Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

15

The Idea of Europe

In the tenth century AD, the famous Arab geographer Masʿudi had this to say about the peoples of ‘Urufa’, as Muslims then called Europe: ‘The warm humour is lacking among them; their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy . . . The farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are.’¹ His slightly later colleague, Saʿid ibn Ahmad, qadi of the Muslim city of Toledo in Spain, wasn’t much more impressed either. According to Bernard Lewis, the great Islamic scholar, in 1068, two years after the battle of Hastings, Ibn Ahmad wrote a book in Arabic on the categories of nations. He found that there had been eight nations that had contributed most to knowledge – including the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians and, of course, the Arabs. On the other hand he found that the north Europeans ‘have not cultivated the sciences [and] are more like beasts than like men . . . they lack keenness of understanding and clarity of intelligence . . .’² Even as late as the thirteenth century, the Oxford scholar Roger Bacon had his eyes fixed firmly on the East. He petitioned the pope, Clement IV, to mount a grand project – an encyclopaedia of new knowledge in the natural sciences. He had in mind the great number of translations then being made from the Arabic, and he recommended the study of Oriental languages, and of Islam.

By the time of his near-namesake, Francis Bacon, however, the world was very different. A massive change had come over Europe, some time between AD 1000 and AD 1500, and the continent had drawn decisively ahead. Francis Bacon believed there was little to be learned from outside Europe.

What had happened? Why had ‘the West’ drawn ahead? What features of this ‘frigid’, ‘gross’ and ‘apathetic’ people, as Ibn Ahmad also called Europeans, were turned round, to create the conditions we see about us today, where the West undisputably leads the world in terms of wealth, technological advance, and religious and political freedoms? In the realm of ideas – the central concern of this book – the change that came over Europe, sometime between the year AD 1000 and, say, 1500, when the discovery of America had been achieved (by west Europeans), is probably the most fascinating question of all, eclipsing all others in importance and giving shape to the latest epoch of history. It is all the more important, in view of the fact that, even today, there is no real answer. There are plenty of theories, but they are all more or less conjectural.

It is in fact surprising that more inquiry has not been devoted to this subject, but from such scholarship as exists, the answers divide into six. They all agree that there was a fundamental change in Europe between 1000 and 1500, and that that is when the ‘West’ first began. But this is as far as the agreement goes. The case for any one decisive factor has yet to be proved.

This chapter, which is in some ways a hinge of the book, will be somewhat different from the others. Whereas the other chapters describe ideas as they occurred, and attempt to assess their importance and place in chronology, this chapter stands back and looks at the possible context of ideas, trying to arrive at some sort of answer to the question as to why, for the remainder of history, the great preponderance of influential ideas arose in Europe, and western Europe at that. In doing so, we shall anticipate some of the developments covered in more detail in later chapters but the immediate aim here is to show why Europe became the home for so many of the ideas that have dominated our lives for the past thousand years.

An attempt at a geographical answer was made by the French historian, of the Annales school, Fernand Braudel. In two books, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, and Civilisation and Capitalism, in particular volume 1, The Structures of Everyday Life, he sought to explain why Europe took on the character that it did. He thought, for example, that there was a broad relationship between foodstuffs and the civilisations of the world. Rice, he found, ‘brought high populations and [therefore] strict social discipline to the regions where they prospered’, in Asia. On the other hand, ‘maize is a crop that demands little effort’, which allowed the native Americans much free time to construct the huge pyramids for which these civilisations have become famous. He thought that a crucial factor in Europe’s success was its relatively small size, the efficiency of grain, and the climate. The fact that so much of life was indoors, he said, fostered the development of furniture, which brought about the development of tools; the poorer weather meant that fewer days could be worked, but mouths still had to be fed, making labour in Europe relatively expensive. This led to a greater need for labour-saving devices, which, on top of the development of tools, contributed first to the scientific revolution, and later to the industrial revolution.³

In his book on the Mediterranean, Braudel tried to be a little more specific, and attempted to identify those features of the sea which contributed to Europe’s rise. He noted, for instance, that the sea is old geologically, and deep, with little in the way of coastal shelves. This ‘tiredness’ of the water and the lack of shallow seas made the Mediterranean relatively poor in fish, prompting long-distance trade. The proximity of mountains to the coastlines, in particular the Alps, meant that people from the upland villages migrated to the coasts, bringing a different technology with them. Migration was a major factor in the spread of ideas and this was facilitated in the Mediterranean (a) because the sea was east–west, in line with the prevailing winds, making sailing much easier; (b) because the islands and general configuration of the Mediterranean divided it up into much smaller areas – the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Adriatic, the Aegean, the Black Sea, the Ionian Sea, the gulf of Sirte – which made navigation and sailing even easier; (c) because the sea was ringed with a number of peninsulas (the Iberian, the Italian, the Greek), the geographical coherence of which promoted strong feelings of nationalism, which in turn fuelled international competition; (d) because the central Alps provided the source for three rivers – the Rhine, the Danube and the Rhône/Saône – which supported transport into the very heart of Europe. The relatively small size of the continent, plus the fact that the three great rivers penetrated so deeply, encouraged the development of roads, to fill in the final phase of the transportation network. The roads, like the navigable seas and the great rivers, meant that the heartland of Europe was opened up as no heartland had been opened up before, with the result that immigrants – with their fresh ways and different ideas – were a more common sight in Europe than elsewhere.

This is fine as far as it goes (though Spain, for one, was less coherent than Braudel implies, with a very mixed population, of Arabs, Berbers, Mozarabs and Jews). However, all that has really been ‘explained’ is why, at some stage, Europe should have taken off. Braudel’s central argument was that geography governed raw materials, the creation of cities (the markets) and trade routes. There was, in other words, a certain geographical inevitability about the way civilisations developed, which made Europe, rather than Asia, Africa or America, the cradle of both science and capitalism. But something more is needed. We still have to explain why the acceleration happened when it did. By no means everyone accepts that the rise of Europe was inevitable.

