The European Middle Ages (Part 1 of 2)

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It is Easter Sunday, 1097.

Under a clear ultramarine sky, the south-eastern Italian port of Brindisi is a high of activity.

Hundreds of men and women lie in the seafront.

Among them is a young priest named Fulca.

Like the others, he is waiting to board the fleet of single-mastered wooden ships

that floated anchor, the snowy white sails snapping in the breeze.

Fulca watches as crates of supplies are heaved onto the ships by a creaking wooden gangplanks.

Horses are led aboard one boat, the sound of their agitation mingling

with the cries of the seabirds wheeling overhead.

The crowd parts as a mounted lord rides through,

shouting instructions at the servants carrying his weapons.

One ship unfurls its sails,

and Fulca shields his eyes as he tracks its slow progress out into the open sea.

He joins a group boarding one of the next ships,

assessing those who will be his companions on the long journey.

Many of them are fighting men, swords visible at their belts,

but just as many are peasants, men and women in rough home spun clothing.

They speak a variety of languages, French and Italian dialect,

even a smattering of old English.

What unites them all is their faith,

which has led them to join this armed pilgrimage,

this crusade to retake Jerusalem for Christendom.

The priest is jostled up the gang plan,

but as he reaches the ship's deck from across the water,

it comes a tearing sound,

like the felling of an enormous tree,

followed by a wave of blood-curdling screams.

The crowd surges towards the ship's rail,

taking Fulca with them.

He struggles to the front,

desperately trying to understand what's happening.

What he sees brings him up short.

A ship that had been maneuvering to depart is foundering.

Overburdened with people and supplies,

an almighty crack now fissures down its middle.

And as Fulca watches, the two halves begin to pull apart.

The water is already full of people,

struggling to stay afloat as they are buffeted relentlessly

by the sea.

Dozens more cling to the splintered planks of the deck,

scrambling to find purchase as the shattered halves

of the boat begin to tilt,

horses scream as they plummet into the waves.

The priest stares in disbelief

as the ruined boat sinks before his eyes,

dragging its unfortunate passengers with it.

Instinctively, he falls to his knees,

issuing a prayer for the souls of the departed,

and the safe passage of the rest of the fleet.

Countless others join him, sobbing and chanting

as the cries of those in the water grow weaker.

The sun has barely moved in the sky

by the time the wreck is complete.

Hundreds of lives lost in an instant.

Fulca rises stiffly,

straightening his legs to relieve the familiar ache in his knees.

As he does so, a man standing by the mast

issues a short fanfare on a metal horn.

The loss of one ship cannot be allowed to delay the fleet.

On cue, sailors swarm the deck.

The ropes attaching them to the dock are cut.

The sail is unfurled and the ship tugs away from the dock.

As the shore begins to recede,

Fulca turns east to face the open sea

and the holy land beyond.

From our modern perspective,

the crusades appear a quintessentially medieval event,

a real-life parallel to the legends of King Arthur.

Knights in shining armour mounted on magnificent steeds,

a perilous quest across the sea into lands unknown,

and the pervasive presence of the Christian faith.

But the period known as the Middle Ages

was defined by far more than knights and warfare.

It began centuries before the first crusade was called

in the confusion that followed the end of Roman rule in Western Europe.

And it persisted for a thousand years,

until the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation,

and the discovery of the so-called New World,

ushered in the beginnings of modernity.

But just how important was the fall of Rome

for people across the continent?

What political and religious institutions

sprang up to fill the power vacuum left behind?

And who were the leaders who strengthened Europe sufficiently?

To once again launch armed expeditions across the sea?

I'm John Hopkins.

From the Noiser Podcast Network,

this is part one of a special two-part short history

of the European Middle Ages.

The period known as the Middle Ages is born in chaos,

beginning its rise as the Roman Empire in the West begins to fall.

Despite enjoying a dominance of a much of the Mediterranean for centuries,

Rome is in a slow decline.

Starting in the three 70s,

Germanic groups who live outside the Empire's borders

begin to move into imperial territory,

pushed westwards by tribes from Central Asia

invading their traditional homelands.

Martin Wittich is author of many books on the medieval period,

including a brief history of life in the Middle Ages.

This series of mass movements were driven by a number of factors,

rising populations beyond the Roman frontiers,

movements of people westward from Central Asia

in a number of waves that forced other tribes

up against imperial frontiers and into them through them and over them.

