Robert Bartlett: The Making of Europe Introduction Europe is both a region and an idea.

The societies and cultures that have existed in this western extremity of the Eurasian land-mass have always been highly diverse, and the case for grouping them together as 'European' has varied from period to period. Since the later Middle Ages, however, there has been enough common ground among the different parts of western and Central Europe to make it reasonable to see this region of the world as a whole. When compared with other culture areas of the globe, such as the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent or China, western and Central Europe exhibited (and exhibits) distinctive characteristics. In particular, Latin Europe (that is, the part of Europe that was originally Roman Catholic rather than Greek Orthodox or non-Christian) formed a zone where strong shared features were as important as geographical or cultural contrasts. Some features were basic throughout the Middle Ages: Europe was a world of peasant communities, making a living from pastoral and arable agriculture supplemented by hunting and gathering, with technological and production levels far below those of the present day. Everywhere a small elite of aristocrats dominated and fed itself from the labours of the peasantry. Some were laymen, trained in warfare, proud of family, committed to the continuation of their line; others were clerics or monks, set apart for the Church, avowedly literate and celibate. Lay lords maintained a network of loyalties, alliances and patterns of subordination and domination that made up the political world; clerics and monks were located in a web of institutions and hierarchies with a loose centre in the papal see at Rome. The cultural inheritance of this society was a mixture of Roman, with Latin as its learned language and a partly surviving physical skeleton of roads and cities, Christian, with the pervasive presence of a scriptural, sacramental religion, and Germanic, as witnessed in the names, rites and ethos of the military aristocrats. The Latin Europe of the early Middle Ages was marked by much greater internal differentiation and by a smaller territorial extent than the Latin Europe of the later Middle Ages. No period of history anywhere can truly be called static or stagnant, but the amount of mobility and cross-regional contact in early medieval Europe was undoubtedly less than that found in the years after 1000 AD. The new millennium did not mark a sudden or radical redrawing of the outlines of this society, but from the eleventh century a period of exceptionally intense creative activity began within western Europe. The invasions that had marked the earlier period (Viking, Magyar and Saracen) ceased; and from the eleventh century until the slump and crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries stretch the High Middle Ages, an epoch of economic growth, territorial expansion and dynamic cultural and Social change. The vitality of European society between the late tenth and early fourteenth centuries can be seen in many spheres of life. The scale and speed of production and distribution were transformed: the population grew, the cultivated area expanded, urbanization and commercialization restructured economic and social life. Alongside the spread of money, and of banking and business devices, there developed in some areas a level of manufacturing activity that had never previously been attained. The same creativity is found in social organization. In many areas of life fundamental institutions and structures were given their decisive shape in these centuries: the incorporated town, the university, central representative bodies, the international orders of the Roman Catholic Church - all date from this epoch. By the year 1300 the European. world was relatively densely settled, productive and culturally innovative. In Flanders tens of thousands of looms were producing textiles for export; in northern Italy sophisticated international banking empires were elaborating credit, insurance and investment; in northern France intellectual life of the highest sophistication and political power of exceptional

effectiveness had developed side by side. Just as this dynamic society had centres, so it had edges, and its internal dynamism was matched by external or territorial expansionism. In some senses this phenomenon is obvious and unproblematic. Everywhere in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries trees were being felled, roots laboriously grubbed out, ditches delved to drain waterlogged land. Recruiting agents travelled in the overpopulated parts of Europe collecting emigrants; wagons full of anxious new settlers creaked their way across the continent; busy ports sent off ships full of colonists to alien and distant destinations; bands of knights hacked out new lordships. Yet in this world of bloody frontiers, raw new towns and pioneer farms, it is not always easy to delineate the boundaries of expansion. This is partly because `internal expansion' - the intensification of settlement and reorganization of society within western and central Europe - was as important as external expansion; and hence the problem of describing and explaining these expansionary movements is not distinct from the problem of describing and explaining the nature of European society itself. This book approaches the history of Europe in the High Middle Ages from one particular perspective, by concentrating on conquest, colonization and associated cultural change in Europe and the Mediterranean in the period 950-1350. It analyses the establishment of states by conquest and the peopling of distant countries by immigrants along the peripheries of the continent: English colonialism in the Celtic world, the movement of Germans into eastern Europe, the Spanish Reconquest and the activities of crusaders and colonists in the eastern Mediterranean. It asks what developments in language, law, belief and habit accompanied warfare and settlement. In doing so it continually alternates its focus between phenomena that are truly 'frontier', born of the needs of new settlement or military confrontation, and forces and developments that are to be found within the heartlands of the culture, for the expansionary power of this civilization sprang from its centres, even if it may be seen most starkly at its edges. Hence the theme is not only colonial conquest and immigration, the moving edge, but also the foundation of an expansive and increasingly homogeneous society - `the Making of Europe'.