Not everyone accepts that change took place between 1050 and 1200 either. In his book Origins of the European Economy: Communication and Commerce, AD 300–900 (2001), Michael McCormick, of Harvard, argues that Europe was on the move from as early as the late eighth century, and that change was fully underway by 1100, which meant that the advance of the continent was three times as long as is usually thought, ‘and three times as difficult’.⁴ He points out that the real low point, in western Europe at least, was 700, when there was a drastic reduction in all commercial activity, when the international trade in spices collapsed, when papyrus stopped reaching Frankland, when fewer palimpsests were produced.⁵ He records that when the Venerable Bede died in 735 he gave away his pepper and incense on his deathbed. Four generations later, however, the pepper trade had increased to the point where it was no longer a once-in-a-lifetime gift. In the Carolingian empire, coinage was far more widespread and sophisticated than has hitherto been thought, he says, and he discovered fifty-four Arab coins at forty-two locations in the empire between the seventh and tenth centuries.⁶ He argues there was a rise in ship-owning in the mid-ninth century, that he discovered accounts of nearly seven hundred people making long, arduous journeys at this time. There was enough traffic on the Danube in the ninth century for it to boast both pirates and toll collectors.⁷ By the early tenth century, there were thriving markets in the Rhineland and in Paris and at the latter, at St Denis, the merchants came from Spain and Provence and dealt in goods from as far away as Iraq.⁸ He points out that a crucial event was the conversion to Christianity of the Hungarian kingdom, around AD 1000, which reopened the overland route to Constantinople.⁹

McCormick’s argument is persuasive (his book is 1,100 pages long and packed with detail). However, he seems to have identified a period of gestation, in which Europe was, as it were, getting itself together. Arabs who, like Masʿudi, travelled in Urufa (as shown by their coins) didn’t appear to note yet that the continent was changing. It undoubtedly was, but the great leap forward had yet to occur.

The second type of explanation for the acceleration after the tenth century is economic, and falls into two parts. The economic/cultural situation in the ‘Old World’ has been described in detail by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, in Before European Hegemony.¹⁰ She writes: ‘The second half of the thirteenth century was a remarkable moment in world history. Never before had so many regions of the Old World come into contact with one another – albeit still only superficially. The apogee of this cycle came between the end of the thirteenth century and the first decades of the fourteenth, by which time even Europe and China had established direct, if limited, contact with each other.’¹¹ This economic world, she says, is not only fascinating in itself but, because it contained no single overriding power, it provided an important contrast to the world system that grew out of it: the one Europe reshaped to its own ends and dominated for so long.

Her argument is that in terms of time, the century between AD 1250 and 1350 constituted a fulcrum or critical ‘turning-point’ in world history, and in terms of space, the Middle East heartland region, linking the eastern Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean, constituted a geographical fulcrum on which West and East were then roughly balanced. The thesis of her book was, contra Braudel, that there was no inherent historical necessity that shifted the system to favour the West rather than the East. She noted that there were eight basic trading systems but that these collapsed into three main ones – the European, the Middle Eastern and the Asian. All of them had several features in common: the invention of money and credit; mechanisms for pooling capital and distributing risk; merchants with independent wealth. Therefore, while conceding that between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries Europe did overtake the Orient, she concludes that there was nothing ‘special’ about Europe; instead the Orient was ‘temporarily in disarray’. She says there was progressive fragmentation of the overland trade routes that had been unified by Genghis Khan, that the depredations of Tamerlane around 1400 had a much worse effect on Asia than the Crusades ever did, and that the Black Death, ‘which spread from China all the way to Europe in the mid-century between 1348 and 1351, decimated most of the cities along the great sea route of world trade, disturbing customary behaviour, changing the terms of exchange because of differential demographic losses, and creating a fluidity in world conditions that facilitated radical transformations, benefiting some and harming others.’¹² This could be seen in Europe, she says, where England, previously part of the periphery, began to play a more central role after the plague, since her ‘die-off’ rate was lower than on the continent. And it was the galleys of the Italian city-states that, by the end of the thirteenth century, had opened the north Atlantic to traffic, delivering the coup de grâce to a world system that had existed for centuries. This led to the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of the Atlantic route to the Indies, much of which had been known to Arab and Chinese traders for centuries. The Arab and Indian vessels, however, proved no match for the Portuguese men-of-war that appeared in their waters in the early 1500s.

Her point is that the world system in place by the thirteenth century was relatively stable, and truly cosmopolitan: different religious systems co-existed – Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism; and business practices were equally sophisticated the world over – ‘The organisation of textile production in Kanchipuram was not unlike that in Flanders, the state built boats for trade in both Venice and China, trading centres – like Cairo, Zaytun and Troyes – grew in much the same way, and at a similar rate in the centuries up to the thirteenth.’¹³ For Janet Abu-Lughod, what happened in the thirteenth century was that a world trading system that had been stable for some time became unravelled, leaving the Western systems, centring on Bruges, Troyes, Genoa and Venice, relatively unscathed, while destroying those centres further east, at Cairo, Baghdad, Basra, Samarkand, Hormuz, Cambay, Calicut, Malacca and mainland China.¹⁴ Abu-Lughod argues that, in general, historians have failed to ‘begin the story early enough’ and have therefore given a truncated and distorted causal explanation for the rise of the West. In fact, she says, the time between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries marked the transition, and geopolitical factors within the rest of the world system created an opportunity without which Europe’s rise would have been unlikely.

For Abu-Lughod, it was thus important that ‘the rise of the west’ was preceded by ‘the fall of the east’. When the Mongols, severely weakened by the Black Death, ‘lost’ China in 1386, the world now forfeited the key link that had connected the overland route, terminating at Peking (Beijing), with the sea routes through the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, terminating at the ports of south-east China. The repercussions of this disjunction at the eastern end of the world system were felt throughout the trading world.¹⁵ In particular, it favoured Genoa at the expense of Venice. Venice was, with Genoa, the gateway of this world system into Europe. But Genoa also had a more ready alternative – the Atlantic. And as the Atlantic opened up, ships plying that route were able to take advantage of the disarray in the East. This geographic reorientation displaced the centre of world gravity in a decisive manner.