Long established connections with the Empire, both via trade,

tribute, diplomatic gifts, recruitment in the imperial military,

meant there was a high level of awareness of the Empire

and its resources and its attractions felt among people outside the Empire.

And what this cause was, steady collapse, steadily steadily

and then all at once, as it were, of the coherence of imperial defense.

The Romans at first tried to make use of some of these so-called barbarian peoples,

employing them as mercenaries and settling them within the Empire.

This strategy works to defend Rome for a time,

until these groups decide to turn on their paymasters.

In 410, Rome is sacked by the Visigoths,

one of these Germanic tribes.

The shock waves are felt throughout the Empire.

The first time in nearly 800 years, the eternal city had fallen to a foreign enemy

and the shocking event symbolized the deep decline of the Western Roman Empire,

which had already been weakening for over 100 years,

resulting from pressure on its borders, population movement,

in the barbarian lands, economic strain, political divisions,

and military overextension.

Decades of unrest follow,

with territory being slowly lost or abandoned,

and some emperors reigning for mere months before they are killed or deposed.

Finally, in 476, another Germanic general named Odawesa

deposes the last emperor, Romulus or Gastulas.

The Western Roman Empire, encompassing modern-day France, Spain,

Italy, North Africa and Britain, has come to an end.

This is now often seen as the end of antiquity,

and the start of the early Middle Ages or early medieval period of history.

This, though it has to be said, is a bit of a problematic bookend,

as though what you might call Germanisation and militarisation of the Empire,

more and more barbarians involved in its defence, for example,

preceded this, and features of Roman life and culture outlived the end of the Empire,

varying from region to region for several generations.

The Empire cast a very long shadow,

and it should be noted that the Roman Empire survived in the east,

albeit subject to its changes,

until Islamic conquest of Constantinople,

modern Istanbul in 1453.

But we normally take this end of Imperial rule in the West

as the beginning of the early medieval period.

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The end of Roman rule does not look the same across the continent.

In Britain, the villas and towns built by the Romans are abandoned.

Its people are cut off from trade with the rest of the empire,

and the north is attacked by the pickets and scots once held back by Hadrian's Wall.

With the withdrawal of imperial soldiers,

looting and pillaging are widespread,

but other areas are less affected.

It is a strange and complex kaleidoscope of events

that lead to the collapse,

and what happens afterwards is also a strange and complex kaleidoscope of events,

which is not uniform from province to province.

Some areas had a significant amount of imperial structures

and lifestyles surviving the turbulence.

Areas, such as Gaul and the Iberian Peninsula,

experience a greater continuation of what might call Romanatast,

Romanisation than areas like Britain,

which seems to have had a much more profound system collapse.

Even in areas which experience relatively milder turmoil,

there are significant changes.

With the removal of imperial bureaucracy and military structures,

maintenance and public order go into decline.

There are no officials to collect the taxes that go towards preserving public infrastructure

and no officials to organise it.

Industrial scale mass production of goods,

including pottery vessels, weapons, bricks and tableware,

as well as long distance trade are severely curtailed,

literacy and the production of written works diminish.

These impacts, however, are perhaps felt most keenly

by the wealthiest members of society,

whose experiences loom largest in our historical sources.

It should be remembered that much of what we associate with Roman Empire

had been enjoyed mostly by a relatively small elite

and an urban minority.

Life for the rural majority,

while clearly influenced by Roman culture and industrial scale production,

was much harder for these people.

For many people, the end of Imperial taxation,

may have initially, for a couple of generations at least,

have met an increase of lifestyle and an increasing living standards.

Perhaps the biggest change is the scale on which life is lived

and political power imposed.

Under Roman rule, much of Europe had,

to a greater or lesser extent, been connected.

Elites from Spain or North Africa served in the capital.

Soldiers from what is now Romania were stationed in Northern England.

By contrast, the beginning of the Middle Ages

is marked by local and often unstable political configurations.

Back in Rome, the groups from the North continue to conquer

and settle much of the Empire's territory,

seizing the opportunity to get their hands on its lands and goods.

The fifth and sixth centuries, this period of the collapse of Roman rule,

and then sub-Roman and then post-Roman Europe as it sometimes termed,

were marked by mass migrations and invasions by peoples.

The Romans had called barbarians.

