Chapter 8: Central Middle Ages (Part I)

Pre-reading

A. Skim and scan the following passage and answer the following questions.

1. What are the economic features of the Central Middle Ages?

2. What changes took place in education in the Central Middle Ages?

3. What facts demonstrate the growth of church power in the Central Middle Ages?

Reading

From the 11th century through the 13th century, Europeans remade their world. They revived old cities and built new ones, created universities, reformed the church, waged aggressive wars, and made and unmade powerful kings and emperors. Although still weaker and less prosperous than the Islamic world and less sophisticated than the Byzantine Empire , the West became an important world power.

From the 10th century through the 12th century, as the invasions of Europe by outside forces ended and the population began to grow, the European countryside was transformed by peasant labor. Farmers made new lands available for cultivation by draining marshes and cutting down forests. Such newly cleared lands were called assarts . The peasants who did this backbreaking labor often gained favorable terms for themselves from their lords in exchange. Many peasants adopted a new, heavy plow that dug deeper furrows and increased crop production. At first these plows were pulled by oxen. Later, with the invention of the horse collar, peasants were able to make use of horses, which were more efficient than oxen. In the course of the 12th century, peasants began to use metal tools and to reinforce their wooden tools and plowshares with iron. Female peasants benefited from the introduction of water mills and wind mills, which freed them from grinding flour by hand.

Territorial lords encouraged agricultural improvements because they profited from them as much as the peasants did. They offered to reduce the obligations of peasants who cleared uncultivated lands. They turned yearly dues of hens, eggs, and farm labor into a fixed money rent. This benefited the peasants, who could attend to their own plots of land. It also benefited the lords, who could employ workers when needed and spend the rest of their money on luxuries. Some of the lords' new wealth came from their monopoly on mills and ovens. The peasants were obliged to use the lords' mills to grind flour and the lords' ovens to bake bread, and they paid a fee for this privilege.

Towns and cities began to appear throughout Europe in the Central Middle Ages. The greatest number of these were in the western half, in The Netherlands, Germany , France , and Italy . Some towns developed out of trading sites as merchants and craftsmen came to trade and sell their wares at castles, cathedrals, and monasteries around Europe . Often permanent trading settlements were built. Innkeepers opened hotels to put up travelers, and other people built their homes nearby. Sometimes these commercial centers became towns and cities.

The most important commercial towns and cities were located along the Baltic Sea in the north and along the Mediterranean coast in the south. The northern cities, such as Lübeck , Hamburg , Gdańsk , and Stockholm , traded raw materials such as salt, fish, furs, timber, amber, and wax. In the southern cities, the wares were lighter and more precious: spices, fine cloths, perfumes, medicines, and dyes. In the 12th century, major Italian cities such as Genoa , Florence , and Venice were engaged in long-distance trade. Venice subjected many of the cities on the shores of the Adriatic Sea to its rule, and its merchants traded regularly in Byzantine and Islamic ports. Other towns and cities, such as Rome , Marseille, Paris , and Trier , grew up in and around the shells of old Roman cities. Italian cities such as Pisa and Genoa developed on sites that had once been Roman towns, expanding in new directions. Genoa , for example, had been nothing but a small town with a fort under the ancient Romans. Starting in the 10th century, however, its inhabitants took advantage of the nearby sea. They used the small profits that they made from farming to build ships, and they used the ships to defend themselves, as well as to raid and trade. As the city grew more prosperous, it grew in size and population.

Most medieval cities were not planned. They looked very different from modern American cities built on rational grids. Almost all medieval cities had at least three centers: the marketplace, the church or cathedral, and the castle. Because these were the most important places in the towns, the homes of settlers tended to congregate around them. Streets were not paved and were dark, narrow, and dirty. Most people lived on the top floor of two-story buildings, with warehouses or shops below. Buildings were crowded together because most cities were ringed by earthen or stone walls for defense, and everyone tried to fit inside. Periodically the population grew too large and new walls had to be built. Medieval cities were small compared to modern cities. Paris had less than 100,000 people at its height at the end of the 13th century. The large cities of Italy , such as Genoa , Florence , and Venice , had more than 25,000 people, but in Germany cities were large if they had more than 10,000 inhabitants. Many urban areas had just a few thousand citizens.

