GoaSW Pt.2 Add: The Medieval System (Expansion)

The rise of feudalism, the Franks, and the Catholic Church

The Medieval System (476 - 1556) 

Depiction of the Treaty of Verdun (843) | Chroniques des rois de France, fifteenth century | via Wikimedia

This article is part of the Geopolitics of a Shrinking World series. For an outline of this series, click here.

Introduction and Economics

The ‘Medieval Era’, or Middle Ages, has no universally agreed upon definition. As we consider Europe during this millennium that transitioned us from the classical era to the modern era, we often fall into the retired historical notion of the ‘Dark Ages’, falsely envisioning a time that was simple, brutish and backwards. To the contrary, in their book The Bright Ages, European historians David Perry and Matthew Gabriele argue that we should reject the conception of a ‘Middle Ages’ altogether and replace it with a more holistic interpretation of this era that doesn’t assume an arbitrary start and end. After all, they point out, “What is clear is that people in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, frustrated with the political chaos and warfare of their ugly era, decided to draw nostalgic links to the worlds of ancient Rome and Greece, using the distant past to sever their connection to the previous thousand years of history. Later, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imperialist European powers and their intellectuals sought a history for their new world order to justify and explain why whiteness—a modern idea, albeit with medieval roots— justified their domination of the world.”

While I agree with their analysis of the political interests that shaped our post-renaissance understanding of this time period, when we think about this thousand-year period there is nonetheless an instinct that causes us to want to lump it together in our minds as we assume society was relatively similar during the duration and radically different before and after it. This section will use a world-systems lens to take a closer look at society’s development throughout the Medieval Era to show that the social system was indeed distinct from the earlier Roman and later Colonial systems, particularly as it regards the balance of power in Europe’s regional order. We will draw on Wallerstein’s analysis of the Medieval Era to build upon his eagle-eye view of socioeconomic trends with a greater emphasis on the major figures and political events that accompanied them. In general, we see that the Medieval Era political-economy was just as dependent on the expansion and redistribution of territory, but can be differentiated by the replacement of the Roman Empire’s monopoly over social and cultural norms with that of the Catholic Church. While the Romans gained loyalty and justified their right to rule over others by centering the “greatness” of the city and its emperor in everything they did, medieval rulers instead emphasized “God’s will” and led strictly devout societies, while also paying homage to Rome’s legacy. After demonstrating how this feudal-religious system spread across Europe and altered throughout the centuries to meet the interests of its landed elites, we will conclude by explaining how increased geopolitical competition from neighboring regions caused it to enter a terminal crisis in the fourteenth century which necessitated that the Church’s power over the system give way to both religious alternatives and the bureaucracy of global capitalism that make up the system we have today.

In his examination of the birth of the medieval European world, Wallerstein summarizes that “Western European feudalism grew out of the disintegration of an empire, a disintegration which was never total in reality or even de jure (in name only). The myth of the Roman Empire still provided a certain cultural and even legal coherence to the area. Christianity served as a set of parameters within which social action took place.” Indeed, following the death of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476, there was an enormous power vacuum in both its Italian cities and its peripheral provinces, enabling the spirituality of the Church to fill the void with its influential bishops and its scatter of missionaries. While new Germanic rulers took control across the continent, the Church survived because they never claimed to challenge the political authority of kings, and instead would offer to legitimize them in the eyes of their followers if they simply recognized Rome’s authority over spiritual matters. This was an attractive alliance to many rulers who didn’t necessarily have the forces to maintain authority across their entire kingdoms alone, but they would often underestimate how powerful the church’s tactics for influencing their kingdom’s politics could be. Appearing as the neutral arbiter who supposedly didn’t have a stake in the outcome of the wars between Europe’s great dynasties enabled all factions to become open to hearing their advice on how God desired every other aspect of society to be, and that advice just so happened to elevate specific rulers who met God’s criteria. In this way, they drew a box of socially acceptable behavior to be applied from every king to every peasant, then labeled a tiny corner of the box ‘politics’, and let Europe’s various power-hungry nobles duke it out for control over the box. Moreover, since few rulers had the military strength or ambition to seek lands outside of Europe, the Catholic Church was the only organized entity with a transnational network that could simultaneously influence the entire sphere of European international relations at once, as well as represent Europe in affairs between the ‘realm of Christendom’ and those civilizations outside. Therefore, while the Church didn’t directly control a kingdom, except a part of central Italy surrounding Rome, they were able to use their religious monopoly to guide the trajectory of medieval Europe more than any one country. This is not to say that kings and landed nobles didn’t exercise an extremely high degree of power as they were nearly always the sole power enforcing rule of law in their own lands, but as the spiritual leaders of a deeply religious society, the clergy possessed an even greater power than decisions of legality and illegality in that they determined who had sinned and who would be saved. As long as the church maintained authority over religion and dictated the cultural and social norms of the societies that kings wished to govern, they often had the power to shape the course of events by communicating God's will in territorial disputes and letting people know which rulers God endorsed.

