the West. In return the pope could profit from using the Benedictines to carry out special projects. The most significant of these was the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England to Christianity. Its great result was that it left a Christian outpost to the far northwest that was thoroughly loyal to the papacy. It was his policy of invigorating the Western Church that most helped to bring it about.

Around 700, when the Benedictines were completing their conversion of England, the long, troubled period of transition between the ancient and medieval worlds was finally coming to an end. And then the ultimate consolidation of a new pattern took place in the reign of Carolus Magnus or Charlemagne (768-814), from whom the new dynasty takes its name of “Carolingian.” Without question Charlemagne ranks as one of the most important rulers of the whole medieval period. Most of his campaigns were successful; he annexed the greater part of central Europe and northern and central Italy to the Frankish domain. To rule this vast area he bestowed all the powers of local government upon his own appointees, called counts, and tried to remain in control of them. Although Charlemagne’s system in practice was far from perfect, it led to the best government that Europe had seen since the Romans. Because of the military triumphs and internal peace of his reign, Charlemagne was long remembered and revered as a western European folk hero.

Primarily to aid his territorial expansion and help administer his realm Charlemagne presided over a revival of learning known as the “Carolingian renaissance.” Charlemagne extended his rule into Germany in the name of Christianity. Amazingly, only in Anglo-Saxon England had literacy been cultivated by the Benedictine monks. The reason for this was that the Anglo-Saxons spoke a form of German but the monks needed to learn Latin in order to say their offices and study the Bible. They had to go about learning Latin by a very self-conscious program of studies. The greatest Anglo-Saxon Benedictine scholar before Charlemagne’s time was the Venerable Bede (d. 735), whose History of the English Church and People, written in Latin, was one of the best historical writings of the early-medieval period and can still be read with pleasure. When Charlemagne came to the throne he invited the Anglo-Saxon Benedictine Alcuin – a student of one of Bede’s students – to direct a revival of studies on the continent. With Charlemagne’s active support Alcuin helped establish new school to teach reading, directed the copying and correcting of important Latin works, including many Roman classics, and inspired the formulation of a new clear handwriting that is the ancestor of our modern “Roman” print. These were the greatest achievements of the Carolingian Renaissance, which stressed practically rather than original literacy or intellectual endeavors. They established a bridgehead for literacy on the Continent which thereafter would never be completely lost. They also helped to preserve Latin literature, and they made the Latin language the language of state and diplomacy for all of western Europe, as it remained until comparatively recent times.

The climax of Charlemagne’s career came in the year 800 when he was crowned emperor on Christmas Day in Rome by the pope. Charlemagne did not gain any actual power by taking the imperial title either, but the significance of the event is nonetheless great. Charlemagne’s assumption of the title was virtually a declaration of Western self-confidence and independence. Since Charlemagne’s vast realm was fully as large as that of the Byzantines, had great reserves of agricultural wealth, and was defining its own culture based on Western Christianity and the Latin linguistic tradition, the claim to empire was largely justified. More than that, both for its symbolism and for its contribution toward giving westerners a sense of unity and purpose it was a major landmark on the road to the making of a great western Europe.

Although the claim to empire was bold and memorable, Charlemagne’s actual empire disintegrated quickly after his death for many reasons. The simplest was that hardly any of his successors were as competent and decisive as he was. And to make matters worst of all, new waves of invasion began just as Charlemagne’s grandsons and great-grandsons started fighting each other. Under these pressures the Carolingian Empire completely fell apart and a new political map of Europe was drawn in the tenth century.

As the Carolingian period was crucial for marking the beginnings of a common North Atlantic western European civilization, so the tenth century was crucial for marking the beginnings of the major modern European political entities. England, which never had been part of Charlemagne’s empire, became unified in the late ninth and the tenth century owing to the work of Kind Alfred the Great (871-899) and his direct successors. Alfred and his heirs reorganized the army, infused new vigor into local government, and codified the English laws. In addition, Alfred founded schools and fostered an interest in Anglo-Saxon writing and other elements of a national culture. The most important German ruler of the period was Otto the Great. He became king in 936, and took the title of emperor in Rome in 962. By this last act Otto strengthened his claim to being the greatest continental monarch since Charlemagne. Otto and his successors, who continued to call themselves emperors, tried to rule over Italy but barely succeeded in doing so.

