Tag Archive | feudalism

Medieval Monday – What Were They Thinking?

Last month my medieval post [at the Seduced by History blog] generated a lot of discussion, and while some of it set me off, other points set me to thinking. One point that was made was that you can’t judge the mindset of medieval people using modern worldviews and values. True. Very true. So, curious as ever, I dove into my collection of history books to piece together a picture of what the mindset of the medieval world really was.

My bookshelf … and also my cat Torpedo

Of course the first thing I discovered is that it was as drastically different within the different eras of the Middle Ages (commonly divided into Dark Ages, High Middle Ages, and Late Middle Ages) as our modern worldview is from any of those three. A peasant living in the kingdom of the Franks under the rule of Odo the Great in 870 would have had a vastly different view of the world than a nobleman living in the England of Henry II in 1170, and both wouldn’t have recognized the values and thought process of a Venetian living in plague-swept Italy in 1370. Life changed, and values with it, just as fast in the overly long stretch of time that we call the Middle Ages as fast as it changed from 1900 to today.

Okay, but what where those values, world views and thought processes like?

First of all, I just want to point out that that “famous” quote about medieval life being “nasty, brutish, and short” is a misquote. The quote, written in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes, was in reference to warfare, not day to day life. Yet somehow a lot of people have the mistaken idea that those words can be used to describe life in the Middle Ages, particularly the Dark Ages.

The reality of the Dark Ages was probably quite different. According to Charles Van Doren, the people of the Dark Ages most likely didn’t think of their own lives as dark at all. Sure, they were poor and uneducated, their lives were rural and small, and they were disconnected from everyone else in their so-called kingdoms. But Van Doren’s theory is that none of that mattered, because the goal of life in the Dark Ages was not material, it was spiritual.

As he discusses in his book A History of Knowledge, Van Doren points to St. Augustine’s seminal work City of God as the primary intellectual motivator of the Dark Ages. In City of God, written as the barbarian hoards were descending on Rome, St. Augustine says that while the material things of this world might pass away, it is the attainment of a non-material relationship to God that mankind should be striving. This was a huge departure from the materialistic culture of the Roman Empire, but it was one that stuck. After all, what better goal could your average person living anytime from 450 – 1000 have than something they had already attained: worldly poverty and spiritual riches.

Van Doren’s theory is that the centuries that we now call the Dark Ages were not a wasteland of underachievement and ignorance, but rather a time when the average person saw spirituality as worthy of merit, not wealth. And it was a spirituality that bore a closer resemblance to the pagan past than what we think of as Christianity today.

By the year 1050 things were beginning to change. As Norman F. Cantor discusses in his book The Civilization of the Middle Ages, Europe as it entered the High Middle Ages was a tapestry of vastly different ideals and achievements. In England you had a culture that had been turned upside-down in the past couple of centuries as Viking invasions had rewritten both the laws and customs. The king, Edward the Confessor, was pious but weak and his nobles saw no problem in waging personal wars against each other and their so-called sovereign for territory and position. Further south, in France, you had a noble class, mostly descended from Italian and Rhenish nobility, engaged in similar local wars. The German emperor, Henry III held more real power in his territory because of his connections with Rome, but this was not an era of centralized authority.

This was an era when most people still never traveled outside of twenty miles from the place where they were born. Peasants were far more concerned with the unprecedented productivity of the land that they were experiencing than national politics. The nobility felt this fluidity of fortune and looked for opportunities to seize power wherever they could. It was an age of political maneuvering and small-scale battles.

Strangely enough, it still wasn’t an age when wealth mattered. In fact, in spite of the fact that the economy was booming, money still wasn’t important to the people of the Middle Ages, not even by the twelfth century. In the twelfth century, the heart of the High Middle Ages, status was all-important. Status was gained through military and matrimonial victory. If you were a noble it was all about who you had married and who you conquered in the process. The rulers who made it to the top of the pile, Henry II of England, Philip Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, got where they were through strategic victories on private battlefields and through savvy negotiations in the bedroom. They were able to maintain their empires through the same means.

But something else was going on behind the scenes, as Joseph R. Strayer demonstrates in his book Western Europe in the Middle Ages. (These are all super awesome books, btw) While the emphasis was still on status over wealth, in the High Middle Ages it was also becoming about the individual over the collective. For kings a self-made man was one who battled his way to the throne. For the common man, advancement could come through skill and hard work.