Most medieval towns had separate districts for different crafts and professions: The butchers tended to live in one district, the shoemakers in another, the cloth workers in a third. This pattern reflected the fact that the crafts were organized into guilds, which were both religious clubs and trade associations that set standards for their members. Guilds controlled everything having to do with their specific craft, from setting prices and establishing manufacturing processes to mandating the number of employees any one shop could have. Because the guild was so involved in every aspect of the craft, members often formed a very tight community and tended to congregate together in one area of a town or city.

Some of the most colorful events in towns and cities were fairs. Fairs were markets and festivals rolled into one. They attracted foreign merchants and traders who bought and sold luxuries and exchanged a great deal of money. Kings, dukes, and other princes sponsored fairs, providing protection for the merchants and assigning them places to stay in town. They reduced normal taxes and tolls, and in return they took a percentage of the profits. Fairs usually took place during church festivals, and sometimes they were even set up on church grounds. In London , for example, the fair of Saint Bartholomew was held in a monastic cemetery. It lasted for three days each year, and it was so popular that merchants were frequently forced to set up their booths beyond the walls of the cemetery. Other fairs were held in open fields. Entertainers, money changers, and other hangers-on added to the activity of fair days. Merchants, moneylenders, and buyers found fairs convenient places to do business. Fairs were also important sources of income for their sponsors.

Although there was a great diversity of people in the cities—humble street cleaners and powerful merchants, day laborers and master craftsmen, servants and financiers—all were united by a sense of common identity as city dwellers. They wanted no overlords. They declared that serfs who came to a city and lived there for a year and a day were free. They asked the kings and princes who ruled over them to allow them to govern themselves. Cities that became independent in this way were called communes. Some communes gained their independence by paying lords to grant it to them, while others governed alongside their lord. Still others battled violently for rights of self-governance. At Laon, in France , members of the commune killed the bishop who ruled the city. The king of France intervened and stopped the revolt, but eventually he recognized the commune's authority. All communes were not always so fortunate, however, and many were never allowed to become independent.

Communes in  Italy  were particularly successful. They gained the right not only to govern themselves but also to rule the farmland and villages around them. By the 13th century, northern Italy was divided politically and economically into competing city-states, regions dominated by their chief city.

Since the Carolingian period, churches and monasteries had run schools to educate boys who were going to become priests and monks. In the 11th and 12th centuries new types of schools were developed in some cities. These schools were different from the old ones because they were usually located in city cathedrals rather than in monasteries, and they were dedicated to more advanced studies than the other schools. For this reason, they attracted students and teachers not just from the neighborhood but from all over Europe who were interested in studying subjects such as philosophy, medicine, and law. Many of the students who attended these schools went on to careers in the church. Others became lawyers and doctors, often serving wealthy merchants and their families. Still others became civil servants and worked for princes or kings.

France  and  Italy  led the way in developing these city schools. Italy and southern France were famous for their schools of law and medicine. Northern France, especially Paris , was known for its schools of philosophy and theology.

In the 13th century many of these schools were organized into universities, the direct ancestors of modern American and European universities. By the end of the Middle Ages, there were nearly 80 universities throughout Europe, not only in France , Italy , and Spain , but also in the empire—at Prague , Heidelberg , and Cologne —in Poland , and in Scandinavia . They were largely self-governing, enforcing their own rules about dress, classroom activities, and the materials taught. Teachers, called masters, decided when the students were ready to get their degrees or to be allowed to teach. Students and teachers often clashed with city authorities. This sometimes led to student and master protests, to demands for special privileges, and to measures that strengthened the universities' self-government. For example, in 1200 a brawl broke out between students and the police in Paris . Some students were killed, and the masters were outraged. The king of France feared that the masters would leave the city and thus deprive him of the prestige and commercial vitality that their presence gave to his kingdom. To prevent this, he recognized the clerical status of the students. From that time on, if students were arrested they were tried by church courts, not royal courts. As church courts tended to be lenient, this privilege pleased both masters and students.