The interests of the Church, however, differed from rulers in that they wanted to generally stifle economic activity and secular learning so as to prevent any king from gaining so much wealth or so many followers that he could use to exert his leverage over the spiritual authority of Bishop of Rome, soon referred to as Papa, or Pope. As the head of the Church’s foreign policy, the Pope could use the tool of excommunication in extreme cases when rulers threatened them, causing them to immediately lose both the Church’s patronage and the sense of normality they provided until their people inevitably revolted. With these tactics, the Church could maintain decisive control over its two most important sources of power. The lesser of these was its control over “temporal matters”, which literally refers to the land, wealth, and revenues of the Church, a portfolio they preferred to keep outside of a monarch’s domestic authority. This meant noble clergymen like the Archbishop of Reims or the Bishop of Cologne were major landowners as well as major land brokers and a source of competition for secular lords. They were also empowered by their constant source of revenue from all landowners in the form of a 10% tax on agricultural production called a tithe, an institution they very much desired to keep respected despite no army to enforce that respect. Their ability to do so came from the greatest source of its power and their most valuable asset: their ownership over people’s hearts and minds. Indeed, it was not uncommon for people highborn and low to fully accept God’s existence and would chalk up most of the good things in life to his blessings and most of the bad things to his wrath. This shared religion was the glue that held societies together, and with little else, they cherished this glue even though most couldn’t even understand the bible as they couldn't read and priests only delivered sermons in Latin. Accordingly, one of the other primary reasons this era is considered the “Dark Ages” is because of the lack of primary sources resulting from the Church’s efforts to suppress any non-Catholic culture that could be used to fuel religious deviance. Still, we shall also point to where there were periods of distinct cultural flourishing, the so-called “Medieval Renaissances”, in which several intellectual and technological innovations were adopted that were vehemently opposed by at least some factions of the clergy.

While the economic incentive structure of the Medieval System was not aligned with growth, there was still slow growth, both in population, as well as in productive capacity. This mainly correlated with the growth of many towns into cities and the gradual cultivations of fields across the continent. Wallerstein adds more clarity to the shape of the economic system in explaining that the during the Medieval Era, “Europe was feudal, that is, relatively small, relatively self-sufficient economic nodules based on a form of exploitation which involved the direct appropriation of the small agricultural surplus produced by a manorial economy by a small class of nobility.” Here, he refers to the Middle Ages more broadly, but immediately after the fall of Rome, it was more accurate to say that our tents, Wallerstein’s nodules, were smaller and flatter in Germania, where the Roman Empire only ever had a sliver of control. However, in the south, power was in the hands of a few large kingdoms and one can envision tall tents with long economic ropes pulling wealth from every corner of their empire towards their center poles. While the smaller northern kingdoms were finally safe from fear of Roman expansion, they could not meaningfully come together to hash out some sort of post-Rome peace deal and build the type of interconnected system that fueled the Roman Empire. Given the breakdown in general authority, certainly very few people were in the business of risking their lives to travel to far off lands and trade their goods. Still, more commerce occurred within towns as time went on. While it is tempting to imagine that medieval European farms practiced subsistence agriculture, Wallerstein points to  B. H. Slicher van Bath’s major work on European agrarian history, noting that in the beginning of the Medieval Era “he does not think Western Europe was engaged in subsistence farming, but rather from 500 A.D. to c. 1150 A.D. in what he calls ‘direct agricultural consumption,’ that is, a system of partial self-sufficiency in which, while most people produce their own food, they also supply it to the nonagricultural population as barter. From 1150 A.D on, he considers Western Europe to have reached that stage of ‘indirect agricultural consumption,’ a stage we are still in today.”