On the continent, in Flanders and Italy in particular, a new phenomenon was underway. It used to be that all people could be classed into one of three categories: those who fought, those who prayed, and those who labored. Now there was a new and increasingly powerful group: the bourgeois. For the first time you had a small but influential class of people whose motto might just have been “show me the money”. These people were increasingly rich. They came from the lower tiers of the nobility, but also from the ranks of the peasantry who had made something of themselves. They built cities, founded churches and religious orders, loaned money to kings, and advised the Church what to do.

Granted, it wasn’t quite time for the French Revolution yet, but this is where the seeds were planted. Yes, the Church was the most powerful entity in Medieval Europe, but the Church was staffed with priests who came from very worldly backgrounds and who were more interested in politics than souls. The twelfth century saw the rise of great universities that still exist today. These centers of learning and inquiry were where most of the religious men from this time onwards came from. By the thirteenth century the Church was powered not so much by the kind of spirituality St. Augustine advocated in City of God, but by the logic and proto-scientific inquiry of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.

Are you still with me? We’ve gone from being a society content with its own material and intellectual poverty, simple in its spirituality and outlook, to a civilization with a sound economy, growing by leaps and bounds, in which status was king but wealth, individuality, and knowledge were beginning to be the measure of a man. Two very different worlds.

And then it all blew up and fell apart.

Just when life was good, when the immense forests of Europe were being cut down to make enough space for people to live, when peasants were contentedly excused from their feudal duties because they could easily pay scutage instead of providing labor, when monasteries were more like a cross between a university and a country club and universities were teaching metaphysics and methods of reason and deduction that would lead to the scientific method, when rediscovered knowledge began to filter back into the west from the east as trade became more prevalent, it all fell down like a house of cards.

If you want to get a good idea of what happened to set Europe back a couple hundred years in terms of development and standard of living, read Barbara W. Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century. I’ve actually written an entire series of blog posts about the various issues that brought Europe to its knees during this time: famine and climate change, the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the Papal Schism. So instead of rehashing all of that horrifically fascinating history that made up the Late Middle Ages, I just want to talk about what it did to people’s attitudes.

Basically, it wrecked them. All of the optimism of the High Middle Ages was gone. Europe experienced a collective period of manic-depression. Death could be around any corner, so you should either live it up and not care what happened or punish yourself for your sins and wait for the better life that was to come. Suddenly material things became much more important because there was no telling when you were going to lose them.

When the English invaded France and it looked like they were going to win the Hundred Years War, soldiers looted noble homes and sent “stuff” back to England. The average English home in the early 1400s was outfitted with pilfered French goods. This was a huge change from, say, the Viking invasions of the Dark Ages. Back then you were more likely to suddenly find your English house stocked with Danish goods than to find a Danish house decked out with English stuff. Warfare had changed from conquer and settle to smash and grab.

This is also when the Church became more militant about squashing any opinion, especially scientific ones, that didn’t agree with their bottom line. And yes, that’s the right metaphor. In the 14th century the Church underwent a civil war. Coming out of that there was a feeling that it needed to crack down on differences of opinion in order to maintain the level of political and social control that it had had back in the High Middle Ages when things were good. Why? Because there was big money in being the only spiritual game in town, in selling indulgences and relics. And after the curtain was pulled back by the Papal Schism, giving the average man a glimpse into the corrupt inner workings of the Church, the rumblings that would eventually lead to Martin Luther and the Protestant revolution were already being heard.

So what were people in the Middle Ages thinking? What were those attitudes that we can’t compare to the way people think now? Well, as Strayer suggests, because the vast majority of primary resources that exist about the Middle Ages were written by and about less than 10% of the population, we can only guess what the other 90% of the population was thinking. Granted, we can make educated guesses based on court records, papal decrees, and laws that were enacted. For example, repeated attempts by the clergy in Paris in the 13th century to shut down the many public bathhouses due to an outbreak of syphilis probably doesn’t indicate that the prevailing attitude in the city was one of anti-cleanliness and chastity. The importance of the brewing, spinning, and soap-making guilds, all female-dominated professions, in the High Middle Ages is a strong indicator that women were not expected to exclusively stay at home under the power of their husbands or fathers. The prevalence of court cases in which a woman sued to have a man who had seduced her be forced to legally marry her, and won those cases too, indicates that it was not so much of a man’s world as we might be tempted to think.