Almost all universities taught the so-called seven liberal arts. The most important of these were the first three, called the trivium: grammar (what would now be called reading and writing), rhetoric (literature and more complicated kinds of writing), and logic. While learning these, students might also study some or all of the other four, called the quadrivium . These were mathematical and scientific subjects: arithmetic (what would now be called number theory), geometry (number relations), music (proportions and harmonies), and astronomy. Some students also studied theology, which was considered the highest and most profound subject, since it was the study of God and his works. When they had successfully completed their studies, students became masters. The courses of study were not the same in all universities, however. At Bologna , in Italy , students studied the laws of the Roman Empire . In the early 12th century, scholars had rediscovered this huge and systematic body of laws, which seemed to cover every problem. At Salerno , also in Italy , students studied medical treatises, observed dissected animals, and learned current theories about the body derived from the works of Greek philosopher Aristotle. They learned about Aristotle from Arab scholars, who had rediscovered, translated, and commented on his writings. Most classes in medieval schools were taught as lectures in which the teacher read a text aloud and commented on its important or difficult passages, while the students followed along, often with a copy of the text. Other classes were organized as discussions in which both masters and students asked questions and prodded one another to provide and support their answers. These were often very lively meetings, and students greatly enjoyed the engaging atmosphere of the classroom.

Although only boys and men attended schools and universities, men were not the only scholars. The 12th-century scholar Hélo?se was the most famous female scholar of the Middle Ages. After receiving an early education at a convent school near Paris , Hélo?se began private lessons with the most brilliant master of the day, French philosopher Peter Abelard. Abelard taught her logic. She taught him about the ancient philosophers Plato and Socrates, and she convinced him of the importance of writing down his thoughts. The two soon became secret lovers, but they were discovered by Hélo?se's uncle, who had Abelard castrated. The couple rarely saw each other after that, but they remained in touch through writing. Abelard was the most important scholar of the 12th century. He revolutionized teaching methods with his book Sic et Non (Yes and No, 1123?), which set contradictory statements from different texts side by side. Rather than resolve the contradictions himself, Abelard required his students to ask questions and come up with their own answers. Abelard's theological writings were similarly daring. They probed the meaning of God through the use of logic. Many of Abelard's contemporaries were outraged by these writings and accused Abelard of heresy (belief in doctrine contrary to that of the church). Abelard died a broken man, but his impact on learning remained.

In subsequent centuries, scholars continued to use Abelard's method of setting contradictory texts next to one other. But instead of letting the readers or students decide the answers for themselves, these scholars added long and careful resolutions to each problem. These resolutions were based on the newly rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle as well as on contemporary Christian thinking. This school of thought is called Scholasticism.

The best-known scholastic is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was born in Naples , in southern Italy , in 1225 and was educated in Cologne (in Germany ) and Paris . He wrote important philosophical studies in Latin called summae (summaries). For example, Aquinas's Summa Theologica was a multivolume work on God and God's creation. Aquinas divided each topic into smaller ones, and then subdivided each of these further, treating each subdivision as a yes or no question. He presented texts first on one side, then on the other. He then gave his own answer and explained away the contradictions as best he could.

It may seem that the writings of the Scholastics had little to do with the concerns of ordinary people, but this is not so. Students flocked to the city schools because they found them exciting. They thought that logic was the key to knowing about life and about themselves. Ordinary townsmen, who did not go to school, were nevertheless keenly interested in what was taught there. They wanted to know, for example, if their own moneymaking and commerce would condemn them to hell or allow them into heaven. The Scholastics answered such questions. Thomas Aquinas himself taught how to reconcile moneymaking with a Christian life. Although townspeople could not read the writings of Aquinas directly, preachers, who could read Latin and then preach it in words understandable to ordinary folk, popularized his and other Scholastic teaching.

Not all learning went on in the city schools, and not all of the important scholars taught at universities. Other 12th-century centers of learning were the monasteries, most of which were out in the countryside. Many respected scholars came from these monasteries. For example, the Cistercian abbot Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote sermons and treatises on love, faith, mystical union with God, and Christian knighthood. His contemporary Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of a convent in Germany, wrote down visions that she had, composed music and chants for her nuns to sing, and wrote a play for them to act out. This play was called Ordo Virtutum (Play of Virtues, mid-12th century) and is one of the earliest known examples of a morality play—a musical story depicting the battle between good and evil.