The theory of Joseph Needham, the Cambridge-based historian of early Chinese science, is quite different. He begins by reminding us of the incredible number of inventions which came out of the East before AD 1000, many of which were described in the preceding chapter. Needham was of the opinion that, in the earlier centuries, Europe had been a much more unstable continent than China, socially, politically and culturally speaking, and that this had kept the region backward. It was poor in precious metals and its layout – a series of peninsulas and archipelagos (Iberia, Italy, Greece) – had made it more nationalistic, because there were many natural boundaries. In addition to this, he says, the alphabet system of writing, precisely because it was so flexible, exacerbated the problem by making it relatively easy for different tribes and groups to evolve mutually incomprehensible languages (in contrast to China which had a unifying script). All this kept Europe embroiled in repeated conflict, and therefore backward.¹⁶

But then came two inventions, both out of China. First was the stirrup, which, by adding immeasurably to the power of the knightly class, helped create feudalism. And second gunpowder, which helped destroy feudalism, at least in Europe, because it reduced the power of the knightly class. As feudalism decayed in the West, according to Needham, it gave rise to a mercantile class, which was closely associated with the rise of science. In China, however, this didn’t happen. As a far more stable continent, with a more entrenched and unified imperial history, and despite the many inventions to its credit, feudalism there was replaced with ‘bureaucratic feudalism’, or a ‘man-darinate’, a scholar-elite class highly suitable to a large country, heavily centralised under an emperor, where mandarin bureaucrats could administer steady progress. The unfortunate side to all this, however, was that under such a system the mercantile class was down-graded – the merchants were the lowest of the four ranks of society, after scholars, farmers and artisans. As well as stifling creativity, this arrangement meant that the city-state never developed in China: cities there were dominated instead by the representative of the emperor, which meant there were no mayors, no guilds, no councillors. Instead of being places of upward mobility, Chinese cities were ruled from the top down. As a result, and despite that long list of inventions, China never developed modern business methods or modern science. For Needham this was, in the end, fatal.¹⁷

Whether or not the city-state ever developed in China, the rest of Needham’s argument has been both discredited and supported by more recent scholarship (entire conferences have been held on the ‘Needham factor’). There are first the doubts over the utility of feudalism as a concept, not simply because the term was a later invention but because the idea of a nexus of land/law/fealty does not really match the medieval experience. The power of the lord over the peasants did not come from horses, and stirrups, but from the wider socio-political system that divided the world into three orders (those who pray, those who fight, those who work) and supported a legal system that upheld the power of the few over the many. Moreover, this system only came into existence about the year 1000 and so it makes no sense to talk of ‘feudalism’ in the early Middle Ages. And what finally made the lords’ power over the peasants crumble had little to do with the fate of the knights – it was much more to do with the demographic crisis of the fourteenth century, when widespread plague and famine reduced the number of peasants, stimulating more demand for their labour, giving them more in wages and a greater freedom of movement, thus ending ‘serfdom’.

At the same time, other historians have underlined the fact that there was indeed a difference between Western and Eastern scholarship. The ideas and research of Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, about the differences in structure between early Chinese and early Greek science, were covered in an earlier chapter (page 173). More recently, Toby Huff has claimed that an important difference between Occident and Orient in this context is that in China and the Islamic world a student’s competence was judged by the state or the master. Neither of these systems fostered independent thought. Huff calculated that, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Europe, China and the Islamic world had roughly the same number of scholars, but that in the East they never achieved a corporate identity; therefore in the Islamic world and in China scholarship never acquired the independent power that it was to achieve in Europe.¹⁸ One reason it did develop in the West, he says, is because of the rediscovery of Justinian’s code, the Corpus iuris civilis (see here above), towards the end of the eleventh century. This reintroduced the concept of a legal system, a new science of law, which led to the idea of shared knowledge, which could be discussed and argued over. The idea of corporate knowledge, Huff says, lay behind the idea of the universities as conceived in Europe but not in China or the Islamic world.¹⁹ This meant there was no organised scepticism in the East. He shows for example that Arab astronomers knew what Kepler knew but because they had no concept of the Corpus astronomicum, a general body of astronomical work, which belonged to all and could be disputed, they never developed a Copernican view of a heliocentric universe.²⁰

A somewhat different economic interpretation returns to Braudel’s point that Europe is relatively small. In The Rise of the Western World, Douglas North and Robert Thomas argue that in the High Middle Ages, the years between 1000 and 1300, Europe was transformed ‘from a vast wilderness into a well-colonised region’. There was a marked population increase which meant that, in effect, Europe was the first region in the history of the world to be ‘full’ with people. This was aided by the layout of its main rivers – the Danube, Rhine and the Rhône/Saône – which led deep into the heartland. Together, these factors had a number of consequences, not the least of which was to begin a change from the old feudal structure, and to give more and more people an interest in property, in owning land.²¹ It was this wider ownership of land which would, before too long, lead to a rise in specialisation (at first in the growing of crops, then in the services to support such specialisation), then to the rise in trade, the spread of markets, and the development of a money economy, so necessary if surplus wealth were to be created, which were the circumstances from which true capitalism developed.²²

As part of the evidence in support of their argument, North and Thomas note that a new system of agriculture was introduced in these years in Europe, namely the change from the two-field system to the three-field system. Under the two-field system all arable land had been ploughed but only half of it planted to crops, the other half being left fallow to recuperate its fertility. The three-field system now divided the arable land of the manor into three parts. Typically, one field was ploughed and planted to wheat during the autumn, the second ploughed and planted in the spring to oats, barley, or legumes, such as peas or beans, and the remainder was ploughed and left fallow. The next year the crops were rotated. This led to a massive 50 per cent rise in yield, at the same time as spreading agricultural labour throughout the year, and reducing the chance of famine through crop failure.²³ This period also saw a change from oxen to horse as the beasts of harness, the latter being 50 to 90 per cent more biologically efficient.