And since this post is now twice as long as I intended it to be, I’ll leave it there. The point is that attitudes changed drastically throughout the span that we think of as the Middle Ages. If you’re a writer wondering what the world your characters inhabit might be like, keep in mind that the ever-changing tapestry of medieval thought was just as complicated as the world we live in now, even if the overall worldview was different.

[This post is a repost of the article I wrote for the Seduced by History blog this past weekend. All images are in the public domain in the US, except my bookshelves]

Medieval Monday – Medieval Government

Nov5

Tomorrow in the United States we will all take part in a governmental extravaganza known as a presidential election. In theory, the citizens of this country will vote for who we want to be our president – although in actuality we’re just voting for the electoral college – who will then decide based on the popular vote who will be president. We’re also voting for federal and state legislators, who, let’s face it, are the ones who really wield the power in our governmental system. In the words of Winston Churchill, “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.”

But how did things work in the Middle Ages? How were people ruled a thousand years ago?

The most general answer to the question is monarchy. Most kingdoms of medieval Europe were ruled by monarchs, although the type and scope of these monarchies varied widely from kingdom to kingdom and through the various centuries of the Middle Ages. The Holy Roman Empire was administrated very differently from the Italian peninsula, which was ruled differently than Scandinavia or France or England. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to talk about government in post-Norman medieval England.

So monarchy, right? Medieval England was ruled by a king who was believed to be divinely ordained and who’s word was law. Right?

Well, yes and no.

Like Modern America, the government of medieval England was complex and layered. It was heavily based on the feudal system. True, you had the king at the top as the ultimate feudal lord. In theory the king was the most powerful feudal lord and all of the other lords and landowners swore fealty to him and fulfilled their obligations to provide fighting men and money accordingly.

William the Conqueror certainly was the strongest feudal lord in that he raised an army and defeated his distant cousin, King Harold, to secure the throne of England. And his descendants managed to hold onto the throne – although sometimes through a female connection instead of direct inheritance – for a really, really long time. The king was absolute, and the only way to become king was to be born into the royal line of succession. No election politics! Yay!

Actually, instead of election politics and Super PACs, medieval England had wars. Because where the line of succession from one monarch to another was not crystal clear, or where various sons of the rightful king decided to kill each other to take the throne, like in the case of Henry IIs progeny, war was the answer. It wasn’t just the sons of kings either. If nephews, cousins, or other relations felt that they would be a better ruler, they would raise an army to try to conquer the throne.

But wait, you say. What gave anyone the right to question the king?

Well, the king was still subject to the feudal system, even though he sat at the top of it. He relied on Great Councils to advise him, help him make decisions, and to implement those decisions and collect taxes. These Great Councils consisted of the heads of the clergy, barons, and earls. Sneak peak: The Great Councils developed into what we now know as Parliament. And that shift happened most formally after the events of 1215 and the signing of the Magna Carta. I could write a whole blog post about the build-up to, the implementation of, and the effects of the Magna Carta, but for now the important thing to take away is that the king was not absolute, he answered to his nobles.

Okay, so how did a noble get to be noble? And how did that effect you and me, who statistically were most likely to be peasants? How did government work for our kind?

It was all about the manor system. When you get right down to it, “federal” government of kings and barons didn’t matter so much to the likes of you and me. It was all about our local government. In a lot of ways, local government would seem more familiar to us. Yes, the be all and end all was our feudal lord, who inherited his manor. Lords who didn’t inherit their manors either won them in battle from the previous lord or were granted them by the king. However they came into possession of their land, the Lord of the Manor was the ultimate authority.

In theory.

Because the Lord of the Manor was often not present – away fulfilling his feudal obligations by fighting for his sovereign or just hanging out in London – he would appoint a man to be Steward and see to things in his place. The Steward would perform all of the duties of a Lord. This too could become a hereditary position. In fact, the Stewart family that would eventually take the throne of England got their name because they were the hereditary Stewards of Scotland, ruling in the place of the English king until independence was gained.