The role of the papacy began to change drastically during the Central Middle Ages. During Late Antiquity the pope was a very important bishop, since he was the bishop of Rome , but he was not the head of the Christian church. He shared that honor with the eastern patriarchs and the Byzantine emperor. In the next few centuries, however, the papacy began to develop greater importance. At the end of the 6th century, Pope Gregory I, known as Gregory the Great, worked to increase the power of the papacy. He made the papacy a major landowner in Italy , kept law and order in the region around Rome , maintained good relations with the Franks, and sent missionaries to convert the English to Christianity. The popes of the 7th and 8th centuries built on Gregory's legacy. They created and ruled a papal state in central Italy , formed an alliance with the Carolingians to protect it, and declared independence from the Byzantine Empire . They even forged a document called the Donation of Constantine that allegedly gave the papacy the right to rule the entire western half of the Roman Empire .

The Carolingians put a temporary end to the growth of papal power. They supported the popes as models of piety and priestly behavior. Nevertheless, the Carolingians acted as the heads of the church. They appointed bishops and abbots. When the church needed reform, the Carolingians took on the job themselves. They opened schools for priests and made certain that the religious texts used in the churches were authentic and readily available. In short, they saw themselves as the heads of both church and state.

In  France  the end of the Carolingian dynasty in the late 10th century meant that churches came under the control of regional powers. To the east, however, Otto I and his successors continued many Carolingian practices, including using the imperial title first bestowed on Charlemagne in 800. They appointed bishops in Germany and Italy and used them as government officials. They also occasionally appointed and deposed popes. Like the Carolingians, they considered themselves responsible for church reform.

In the 11th century, more and more churchmen, monks, and laymen began to feel the need to change the church. At first they concentrated on two abuses: clerical marriage and simony (paying money or giving gifts in return for a church office). Clerical celibacy, which demanded that priests and bishops abstain from sexual relations and therefore not marry, had been an ideal since Late Antiquity, but until the late 11th century it was almost never enforced. With the 11th-century reforms, priests and bishops were forced to renounce their wives if they were married; if they were single, they were required to abstain from marriage throughout life.

Unlike celibacy, simony was a new issue. Few people saw anything wrong with payments for church office before the 11th century. Until then, payments were understood to be a type of gift—tokens of friendship, support, and good relations. However, the commercial revolution made people aware of the potentially crass uses of money. They saw that goods had price tags and that gifts had easily calculated monetary value. They began to think of gifts and payments for church offices as crass cash purchases.

In the mid-11th century, Emperor Henry III, who ruled both Germany and Italy , took an active role in church reform. He refused to take money or gifts in exchange for appointing bishops to church offices, although he still considered it his right to appoint bishops, even the pope. The popes were beginning to disagree, however. They were coming to see themselves as the successors of Saint Peter, Jesus' disciple and traditionally understood to have been the first bishop of Rome . Therefore, 11th-century popes felt that they were more than just ordinary bishops. Beginning in this period, the popes asserted their own leadership of the Christian church and their independence from the emperor.

The most important of these popes was Gregory VII, who ruled from 1073 to 1085. Gregory gave his name to the church reform movement: the Gregorian Reform. Even before Gregory's time, however, the papacy had succeeded in depriving the emperor of his traditional power to name the pope. In 1059, a few years after the death of Henry III, the papacy took advantage of the weakness and youth of Henry's successor, Henry IV, to decree that henceforth popes would be elected by the cardinals—the chief clerics that surrounded the pope in Rome. However, Pope Gregory VII was not content with just free papal elections; he was determined to make the church completely independent from the emperors. He believed that independence could be achieved only if regional rulers, princes, and emperors stopped appointing all churchmen.

The chief point of Gregory's reform program was to end lay investiture. Investiture was the ritual by which a priest or bishop became a churchman and received his office. Lay investiture meant that a layman—a man who was not a churchman—controlled the ritual. Gregory wanted to end the power of emperors to invest churchmen, a power that they had exercised since the time of Charlemagne.

