Nevertheless, in the course of the central Middle Ages (between 1000 and 1300), western civilisation began to show sure signs of development and expansion. Urbanisation slowly gathered pace, and growth in the population of towns and cities helped to stimulate economic recovery and the revival of a monetary-based economy. Among those communities who spearheaded a resurgence in long-distance trade were the seaborne merchants of Italy, based in cities like Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa and Venice. Other groups demonstrated a marked propensity for military conquest. The Normans of northern France (descendants of Viking settlers) were especially energetic in the mid-eleventh century: colonising Anglo-Saxon England; and seizing southern Italy and Sicily from the Byzantines and North African Arabs. Meanwhile, in Iberia, a number of Christian realms began to push their borders south, reconquering territory from the Muslims of Spain.

As western Europeans began to look beyond their early medieval horizons, the forces of commerce and conquest brought them into closer contact with the wider world, and with the great civilisations of the Mediterranean: the ancient ‘eastern Roman’ Byzantine Empire and the sprawling Arab-Islamic world. These long-established ‘superpowers’ were historic centres of wealth, culture and military might. As such, they tended to regard the West as little more than a barbarian backwater–the dismal homeland of savage tribesmen who might be fierce fighters, but were essentially just an uncontrollable rabble, and thus posed no real threat. The coming of the crusades would help to overturn this dynamic, even as it confirmed many of these prejudices.³

Latin Christendom

Ancient Roman rule undoubtedly had a profound effect upon all aspects of western history, but the empire’s most important and enduring legacy was the Christianisation of Europe. Constantine the Great’s decision to embrace Christianity–then a minor eastern sect–after experiencing a ‘vision’ in 312 CE, catapulted this faith on to the world stage. Within less than a century Christianity had displaced paganism as the empire’s official religion, and through the agency of Roman influence ‘Christ’s message’ spread across Europe. Even as the political state that had given it impetus faltered, the Christian faith gained in strength. Europe’s new ‘barbarian’ chieftains converted and soon began to claim that they had a divinely ordained right to rule over their tribes as kings. The mighty unifier Charlemagne styled himself as a ‘sacral’, or sacred, ruler–one who held the right and responsibility to defend and uphold the faith. By the eleventh century, Latin Christianity (so-called because of the language of its scripture and ritual) had penetrated to almost every corner of the West.*

A central figure in this process was the pope in Rome. Christian tradition maintained that there were five great fathers–or patriarchs–of the Church spread across the Mediterranean world at Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. But the bishop of Rome–who came to call himself ‘papa’ (father) or pope–sought to claim pre-eminence among all these. Throughout the Middle Ages, the papacy struggled not only to assert its ecumenical (worldwide) ‘rights’, but also to wield meaningful authority over the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Latin West. The decline of the Roman and Carolingian Empires disrupted frameworks of power within the Church, just as it had done within the secular sphere. Across Europe, bishops enjoyed centuries of independence and autonomy from papal control, with most prelates owing their first allegiance to local political rulers and the ‘sacral’ kings of the West. By the early eleventh century, popes were straining simply to make their will felt in central Italy, and in the decades that followed they would sometimes even find themselves exiled from Rome itself.

Nonetheless, it would be a Roman pope who launched the crusades, prompting tens of thousands of Latins to take up arms and fight in the name of Christianity. This remarkable feat, in and of itself, served to extend and strengthen papal power, but the preaching of these holy wars should not be regarded as a purely cynical, self-serving act. The papacy’s role as the progenitor of crusading did help to consolidate Roman ecclesiastical authority in regions like France and, to begin with at least, crusader forces looked as though they might follow the pope’s commands, functioning almost as papal armies. Even so, more altruistic impulses probably also were at work. Many medieval popes seem earnestly to have believed that they had a wider duty to protect Christendom. They also expected, upon death, to answer to God for the fate of every soul once in their care. By constructing an ideal of Christian holy war–in which acts of sanctified violence would actually help to cleanse a warrior’s soul of sin–the papacy was opening up a new path to salvation for its Latin ‘flock’.

In fact, the crusades were just one expression of a much wider drive to rejuvenate western Christendom, championed by Rome from the mid-eleventh century onwards in the so-called ‘Reform movement’. As far as the papacy was concerned, any failings within the Church were just the symptoms of a deeper malaise: the corrupting influence of the secular world, long enshrined by the links between clergymen and lay rulers. And the only way to break the stranglehold enjoyed by emperors and kings over the Church was for the Pope finally to realise his God-given right to supreme authority. The most vocal and extreme proponent of these views was Pope Gregory VII (1073–85). Gregory ardently believed that he had been set on Earth to transform Christendom by seizing absolute control of Latin ecclesiastical affairs. In pursuit of this ambition, he was willing to embrace almost any available means–even the potential use of violence, enacted by papal servants whom he called ‘soldiers of Christ’. Although Gregory went too far, too fast and ended his pontificate in ignominious exile in southern Italy, his bold strides did much to advance the twinned causes of reform and papal empowerment, establishing a platform from which one of his successors (and former adviser), Pope Urban II (1088–99), could instigate the First Crusade.⁴

Urban’s call for a holy war found a willing audience across Europe, in large part because of the prevailing religious atmosphere in the Latin world. Across the West, Christianity was an almost universally accepted faith and, in contrast to modern secularised European society, the eleventh century was a profoundly spiritual era. This was a setting in which Christian doctrine impinged upon virtually every facet of human life–from birth and death, to sleeping and eating, marriage and health–and the signs of God’s omnipotence were clear for all to see, made manifest through acts of ‘miraculous’ healing, divine revelation and earthly and celestial portents. Concepts such as love, charity, obligation and tradition all helped to shape medieval attitudes to devotion, but perhaps the most powerful conditioning influence was fear; the same fear that made Fulk Nerra believe that his soul was in peril. The Latin Church of the eleventh century taught that every human would face a moment of judgement–the so-called ‘weighing of souls’. Purity would bring the everlasting reward of heavenly salvation, but sin would result in damnation and an eternity of hellish torment. For the faithful of the day, the visceral reality of the dangers involved was driven home by graphic images in religious art and sculpture of the punishments to be suffered by those deemed impure: wretched sinners strangled by demons; the damned herded into the fires of the underworld by hideous devils.

Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that most medieval Latin Christians were obsessed with sinfulness, contamination and the impending afterlife. One extreme expression of the pressing desire to pursue an unsullied and perfected Christian life was monasticism–in which monks or nuns made vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and lived in ordered communities, dedicating themselves to God. By the eleventh century, one of the most popular forms of monastic life was that advocated by the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, in eastern France. The Cluniac movement grew to have some 2,000 dependent houses from England to Italy and enjoyed far-reaching influence, not least in helping to develop and advance the ideals of the Reform movement. Its power was reaching an apex in the 1090s, when Urban II, himself a former Cluniac monk, held the papal office.