From the eighth to the eleventh century the European economy was based almost entirely on agriculture and very limited local trade. The main economic unit throughout the period was the self-supporting large landed estate, usually owned by kings, warrior aristocrats, or large-scale monasteries. Farming tools in most places were still too primitive to bring in a fully adequate return on the enormous investment of effort expended by the laboring masses. The subsequent invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries set agricultural life back and new beginnings would have to be made in the years thereafter.

Given the low level of early-medieval economic life, it is not surprising that the age was not a prosperous time for learning or the arts. There is not going to be much to support schools or major artistic projects. Throughout the period, even in the best of years, learning was a privilege for the few. Learning also consisted mostly of memorization, without regard for criticism or refutation. There was some revival of learning under Charlemagne that may be called a “renaissance” but that it did not issue into any real intellectual creativity. Its major accomplishment was the founding of enough schools to educate the clergy in the rudiments of reading and the training of enough monastic scribes to recopy and preserve some major works of Roman literature. Even this accomplishment was jeopardized in the period of invasions that accompanied the fall of the Carolingian Empire. Fortunately just enough schools and manuscripts survived to become the basis for another – far greater – revival of learning that began in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

In the realm of literature the early Middle Ages had an extremely meager production. Toward the close of the period, however, the vernacular languages, which were either Germanic or based on different regional dialects of Latin began to be employed for crude poetic expression, usually first by oral transmission. The best-known example of this literature in the vernacular is the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. First put into written form about the eighth century, this poem incorporates ancient legends of the Germanic peoples of northwestern Europe. It is a story of fighting and seafaring and of heroic adventure against deadly dragons and the forces of nature. The background of the epic is pre-Christian, but the author of the work introduced into it some qualities of Christian idealism. Beowulf is important not only as one of the earliest specimens of Anglo-Saxon or Old English poetry, but also for the picture it gives of the society of the English and their ancestors in the early Middle Ages.

The artistic history of the early Middle Ages was a story of isolated and interrupted accomplishments because artistic life relied most of all on brief moments of local peace or royal patronage. The earliest enduring monuments of early-medieval art were those created by monks in Ireland – which had its own unique culture – between the sixth and the eighth centuries. The Irish monks developed a thoroughly anticlassical and almost surrealistic style. The greatest surviving product from this school is the stunning Book of Kells, an illuminated Gospel book that has been called “the most sophisticated work of decorative art in the history of painting.” The Irish school declined without subsequent influence and was followed by artistic products of the Carolingian Renaissance.

For much of its inspiration, the art of Charlemagne’s period returned to classical models. In the tenth century, new regional schools emerged. The northern Spanish created a rather strange and independent style mostly influenced by the decorative style of Islamic art.

Undoubtedly, there is no single, obvious terminal date for early-medieval history as a whole. The date 1000 is sometimes given because it is a convenient round number, but even as late as 1050 Europe had not changed on the surface very much from the way it had been since the end of the Carolingian period. Indeed, looking at Europe as late as 1050 it would at first seem that not much progress had been made over the entire course of the early-medieval centuries. But actually much had been accomplished. By shifting its main weight to the Atlantic northwest, European civilization became centered in lands that would soon harvest great agricultural wealth. By 1050 the Anglo-Saxon English state created by King Alfred and his successors was falling apart. By preserving some of the traditions developed by Gregory the Great, St. Boniface, and Charlemagne, European civilization had also developed an enduring sense of cultural unity based on Western Christianity and the Latin inheritance. And in the tenth century the beginnings of the future European kingdoms and city-states started to coalesce. Western European civilization was thus for the first time becoming autonomous and distinctive. From then on it would become a leading force in the history of the world.

The period between about 1050 and 1300, termed by historians the High Middle Ages, was the time when western Europe first clearly emerged from backwardness to become one of the greatest powers on the globe. Around 1050 the West was still less developed in most respects than the Byzantine Empire or the Islamic world, but by 1300 it had forged ahead of these two rivals. From a global perspective, only China was its equal in economic, political, and cultural prosperity. Given the sorry state of western Europe around 1050, this startling leap forward was certainly one of the most impressive achievements of human history.

The reasons for Europe’s enormous progress in the High Middle Ages are predictably complex. One is that Europe between 900 and 1050 was already poised for growth and could finally begin to live up to its potential once the devastating invasions had ceased. Most of these invasions had tapered off by around 1000, but in the eleventh century England was still troubled by the Danes: the year 1066, more famous as the year of the Norman Conquest, was also the year of the last Viking invasion of England. Once foreign invasions were no longer imminent, western Europeans could concentrate on developing their economic life with much less fear of interruption than before. Because of the relative continuity allowed by this change, extraordinarily important technological breakthroughs were made, above all those that contributed to the first agriculture made food more bountiful and provided a solid basis for economic development and diversification in other spheres. Population grew rapidly, and towns and cities grew to such a degree that we can speak also of an “urban revolution,” even though western Europe remained predominantly agrarian. At the same time political life in the West became more stable. In the course of the High Middle Ages strong new secular governments began to provide more and more internal peace for their subjects and became the foundations of our modern nation-states. In addition to all these advances, there were also striking new religious and intellectual developments, which helped give the West a new sense of mission and self-confidence. Although at first we will treat only the economic, social, and political accomplishments of the High Middle Ages, it is well to bear in mind that religion played a pervasive role in all of medieval life, and that all aspects of the high-medieval “great leap forward” were inextricably interrelated.

The religious and intellectual changes were as important as the economic, social, and political ones. In the sphere of religion, the most fundamental organizational development was the triumph of the papal monarchy. Before the middle of the eleventh century certain popes had laid claim to primacy within the Church, but then, most dramatically, the popes emerged as the supreme religious leaders of Western Christendom. They centralized the government of the Church, challenged the sway of emperors and kings, and called forth the crusading movement. By 1300 the temporal success of the papacy had proven to be its own nemesis, but the popes still ruled the Church internally, as they continue to rule the Roman Catholic Church today. While the papacy was assuming power, a new vitality infused the Christian religion itself, enabling Christianity to capture the human imagination as never before. At the same time too there was a remarkable revival of intellectual and cultural life. Westerners boasted that learning and the arts had moved northwest to them from Egypt, Greece, and Rome – a boast that was largely true. In the High Middle Ages Europeans first started building on ancient intellectual foundations and also contributed major intellectual and artistic innovations of their own.

Inseparable from the agricultural revolution, the enfranchisement of serfs, and the growing sophistication of noble life was the revival of trade and the burgeoning of towns. River and sea routes were used wherever possible, but land transport was also necessary, and this was aided by improvements in road-building, the introduction of packhorses and mules, and the building of bridges. Whereas the Romans were really only interested in land communications, medieval people, starting in the eleventh century, concentrated on land transport to the degree that they were much better able to maintain a vigorous land-based trade. Starting again in the eleventh century they began to make the former Roman “lake” the intermediary for an extensive seaborne trade that stretched over shorter and longer distances. As a result, luxury goods such as spices, gems, perfumes, and fine cloths began to appear in Western markets and stimulated economic life by inspiring nobles to accelerate the agricultural revolution in order to pay for them.

This revival of trade called for new patterns of payment and the development of new commercial techniques. Most significantly, western Europe returned to a money economy after about four centuries when coined money was hardly used as a medium of exchange. By the thirteenth century gold coins were minted by Italian states such as Florence and Venice. In a similar pattern of development, the peddlers evolved into more prosperous merchants who managed to offer their wares at international trade fairs. By such means a unified European economy came into being. Now staying at home entirely themselves, large-scale trading entrepreneurs perfected modern techniques of business partnerships, accounting, and letters of credit. In addition to the expansion of money and credit, trade was vastly facilitated by the rapid growth of towns. Existing towns that had barely survived from the Roman period grew enormously in size. Moreover, from the High Middle Ages until now a vigorous urban life has been a major characteristic of western European and subsequently modern world civilization.