Since ‘rule of law’ came down to what rules and laws could be enforced by a small army over great distances, a decentralized political system formed known as feudalism. As a result of the greater need for defense, wealthy landowners, called lords, now tended to live directly on their land in a manor rather than in villas near big cities as they once had. For protection, they would recruit knights into their service, providing them the honor of a place in their court in exchange for military service. The farming, and all other work in the manor, would be done by serfs, borderline slaves who were often not allowed to leave the manor without their lord’s permission, dangerous as it was, and gave the lord any surplus they produced as rent. A hierarchical taxation structure existed, but taxes were hard to collect because of the lack of bureaucracy and the limited use of currency, so most were paid in-kind, including the tithe to the church. Despite most of the land they worked being used for other people’s production, peasants still managed to provide for themselves thanks to their access to the commons, less-desirable plots of land that the lord didn’t necessarily care about and thus let them use as they willed. As for the lords, they maintained their power over their land by making sure their knights got paid and that their serfs had sufficient farming equipment and fertilizer to not starve. To get the resources to pay for this, they had to conquer their neighbors, killing other lords and redistributing their lands and plunder to their noblemen. Alternatively, they could use diplomatic pressure to get other lords to submit to them as underling lords, or vassals, which usually involved marrying their daughters to the higher lord’s younger sons. Thus, on the international stage, the elites of Europe developed a system of strategic marriage-making to gain more land under their control, always to be blessed by the Church of course. Such marriages would become the foundation for negotiating treaties and alliances, with lords planning generations ahead how they could gradually raise their family’s position on the fractious international-playing field, giving their kingdoms a better chance to invade others than to be invaded. Meanwhile, as a serf, your best hope was that not only would a better-situated kingdom not come to raid your lands and probably kill you, but that your king was also out successfully raiding other far-off lands to keep rivalrous nobles happy and any potential rebellions quelled at home. Again, territorial expansion was still just as necessary to keep the system going as it was in the Roman era, and a powerful cultural narrative was still just as necessary for rulers to mobilize their societies towards achieving that expansion.

Example of a European medieval manor | via Students of History

Geopolitics of Early Catholic Expansion (476 - 732)

The rise of the Catholic Church to the peak of the European system came not after the Fall of Rome in 476, but in the void left by the decline of the great Germanic empires that invaded Western Rome. However, when these rulers initially conquered large parts of the western empire, not only did they have sufficient military forces to maintain their borders, they also had plenty of plunder to spread to their nobles, and thus, had little interest in seeking the influence of the Bishop of Rome. In the immediate aftermath of Rome’s downfall, the three great empires of the Mediterranean were the Visigoths in Iberia and southern Gaul, Odoacer’s kingdom in Italy, and, of course, the Eastern Roman Empire, still going strong in Constantinople (this realm is often referred to as the ‘Byzantine Empire’, a term used to bolster the Latin Christendom’s claim to the title of Rome’s true successor, but we will also use it for simplicity’s sake). On top of ruling over the Balkans and Asia Minor, the Byzantine Emperor still claimed ownership of the west and considered the Germanic rulers merely temporary occupants to be tolerated. Other strong forces remained organized since the Hunnic Wars including the ex-foederati kingdoms of the Burgundians and the Franks, as well as the powerful Ostrogoths who had allied with the Huns and settled in the former Roman province of Pannonia (the area southwest of the Danube now split by Austria and Hungary). Hardly strong forces but still standing in the periphery of the Western Roman Empire were the “rump states” of Dalmatia, where Julius Nepos, the predecessor to Romulus Augustulus, was futilely still claiming emperorship over all of Western Rome, and the Kingdom of Soissons, based in central Gaul, where the Roman general Syagrius was still claiming the authority granted to him to govern the Roman province of Gaul. In Central Europe, small kingdoms emerged among the Alemanni in southern Germany, the Saxons in northern Germany, and the Thuringians in eastern Germany. Going west to east along Pannonia’s northern border were the kingdoms of the Rugii, Lombards and Heruli, but the large Carpathian basin (otherwise known as the Pannonian basin) was ruled by the Gepids. All of these were Germanic people from distant lands who migrated during this period, seeking opportunity in Rome’s wake. Furthest away of all, Saxons in Germany who had intermarried with their northern neighbors, the Angels, were setting up small kingdoms along the east coast of Britain in the lands abandoned by Rome.

Map of Europe in 477 after the Fall of Rome | via The History of Europe: Every Year