The Penguin History of the World

4 The New Middle East and the Making of Europe

Byzantium was not the only temptation to the predators prowling about the Middle East; indeed, it survived their attentions longer than its old enemy the Abbasid caliphate. The Arab empire slipped into decline and disintegration and from the tenth century we enter an age of confusion, which makes any brief summary of what happened a despairing exercise. There was no take-off into sustained growth such as the flowering of commerce and the emergence of moneyed men outside the ruling and military hierarchies might have seemed to promise. Rapacious and arbitrary exactions by government may be the basic explanation, but, for all the comings and goings of rulers and raiders, nothing disturbed the foundations of Islamic society. The whole area from the Levant to the Hindu Kush was pervaded for the first time in history by a single religion and it was to endure. Within that zone, the Christian inheritance of Rome hung on as a major cultural force only until the eleventh century, bottled up beyond the Taurus Mountains in Asia Minor. After that, Christianity declined in the Middle East to become only a matter of the communities tolerated by Islam.

The stability and deep-rootedness of Islamic social and cultural institutions were enormously important. They far transcended the weaknesses – which were mainly political and administrative – of the semi-autonomous states which emerged to exercise power under the formal supremacy of the caliphate in its decadent period. About them little need be said. Interesting to Arabists though they are, they need be noted here rather as convenient landmarks than for their own sake. The most important and strongest of them was ruled by the Fatimid dynasty which controlled Egypt, most of Syria and the Levant, and the Red Sea coast. This territory included the great shrines of Mecca and Medina and therefore the profitable and important pilgrim trade. On the borders of Anatolia and northern Syria another dynasty, the Hamdanid, stood between the Fatimids and the Byzantine empire, while the heartland of the caliphate, Iraq and western Iran, together with Azerbaijan, was ruled by the Buwayhid. Finally, the north-eastern provinces of Khurasan, Sijistan and Transoxiana had passed to the Samanids. Listing these four groupings of power far from exhausts the complexity of the unsettled Arab world of the tenth century, but it provides all the background now needed to narrate the unrolling of the process by which two new empires appeared within Islam, one based on Anatolia and one on Persia.

The thread is provided by a Central Asian people already introduced into this story, the Turk. Some of them had been granted a home by the Sassanids in their last years in return for help. In those days the Turk ‘empire’, if that is the right word for their tribal confederation, ran right across Asia; it was their first great era. Like that of other nomadic peoples, this ascendancy soon proved to be transient. The Turk faced at the same time inter-tribal divisions and a resurgence of Chinese power, and it was on a divided and disheartened people that there had fallen the great Arab onslaught. In 667 the Arabs invaded Transoxiana and in the next century they finally shattered the remains of the Turk empire in western Asia. They were only stopped at last in the eighth century by the Khazars, another Turkic people. Before this the eastern Turk confederation had broken up.

In spite of this collapse what had happened was very important. For the first time a nomadic polity of sorts had spanned Asia and it had lasted for more than a century. All four of the great contemporary civilizations – China, India, Byzantium and Persia – had felt bound to undertake relations with the Turk khans, whose subjects had learnt much from these contacts. Among other things, they acquired the art of writing; the first surviving Turkic inscription dates from the early eighth century. Yet in spite of this, for long stretches of Turkic history we must rely upon other people’s accounts and records.

This, combined with the fragmentation of the Turkic tribes, makes for obscurity until the tenth century. Then came the collapse of the Tang dynasty in China, a great event which offered important opportunities to the eastern and Sinicized Turks, just at the moment when signs of weakness were multiplying in the Islamic world. One was the emerging of Abbasid successor states. Turkic slaves or ‘Mamluks’ had long served in the caliphates’ armies; now they were employed as mercenaries by the dynasties which tried to fill the power vacuum. But the Turkic peoples themselves were again on the move by the tenth century. In the middle of it a new dynasty re-established Chinese power and unity; perhaps it was this which provided the decisive impetus for another of the long shunting operations by which Central Asian peoples jostled one another forward to other lands. Whatever the cause, a people called the Oghuz Turks were in the van of those who pressed into the north-eastern lands of the old caliphate and set up their own new states there. One clan among them were the Seljuks, the ancestors of the modern Turkish people of Anatolia. With close contacts with the Khazars, some of them had first adopted Judaism, but by 960 they had been converted to Islam by the assiduous missionary efforts of the Samanids, when still in Transoxiana.

Many of the leaders of the new Turkic regimes were former slave soldiers of the Arab-Persians; one such group were the Ghaznavids, a dynasty who briefly built a huge dominion which stretched into India (this was also the first post-Abbasid regime to choose its generals as sultans, or heads of state). But they were in their turn pushed aside as new nomadic invaders arrived. The Oghuz came in sufficient numbers to produce a major change in the ethnic composition of Iran and also in its economy. In another way, too, their arrival brought a deeper change than any preceding one and opened a new phase of Islamic history. Because of what the Samanids had done, some of the Oghuz Turks were already Muslim and respected what they found. There now began the translation into various versions of Turkic of the major works of Arabic and Persian scholarship, which was to give the Turkic peoples access to Arab civilization as never before.