It used to be thought that the primary cause of the medieval urban revolution was the revival of long-distance trade. In fact, the picture is far more complicated than that. While some towns did receive great stimulus from long-distance trade, and the growth of a major city such as Venice would have been unthinkable without it, most towns relied for their origin and early economic vitality far more on the wealth of their surrounding areas. These brought them surplus agricultural goods, raw materials for manufacture, and an influx of population. In other words, the quickening of economic life in general was the major cause of urban growth. Once towns started to flourish, many of them began to specialize in certain enterprises. The most important urban industries were those devoted to cloth-making. Cloth manufacturers sometimes developed techniques of large-scale production and investment that are ancestors of the modern factory system and industrial capitalism. But it must be emphasized that large industrial enterprises were atypical of medieval economic life as a whole.

Medieval cities and towns were not smaller-scale facsimiles of modern ones; to our own eyes they would still have seemed half-rural and uncivilized. The most distinctive form of economic and social organization in the medieval towns was the guild. This was, roughly speaking, a professional association organized to protect and promote special interests. The main types were merchant guilds and craft guilds. The primary functions of the merchant guilds were to maintain a monopoly of the local market for its members and to preserve a stable economic system. To accomplish these ends the merchant guild severely restricted trading by foreigners in the city, guaranteed to its members the right to participate in sales offered by other members, enforced uniform pricing, and did everything possible to ensure that no individual would corner the market for goods produced by its members. Craft guilds, similarly regulating the affairs of artisans, sought to preserve monopolies and to limit competition. Thus they established uniformity of prices and wages, prohibited working after hours, and formulated detailed regulations governing methods of production and quality of materials. Hence if these guilds were anything like modern trade unions, they were unions of bosses. In addition to all their economic functions, both kinds of guilds served important social ones. Often they acted in the capacity of religious associations, benevolent societies, and social clubs. Wherever possible guilds tried to minister to the human needs of their members.

All in all, the importance of the high-medieval urban revolution can scarcely be overestimated. The fact that the new towns were the vital pumps of the high-medieval economy has already been sufficiently emphasized: in providing markets and producing wares they kept the entire economic system thriving. In addition, cities and towns made important contributions to the development of government because in many areas they gained their own independence and ruled themselves as city-states. Italian city-states were particularly advanced in their administrative techniques and thereby helped influence a general European-wide growth in governmental sophistication. The rise of towns contributed greatly to the quickening of intellectual life in the West. New schools were invariably located in towns. By the thirteenth century the needs of merchants to be trained in reading and accounting led to the foundation of numerous lay primary schools. Equally momentous for the future was the fact that the stimulating urban environment helped make advanced schools more open to intellectual experimentation than any in the West since those of the Greeks. Not coincidentally, Greek intellectual life too was based on thriving cities. Thus it seems that without commerce in goods there can be little exciting commerce in ideas.

If any western European city of around 1200 epitomized Europe’s greatest new accomplishments it was Paris: that city was not only a bustling commercial center and an important center of learning, it was also the capital of what was becoming Europe’s most powerful government. France, like England and the new Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula, was taking shape in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a national monarchy, a new form of government which was to dominate Europe’s political future. Because the developing national monarchies were the most successful and promising European governments we must concentrate on them.

Around 1050 Germany was unquestionably the most centralized and best-ruled territory in Europe, but by 1300 it had fallen into a congeries of warring petty states. Since most other areas of Europe were gaining stronger rule in the very same period, the political decline of Germany becomes an intriguing historical problem. The major sources of Germany’s strength from the reign of Otto the Great in the middle of the tenth century until the latter part of the eleventh century were its succession of strong rulers, its resistance to political fragmentation, and the close alliance of its crown with the Church. But just then the whole system shaped by Otto the Great and his successors was dramatically challenged by a revolution within the Church.

The story of high-medieval Italian politics may be told more quickly. Southern Italy and Sicily had been welded together into a strong monarchical state in the twelfth century. But then, the area was brought to ruin. Although economic and cultural life was very far advanced in the Italian cities, and although the cities made important experiments in administrative techniques, political stability was widely lacking in northern Italy throughout most of the high-medieval period.