In turn, the eleventh century saw a rise in the use of watermills. This idea had begun outside Europe but its introduction spread rapidly in the new climate, despite the high capital expenditure that was required: in 1086, the Domesday Book recorded 5,624 mills for 3,000 communities in England. There is no reason to believe that England was technologically more advanced than the rest of Europe, though watermills naturally tended to multiply there because there were a lot of rivers in a small area. Hence wool and cloth manufacture became a major feature of England and Flanders.

These twin developments, of significantly more people having a stake in the land, and the idea that there was no more to go around, had two psychological effects, say North and Thomas. It helped make people more individualistic: because he or she now had a stake in something, a person’s identity was no longer defined only by his or her membership of a congregation, or as the serf of a lord of the manor; and it introduced (or reintroduced) the idea of efficiency, because resources could now be seen to be limited. Allied to the increased specialisation that was developing, and the burgeoning markets (offering tempting goods from far away), this was a profound social-psychological revolution which, in time, would lead to the Renaissance.

This too is an idea which has suffered from recent scholarship, which emphasises that there was always a large proportion – say, 40–50 per cent – of the population which was not serfs (in the sense of being ‘unfree’) and who already owned their own land. Carlo M. Cipolla, the Italian economic historian, further argues that there was no shortage of land in Europe, quite the opposite in fact: there was plenty. He notes that Europe may have differed from the East in having a larger proportion of the population who were unmarried, which helped avoid the breakup of estates and reduced the number of large families, both factors which helped ameliorate poverty. Cipolla also supports the arguments of Michael McCormick in showing a steady growth of technology: the watermill from the sixth century; the plough from the seventh; the crop rotation system from the eighth; the horseshoe and the neck harness from the ninth. In the same way the use of the mill proliferated to other uses, from beer-making in 861, through tanning in 1138, paper-milling in 1276, to the blast furnace in 1384.²⁴ All this argues for a steady take-off of Europe rather than anything sudden. Cipolla agrees with North and Thomas that there were new business techniques from the eleventh century, especially a change from the hoarding of savings (deflationary) to the investment of ‘capital’, in particular the contratto di commenda.²⁵ This was in effect a contract for one party to lend capital to another party, to finance foreign trade, the capital to be repaid, with interest, out of profits. Cipolla also notes that there was a growing demand for money (coins) from the tenth century on, and provides maps of the many mints sanctioned at that time. He notes that the terms ‘banks’ and ‘bankers’ make their first appearance in the twelfth century. Gold coinages appeared in Venice, Genoa and Florence between 1252 and 1284 and quickly became standards of value.²⁶ Whether these are causes or symptoms of change isn’t clear.

An entirely different explanation for the rise of Europe, and the one with the most scholarship attached to it, relates to the Christian church and its role in the unification of the continent. At the time, the name Europe (Latin: Europa) was rarely used. It was a classical term, going back to Herodotus, and though Charlemagne called himself pater Europea, the father of Europe, by the eleventh century the more normal term was Christianitas, Christendom.

The early aim of the Church had been territorial expansion, the second had been monastic reform, with the monasteries – dispersed throughout Christendom – leading the battle for the minds of converts. Out of all this arose a third chapter in church history, to replace dispersed localism with central – papal – control. Around AD 1000–1100 Christendom entered a new phase, partly out of the failure of the millennium to provide anything spectacular in a religious, apocalyptic sense, partly as a result of the Crusades which, in identifying a common enemy in Islam, also acted as a unifying force among Christians. All this climaxed in the thirteenth century with popes vying with kings and emperors for supreme control, even to the point of monarchs being excommunicated (covered in the next chapter).²⁷

Around and underneath this, however, there developed a certain cast of mind, which is the main interest here. The problems of the vast, dispersed organisation of the continent-wide church, the relations between church and monarch, between church and state – all these raised many doctrinal and legal matters. Because these matters were discussed and debated in the monasteries and the schools that were set up at this time, they became known as scholastic. The British historian R. W. S. Southern was most intimately involved in showing how scholars, as a ‘supranational entity’, aided the unification of Europe. These pages are based largely on his work.

The role of the scholars was immediately obvious in the language they used – Latin. All over Europe, in monasteries and schools, in the developing universities and in bishops’ palaces, the papal legates and nuncios exchanged views and messages in the same language. Peter Abelard’s enemies perceived his books to be dangerous not only for their content but for their reach: ‘They pass from one race to another, and from one kingdom to another . . . they cross the oceans, they leap over the Alps . . . they spread through the provinces and the kingdoms.’²⁸ Because of this, papal careers were notoriously international. Frenchmen might be seconded to Spain, Germans to Venice, Italians to Greece and England and then to Croatia and Hungary, as Giles of Verraccio was between 1218 and 1230. In this way there was in Europe between AD 1000 and 1300 a unification of thought, of the rules of debate, in the ways of discussing things and in agreeing what was important, that did not occur anywhere else. And it was not only in strictly theological matters, but was felt in architecture, in law, and in the liberal arts. Theology, law and the liberal arts were, according to Southern, the three props on which European order and civilisation were built during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – ‘That is to say, during the period of Europe’s most rapid expansion in population, wealth and world-wide aspirations before the nineteenth century.’ These three areas of thought each owed its coherence and its power to influence the world to the development of schools of European-wide importance. Both masters and pupils travelled from all regions of Europe to these schools and took home the sciences which they had learned.²⁹