It goes further still, because sometimes even the Steward couldn’t be bothered to see to the day-to-day workings of the manor. That’s where the position of Reeve came into play. The Reeve was the man on the ground, so to speak. He was the one who had all of the actual responsibility, and in many cases the real power. How someone became the Reeve depended on the traditions of the given manor in question. In some cases he was appointed by the lord, but in many cases he was a peasant elected by the other peasants on the manor once a year at Michaelmas. The Reeve was responsible for everything from maintaining order to delegating work to making sure the produce of the manor made it to market and received a fair price. The Shire-Reeve, or Sheriff, was responsible for the administration of an entire shire.

So yes, while the king was the ultimate authority, like the federal government, and the Lord of the Manor was the de facto ruler of your patch, like a state governor, and while the Steward served to put the wishes of the Lord of the Manor in place, like a state legislature, the Reeve was the closest most of the population of medieval England got to authority, sort of like the mayor of a modern hometown. And the Reeve was as likely as not to be elected from amongst the people. If there was a dispute of some sort between citizens, you would take it to the Reeve or a local magistrate first, then the Steward if that failed, the Lord of the Manor if you needed to, and in the rarest of cases, to the king. But in essence, most local disputes were solved at the local level by lower officials and the Lord of the Manor and the king were lofty figureheads. Who the king was probably didn’t affect the daily lives of the peasants until and unless a war was fought directly on their land or they were plucked from the fields to go fight for their lord.

Mind you, I didn’t even scratch the surface of the influence of the Church or Church government here, and it was no small thing.

It was a very different sort of political system than we have now in America. Frankly, I don’t think I would mind living in this system as long as my Lord of the Manor was a good man who had appointed an honest Steward, and my fellow peasants had elected a good man to be Reeve. At least there wouldn’t have been political campaigns and TV commercials generating negativity. Considering how fruitful, populous, and economically stable England became in the years of the High Middle Ages and beyond, I think it’s safe to say that more Lords of the Manor ran things in a mutually beneficial way more often than not.

I’ve never been one to automatically assume that just because citizens of a given area didn’t have the right to vote it necessarily meant that they were all oppressed, down-trodden, and destitute. Living under an enlightened despot might actually have been a recipe for a more secure and prosperous life. Or maybe I’m just saying that right now because if I see another political ad I might go postal. Either way, I’ll definitely be voting tomorrow.

Medieval Monday – There’s A New Sheriff In Town

Oct8

One of the details in my Noble Hearts trilogy that makes them particularly susceptible to being compared to the Robin Hood legend is the presence of a sheriff. Not to give too much away, but he’s the bad guy in The Loyal Heart and the good guy in The Faithful Heart. Either way, the mere mention of a sheriff as being in charge takes people’s minds instantly to that best-known sheriff of all, the Sheriff of Nottingham. But there’s a reason why I needed the character of a sheriff in my novels and why the author of the Robin Hood legend needed one in his. It’s the very simple reason that if you lived in the medieval English countryside, the sheriff was in charge.

This was, of course, an evolution of government. Way, way back in Anglo-Saxon England, long before the Norman Invasion, the countryside was divided into tiny little individually-owned properties known as manors or demesnes. Manors were owned by a lord and worked by peasants who had feudal duties to that lord. In these early days the lord would provide protection for the peasants on his land and the peasants would perform labor. Easy. And who was in charge of overseeing all of that work? The reeve.

A reeve was basically someone chosen by the people to be an administrative officer. Before the Conquest this more or less meant that he was in charge of seeing to the day to day organization of life and work on the manor so that the lord didn’t have to be bothered if he didn’t want to be. There were several kinds of reeves too. There were manor-reeves in charge of the manor, port-reeves in charge of port areas, town-reeves in charge of towns. You get the idea. And then there were shire-reeves.

The shire-reeve’s job was originally that of detecting and preventing crime. His reach extended throughout the entire shire that he had been elected to serve. It was an important position, one that demanded a man who was both competent and respected. He held a great deal of authority within a shire, and yet he wasn’t necessarily a lord himself.

After the Conquest life in England changed. As England made the transition into the High Middle Ages with its prosperity and stability, the jobs of the reeves changed as well. On a manor the reeve continued to be in charge of day to day activities, but he also took on the major financial tasks of the manor. He was responsible to making sure the manor’s produce was sold at reasonable prices, that taxes and fines were collected for the lord, and that all accounts were paid. And yes, he was generally a peasant chosen once a year at Michaelmas to serve a year-long term. Although quite frequently a good reeve could end up holding the position for life.