Gregory's goal struck at the very heart of the imperial office and royal power as it had developed up until his time. The emperor was anointed just as churchmen were, and he had always played a key religious role, but Gregory denied him any place in church leadership. Both emperor and pope gathered their supporters and went to war over the issue. Their struggle, known as the Investiture Controversy ( 授权争论 ), was not a movement for the separation of church and state, but it was the beginning of such an idea. In both the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the ruler remained (and in the Middle East remains even today) a religious figure. In the West the idea that the church and the state were separate entities developed gradually. The Gregorian Reform and the Investiture Controversy were important steps in this process.

The conflict broke out over the appointment of the bishop of Milan . Emperor Henry IV defied Gregory's decree against lay investiture and appointed his own man to be bishop. The two sides denounced each another. Henry called a council that asked Gregory to resign. In response, Gregory excommunicated Henry, expelling him from the church and its promise of eternal salvation. This was a rarely used penalty and was shocking at the time. Gregory also forbade anyone to serve Henry as king, cutting him off from his supporters. Henry had no choice but to find the pope, do penance, and be received back into the church. Gregory and Henry met at Canossa , high in the Italian Alps. The emperor stood in the snow for three days, begging for forgiveness. Now it was the pope who had no choice—as a priest, he had to pardon a penitent sinner. He lifted the excommunication.

In the end, however,  Canossa did not resolve the question. War raged in Germany and Italy as the two sides fought for supremacy. In 1122 the struggle ended in a compromise with the Concordat of Worms. The emperor was permitted a small role in investiture: He was allowed to give the worldly trappings—the lands and physical churches—that belonged to the church office. The pope got the right to give the spiritual symbols of the office, the ring and staff, which were the most important. As a result of the Investiture Controversy, the papacy gained recognition as the head of the Christian church.

The papacy that developed after the Investiture Controversy has been called a monarchy. Like kings, the popes issued laws and hired masters to collect revenues and judge cases. They were deeply involved in the great political events of their day. They even declared wars: The crusade that Pope Innocent IV called against Frederick II was no armed pilgrimage like the Crusades to the Holy Land—it was part of the pope's battle for supremacy in Italy . The papacy's victory in the Investiture Controversy made it the effective head of the church. The Concordat of Worms in 1122 provided a workable solution to the problem of lay investiture. After an enormous struggle, the church reform movement ended clerical marriage in most parts of Europe . It largely eliminated simony as well.

With these accomplishments behind them, the popes turned to strengthening the system of church courts, in which clerics were tried. These courts gave penalties far more lenient than those given out by kings and princes. Henry II of England , who was developing his own system of justice, tried to weaken the church courts in his kingdom. He wanted clerics accused of crimes to be tried in royal courts. On this matter, the archbishop (head bishop) of England , Saint Thomas à Becket, supported the pope and opposed Henry bitterly. Their conflict raged for years, until a few of Henry's men murdered Becket in his cathedral in 1170. Instead of solving Henry's problem, this action made it much worse. Widespread indignation and condemnation of the act forced Henry to back down and to do penance for the murder. Church courts remained important in England .

The papacy became a court of appeals. Bishops whose elections or appointments were disputed went to Rome to have their cases decided. Abbots who were in conflict with other monasteries over land or rights went to the pope to get his ruling. Providing lawyers, judges, and notaries to write things up in the proper form cost money, and the papacy charged for these services. The papal curia, or court, became a major revenue collecting agency, and the papacy gained wealth and power.

As the head of the church, the pope also became more involved in the lives of ordinary Christians. In 1215 Pope Innocent III presided over the bishops and other clerics called to meet at the Fourth Lateran Council. The council's rulings covered many aspects of personal conduct. They required all Christians to hear Mass and confess their sins at least once a year. They declared marriage to be a sacrament, a rite through which God's grace was received. Because of this, marriages had to be announced in advance, and priests were to decide whether they should take place.

The council dealt harshly with Jews and heretics (Christians who taught or believed doctrines other than those of the official church). It required Jews to wear badges or other signs to distinguish them from their neighbors. It ordered rulers to rid their lands of "heretical filth" or lose their territories. Some of these laws had been declared by the church at earlier councils. By bringing them together and adding more laws, the Fourth Lateran Council showed its determination to reform the world according to one ideal image—the image held by the church.