Included, for example, the Visigoths who ended up in Spain,

the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Franks in Goul,

the Anglo-Saxons in England, the Lombards in Northern Italy,

and the Vandals who eventually established a kingdom in North Africa.

Although many of these people were coalitions who have been brought together

by campaigns against the Empire,

so we shouldn't think of these people as always existing in those forms.

The settlement of these new groups leads to a change in identity.

The elites in places conquered by Germanic groups stop seeing themselves as Roman.

Instead, they integrate into Gothic or Frankish identities.

Sometimes, populations are almost entirely replaced.

The indigenous people of Britain are pushed to the edges of the map

into northwest and southwest England, Wales and Scotland.

The rest of the island is now taken up by the new angle and Saxon arrivals.

Political organisation among newly settled migrants is simple at first.

In the place of Imperial rule, power devolved to local elites and to warrior leaders.

Initially, these were relatively small-scale, face-to-face,

authority warrior societies held together by personal loyalty to kings or chieftains

rather than institutions, and many were initially illiterate.

In parts of eastern and central Europe, these small communities remain the norm.

Archaeological evidence reveals villages with few material goods and limited wealth,

but elsewhere, bit by bit, larger kingdoms begin to form,

each with their own distinct cultural identity.

In places like France and Italy, the old Roman heartlands,

new leaders set themselves up as the successors of imperial traditions.

Many of their signs and symbols on ways of expressing themselves,

even though they would have not appeared very imperial in the height of imperial Rome,

were nevertheless echoes of Romanatas, echoes of Rome.

Many of these people saw themselves as the inheritors of Rome, not its destroyers,

although obviously indigenous peoples within the empire may have seen it relatively differently.

In the early 6th century, a Frankish king named Clovis conquers much of modern-day France,

in a campaign continued by his sons.

They establish what has become known as the Merovingian dynasty,

which rules Francia until 751.

From the time of Clovis' conversion, these Frankish kings are Christian,

and their aristocrats are among the wealthiest in Europe,

employing a written system of administration.

Similarly, the Visigothic king Leovigild,

who unites most of Spain in the 570s and 80s,

issues a Roman-style law code for his new kingdom.

His son insists on uniformity of belief throughout the land,

and persecutes adherence of minority Christianity sects.

The same cannot be said for all these early medieval kingdoms.

The Angles and Saxons, who settle in England, for example,

remain culturally distinct from the Romanized elites across the channel.

By the end of the 6th century, Britain is a patchwork of small kingdoms.

There's as the culture described in the Old English epic Beowulf,

a world of kings feasting in wooden halls,

presenting gold arm rings and swords to their loyal bands of warriors.

Similar to the situation in Scandinavia where the Permis set,

it's an age of blood feuds, violence, and pagan gods,

where petty kings fight one another to establish their dominance.

But even Britain will not remain pagan forever,

because another even stronger power is rising in early medieval Europe.

There was one transnational international organization

that had united the Western Empire and indeed the East and West of the Roman Empire

that survived the collapse.

And that was the Roman Church.

Latin survived as a common language within the West within the Christian Church.

The Christian Church preserved aspects of Roman administration

and the idea of Roman law endured in memories and in manuscripts often protected within church scriptoria.

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From the 6th century, the Pope begins sending out missions to those places in Europe which remain pagan.

The first success is in England.

In 597, a group led by a man named Augustine lands in the Kingdom of Kent.

The king married to a Christian, Frankish princess gives Augustine a church in his capital,

Canterbury, and allows him to preach to his subjects.

Within a year, thousands have been baptized, including the king himself.

Over the next few decades, the faith spreads to the other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms,

with Canterbury remaining the head of the English church.

One strong motive for these conversions is the political connections to Rome and

Francia that Christianity brings.

And the monasteries and bishoprics, founded within their territories,

filled with literate monks, can act as outposts of royal authority and administration.

A means through which kings can exert their control over the land and its people.

The conversion of Britain is not the only success story for the early medieval papacy.

We were like Patrick took the faith to Ireland which had never been part of the empire,

and people like Boniface and a whole range of very active women's supporters.

Cuthburger Leoba from Wessex took the faith into Germany which had never been part of the empire,

so in a very striking way, the church and its institutions survive and strengthen

as the empire collapses and they then take the Christian faith to barbarian peoples who were pagans

and indeed to peoples who had never been part of the empire.