Chaucer’s Reeve was a seriously good guy

Now, multiply that new and highly responsible manor-reeve by an entire shire and you have the new shire-reeve … or sheriff, as the position came to be called. This new sheriff was responsible for the administration of the shire as a whole. He was responsible for financial and governmental transactions throughout the entire area of his shire. He was also still responsible for detecting and preventing crimes, and for doling out justice for those crimes.Of course, by this time the sheriff wasn’t a peasant elected by his peers to serve a limited term. The sheriff was usually someone much more important, a landowner appointed to the position. Of course you could also buy the position of sheriff too, like Hugh Nonant bought his three sheriffdoms of Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Staffordshire in the late 1180s. Incidentally, Hugh Nonant was one of Prince John’s supporters during the time that Richard was away on his crusade and in captivity, and he was tried and punished along with John when Richard returned in 1194. So the originator of the Robin Hood legend wasn’t just making up the idea that a sheriff here or there supported the prince over the king.

The fact of the matter is, the sheriff of any given shire was a crucial figure in shaping the law and government of that shire. Robin Hood’s author didn’t make that up, Disney didn’t make that up, and I didn’t make that up either. But sometimes a boring administrative fact of history becomes so romanticized that we mistakenly believe it must have been a unique creation of an author looking for a villain. If that were the case, I’m surprised we don’t have more congressmen villains in modern novels!

So when you find yourself reading The Loyal Heart and being tempted to think “Hey, Buxton seems an awful lot like the Sheriff of Nottingham,” stop to consider that he might, in fact look much more like Hugh Nonant instead! And Buxton’s successor as sheriff…. Well, I won’t give that one away. You’ll just have to read the book.

Medieval Monday: Medieval Technology – Part Two: Farmville

Feb27

One of the biggest misunderstandings in history is that the Middle Ages were a time of ignorance and deprivation, a time when life was nasty, brutish, and short. The assumption is that because higher learning was restricted to monasteries, because civilization was more spread out, and because the Church was the greatest unifying factor in Europe that people were dirty and stupid. The truth couldn’t be further from this.

The Middle Ages was, in fact, a time of discovery and advancement on many levels. One of the reasons why people write it off as the “Dark Ages” is because so many of the advancements, especially in the early part of the Middle Ages, were rural and agrarian. But because the common man isn’t as flashy as philosophers and scientists in huge urban centers they don’t get as much attention. Without the quiet, steady advancement of agricultural technology, though, the big cities with their fancy architecture and science can’t grow and function.

The Roman Empire was very good at urban and military technology, but it wasn’t as good at the basics of rural technology. The huge Roman plantations, or latifundia, were owned by a few wealthy citizens and run by legions of slaves. Honestly, that’s not the most efficient system. Slaves have no vested interest in their jobs or the land that they work. The Romans also failed to take advantage of a few simple technological advances, from more effective horse harnesses to more efficient plows, that were available to them.

The first and perhaps best advancement in rural Medieval Europe, one that laid the groundwork for all the rest, was simply the feudal system. No longer was the land worked by slaves. As central Roman power broke down and barbarian tribes took over the countryside of Europe, manors owned by local lords, made up of small farms worked by peasants and serfs became the order of the day. The beauty of the feudal system was that peasants worked a certain amount of hours and days on their lord’s land as service to him, but they also worked land for themselves. And when someone has even a small sense of ownership over their land, their livelihood, and their life it inspires them with a whole different level of motivation to advance and produce.

The most important technological advancement of the early Middle Ages was the introduction of the horse as the go-to draft animal. In Roman times oxen were used to plow fields and horses were ridden or used to pull chariots at most. And yeah, this worked okay, but oxen were slow and the throat-and-girth harness used for horses choked the poor animals if they tried to pull anything larger than a chariot.

Then voila! The padded horse collar was introduced from China by way of trade routes. The padded horse collar sat much lower on a horse’s neck and pressed against their breastbone instead of their throat. This allowed them to pull four times the weight of the old style harness. Add to that the introduction of the iron horseshoe and suddenly Medieval farms had an animal that could pull a heavy plow longer distances at a faster speed. This, of course, meant that more land could be cleared and cultivated. Did the Romans have access to this Chinese technology. Yes, they did. Did they take advantage of it? Nope. Their loss.