Even by the year 1250 there were still very few universities in Europe: Bologna in northern Italy, Montpellier in southern France, Paris in northern France, Oxford in England. But each of them was truly international. Later on, universities became very nationalistic but not in the beginning, and not only because Latin was the universal language.³⁰ The main groundwork of scholastic thought was laid down in the first half of the twelfth century, which brought about a new outlook on the world of nature and of organised Christian society.³¹ The aim may read oddly now but it was in fact a coherent view of the Creation, of the Fall and Redemption of mankind, and of the sacraments, ‘whereby the redeeming process could be extended to individuals’. Coherence was achieved because the men who created the system all used the same, ever-growing body of textbooks, and they were all familiar with similar routines of lectures, debates and academic exercises and shared a belief that Christianity was capable of a systematic and authoritative presentation.³²

What had been inherited from the ancient world was very largely unco-ordinated. The scholars’ aim now was to restore ‘to fallen mankind, so far as was possible, that perfect system of knowledge which had been in the possession or within the reach of mankind at the moment of Creation’.³³ This body of knowledge, so it was believed, had been lost completely in the centuries between the Fall and the Flood, but had then been slowly restored by divinely inspired Old Testament prophets, as well as by the efforts of a range of philosophers in the Graeco-Roman world. These achievements had, however, been corrupted once again and partly lost during the barbarian invasions which had overwhelmed Christendom in the early Middle Ages. Nevertheless, many of the important texts of ancient learning had survived, in particular Aristotle, albeit in Arabic translations and glosses, as was covered in Chapters 11 and 12. It was understood as the task of the new scholars, from about 1050 onwards, to continue the responsibility of restoring the knowledge that had been lost at the Fall.³⁴ This responsibility included clarification, correction of errors caused either by corruption of the texts or by the partial understanding of their ancient authors, and finally systematisation, to make the new knowledge generally accessible throughout western Christendom. ‘The complete knowledge of the first parents before the Fall had gone beyond recall, and there was a profound sense in which to seek to know everything was to fall into the sin of curiosity. But what could legitimately be sought was that degree of knowledge necessary for providing a just view of God, of nature and of human conduct, which would promote the cause of mankind’s salvation . . . The whole programme, thus conceived, looked forward to a time not far distant, when a two-pronged programme of world-wide return to the essential endowment of the first parents of the human race would have been achieved so far as was possible for fallen mankind.’³⁵ In the theological context of the times, there was a very practical aim to the restoration of knowledge.³⁶ ‘The world would probably come to an end within decades or at most a few centuries, almost certainly before another millennium had passed. At all events, it would end when the perfect, but to us unknown, number of the redeemed had been accomplished, and the aim of the schools, as of the Church in general, was to prepare the world for this event, and to hasten it.’³⁷ Southern also reminds us that the scholastic synthesis did not appear quite as daunting as it would be today, since the number of basic texts across the whole range of subjects was very small by modern standards – no more than three or four hundred volumes of moderate size would have contained all the basic material.³⁸

This hope of a final synthesis did not outlast the fourteenth century but by then the early universities had come into existence and their international character produced enough masters and pupils, sharing the same approach and values, to create across Europe an entire class of learned men (mainly men) who had been trained in the same texts and commentaries, and regarded the same questions as important. As noted, all shared the view that theology, the liberal arts, and the law were what counted.³⁹ In addition, the theory of knowledge on which the scholastic system was based – that all knowledge was a reconquest of what had been freely available to mankind in its prelapsarian state – brought with it the idea that a body of authoritative doctrine would slowly emerge as the years passed.⁴⁰ By 1175 scholars saw themselves not only as transmitters of ancient learning, but as active participants in the development of an integrated, many-sided body of knowledge ‘rapidly reaching its peak’.⁴¹ In stabilising and promoting the study of theology and law, the scholars helped create a fairly orderly and forward-looking society. Europe as a whole was the beneficiary of this process.

In addition to the theologians, three scholars in particular may be singled out for their contributions to the idea of the West. The first is the Bolognese monk, Gratian. Before him, canon law did not exist as a systematic body of study. Until then, most decisions had been taken locally by bishops and it is fair to say that, by 1100, the whole system was in disarray. So, when his treatise A Concordance of Discordant Canons, aka the Decretum, appeared in 1140 it was rapturously received right across the continent.⁴² Gratian attempted to rethink, reorganise and rationalise ecclesiastical law (which was of course the main form of law in a totally religious society) in such a way that blind custom was done away with. He did not always succeed but, after him, the law was much more subject to the test of reasonableness, so that it could be accepted by popes and local bishops and priests with more or less equal enthusiasm. It was liberating as well as unifying.

The second scholar was Robert Grosseteste (c. 1186–1253). A graduate of Oxford, who studied theology at Paris, Grosseteste is best known for being chancellor of Oxford. He was a translator of the classics, a biblical scholar and bishop of Lincoln. But he was also, and possibly most importantly, the inventor of the experimental method.⁸ Roger Bacon was the first to point out, in his Compendium Studii, that ‘before other men, Grosseteste wrote about science’.⁴³ In the half-century before Grosseteste was born, Western scholars had been translating Greek and Islamic scientific writings out of Arabic into Latin, and this in itself was a factor in the creation of the West. Grosseteste took part in the translation movement but it was he who saw that if progress beyond the classics were to be made, then the problem of scientific method had to be sorted out. There had been considerable technical advance in the West since the ninth century, when the new wheeled plough and new methods of harnessing draught animals were brought in. In addition, watermills and windmills had transformed corn-grinding and metallurgy, the compass and the astrolabe had been improved, and spectacles and the clock were invented. But, as with the law before Gratian, these were ad hoc, rule-of-thumb advances, and there was at the time no notion of how to generalise arguments, so as to establish proof, generate explanations, and provide more exact measurements and answers.