By the end of the 7th century, early medieval Europe is beginning to take shape.

Germanic peoples have spread across the continent, settled and formed kingdoms,

and missionaries have spread Christianity far and wide.

With politics now operating on a smaller scale, long distance trade and large scale production

remain far more limited than under Roman rule.

Even so, a measure of stability has once more been achieved.

The map of early medieval Europe is however always in flux and affected by forces beyond its borders.

For much of the 7th century, Arab Muslim forces have been expanding their control outwards

from what is now Saudi Arabia.

This growing empire or caliphate is ruled by the Umayyad dynasty,

distant relatives of the Prophet Muhammad.

After conquering the Middle East, they move into Persia, Anatolia, Egypt and North Africa.

And then they turn their attentions towards Europe.

In 711, an army largely composed of recently converted burbers from North Africa

led by the Umayyad commander, Tarek Ibn Zayyad, cross the strait of Gibraltar.

It was not initially a full-scale imperial conquest.

It began as an intervention in a busy gothic succession dispute.

Remember the busy goths with those who had become rulers in the Arabian Peninsula.

Following busy gothic political collapse, Muslim forces advance quickly.

Local elites often negotiated terms with them, allowing some preservation of property, autonomy and Christian religious practices.

It exchanged for tribute.

But by 718, most of the peninsula, except small areas in the far north, were under Muslim control.

And we know that there was excursions raised into a Frankish territory, what's now France as well.

To begin with, Iberia, what is now Spain and Portugal, is organized as a province of the wider Islamic caliphate.

And given the name Al-Andalus.

Within a few decades, the caliphs are overthrown.

And a survivor of the deposed Umayyad dynasty, Abda Aramun, makes his way to the capital at Cordoba.

He proclaims Al-Andalus an independent Emirate in 756, with himself as Emir.

Under him and his successes, it becomes a region unlike any other in early medieval Europe.

The year is 830, and it is late spring in the city of Cordoba.

Inside the kitchens of the Royal Palace, a young servant picks up a large dish of soup, trying to balance its weight before he is chewed out by the cook.

He walks carefully in a line behind other youths, all bearing deep dishes filled to the brim with fragrant soups and broths.

The first course of the magnificent banquet the Emir is hosting tonight.

The servant in hails, savoring the aroma of fresh coriander, that wafts from the bowl in his hands.

They ascend a steep stone staircase, before coming to the grand archway that marks the entrance to the bang-butting hall.

Arms aching, the servant follows the boy in front of him into the brightly lit, collinated room, its honey-colored walls glowing in the lamp light.

The space is dominated by a long table, its wooden surface hidden by an elegant leather covering chased with scrolling designs.

Sitting at it are the most powerful men in the city, dressed in bright silk tunics, while a top table is dominated by the Emir and his closest advisors.

In one corner of the room, an enslaved woman plays a five stringed wooden lute and sings, her voice rising sweetly to the high ceiling.

One of the men raises a crystal goblet and a girl hurries to refill it.

The servant stares, bees must be new.

He had previously only imagined that drinking vessels could be made of metal.

This one looks impossibly delicate, the candlelight shining right through it and illuminating the liquid within.

Shaking his head, the boy places the bowl of soup on the table and hurries back out of the room.

The Emir's new way of dining means that food is now served in separate courses, rather than every dish being brought to the table at once, and there are still several courses to go.

He returns a few minutes later with a dish of grilled fish and asparagus for the top table.

As he approaches, he observes a spirited discussion between the Emir and the man sitting next to him, Ziayab, the cultural advisor responsible for this new way of serving food.

It is something to do with the stars, although the details make no sense to the servant, but the Emir is a learned man and such debates on points of astronomy and philosophy are a regular feature of life at court.

The servant bows and backs away before once again retracing his steps to the kitchen.

It will be time for the sweet course soon. He sighs.

Thanks to Ziayab's innovations, he will be running up and down the stairs to the kitchen all night.

Al-Andalus flourishes like nowhere else in Europe. It is a multi-ethnic society, home to Muslims, Jews and Christians.

Non-Muslims must pair poll tax, but are otherwise allowed to practice their faiths.

Communities of Christian worshipers form in Toledo, Seville, Marida and Cordoba itself.

Jewish people are equally free to worship and live according to their own laws and customs, and many become prominent members of the Emir's court and Cordoba's cultural elite.

