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High Middle Ages
Around the year 1000 Europe began to grow: more people, more ploughed land, new towns and busy trade fairs. Lords and knights, a powerful papacy and the crusades shaped its politics, while the first universities and Gothic cathedrals with walls of coloured glass showed a new confidence in reason and faith.
Lords, knights and peasants
THEME ONE
Land was held in exchange for service. A king or great lord granted a fief to a vassal, who swore loyalty and owed him military service as a mounted knight. Peasants worked the lord's land, paid him dues and, as serfs, could not leave the manor freely. Stone castles marked the lords' power. The heavy plough, the three-field system and water mills raised harvests and fed a growing population.
Popes and crusades
THEME TWO
Reforming popes such as Gregory VII claimed authority over the Church and even over kings, and in 1077 Emperor Henry IV had to seek his pardon at Canossa. In 1095 Pope Urban II called Christians to free Jerusalem, and the First Crusade took the city in 1099. Crusader states held the coast of the Levant for almost two centuries. Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, and in 1204 crusaders sacked Christian Constantinople.
Towns, trade and universities
THEME THREE
Venice and Genoa traded across the Mediterranean, Flemish towns wove cloth, and the fairs of Champagne brought merchants from north and south together. Townspeople organised in guilds and won charters of freedom - "town air makes you free", went a German saying. Universities grew in Bologna, Paris and Oxford, where Thomas Aquinas and others sought to reconcile Christian faith with the logic of Aristotle.
The Gothic cathedral
THEME FOUR
Around 1140 Abbot Suger rebuilt the choir of Saint-Denis near Paris with pointed arches, ribbed vaults and large windows. Flying buttresses soon let builders raise walls ever higher and fill them with stained glass. Chartres, Notre-Dame de Paris, Reims and Cologne followed. A cathedral could take a century or more to finish, and whole towns paid and worked for it.
Periods
Growth and reform
1000 – 1095
The split between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople (1054), the Norman conquest of England (1066) and the struggle between popes and emperors.
The age of the crusades
1095 – 1204
From the call at Clermont to the sack of Constantinople: crusader states in the Levant, the first Gothic churches and the growth of towns.
Kings, towns and universities
1204 – 1300
Magna Carta, stronger monarchies in France and England, the great universities, the Mongol invasion of eastern Europe and the fall of Acre, the last crusader city, in 1291.
Key dates
- 1054The split between the Latin and the Greek Church.
- 1066William of Normandy wins at Hastings and conquers England.
- 1099The First Crusade takes Jerusalem.
- 1163Building work begins on Notre-Dame de Paris.
- 1215King John of England seals Magna Carta.
- 1291Acre falls, ending the crusader states in the Holy Land.
Questions and answers
What was feudalism?
A modern name for a society in which land was held in exchange for service and loyalty. Lords granted fiefs to vassals who owed them military service, and peasants worked the land and owed rents and labour. The arrangements varied so much from region to region that some historians now avoid the word.
How many crusades were there?
Historians traditionally number eight or nine major crusades to the Holy Land between 1096 and 1272. But there were many more crusades: against the Muslims of Spain, against pagans in the Baltic and against Christian heretics in southern France.