The reforms of Gregory VII greatly increased the power and prestige of the papacy. In 1095 Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus appealed to Gregory's successor, Pope Urban II, for help against the Seljuk Turks, an Islamic group that was attacking the Byzantine Empire . Urban was able to use the new power of the papacy to unite people behind his cause, which in addition to aiding the Byzantines had a far greater goal: to reclaim the important cities of the Holy Land—especially Jerusalem—from the Muslims. Urban crossed the Alps to France and called upon the Franks to stop fighting one another and to use their weapons against the Muslims instead. The audience, gathered in a field to hear the pope's words, cried out, "God wills it." The First Crusade was launched.

The First Crusade was an armed pilgrimage—a journey to a sacred place that had both religious and worldly purposes. For knights, it was a chance to express their piety and gain booty. For princes, equally pious, it was also an opportunity to carve out new territories. For churchmen, it was a chance to utilize warfare for Christian ideals. Other folk also went on the Crusade. Some were foot soldiers. Others were servants. Some kept the war machines in good repair. Women went along as well, some to accompany their husbands, some to participate in a holy cause, and some to earn money as prostitutes. The First Crusade was made up of many different armies, each under a different leader. Some of these armies were badly armed and not authorized by the pope. These consisted largely of peasants and poor people from the towns. On their way across Europe, some of these peasant armies made a detour to massacre Jews in the Rhineland, in what is now western Germany . This was the first, but not the last, attack on the Jews of Europe. Other armies, better armed, arrived at Constantinople and began their march south toward Jerusalem.

The First Crusade won its objective, due largely to the disunity of the Muslim defenders. The Crusaders conquered a thin wedge of territory down the coast of the Mediterranean leading to Jerusalem . They set up states there and named their leaders as rulers. These states were very weak, however, and had to be continually defended by new crusades. The states were gradually reconquered by the Muslims during the 13th century, with the last one falling in 1291. The First Crusade was important not because of the land that it conquered but because it was the first example of European expansionism. It set the stage for the discovery of the Americas , the establishment of European colonies in Asia and Africa , and the political domination of the world by Europeans. One result of the Crusades was the development of military religious orders. Members of the order known as the Knights Templar, for example, were both monks and knights. They lived together in communities according to a rule, but their main job was to defend the roads that pilgrims used to come to Jerusalem once the First Crusade had captured that city. Soon they became Crusaders themselves, maintaining castles and troops in the Holy Land . The Templars, as they were called, became extremely popular and very wealthy. Similarly, the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, who were known as the Hospitalers, grew out of the needs of the new states established by the Crusaders. At first, the Hospitalers spent their time serving the sick, especially the poor and pilgrims. Their hospital at Jerusalem was huge, with separate wards for men and women and even tiny cots for babies. It became the model for numerous hospitals in Europe . However, the Hospitalers themselves gradually grew less interested in caring for the sick than in defending the Crusader states.

Increasing piety went hand in hand with aggression. The First Crusade was followed by more in the 12th and 13th centuries. Europeans also expanded into Spain and eastward along the Baltic coast during this period. At the same time, they began to turn on non-Christians and heretics within their own society with increasing fury.

Popes called many Crusades during the 12th and 13th centuries. In addition, armed troops were periodically sent east to help defend the crusader states, the regions in the Holy Land conquered by Europeans. Through much of this, the ideal of the Crusades remained essentially the same: armed pilgrimages for Christian purposes. However, the Fourth Crusade, which was called by Pope Innocent III in 1199, was a turning point.

Far fewer troops turned out for the expedition than had been expected. Although the pope wanted the Crusaders to go straight to the Holy Land , he was unable to control them. Their leaders could not pay the Venetians, who had been hired to take the army from Italy to Jerusalem . The Venetians decided to ask for help in place of payment. Hoping to gain trading privileges through force, the Venetians convinced the Crusaders to attack Constantinople . In 1204 the Crusaders broke through the walls of Constantinople and sacked it. Innocent III complained, but he also told the Crusaders to stay where they were and to keep control of the city. Thus a crusade against Muslims turned into a siege of a Christian city. From that time on, little distinction existed between a Crusade and any other kind of war.