Early in the eleventh century the Seljuks crossed the Oxus, too. This was to lead to the creation of another Turkic empire, which lasted until 1194, and, in Anatolia, to 1243. After evicting the Ghaznavids from eastern Iran, the Seljuks turned on the Buwayhids and seized Iraq, thus becoming the first Central Asian invaders of historical times to penetrate further than the Iranian plateau. Perhaps because they were Sunni Muslims they seem to have been readily welcomed by many of the former subjects of the Shia Buwayhid. They went on, though, to much greater deeds than this. After occupying Syria and Palestine they invaded Asia Minor, where they inflicted on the Byzantines one of the worst defeats of their history at Manzikert in 1071. Significantly, the Seljuks called the sultanate they set up there the sultanate of Rum, for they saw themselves henceforth as the inheritors of the old Roman territories. That Islam should have a foothold inside the old Roman empire touched off crusading zeal in Europe; it also opened Asia Minor to the settlement of Turks.

In many ways, then, the Seljuks played an outstanding historic role. Not only did they begin the conversion of Asia Minor from Christianity to Islam, but they provoked the crusades and long bore the brunt of resisting them too. This cost them heavily on other fronts. By the mid-twelfth century Seljuk power was already dwindling in the Iranian lands. Nevertheless, the Seljuk empire lasted long enough to make possible a final crystallization over the whole Islamic heartlands of a common culture and of institutions which this time included Turkic peoples.

This was less because Seljuk government innovated than because it recognized social (and in Islam that meant religious) realities. The essence of the Seljuk structure was tribute rather than administrative activity. It was something of a confederation of tribes and localities and was no more capable of standing up to long-term stress than its predecessors. The central apparatus of the empire was its armies and what was necessary to maintain them; locally, the notables of the ulema, the teachers and religious leaders of Islam, ruled. They provided a consolidation of authority and social custom which would survive the caliphates and become the cement of Islamic society all over the Middle East. They would run things until the coming of nationalism in the twentieth century. For all the divisions of schools within the ulema, it provided at local levels a common cultural and social system, which ensured that the loyalty of the masses would be available to new regimes which replaced one another at the top and might have alien origins. It provided political spokesmen who could assure satisfaction at the local level and legitimize new regimes by their support.

This produced one of the most striking differences between Islamic and Christian society. Religious élites were the key factor in the ulema; they organized the locally, religiously based community, so that bureaucracy, in the western sense, was not needed. Within the political divisions of the Islamic world in the age of the caliphates’ decadence these élites provided its social unity. The Seljuk pattern spread over the Arabic world, and was maintained under the successor empires. Another basic institution was the use of slaves, a few as administrators, but many in the armies. Though the Seljuks granted some great fiefs in return for military service, it was the slaves – often Turkic – who provided the real force on which the regime rested, its armies. Finally, it relied also on the maintenance, where possible, of the local grandee, Persian or Arab.

The declining years of the Seljuk regime exposed the weaknesses in this structure. It depended heavily for its direction upon the availability of able individuals supported by tribal loyalties. But the Turks were thin on the ground and could not keep their subjects’ loyalties if they did not succeed. When the first wave of Muslim settlement in Anatolia was spent, that area was still only superficially Turkish, and Muslim towns stood in the middle of a countryside linguistically distinct; local language was not arabized as it was further south and the submergence of the Greek culture of the area was only very slowly achieved. Further east, the first Muslim lands to be lost went to pagans in the twelfth century; a nomad ruler (widely supposed in Europe to be a Christian king, Prester John, on his way from Central Asia to help the crusaders) took Transoxiana from the Seljuks.

The crusading movement was in part a response to the establishment of Seljuk power. The Turks, perhaps because of their late conversion to Islam, were less tolerant than the Arabs. They began to trouble Christian pilgrims going to the holy places. The other causes which promoted the crusades belong rather to European than to Islamic history and can be dealt with elsewhere, but by 1100 the Islamic world felt itself on the defensive even though the Frankish threat was not yet grave. Still, the reconquest of Spain had begun, and the Arabs had already lost Sicily. The first crusade (1096–9) was favoured by Muslim divisions, which enabled the invaders to establish four Latin states in the Levant: the kingdom of Jerusalem, and its three fiefs – the county of Edessa, the principality of Antioch and the county of Tripoli. They were not to have much of a future, but in the early twelfth century their presence seemed ominous to Islam. The crusaders’ success provoked Muslim reaction, and a Seljuk general seized Mosul as a centre from which he built up a new state in northern Mesopotamia and Syria. He recaptured Edessa in 1144, while his son saw the possibilities of exploiting the Christians’ alienation of the local Muslim population by their bad treatment. It was a nephew of this prince, Saladin, who seized power in Egypt in 1171, declaring the Fatimid caliphate at an end.

Saladin was a Kurd. He came to be seen as the hero of the Muslim reconquest of the Levant and he remains a captivating figure, even after strenuous efforts by unromantic and sceptical scholars to cut through the image of the beau idéal of Saracenic chivalry. The fascination he exercised over the minds of his Christian contemporaries was rooted in paradoxes which must have had real educational force. He was indisputably a non-Christian, yet he was said to be good, a man of his word and just in his dealings; he was chivalrous, yet of a world that did not know the knightly ideal. (This puzzled some Frenchmen so much that they were forced to believe he had in fact been knighted by a Christian captive and that he baptized himself on his deathbed.) On a more mundane level, