A History of the Crusades Read Online Free PDF Page B

shown in the crusades.
    What, then, was it about late eleventh-century Europe which made the First Crusade possible? One basic feature was the thorough militarization of society, a characteristic rooted in long centuries of development. The political units which had emerged from the slow and painful dissolution of the western Roman empire were dominated by aristocratic kindreds which derived their wealth and power from the control of land and asserted their status by leadership in war. An inescapable fact of life in medieval Europe was that governments lacked the resources, administrative expertise, and communications to impose themselves upon society unaided. The best they could hope for was to reach accommodations with the ruling élites which had day-today power on the ground. The ideal arrangement was for central authority (usually a king) and regional warlords to find a common purpose so that co-operation and the pursuit of self-interest could combine harmoniously. The ways in which European society was structured on the eve of the First Crusade were the distant legacy of the last time such an accommodation between the centre and the regions had been attempted on a grand scale. In the eighth and early ninth centuries the Carolingian kings who dominated the western European continent had developed a political system which mobilized Frankish society for frequent wars of expansion in southern Gaul, Italy, Spain, and central Europe. In part because convenient victims became ever scarcer, however, and in part because western Europe was forced by Viking and Muslim attacks to look to its internal defences, the rhythm of channelled aggression broke down as the ninth century wore on. The West’s problems wereexacerbated by bitter civil wars between members of the Carolingian family. A consequence was the loosening of the bonds of loyalty and common purpose which had connected the kings to the warrior dynasties of the regions. In one sense political life simply reverted to type, as power became concentrated once more in the hands of economically and militarily dominant kindreds. But the Carolingian legacy supplied an important added ingredient, in that the great nobles—the ‘princes’ in the sense of ‘those who ruled’—were able to perpetuate and exploit the surviving institutions of public governance, often with only notional reference to the centre.
    Since the 1950s historians have developed a thesis which sees the dislocation of royal power in the ninth and tenth centuries as the prelude to even more momentous changes which took place in the decades either side of 1000. Because this model of explanation—what French medievalists call the
mutation féodale
, the feudal transformation—has hardened into an orthodoxy, it is worth sketching in outline. From around the middle of the tenth century, according to the
mutationiste
view, the large regional blocs which were the remnants of the Frankish polity themselves became subjected to centrifugal pressures from petty warlords, many of whom had risen to prominence as the princes’ deputies in the localities. Repeating the earlier pattern of fragmentation, but now on a much smaller scale, the local lords flourished by combining their economic muscle as landowners and their residual public powers with regard to justice and military organization. Peasants found themselves subjected to increasingly burdensome rents and labour obligations. Courts ceased to be public forums which served the free population of their area and became instruments of private aristocratic might, privileged access to which was gained by entering into the lord’s vassalage. One compelling demonstration of the lords’ success was the proliferation of castles, particularly in the years after 1000. Wooden structures for the most part, but coming increasingly to be made of stone, the castles amounted to a stark geopolitical statement that power in large stretches of the old Frankish empire had become