 On the northeastern fringes of Europe a push similar to the Spanish Reconquista was taking place against the Slavic peoples of the Baltic coast. German duke Henry the Lion joined with the king of Denmark to support this movement, and churchmen preached on its behalf. In the course of the 13th century, German peasant settlers and Cistercian monks moved into northeastern Europe , joining the Slavs. Unlike the Holy Land , the Baltic coast was permanently brought under European Christian control.

Within the heart of  Europe , Christians isolated the Jews in their midst, persecuting and attacking them. The first attacks on Jews began with the First Crusade in the 11th century. Before that time, however, Jews had been forced out of the countryside and into the cities by the spread of the seigniorial system. There they had taken up a variety of trades. However, the rise of guilds, which were not just for trade but were also religious institutions, pushed many Jews out and into the one profession without a guild: moneylending. As moneylenders Jews were both necessary and hated. In the new commercial society, almost everyone needed to borrow money at one time or another, but they resented having to pay their loans back with interest. In the course of the 12th century, hateful stories about Jews were created and published. For example, Jews were accused of killing Christian children for their Passover celebrations. This so-called blood libel led many Christian communities to kill or expel their Jews. In various towns and cities of Europe , Jews suffered lynchings and other attacks. Although Jews looked like their neighbors, artists began to depict them with ugly faces and strange hats. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council forced all Jews to wear badges. From then on it was easy to tell them apart from Christians, and persecutions increased. Kings called Jews their personal serfs. They borrowed from them and taxed them. They also persecuted them, confiscating their goods and even at times expelling them from their kingdoms. King Philip II of France banished the Jews from his royal domain in 1182; King Edward I expelled them from England in 1290. These kings profited in the short term from these expulsions because they got all the property that the Jews left behind. They also enhanced their prestige as zealous Christian rulers. Finally, they pleased people who were in debt to the Jews. The persecution and expulsion of Jews was part of a general attempt by Christian leaders to define, control, and “purify” all of European society.

Heretics were also persecuted. One such group was the Albigenses in the south of France . They believed that the world was divided between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil. They had their own bishops, their own rituals, and a large following. At first the church tried to convert the Albigenses. The Dominicans were an order of friars much like the Franciscans that was originally set up to preach against the beliefs of the Albigenses and bring them back to the church. However, Pope Innocent III declared a Crusade against the Albigenses in 1208. Much of southern France was laid waste by the Crusade, although some of the Albigenses managed to escape.

In the 13th century, to stamp out the Albigenses and other heretics entirely, the church established inquisitorial courts. Historians sometimes call these courts, their trials, imprisonments, and punishments the Inquisition. Other historians see too much variety and change over time to give them one name. These courts were charged with seeking out, trying, and sentencing persons guilty of heresy. They called on people accused of heresy to confess and repent. Those who did not were burned. Those who did were forced to wear large yellow crosses on their clothing. This kept them isolated from other Christians, and it advertised their penance. Some heretics were considered so dangerous to others that they were kept in prison even after they had confessed. The Inquisition remained a powerful force in Europe far beyond the Middle Ages, into the 17th century.

Test yourself

Fill in the blanks by referring the question given:

What changes happened in education in the Central Middle Ages?

Since the Carolingian period, churches __ monasteries had run schools to __ boys who were going to __ priests and monks. In the __ and 12th centuries new types __ schools were developed in some __ . These schools were different from __ old ones because they were __ located in city cathedrals rather __ in monasteries, and they were __ to more advanced studies than __ other schools. For this reason, __ attracted students and teachers not __ from the neighborhood but from __ over Europe who were interested __ studying subjects such as philosophy, __ , and law. Many of the __ who attended these schools went __ to careers in the church. __ became lawyers and doctors, often __ wealthy merchants and their families. __ others became civil servants and __ for princes or kings. __ the 13th century many of __ schools were organized into universities, __ direct ancestors of modern American __ European universities. By the end __ the Middle Ages, there were __ 80 universities throughout Europe . They __ largely self-governing, enforcing their own __ about dress, classroom activities, and __ materials taught. Teachers, called masters, __ when the students were ready __ get their degrees or to __ allowed to teach. Students and __ often clashed with city authorities. __ sometimes led to student and __ protests, to demands for special __ , and to measures that strengthened __ universities' self-government.

To the last chapter

To the next chapter

Back to the contents