If one looks for the centers of growing political stability in Europe, then one has to seek them in high-medieval France and England. Ironically, some of the most basic foundations for future political achievement in France were established without any planning just when that area was most politically unstable. These foundations were aspects of a level of political decentralization often referred to by historians as the system of “feudalism.” The use of this word is controversial because ever since Marx some historians prefer to use it as a term to describe an agrarian economic and social system wherein large estates are worked by a dependent peasantry. The difficulty with this usage is that it is too imprecise, for such large estates existed in many times and places beyond the European Middle Ages and the medieval agrarian system can best be called manorialsim. Nonetheless, for convenience we can apply it to a specific point in medieval political development so long as we bear in mind that, like manorialism, it is only meant to serve as an approximation and that other historians may use it as a term for economic or sociological analysis.

Political feudalism was essentially a system of extreme political decentralized wherein what we today would call public power was widely vested in private hands. By a complicated and hard-to-trace process of rationalization, a vague theory was worked out in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries that tried to establish some order within feudalism. Since feudalism was originally a form of decentralization, it once was considered by historians to have been a corrosive or divisive historical force. But scholars more recently have come to the conclusion that feudalism was a force for progress and a fundamental point of departure for the growth of the modern state. They note that in the areas of France and England, which saw full feudalization, stabilization and governmental centralization came rapidly afterward. Because feudalism was originally spontaneous and makeshift, it was highly flexible. Their governments, however crude, worked the best for their times and could be used for building an even stronger government as time went on. A second reason for the effectiveness of feudalism was that it drew more people into direct contact with the actual workings of political life than had the old Roman. Third, feudalism helped lead to certain more modern institutions by its emphasis on courts. A final reason why feudalism led to political progress is not really intrinsic to the system itself.

The greatest possibilities for the use of feudalism were first demonstrated in England after the Norman Conquest of 1066. With hindsight we can say that the Norman Conquest came at just the right time to preserve and enhance political stability. Before 1066 England was threatened with disintegration under warrior aristocrats, but William destroyed their power entirely. In its place he substituted the feudal system. He used feudal practices to help govern England when there were not yet enough trained administrators to allow any real governmental professionalization.

The history of English government in the two centuries after William is primarily a story of kings tightening up the feudal system to their advantage until they superseded it and created a strong national monarchy. After an intervening period of civil war Henry I, the Conqueror’s energetic son, was succeeded by his grandson Henry II (1154-1189). Henry II’s reign was certainly one of the most momentous in all of English history. He made enormous governmental gains in other areas. His most important contributions were judicial. Henry also for the first time allowed parties in civil disputes to obtain royal justice. His legal innovation benefited both the crown and the country in several ways. The widespread use of juries in Henry’s reign brought more and more people into actual participation in royal government. In so doing it got them more interested in government and more loyal to government. Henry brilliantly managed to expand the competence and popularity of his government at very little cost.

The most concrete proof of Henry II’s success is that after his death his government worked so well that it more or less ran on its own. But John (1199-1216), the new king, needed money both to govern England and to fight in France and the barons particularly resented his financial exigencies and, in 1215 they made him design the subsequently famous Magna Carta (Great Charter), to redress all the other abuses the barons could think of. Most common conceptions of Magna Carta are erroneous. It was not intended to be a bill of rights or a charter of liberties for the common man. On the contrary, it was basically a feudal document in which the king as overlord pledged to respect the traditional rights of his vassals. Nonetheless, it did enunciated in writing the important principles that large sums of money could not be raised by the crown without consent given by the barons in a common council, and that no free man could be punished by the crown without judgment by his equals and by the law of the land. Above all, Magna Carta was important as an expression of the principle of limited government and of the idea that the king is bound by the law.

As the contemporary American medievalist J. R. Strayer has said, “Magna Carta made arbitrary government difficult, but it did not make centralized government impossible.” In the century following its issuance, the progress of centralized government continued apace. English central government was now fully developing a trained officialdom. The last and most famous branch of the medieval English governmental system was Parliament. This gradually emerged as a separate branch of government in the decades before and after 1300, above all owing to the wishes of Henry III’s son, Edward I (1272-1307).