Agriculture provides the backbone of the economy, with farmers growing wheat, barley, fruit and olives.

Cities are centers of trade and artisan production, where silk, leather goods and armour are manufactured as well as fine metal and glass vessels.

But the Jewel in the Andalusian Crown is Cordoba itself.

Under Muslim rule, the city reaches unprecedented heights, as a center of commerce and culture, with a population of a quarter of a million.

It is a figure unmatched in the West, rivaled only by the Abbasid capital of Baghdad and Constantinople, the seat of the Byzantine Empire.

Its citizens can walk down streets that are well paved, clean and lit by lanterns hung from the roofs of buildings.

There is access to plentiful running water, thanks to an aqueduct constructed by the first Emir, and the city is home to numerous bathhouses.

Ambitious building projects are undertaken, including the construction of Cordoba's famous grand mosque, with its distinctive red and white striped arches.

The city's fame is such that, by the 10th century, word has reached far beyond the Iberian peninsula.

A nun, Horsvita of Ganderheim, considered the first female German writer, sings Cordoba's praises in Latin verse.

Despite criticizing its Muslim rulers, she hails the city as the glittering ornament of the world, shining in the Western regions.

Cordoba might outshine other European cities for now, but other countries are by no means stagnating.

For these same centuries, see a remarkable level of political dynamism across the continent, and the establishment of ever larger kingdoms, under ever more powerful kings.

From about the year 700 onwards, we see increasing unity, sophistication and kingdom building in a wide range of these successor states that had risen out of the wreckage of the Western Roman Empire.

The first and most impressive of these is the Carolingian Empire, named after both its founder Charles Martel and his grandson, who becomes Charles the Great, or to give him the name by which he is better known, Charlemagne.

Charlemagne, Charles the Great, unified much of Western Europe.

Charlemagne ruled from 768 to 814, expanded his empire over what we now call modern France, areas of Germany, the low countries, northern Italy and beyond.

The descendant of a Frankish aristocratic family, his grandfather and father rested power from the ruling Maravindrian kings.

By 771, he has become the sole ruler in France. He then sets about expanding his domain.

Over the course of several long and brutal campaigns, he conquers the Lombard kingdom of northern Italy, forces the submission and conversion of the Saxons on his northern border, expands into Bavaria and establishes a frontier in Catalonia.

His achievements are triumphally marked on Christmas Day 800, when he takes the new title of Emperor of the Romans.

It was a revival of something of roman-ness of imperial connectivity in the West.

And so Charlemagne was, effectively, emperor of the new Roman Western Empire, as it were.

And the church blessed that because it was part of stability, part of protection of the new community that was emerging, which was increasingly a Christian community.

But it was also a symbolic revival of the Western Empire, and it linked the Frankish kingship with ancient Roman authority and with a Christian mission.

Under the Carolingians, agricultural production in Francia increases, thanks to more active land management by the aristocrats and monasteries who own the fields and pastures.

A network of markets springs up, selling goods like wine and cloth.

While the peasantry is subjugated, often violently, the elites become extremely wealthy.

And twice a year, they make the journey to the new imperial court at Arcan, near the modern German border with Belgium.

Attended by military retinues, they bring with them glittering piles of gifts for the emperor.

The purpose of these assemblies is to discuss important matters of state.

Though the emperor's voice always prevails.

The Carolingian empire is also marked by its commitment to learning.

Charlemagne sponsors intellectuals who come to his court from all over Europe.

Latin literacy is revived.

A palace school is set up at Arcan, and monastery schools are encouraged to train both monks and local elites.

But with so much power falling to one man, the empire is fragile.

After Charlemagne's death, his empire fragmented under his heirs, culminating in the Treaty of Verdun in 843.

We divide the empire into three kingdoms, broadly speaking, precursors what we might call France, Germany and Italy.

So what was done was not permanent, and yet it showed what was possible.

In England, just as Charlemagne's empire is fracturing, a similarly unifying figure emerges from among the patchworks of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.

In this case, thanks to the destruction wrought by the Vikings.

The wave of Viking invasion and settlement, which begins in the dying days of the 8th century, is often seen by historians as the last of the migrations that began as the Roman Empire was formed.

As with the earlier mass movements of people, the period from the late 8th to 11th centuries sees Scandinavians trading, raiding and setting up communities far outside their homelands.