Grosseteste’s main insight, building on Aristotle, was to develop his model of ‘induction’ and systematic testing. He said that the first stage of an inquiry was to break up the phenomenon under investigation into the principles or elements of which it was comprised – this was induction. Having isolated these principles or elements, one should recombine them systematically to build up knowledge of the phenomenon. He started with the rainbow, observing how it occurred in the sky, in the spray made by mill-wheels, by the oars of a rowing boat, by squirting water from the mouth, and by sunlight passing through a glass flask full of water. This eventually led to Theodoric of Freiburg’s idea of the refraction of light through individual spherical drops of water and in this sense is the first example of the experimental approach.⁴⁴

Grosseteste’s innovation, which initiated an interest in exactness, led in turn to a concern with measurement and this too was a profound psychological and social change, which occurred first in the West in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At the same time, the clock was invented (the 1270s). Until then, time had been seen as a flow (helped by the clepsydra, or water clock) and clocks were adjusted for the seasons, so that the twelve hours of daylight in summer were longer than the twelve hours of daylight in winter. Now clock towers began to appear in towns and villages, and workers in the field timed their hours according to the bell that sounded the hour. In this, exactitude and efficiency were combined. At the same time that Europeans’ attitudes to time changed, so did their understanding of space, where exactitude also became increasingly possible. These combined changes are discussed in Chapter 17.

The third scholar who helped to lay the fundamentals of the West was Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274). His attempt to reconcile Christianity with Aristotle, and the classics in general, was a hugely creative and mould-breaking achievement, which is considered in more detail also in Chapter 17. Before Aquinas the world had neither meaning nor pattern except in relation to God. What we call the Thomistic revolution created, at least in principle, the possibility of a natural and secular outlook, by distinguishing, as Colin Morris puts it, ‘between the realms of nature and supernature, of nature and grace, of reason and revelation. From [Aquinas] on, objective study of the natural order was possible, as was the idea of the secular state.’ Aquinas insisted there is a natural, underlying order of things, which appeared to deny God’s power of miraculous intervention. There is, he said, a ‘natural law’, which reason can grasp.⁴⁵ Reason was at last re-emerging from the shadow of revelation.

Aquinas was a hinge figure too, in one way the culmination of a particular strand of thinking, and in other ways the start of a totally new way of looking at the world. The strand of thought of which Thomas was the culmination was first made explicit by Hugh of Saint-Victor (St Victor being an Augustinian abbey in twelfth-century Paris), who proposed that secular learning – focused on the sheer reality of the natural world – was a necessary grounding for religious contemplation. ‘Learn everything,’ was his motto, ‘later you will see that nothing is superfluous.’ From this attitude grew the medieval practice of writing summae, encyclopaedic treatises aimed at synthesising all knowledge. Hugh wrote the first summa and Aquinas, arguably, the best. This attitude was also helped by Abelard’s Sic et Non (Yes and No), a compilation of apparently contradictory statements by religious authorities. Though ostensibly negative in approach, its positive side was to draw attention to the fact that logical argument, by questioning contradictions and exploring syllogisms, can investigate beneath the apparent surface of knowledge.⁴⁶

The recovery of the classics could not help but be influential, even though that recovery was made within a context where belief in God was a given. Anselm summed up this changing attitude to the growing power of reason when he said, ‘It seems to me a case of negligence if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe.’ At much the same time, a long tussle between religious and political authorities climaxed when the University of Paris won a written charter from the pope in 1215, guaranteeing its independence in the pursuit of knowledge. It was a scholar at Paris, and Aquinas’ teacher, Albertus Magnus, who was the first medieval thinker to make a clear distinction between knowledge derived from theology and knowledge derived from science. In asserting the value of secular learning, and the need for empirical observation, Albertus set loose a change in the world, the power of which he couldn’t have begun to imagine.

Aquinas accepted the distinction as set out by his teacher, and also agreed with Albertus in believing that Aristotle’s philosophy was the greatest achievement of human reason to be produced without the benefit of Christian inspiration. To this he added his own idea that nature, as described in part by Aristotle, was valuable because God gave it existence. This meant that philosophy was no longer a mere handmaiden of theology. ‘Human intelligence and freedom received their reality from God himself.’⁴⁷ Man could only realise himself by being free to pursue knowledge wherever it led. He should not fear or condemn the search, as so many seemed to, said Aquinas, because God had designed everything, and secular knowledge could only reveal this design more closely – and therefore help man to know God more intimately. ‘By expanding his own knowledge, man was becoming more like God.’⁴⁸

Thomas’ strong belief that faith and reason could be united at first drew condemnation from the church, and then support. But, like Albertus before him, he too had unleashed more than he knew. Other contemporaries at Paris, Siger of Brabant, for example, argued that philosophy and faith could not be reconciled, that in fact they contradicted one another and so, if this were the case, ‘the realm of reason and science must be in some sense outside the sphere of theology’.⁴⁹ For a time, this was ‘resolved’ (if that is the word) by positing a ‘double truth’ universe. The Church refused to accept this situation and communication was severed between traditional theologians and the scientific thinkers. But it was too late. Even now, the independent-minded scientist/philosophers still had faith, but they were more than ever concerned to follow reason wherever it led.

Aquinas had partially succeeded in amalgamating Aristotle and Christianity. This made Aristotle accepted where he hadn’t been accepted before. In Christianising Aristotle, Aquinas eventually succeeded in Aristotelianising Christianity. A secular way of thinking was introduced into the world, which would eventually change man’s understanding for all time. It is essentially the dominant theme underlying the next section of this book.

The scientific method, exact measurement, an efficient, intellectually unified, secular world: any definition of Western modernity would certainly include these as fundamental elements. Less tangible than all that, but more intriguing, is the notion that a basic psychological change, a certain form of individuality, was born in Europe some time between 1050 and 1200, and that this accounts most of all for the Western mentality and its surge ahead in all the matters reported above. If individuality is really what counts, then all the other advances – in science, in scholarship, in exactness, in the secular life, etc. – may be symptoms rather than causes.

