At first, indeed, it seemed as though the nascent states were about to be dissolved by disruption from within and attacks from without. All alike were subject to the attacks of the Norse sea-rovers, hardy pirates who not only Rise of feudalism. scourged all the coasts of Europe but penetrated, burning and harrying, far inland up the great waterways. Meanwhile, the weakening of central government due to dynastic struggles had led to the growth of independent or semi-independent powers within the states themselves. The Frank landowners had successfully asserted their independence of the jurisdiction of the king (or emperor) and his officials; the imperial officials themselves, dukes or counts, had received grants of lands with similar immunities (beneficia), and these had become hereditary. Thus sprang up a class of great territorial nobles to whom, amid the growing anarchy, men looked for protection rather than to the weak and remote central power; and so, out of the chaos that followed the break-up of the empire of Charlemagne, was born the feudal system of the middle ages (see [Feudalism]). This organization was admirable for defence; and with its aid, before the close of the first decade of the 10th century, the frontiers of France and Germany had been made safe against the northern barbarians, who had either been driven off and barriers erected against their return—e.g. the marks established by Henry the Fowler along the middle Elbe—or, as in the case of the Normans, absorbed into a system well adapted for such a process. By the treaty of St Claire-sur-Epte (911) between Charles the Simple and Rollo, chief of the Norsemen, the Normans were established in the country since known as Normandy (q.v.), as feudatories of the French crown. In England, by the treaty of Wedmore (878) between Alfred and the Danish king Guthrum, the Danes had already been established in a large part of England.
Feudalism, by the time the Northmen had been subdued by its aid, was quite firmly established in the western part of Europe. During the 11th century it was carried by the Normans into England, into Sicily and southern Italy, and by the Royalty and feudalism. nobles of the first crusade into the newly established kingdom of Jerusalem (1099). By the kings of France, England and Germany, however, who saw themselves in danger of being stripped of all but the semblance of power by its delegation to their more or less nominal vassals, the feudal organization was early recognized as impossible as a form of state government, if the state was to be preserved; and the history of the three great European powers during the succeeding centuries is mainly that of the struggle of the sovereigns against the disruptive ambitions of the great feudal nobles. In England the problem was, from the outset, simplified; for though William the Conqueror introduced the system of feudal land tenure into England in 1066 he refused to set it up as his system of government, retaining alongside of it the old English national policy. In France, on the other hand, feudalism as a system of government had become firmly established; and it was not till the days of Philip Augustus (1180-1223) and Louis IX. (1226-1270) that the monarchy began to get the upper hand. From this time until the 17th century the power of the French monarchy, in spite of occasional lapses, grew steadily stronger. The reverse was the case with the German kingship. Its association with the undefined claims involved in the title of Roman emperor, traditionally attached to it, and notably those to authority in Italy, necessitated concession after concession to the feudal nobles, in order to purchase their support for their assertion. The kingship, moreover, became elective; the imperial title was obtainable only at Rome at the hands of the pope; and the German kings thus became entangled in contests, not only with their own vassals, but with the tremendous spiritual force of the medieval papacy by which, for its own ends, the spirit of feudal insubordination was from time to time fomented. Thus in Germany the feudal nobles gradually acquired a sovereign status which, in some cases, has survived the territorial rearrangements of the 19th century and left its mark on the federal constitution of modern Germany; while the kingship and the imperial title grew more and more shadowy till in 1806 it vanished altogether. (See [English History]; [France]: History, [Germany]: History.)
In France the process by which a strong hereditary monarchy was established was a slow one. During the greater part of the 10th century the Carolingians, stripped of the vast domains which had been the basis of the power of The rise of the house of Capet. Pippin, owed their continued existence to the forbearance of Hugh the Great, count of Paris. In 987, however, the last Carolingian king died, and Hugh Capet, son of Hugh the Great, the most powerful of the territorial magnates, was chosen king of France. With his election dates the real beginning of the French monarchy, and under him and his successors Paris became the capital of France. Hugh’s election, however, was the work of the great feudatories, and France remained divided among a number of great fiefs, of which the chief were Brittany, Anjou, Flanders, Vermandois, Champagne, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Poitou, Gascony, Toulouse and Normandy.