The heavy plow went hand-in-hand with this advancement in agricultural technology. To greatly over-simplify the tool, a heavy plow involved a metal-reinforced plowshare mounted on wheels so that it could be raised or lowered to suit the land being plowed which was attached to a harness for multiple animals. A slightly later Medieval invention was the addition of a harrow, which broke up the clods of dirt churned up by the plowshare. This was important because the whole process could be done at once instead of requiring someone else to come along and break up the clods.

The heavy plow was particularly important further north in Europe, where the dirt was more dense, and in previously forested areas that had been recently cleared. Now add the newly effective horses to a better, stronger plow and suddenly you have vast areas of the landscape of Europe that were able to be cleared, settled, and farmed. And of course more agricultural production means more food, and more food means greater health and a population increase.

But wait! There’s more!

The old system of farming involved a two field system. One year one field would be planted while the other was left fallow and the next year the second field would be planted while the first one was left to rest. This changed with the introduction of the three field system. Our good buddy Charlemagne is credited with coming up with this idea. Land was divided into three fields. Field one was planted in the Fall with winter wheat, rye, and other crops that grew in the colder part of the year. In the Spring the second field was planted with crops like peas, lentils, and beans. The third field was left fallow. Each year the fields were rotated. This meant two things. First, more land could be in production at any given time. Second, a greater variety of crops were able to be planted leading to a greater variety in the diet of Medieval people. It was a win-win situation.

One other thing to mention is the introduction of the scythe. Yes, the scythe was a Medieval invention. More than just the tool of the Grim Reaper, it enabled farmers to harvest their crops much faster and with less manpower wasted than the handheld tools used before. Which, once again, meant higher yield and greater abundance for the people of the Middle Ages.

So to recap, the dawn of the Middle Ages brought with it a closer sense of ownership of the land. That, in turn, lead to a motivation on the part of lords and peasants alike to bring in the latest and most effective technology available. Food was produced on a local, personal level instead of being something that you went to the market to buy like in Rome, like today. The adoption of technology that had been hanging around unimplemented lead to the clearing of land and greater production and variety, which lead to healthier people and more of them.

I personally think that the reason these kinds of remarkable advances have been ignored by history is because they are so basic and quite literally dirty. Farming isn’t glamorous work, but without it, without food, everything else falls apart. Also, the things that enabled revolutionary advances in the Middle Ages are yesterday’s news to people today. Modern people tend to forget that the simplest of things, things that we take for granted now, changed life drastically at the time they were invented.

So don’t knock Medieval agricultural technology! It was the backbone on which an avalanche of even greater technological inventions came to be. But more about that next week.

Medieval Monday – Charles Martel Saves The World

Jan23

Western Europe at the dawn of the 6th century was a pitiful backwater on the verge of annihilation. The collapse of the Roman empire had left it a disconnected scattering of tribal landholdings clinging to a fading Roman culture that they no longer understood. Although one of the most fertile agrarian areas in the known world, its economic system was rudimentary … and its political systems were even worse. Almost everyone in the region had accepted Christianity, but they were lukewarm about it. The Church which we think of as being such an all-consuming and powerful entity in the Middle Ages was, at this point, unorganized and disconnected without much uniformity in practice from region to region. To top it all off, the mighty Muslim empire, the Moors, had conquered Spain and had their eyes on the rest of Western Europe.

On paper it looked like the end for Western Europe. And yet, if you look around today what do you see? We’re not all speaking a variation of Arabic, we’re not all worshiping in mosques, and Western models of law, learning, culture, and commerce prevail and Christianity is the predominant religion.

So what happened?

The Carolingians happened.

Charles Martel

Back to the dawn of the 6th century. Western Europe was a backwater. The barbarian invasions of previous centuries had settled down into struggling kingdoms ruled by kings with a very small reach. The Anglo-Saxons in Britain couldn’t get things together and were dealing with Viking invasions. The Lombards in Northern Italy were hostile to the Pope in Rome. The Germanic tribes of the east were little more than clans. The only kingdom and people that had any sort of real power were the Franks.

The Franks were a mixture of the Gauls of the Roman era and the Germanic people they had integrated with them. They had the advantage of remnants of Roman culture mingled with Germanic warrior strength. Their kingdom spread through much of the area that is now France and a big portion of the Rhine valley. But the big problem of the Frankish kingdom was that their hereditary line of kings was quite literally weak. Many of them died while they were still young.