There are three main candidates for this change in sensibility. One was the growth of cities. These promoted the development of different professions outside the church – lawyers, clerks, teachers. Suddenly there was more choice than ever before. A second candidate was the changing ownership of land, which encouraged a trend to primogeniture, brought in to slow the division of estates, which made them vulnerable to attack. One important side-effect of this was that younger sons, denied their birthright, were forced elsewhere in search of their fortunes. As often as not, this involved attaching themselves to other courts, as fighters. Such a society soon evolved a taste for heroic literature (younger sons seeking their fortunes), and it was amid this set of circumstances that the ideas of chivalry and courtly love emerged (though there were other reasons). All at once the intimate emotions moved centre-stage. For example, the focus on love stimulated an interest in personal appearance, meaning that the twelfth century was a time of daring innovation in dress, another way in which a growing individuality was expressed.⁵⁰

A third stimulant to change was the renaissance of the twelfth century, the rediscovery of classical antiquity, which among other things forced people to acknowledge the shortcomings of the immediate past, to admit that the classical authors had shown that men may vary in their motives, in the way they solve common problems, and even that a full life was possible outside the Church.⁵¹ No less important, the new scholasticism showed that the great authorities of the past sometimes disagreed and disagreed profoundly. People were thus forced to rely on themselves, to find new solutions – their own – and to fashion a new doctrine. And this produced what was perhaps the most revolutionary idea of all: individual faith.⁵² It was summed up, says Richard Southern, by the phrase ‘Know yourself as a way to God’. The basic idea was that each soul was coloured by the individual’s mind, that individuals had a lot in common with each other but that they also differed in the extent to which they approached God.⁵³ This change should not be overstated. It mainly affected the elite. There was added variety in worship but for the masses they still looked upon themselves as groups, as congregations.

An associated reason was the arrival, and passing, of the millennium, the year AD 1000 in the chronology of the time. While there were those who, around 1000, still expected an apocalyptic change in the order of life on earth, as the eleventh century progressed, and nothing happened, a belief in the resurrection of the body could not be sustained for ever. As a result, mystical thought increased and there was a rise in so-called Jerusalem literature, mainly in the form of new hymns. This involved a change in the meaning of Jerusalem. The city was no longer expected to descend from heaven, to form paradise on earth – instead the aim was to reach the New Jerusalem in heaven. This was a major shift because it implied that not everyone would be saved, only those who earned it. In turn, this promoted the idea of individual salvation.⁵⁴ These new ideas were reflected in an important change in the representation of the crucifix in art. In the early Middle Ages, there was a fairly standard iconography, in which the triumphant Christ is nailed to the cross, watched by Mary and John. The figure of Christ is alive and upright, feet side-by-side on a support. His eyes are open, his arms straight, he shows no sign of suffering. His face is often beardless and young. It is a remarkable fact that in the first thousand years of the Church’s history, years in which death was all around and threatening to most people, the figure of the dead Christ was almost never depicted. ‘The crucifix was conceived as an expression of the triumph of Christ, the Lord of all things’ (Pantocrator).⁵⁵ Christian tradition was uneasy about considering Christ as a suffering man, and preferred to see in him the expression of divine power. In the eleventh century, in contrast, we suddenly find Jesus slumped in agony, or dead, dressed in a flimsy loincloth and all too human in his degradation. The concern now is with the sorrow of Jesus, his inward suffering.

The old, pre-change mentality was evident most in the liturgy of the church.⁵⁶ The kings and aristocracy were so concerned to maintain monastic ritual that the government of the time has been described with justification as ‘the liturgical state’. For example, at Cluny, the biggest and most influential monastic centre of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the liturgy grew so much and became so complicated that it swallowed up the time allotted to study and manual labour. The bloated liturgy, together with the proliferation of vast buildings despite the fact that the peasants routinely lacked many of the bare necessities of life, and not least the conduct of ritual in a language incomprehensible to most of the laity – all this underlined the lack of individuality, as did the monastic practice of world-renunciation.⁵⁷ Amid all this the ordinary, lay individual was allowed only to witness the re-enactment of God’s victory in Christ, not take part.⁵⁸ The brutality and violence of the Middle Ages also played a part, for in the unhappy world of the tenth century, withdrawal seemed to many the only path to salvation.⁵⁹ This very different psychology is reinforced by the fact that, until about 1100, Christians believed that man had been created in order to make up for the number of fallen angels. In other words, man’s purpose was not human but angelic. Man should not expect to develop his own nature, ‘but to become something quite different’.⁶⁰ Hymns at this stage are communal, not personal.

Colin Morris notes that, in the literature of the early Middle Ages, especially in epic poetry, the stories inevitably narrate conflicts of loyalty and formal obligations in a rigid aristocratic and hierarchical society. There is next to no scope for personal initiative, or for the representation of the more intimate emotions.⁶¹ But this too broke down in the eleventh century. Now we find an increased desire for self-expression. For example, there was in the period 1050–1200 a huge increase both in the preaching of sermons and in the extent to which individual interpretations of the gospel was advocated. Here is Guibert of Nogent: ‘Whoever has the duty of teaching, if he wishes to be perfectly equipped, can first learn in himself, and afterwards profitably teach to others, what the experience of his inner struggles has taught . . .’⁶² It is important to add that Guibert, though he saw himself as an intellectual rebel, was so only within strictly defined limits.