While the process of governmental centralization was making impressive strides in England, it developed more slowly in France. But by around 1300 it had come close to reaching the same point of completion. French governmental unification proceeded more slowly because France in the eleventh century was more decentralized than England and faced greater problems. In many respects, however, luck was on their side: (1)there were no deadly quarrels over the right of succession;(2) most of the French kings lived to an advanced age;(3) the growth of agricultural prosperity and trade in their home region; (4) the kings were able to gain the support of the popes; (5) the growth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the University of Paris as the leading European center of studies. Finally, and by no means least of all, great credit must be given to the shrewdness and vigor of several of the French kings themselves.

The first noteworthy Capetian king was Louis VI, “the Fat” (1108-1137). He managed to pacify his home base, the Ile-de-France, by driving out or subduing its turbulent “robber barons.” Once this was accomplished, agriculture and trade could prosper and the intellectual life of Paris could start to flourish. The really startling additions to the realm were made by Louis’s grandson, Philip Augustus (1180-1223),who was wily enough to know how to take advantage of certain feudal rights in order to win large amounts of western French territory from the English King John. Most impressive of all, Philip worked out an excellent formula for governing his new acquisitions. This pattern of local diversity balanced against bureaucratic centralization was to remain the basic pattern of French government. Thus Philip Augustus can be seen as an important founder of the modern French state.

Philip IV, “the Fair” (1285-1314) fought many battles, seeking to round out French territories in the northeast and southwest and to gain full control over the French Church instead of sharing it with the pope in Rome. All these activities forced him to accelerate the process of governmental centralization, especially with the aim of trying to raise money. Thus his reign saw the quick formulation of many administrative institutions that came close to completing the development of medieval French government. Philip the Fair was successful in most of his ventures. By his reign France was unquestionably the strongest power in Europe. With only a sixteenth-century interruption, it would remain so until the nineteenth century.

While England and France followed certain similar processes of monarchical centralization and nation-building, they were also marked by basic differences that are worth describing because they were to typify differences in development for centuries after. England, a far smaller country than France, was much better unified. Aside from Wales and Scotland, there were no regions in Britain, no such different languages or traditions that they thought of themselves as separate territories. Correspondingly, England never really had to face the threat of internal division and could develop strong institutions of united national government such as Parliament. It meant that the English kings could rely on numerous local dignitaries, above all, the knights, to do much work of local government without pay. The obvious advantage was that local government was cheap, but the hidden implication of the system was that government also had to be popular, or else much of the voluntary work would grind to a halt. As time went on England became most clearly a limited monarchy. The French kings, much to the contrary, ruled a richer and larger country, which gave them – at least in times of peace – sufficient wealth to pay for a more bureaucratic, salaried administration at both the central and local levels. French kings therefore could rule more absolutely. But they were continually faced with serious threats of regional separatism. Different regions continued to cherish their own traditions. French kings often had to struggle with attempts at regional breakaways and take various measures to subdue their aristocrats. Up to around 1700 the monarchy had to fight a steady battle against regionalism, but it had the resources to win consistently and thereby managed to grow from strength to strength.

Now we’d better to assess the general significance of the rise of the national monarchies in high-medieval western Europe. Until their emergence there had been two basic patterns of government in Europe: city-states and empires. City-states had the advantage of drawing heavily upon citizen participation and loyalty and thus were able to make highly efficient use of their human potential. But they were often divided by economic rivalries, and they were not sufficiently large or militarily strong to defend themselves against imperial forces. The empires, on the other hand, could win battles and often had the resources to support an efficient bureaucratic administrative apparatus, but they drew on little voluntary participation and were too far-flung or rapacious to inspire any deep loyalties. The new national monarchies were to prove the “golden mean” between these extremes. They were large enough to have adequate military strength, and they developed administrative techniques that would rival and eventually surpass those of the Roman or Byzantine Empires. More than that, building at first upon the bases of feudalism, they drew upon sufficient citizen participation and loyalty to help support them in times of stress when empires would have foundered. By about 1300 the monarchies of England, France, and the Iberian peninsula had gained the primary loyalties of their subjects, superseding loyalties to communities, regions, or to the government of the Church. For all these reasons they brought much internal peace and stability to large parts of Europe where there had been little stability before. Thus they contributed greatly to making life fruitful. The medieval national monarchies were also the ancestors of the modern nation-states-the most effective and equitable governments of our day. In short, they were one of the Middle Ages’ most beneficial bequests to modern times.