The salvation of the Franks came from what probably started in a totally pedestrian position: Mayor of the Palace. It is thought that the position of Mayor of the Palace was probably nothing more than the manor steward at first. (My character Simon from The Faithful Heart would be so proud) Various members of the Carolingian family had held this position off and on for centuries. But because the Frankish kings were so weak, the position of Mayor of the Palace became a very powerful one indeed. Whoever held the position was the king’s chief advisor. All policy and decisions came through and were issued from the Mayor. The position can be likened to the modern Prime Minister. It wasn’t necessarily an inherited position. In fact, it was more often a prize given as spoils of war between battling regional lords.

Charles Martel was raised to the position of Mayor of the Palace in 717. The world he faced was one of disorganization, infighting amongst the Frankish lords, and serious threats to the very existence of the Franks and the whole European way of life in the form of the Moors. His first order of business was to take care of things at home. In the years after 717 he subdued the rebellious leaders of the Germanic tribes and lands to the east and north of Paris (which was the center of the Frankish kingdom even back then). He was incredibly successful at bringing them to heel by force and then holding them through religious persuasion and by making them swear fealty to him. Hint: this was the beginning of the feudal system.

Then, in 721, the Moors attacked the Duchy of Aquitaine in the southwest. Aquitaine’s ruler, Duke Odo defeated them at Toulouse, but that was not the end of things. The threat was constantly there. And Odo was not best buddies with Charles. In fact, Charles had to turn the attention of his armies to Aquitaine to fight more than just the Moors.

So if Odo, Duke of Aquitaine defeated the Moors at Toulouse in 721 and Charles had to turn his attention to the region to keep Odo in check, how come we didn’t end up with a grand line of European kings named Odo? Well, Charles was smarter. He studied the situation with Odo and with the Moors and realized he needed to do something truly radical to face the challenge. In those days soldiers were only available when they weren’t needed back home for planting or harvesting. War was a seasonal thing and armies were temporary at best. Charles saw that this wasn’t going to work. He needed a full-time, year-round army that could be trained and train new recruits in turn. And to have a full-time army he needed to pay them. He took a huge risk in seizing money from the Church to pay for his army. The Church was furious. The good relationship they had had fell apart to the point where Charles was almost excommunicated.

And then the Moors invaded again in 732. They were twice as strong and this time they fully intended to capture all of Europe. They sacked Bordeaux and good old Odo fled in a panic to seek Charles’ help. Charles was more than happy to bring his full-time, trained army to the rescue. Then he did something that none of his contemporaries expected. He enlisted Odo and his men to help fight the battle. See, in those days it was unheard of for a ruler to include his enemy in his army. It was seen as suicidal. But Odo was in trouble, the Moors were serious, and Charles was thinking way, way ahead. In exchange for coming to Odo’s defense he made him swear fealty and more or less give Aquitaine to the Frankish crown on a level it hadn’t been pledged before. Odo agreed.

Charles met the forces of the invading Moors at the Battle of Tours in October of 732. The Moors had vastly underestimated Charles’ strength. The Franks crushed them. They crushed them so badly that Charles was given the moniker “Martel” which means “The Hammer”. The Muslim Moors were pushed through Aquitaine and back over the Pyrenees into Spain. They would attempt a few more invasions in the next handful of years but they were easily defeated by then.

Charles Martel had stopped the spread of Islam into Europe. Up until that point it was a real possibility that the Moors could have taken over, converted Europe, and Christianity could have been squelched as an also-ran religion. The foresight and creative thinking of Charles, not to mention his highly trained army, put a stop to that. But Charles’s victory meant much, much more than that. In defeating the Moors he had rallied most of the duchies, territories, and minor kingdoms within the kingdom of the Franks under one banner. He had required that the lords swear fealty in a whole new system that would set the benchmark for centuries to come. He also began reforms within the Church that set the wheels in motion to create one organization that could unite all of the diverse kingdoms and peoples of Europe whose cultures were so different that nothing else could have given them a sense of unity.

There is a whole other element to the might of the Carolingians. If Charles Martel had done all of this and then died without leaving a strong legacy things might have fallen apart. But his son, Pippin, was just as strong and dedicated to the cause as he was. And his grandson was so powerful and shared the vision with such clarity, and carried so many of his changes and improvements to their completion, that he became known as Charles the Great, aka Charlemagne.

But more about Pippin and Charlemagne next week.

Merry Farmer

An Historical Romance