Parallel changes were seen in the church’s disciplinary arrangements. Before the middle of the eleventh century, those who sinned had to be forgiven before the full assembly of the church following, in the case of serious offences, a period of exclusion from full membership. This had been supplanted by punishment of a specific penance. Southern quotes as an example the penalties imposed on the army of William the Conqueror after the battle of Hastings in 1066. Anyone who had killed a man had to do penance of a year for each man he had killed. Men who had wounded others had to do forty days per person they had struck. Anyone who didn’t know how many he had killed or wounded had to do penance one day a week for the rest of his life. The point here is that there was no allowance for motive or for contrition, in short for the interior feelings of the soldiers. That is what changed in the twelfth century.⁶³ There was an awareness now that external penance was less important than inner repentance. Eventually, this stress on inward sorrow led to the wider adoption of individual confession. At first the use of confession was rare – an affair of the deathbed, or a pilgrimage, say. But, at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 an annual confession was imposed as a minimal requirement for every member of the church, so that the faithful might listen to the ‘voice of the soul’. ‘The pursuit of an interior religion had now gone beyond the elite to everyone.’⁶⁴

These changes were mirrored outside worship. In the paintings of the period, according to Georges Duby, for the first time in Italian history, the various figures ‘give vent to their deepest feelings’: tenderness, veneration, desperation.⁶⁵ There was a growth of literature written in the first-person, the verb ‘to earn’ came into common use and, ‘some time between 1125 and 1135, the stone cutters working on the porch of Saint Lazare in Autun apparently were ordered by those responsible for the iconography to forego abstraction and give individualised expression to each figure’.⁶⁶ There developed an obsession with cleanliness, Duby says, and then with bathing and nudity, making people more self-conscious about their bodies. For those who could afford it, houses began to have rooms that offered privacy – e.g., studies.⁶⁷ More and more people had personal names, and in particular nicknames, which stressed individual characteristics. For example, in the 1140s three canons of the cathedral of Troyes were called Peter and each had his identifying nickname (in Latin, of course): Peter the Squinter, Peter the Drinker and Peter the Eater.⁶⁸ Autobiography, almost unknown in the ancient world, also saw an increase from the late eleventh century on.⁶⁹ So too with biography and letter-collections, which often explored the inner lives of the correspondents, their reactions to one another, their self-examination, a parallel to what was happening in confession.⁷⁰ (At least, it seems so to us.) And in strong contrast to the attitude in Byzantium, we read of identifiable artists who for the first time expressed pride in their works.⁷¹ For example, here is Eadwine, the scribe or designer of a psalter produced at Canterbury in about 1150: ‘I am the prince of writers; neither my fame nor my praise will die quickly . . . Fame proclaims you in your writing for ever, Eadwine, you who are to be seen here in the painting.’⁷²

Art was changing in other ways too. After 1000 we see an increase in the personal details included in portraits. Colin Morris argues that in fact the portrait as we understand it was lost around the second century AD and did not return until the eleventh/twelfth century ‘to form a new concept’.⁷³ For example, royal portraits and tomb sculpture become more explicit, less idealised, less often figures representing the virtues, following instead a more characteristically modern way of seeing the human form.⁷⁴ ‘The figure of Eve, carved at Autun before the middle of the century by its sculptor Gislebert, has been called the first seductive female in western art since the fall of Rome.’⁷⁵ Memorial sculptures, virtually unknown before the late eleventh century, now become progressively more common.

A final aspect to this set of changes, linking individualism, psychology, and the Church, was what one historian has called ‘The Love Revolution’. The eleventh century saw an explosion of love literature which was no less accomplished – and maybe more so – than the greatest poets of Rome. More than one historian has said that all of European poetry derives from the love poetry of the High Middle Ages. What was new, certainly among the troubadours, whom we know most about, was the (highly stylised) subservience of the men to the women. The poets tried hard, on the page if not so much in real life, to be different in their reactions to everyone else and unrequited love became, if not an ideal, then a widespread preoccupation. One important reason for this was because it differed from the love of God. One could never know in this life how one compared with others in one’s love of God – not until Judgement Day. On the other hand, unrequited love of a woman threw men back on themselves and forced them to consider why they had failed and how they might improve.⁷⁶

And have we given enough consideration to the monasteries? The foundations for the monastic revival were laid between 910 and 940, while the numerical strength of the monastic world increased out of all proportion between 1050 and 1150. For England, where the figures are known fairly accurately, the number of monasteries for men rose between 1066 and 1154 (the accession of Henry II) from just under fifty to about five hundred, and Christopher Brooke calculates that the number of monks and nuns rose seven- or eight-fold in just under a hundred years.⁷⁷ The Cistercian order alone built 498 monasteries between 1098 and 1170.⁷⁸ In Germany the numbers of houses for women rose from about seventy in 900 to five hundred in 1250.⁷⁹ This revival had a massive impact on architecture and on art, in particular on stained glass, book illumination, but above all, perhaps, on sculpture and on attitudes to women and womanhood. The great build-up of the monasteries, and then of the cathedrals (which are introduced in the next two chapters), fostered an explosion of sculptures which, besides being glories in their own right, would spark an interest in perspective, which was to become such a feature in the modernisation of art.⁸⁰ It was in the monasteries of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that the cult of the Blessed Virgin was established and developed. As well as providing a (male-conceived) ideal for women, worship of the Virgin was one aspect of the new variety of worship available to the faithful. ‘There is copious evidence . . . of a strong demand for greater opportunities for women in the religious life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.’⁸¹ Women turned inward, as well as men.

‘The discovery of the individual’, says Colin Morris, ‘was one of the most important cultural developments in the years between 1050 and 1200.’⁸² But did it contribute to the emergence of the distinctively Western view of the individual? It certainly seems to have been a cause or a symptom of a fundamental change in Christianity, which itself had done so much to help unify the continent. The new religious orders of the High Middle Ages, Franciscan rather than Benedictine, stressed vocation rather than organisation, and conscience won out over hierarchy. ‘If any one of the ministers gives to his brothers an order contrary to our rule or to conscience, the brothers are not bound to obey him.’⁸³

John Benton has argued that if men and women did turn inward in the years between 1050 and 1200 they must have had more self-esteem than their predecessors and that it was this change in mentality, combined with a greater (verbal and visual) vocabulary in considering the self that eventually gave rise to the increasing self-confidence of the West, the age of discovery and the Renaissance.

The case is not proved. But change did occur. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a hinge period, when the great European acceleration began. From then on, the history of new ideas happened mainly in what we now call the West. Whatever the reason, it was a massive change that cannot be overestimated.