From Russia and Ukraine in the east to Iceland and even briefly North America in the west.

In the 860s, Viking armies begin to launch large scale attacks on England.

One after another, the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms fall.

After 873, only the kingdom of Wessex in the southwest of the country remains standing.

It is led by King remembered to history as Alfred the Great.

The one surviving kingdom, Wessex the Wessexans, campaigned with a strategy of presenting themselves as the only viable Christian alternative to pagan North rule to other English-speaking people who are now under North-speaking rule in East Anglia, the Midlands and the North.

And out of that, eventually a unified kingdom of England would emerge.

Now Alfred begins the process of reconquering territory from the Viking invaders.

Thanks to a string of victories, one by his sons and grandsons, within a few decades of his death, the House of Wessex comes to dominate the entirety of England.

A united kingdom of England did emerge throughout the 10th century, under for example Atholstan and those who ruled after him until finally in 954, the last of the independent North-speaking rulers of the North, Eric Bloodaxe died in battle.

In that period onwards, we can talk about something which is a precociously united, although complicated kingdom which we now call England.

Like Charlemagne, Alfred and his heirs promote learning, especially in Old English, and encourage education for the sons of nobles.

They also build roads and fortified settlements, providing work and security for ordinary people.

But the early medieval kingdoms built by rulers like Charlemagne and Alfred are not destined to last.

The German lands once ruled by the Carolingians are taken over by the Autonian dynasty, who revive the imperial title and rule as Empress.

Italy increasingly becomes a series of independent city states, and England will be conquered by Scandinavians and then Normans in the centuries after Alfred's death.

But across the continent, the one international organization that had survived the fall of Rome, the papacy, is experiencing a period of deepening crisis.

The beginning of this tumultuous period is best exemplified by a shocking incident known as the Kadava Synod.

In 897, Pope Stephen has the body of his predecessor and rival, Formosus, exhumed and put on trial.

The corpse is dressed in papal regalia and propped up on a throne before being found guilty of perjury, coveting the papacy and illegally leaving his role as bishop to become Pope.

Formosus is stripped of his vestments and has the three fingers he used in blessings snapped off in punishment, before being thrown unceremoniously into the taiba.

In the following century, one in three popes is murdered. The eight years between 896 and 904 alone see the election of nine pontiffs in an era labelled by historians as the papal dark ages.

By the 10th century, there's plenty of evidence that developing papacy had fallen into some significant problems in terms of corruption and local Roman politics because the Pope was very much a ruler within Rome, so had both secular and spiritual roles.

Powerful noble families often dominated the election of popes and simony the buying and selling of church office was widespread.

The Pope's dual secular and religious power in Rome means that competing local families have an incentive to install candidates loyal to them.

They can also hand out lucrative church offices to their followers and allies.

One of the popes put into power by a prominent Roman family is John XII, a relative of the powerful counts of Tusculum.

He is elected in 955, while still a very young man.

During his time as Pope, he is accused of an extraordinary number of crimes and sins, ordaining a deacon in a horse's stable, receiving bribes to make certain men bishops, sleeping with his own father's concubine, blinding his spiritual advisor, hunting and going about clad in armor and a helmet.

Even accounting for the biases of contemporary and often deeply hostile chronicles, John is still seen today as one of the most depraved occupants of St. Peter's throne.

And it is not only his life that makes him infamous.

It is the 14th of May, 964.

In a noble house in Rome, in the blackest part of the night, a servant girl is torn roughly from her slumber by a loud crash ringing out in the darkness.

Blinking awake, she glances at the ceiling. It sounds as though it came from directly above her head, from her mistress's room.

She throws off her coverlet and leaps to her feet, hurriedly dragging her dress over her head.

Within seconds, she is out of the door and rushing down the corridor and up the stairs towards the raised voices coming from her employer's chamber.

She finds a group of servants hovering outside the door, beyond which come the sounds of a fiery argument.

The girl peaks through the crack between the door and the frame, nervously chewing on her lower lip.

The room is lit by the warm glow of the fireplace.

The lady of the house cowers on the edge of the bed, still wearing the thin nightgown, the girl had dressed her in before bed.

But her hair is in disarray, unraveled from the neat braids she usually sleeps in.

She sobs loudly as her raging husband paces back and forth in front of her.

