The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 - 1350

The author impressively employs an encyclopaedic knowledge of case histories to describe how Latin Christendom doubled in size between 950 and 1350, the High Middle Ages, to replicate itself beyond the boundaries of Hamburg, Pisa and Barcelona. Rather than focus on enmities and competition between the different components of Christian Europe, he identifies the common threads that unified them in method and purpose. There occurred a dynastic diffusion and diaspora of Western European Carolingian aristocrats, primarily from France or Frankish territories and often represented by younger sons and middle-level warrior knights in search of land they could not get access to at home. Encouraged through religious fervour, they took to crusading against surrounding territories hitherto variously ruled by Celts, Slavs, Pagans and Muslims. The book begins by the tracking of bishoprics over the period in order to subjectively measure the expansion of assimilated territories. It then examines the mechanisms by which this growth took place as new fiefdoms ranging from a few square miles to much more were established in outlying regions in all directions. The underlying unifying of the Christian cause came from the influence of Rome (oddly, far from the geographical epicentre of this movement) on monarchies around Europe, directly as well as through local religious hierarchies and monastic orders such as the Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, and notably the Cistercians. The distinction between warriors and religious men became blurred. After the initial onslaught through modern military techniques that included heavy cavalry, crossbowmen and siege equipment, knights raised funds to consolidate their new territories by building wooden and eventually stone castles and accompanying towns. England, for example, gained one castle every ten miles. The highly effective but fearsome crossbowmen were generally detested, so their number was encouraged through tax exemptions. Knights were variously polyglot, energetic, courageous, violent, ambitious, revengeful, and greedy. They developed a culture of conquest over inheritance and even granted each other future spoils of conquest. Once in place in their newly acquired territories they started to develop procedures and laws to better manage their domains and improve productivity. The use of mattocks to tame the land gradually enabled the use of ploughs. However, the new colonised regions were often characterised by a lack of manpower, and as new towns were captured, inhabitants were enticed, usually voluntarily through offers of free rent or hereditary rights, to go and settle newly acquired lands elsewhere. Mansi, acres, yugida, carucates, unci and various other terms represented the plots of varying sizes that were allocated to the new settlers who often took up cerealisation and contributed to supplying seigneurial mills. There also occurred an explosion of urbanisation characterised by plurism; towns, became ‘linguistic islands’, centres of foreign immigrants. They were chartered and denizens awarded economic privileges and liberties. Individuals of different backgrounds remained subjected to and tried by their laws of origin, whether German, Jewish, Muslim or other. Along the frontiers, especially Genoans and Venetians took to trading into foreign territories. Towards the end of the period, under the pressures in part created by recession and growing discrimination, drives towards uniformity started to occur. Linguistic nationalism, such as the decline of Arabic in Spain and southern Italy, started to take hold, and the book ends describing the homogenisation of first names, coinage, education and social order.

Scholarly book well written. Original thinking with lots of evidence. A very interesting read. A little bit repetitive though.

An enjoyable and informal piece of scholarship about how European society evolved during the High Middle Ages. Recommended book by Oxford and Cambridge on reading lists. Good for those preparing for a History Degree, particularly those who are interested yet want to know more about this period. Some prior knowledge of European Middle Ages is advised.

Very detailed, thorough and extremely well-written, but a work that's so in-depth you feel you need to study and digest it to wholly appreciate it.Not for everyone I suspect if you are really only interested in gleaming key points of this era. This is a graceful and gradual explanation of a process that itself proceeded in a similar way!

Awesome