While the central power in France advanced slowly but steadily, the development of the royal authority in Germany was in the 10th and 11th centuries more rapid. In 911 the German magnates had elected Conrad the The royal power in Germany. Franconian to reign over them, and in 919 Henry “the Fowler” of Saxony, “whose reign forms one of the great turning-points in the history of the German nation.” He defeated the Hungarians, the Slavs and the Danes, and by encouraging the growth and development of towns he contributed greatly to the formation of the German kingdom. His immediate successors, Otto the Great and Otto II., continued his work, which was only interrupted for a short time during the reign of the idealist Otto III., whose “cosmopolitan imperialism” brought him into collision with the German Church and to some extent with the German nobles. Henry II. (1002-1025) asserted with success his authority over Germany, and his successor Conrad II., who belonged to the Salian or Franconian line, did much to secure unity and prosperity to the Empire. His son and successor Henry III. (1039-1056) governed Germany wisely, and his reign witnessed the culminating point of the Holy Roman Empire. At the time of his death it seemed probable that Germany, like England and France, would gradually escape from the thraldom of the great feudatories. The future of the German monarchy depended upon the ability of future kings to suppress the forces of feudal disintegration in Germany, and to withstand the temptation of struggling to establish their influence over Italy. Unfortunately for German kingship Henry IV. (1056-1106) was only six years old on his accession, and when he became a man he found that the papacy under Hildebrand’s influence was practically independent of the emperor. Had Henry confined his efforts to coercing the German barons he might, like the Normans and Angevins in England, and like the Capetians in France, have proved successful. Unfortunately for Germany Henry entered upon the famous contest with the papacy under Gregory VII. (1073-1080), which ended in the 13th century in the defeat of the Empire in the person of Frederick II. The struggle began in 1073 over the question of investiture (q.v.), and widened into a duel between the spiritual and temporal powers. During the early years of the contest the influence of the papacy reached a high pitch and made itself felt in the crusading movement, which received its first impetus from Pope Urban II., who appealed to Europe at the council of Clermont in 1095 to recover the Holy Places from the Turks.
During the 11th century the Eastern Empire was attacked by the Russians, the Normans and the Seljuks. The emperor Alexius Comnenus found himself on his accession in 1081 threatened by the Seljuks (the victors in the decisive The eastern Empire and the Crusades. battle of Manzikert in 1071) and by the Sicilian Normans who in 1081 besieged Durazzo. In 1083 he defeated the Normans in the battle of Durazzo, and with the death of Robert Guiscard in 1085 all danger from a fresh Norman invasion passed away. But the first crusade brought new anxieties to Alexius, for he feared that the crusaders might attack Constantinople. That fear removed, he took advantage of the increased connexion between eastern and western Europe by bestowing commercial privileges upon the Italian trading republics, who thus gained access to the ports of the Empire on easy terms.
With the era of the Crusades, which lasted till the middle of the 13th century, Europe entered upon a period of change, the importance of which is realized by contrasting the condition of western Christendom in the 11th with its condition in the 13th century. Between the opening and close of the crusading The Crusades and the Hildebrandine reformation. movement Europe underwent a complete revolution. While the Crusades tended to enhance the prestige and authority of the papacy and the power of European monarchs, they also led to increased knowledge of the East, to the rapid development of commerce, to the introduction of new industries, to the rapid decline of the influence of the feudal nobility, and to the rapid development of town life (see [Commune]). At the same time the Hildebrandine reformation was having an immense influence upon the intellectual condition of Europe. The 12th century saw the establishment of many new monastic orders (see [Monasticism]), and at the same time a remarkable speculative and literary revival (see [Scholasticism]). This movement owed not a little of its success to the influence of the Crusades, which stirred up intellectual as well as commercial activity. This intellectual activity, as well as the fruits of commercial expansion, were—since learning was still a monopoly of the clerical order—weapons in the hands of the papacy, which in the 12th century attained the height of its power, if not of its pretensions. It is, indeed, impossible to exaggerate the influence of the Roman Church upon the development of Europe at this period. The popes, in fact, represented Europe in a sense that could not be predicated of the emperors; the terror of their spiritual power, their vast wealth derived from the tribute of all the West, their unique experience of international affairs, and—in the case of the great popes of this epoch—the superiority of their minds and characters, made them not only the spiritual rulers of Europe, but the effective centres of whatever political unity it possessed. As a Byzantine observer was to observe of Innocent III., they had become the successors of the Caesars rather than of Peter (see [Papacy]).