The girl notes a broken ceramic dish lying in the corner of the room.

As she watches, he flings aside the heavy wooden chair that stands in front of the dressing table, causing it to crash to the floor.

It's only now that the girl notices the third figure in the room,

huddled under the bedclothes, trying and failing to pull the sheets over his naked chest, is a man.

Though the light from the fire casts distorting shadows around the room, his face is clearly illuminated.

He has visited her mistress before when her husband was absent.

It is none other than Pope John himself.

The master's rage is clearly increasing as he gesticulates wildly from his wife to the man in her bed, bellowing about betrayal.

The servants draw in a collective breath when the master picks up a fearsome metal poker from the fireplace.

Without a word, he lashes out, catching the naked Pope across the temple.

John slumps forward, a dark trickle of blood running down his face.

The lady of the house screams, reaching to try and pull the poker out of her husband's hands.

But he simply shakes her off and throws the weapon to the floor before storming from the room, slamming the door open violently and sending the assembled eavesdropper scattering.

Hurrying into the room, the girl finds her mistress wailing in her blood-stained marital bed, calling for help as she cradles the lifeless body of her lover.

John XII, who allegedly dies in his married mistress' bed, is perhaps the most notorious Pope of the papal dark ages.

But in the decades following his violent demise, the papal scene will begin to pull itself out of the gutter and towards the light once more.

Calls for reform began to increase over this increasingly influential institution, and we see aspects of this showing itself in a number of ways.

So a revival began with a monastic reform movement centered on Clooney Abbey, founded in Burgundy.

Clooneyac monks sought to purify the church by restoring clerical celibacy, rejecting simony and asserting papal independence from secular rulers.

In 1049, Leo IX becomes Pope.

Though, like several of his predecessors, he is nominated for the role by the German Emperor, Leo seeks to reassert the independence of the papacy from powerful secular rulers.

After his election, he arrives in Rome barefoot in the manner of a pilgrim and promises to leave if the Romans do not want him as Pope.

The clergy and people unanimously declare their support for this humble man.

The reform movement reaches its peak with one of Leo's successes, Gregory VII.

This culminated in many ways in the Gregorian reforms, often named after Pope Gregory VII, 1073 to 1085, who sought to free the church from lay control, leading to what we sometimes call the Investiture Controversy with the German Emperor Henry IV, over who had the right to appoint bishops.

As a reformer, Gregory's goals are threefold.

Firstly, he seeks to enforce total celibacy among all priests and prohibit them from marrying.

Secondly, he puts an end to simony, the buying and selling of church appointments.

And, most importantly, he removes secular influence over the church, in particular by preventing kings from choosing the bishops in their territories.

And Gregory starts the Pope's supreme spiritual authority over kings, dramatically increased the power and prestige of the papacy, while also helping define Western Christendom as a distinct spiritual and moral community under papal leadership.

As well as extricating itself from secular interference, the church gradually attempts to impose its moral authority over more areas of society.

By this period, the social structure of Western European life can simply be imagined as a pyramid.

At the top is the king or other ruler, beneath whom are the military land-owning elites.

And the whole system is supported on the backs of the peasant class, whose lives in many ways remain the same throughout the medieval period.

It is a system often referred to as feudalism, and it solidifies more fully in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Through the 10th and 11th century, there is a real cause for concern for many of these people who are living within these violent societies as a form of feudalism begins to emerge.

And the church tries to impose some form of moral standards on this, because there is still a great deal of decentralization, which bred violence and instability with knights training for war, frequently turning their aggression on local peasants or rival lords.

Seize the church in response, launching a number of significant movements, like the peace of God movement in the late 10th century and the truce of God movement in the early 11th century.

Which sought to limit private warfare and its impact on ordinary people by threatening spiritual sanctions on those who attack the poor, attack the women or clergy or fought on certain holy days.

Despite his powerful convictions, the path to reform is not smooth for Gregory or his successes.

The expansion of papal power is opposed by rulers, including the German emperor, at times violently.

But in the dying days of the 11th century, a stunning intervention by Gregory's successor Erbann II demonstrates the unquestionable centrality of the Pope to both the political and religious life of Europe.

In November 1095, at a church council in France, Pope Erbann II delivers a sermon that changes the course of history.