Nowhere were the beneficial effects of the Crusades seen more clearly than in France. The smaller fiefs were steadily absorbed by the greater lordships, which in their turn fell victims to the royal power. It might almost be said Growth of the royal power in France. that “modern France is a creation of the Crusades.” The effects of the crusading movement were felt in France as early as the reign of Louis VI. (1108-1137). Aided by his able minister Suger, Louis managed before his death to add to the possessions of his house the Île de France and a prospective claim to Poitou and Aquitaine. Under his successor Louis VII. (1137-1180) the consolidation movement was checked owing to the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine (after her divorce from Louis VII.) to Henry II of England. By the addition of his wife’s lands (Gascony and Guienne) to those which he had already inherited from his father and mother (Normandy, Anjou, Touraine and Maine) Henry was enabled to form the powerful though short-lived Angevin empire. But the lost ground was rapidly recovered by Philip Augustus (1180-1223), who took advantage of the weakness and folly of John of England, and before 1215 had united firmly to France Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Touraine. Louis VIII. and Louis IX. adhered firmly to the policy of Philip IV., and in 1258, by the treaty of Paris, Henry III. of England recognized the loss of Poitou. There thus remained to England out of the vast continental domains of Henry II. only Gascony and Guienne.
The rest of Europe was also in various degrees affected by the Crusades. While Spain was occupied in a crusade of her own against the Moors and gradually driving them into Granada, Germany, Italy, and to some extent England, General results of the Crusades. were interested in, and influenced by, the Crusades against the Turks. During the absence of many of the nobles in the East the growth of towns and the development of the mercantile class proceeded without interruption. The trading classes demanded strong governments and equal justice, and vigorously supported the monarchs in their suppression of feudalism.
During the 12th and 13th centuries the Crusades thus proved a large factor in the commercial prosperity of the Italian maritime states, an “open door” between East and West was secured, and reinforcements from Europe were poured into Syria as long as the peoples of the West regarded the stability of the Latin kingdom of Syria as a matter of prime importance. During the crusading period a check was placed to the tide of Mahommedan conquest, while to the caliphate the Crusades proved a perpetual drain upon its material resources. To the Mahommedans the possession of the Holy Places by the Christians was as great a humiliation as their desecration by the Mahommedans was to the crusaders. Unfortunately the Crusades led to a disastrous schism between the Byzantine empire and western Christendom, which had calamitous results. The decay of the crusading spirit was a necessary result of the growth of the consolidation of the European nations, but the price paid was the fall of Constantinople and the establishment of the Turks in eastern Europe. The Crusades thus not only postponed the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks for some two hundred years, but led, as had already been said, to a vast expansion of commerce, as seen in the rapid growth and development of the Italian cities, and to a striking development of town life.
The Crusades had enormously strengthened the power and prestige of the papacy, and indirectly contributed to its victory over the Empire in the person of Frederick II. From the reign of the emperor Henry IV. to the death of The struggle between the Empire and the papacy. Frederick II. in 1250 the struggle between the Empire and the papacy continued, and is coincident in point of time with the Crusades. The reign of Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1190) saw that struggle at its height, and during that reign it became apparent that the emperor’s efforts to unite Italy and Germany under one crown were doomed to failure. The rise and success of the alliance of Italian republics known as the Lombard League no doubt contributed to the success of the papacy, but in their contest with the popes the emperors never had any chance of gaining a permanent victory. Frederick II continued with great energy to attempt the hopeless task of dominating the papacy, but his possession of Sicily only made the popes more determined than ever to establish their predominance in Italy. Frederick’s death in 1250 marked not only the triumph of the papacy in Italy, but also that of feudalism in Germany. He has been called the “most dazzling of the long line of imperial failures,” and with him ends the Empire as it was originally conceived. Henceforward the Holy Roman Empire, which implied the unity of Italy and Germany, and the close alliance of pope and emperor, no longer exists save in name, and its place is taken by a glorified German kingship presiding over a confederation of turbulent German nobles.