In 1095, Pope Erbann II called the first crusade at the council of Clemmel. He urged Western lights to cease fighting each other and instead fight a holy war to aid Eastern Christians in the Eastern Roman Empire in the Byzantine Empire to eventually it was hoped to recover Jerusalem from Muslim control.

The Eastern Roman Empire had been facing increasing problems in Anatolia and had lost huge amounts of territories to Islamic expansion and this core for the first crusade sought to roll back that.

Erbann's appeal to the lords and knights of France builds directly on wider church efforts to curb the violence and depredations of the nightly classes.

It unites Europe's warrior class under a common religious cause offering them forgiveness for their sins and eternal salvation in return for their participation in this holy war to reclaim the Christian sacred places in the East.

And it demonstrates the renewed power and influence of the papacy.

It's both a product of papal power at its zenith and a response to the instability of the feudal world as well to try to turn that round and outward against people who are perceived as being cultural opponents in this case a clash between Christianity and Islam.

The response to Erbann's call is immediate.

Leaders from across Europe including Robert the Duke of Normandy and eldest surviving son of William the Conqueror gather armies of loyal knights and begin the journey eastwards.

Ordinary citizens are also inspired by the promise of salvation.

What becomes known as the People's Crusade made up of thousands of peasants and low ranking knights also sets off for Jerusalem led primarily by charismatic preacher named Peter the Hermit.

As they travel overland through central Europe these zealous Christians whipped into frenzy by sermons about the evil of non-believers carry out brutal massacres of Jewish communities.

800 are killed in the German town of Vorms and over a thousand in neighboring monks.

The total death toll is impossible to quantify but maybe as high as 10,000.

They never make it to Jerusalem. In October 1096 the peasant army is largely destroyed by Turkish forces in Anatolia.

The crusading armies led by European lords however fair better.

Chronicle by the priest Fulka who travels with them they pass through Constantinople and proceed to capture huge swathes of territory in the Middle East.

Against all odds Jerusalem falls to the Christian forces in 1099.

The massacre of Muslims is so great that one contemporary account describes ankle deep rivers of blood flowing through Temple Mount.

In the wake of their victories four crusader states ruled by Western Christians are founded in the Middle East.

For the first time in its history Latin chrysanthem extends beyond the continental borders of Europe.

So the crusader movement brought together a whole range of different trends that had been flowing through Western Europe and diverted them or rather focused on perhaps what you say.

Focus them on this particular activity of the recovery and maintenance of Jerusalem and then the kingdoms of Uttrima, the kingdoms outside Western Europe, the kingdoms across the sea.

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At the beginning of the Middle Ages European political and economic life had been thrown into crisis by the fall of the Roman Empire.

By 1095 when Pope Urban preached what became the first crusade.

He could call on the lords and kings of Western Europe to form and finance armies and take them to fight in distant lands inspired by a shared vision of the Christian faith.

The crusade also reflected a growing sense of Christendom as a concept, a shared European identity defined by Latin Christianity and papal authority.

Western Europe once exclusively in with looking and fragmented now for time at least projected power abroad under a common religious ideal.

So by the end of the early medieval period we see many of the features that had characterized the beginning of it begin to roll back as a foundation is laid what would then occur in the high middle ages.

On the cusp of the 12th century countries across Europe had stronger rulers and developing governmental institutions.

Their burgeoning legal systems and societies were largely based on an evolving feudal order of nightly landholders and peasants who worked that land.

These era defining developments were all thanks to the early Middle Ages and the people and events that had shaped them.

From the ashes of Rome a new world had risen.

It remained to be seen what the later Middle Ages would bring.

Join us for part two to discover how the renewed papacy would attempt to increase the reach of the church into more areas of people's lives.

What impact the feudal class system would have on the peasantry and whether they would push back against their subjugation.

And what would come of the connections Europe was forging with the rest of the world for good and for ill.

Next time on short history of we'll bring you the final part of a special two part short history of the European Middle Ages.

I would say that in several significant ways the Middle Ages are the foundation for what we now are,

the concept of Europeanness of Christendom of something that is bigger than the nation state, the concept of the emerging nation states themselves,

the idea of the challenge of how communities should live together and work together, both religiously and ethnically,

and our contested and complex global world also has its roots in the voyages of discovery with their positive and terribly negative effects too,

which are also products of the late medieval period.

The Middle Ages are still very much with us, whether we like it or not.

That's next time.

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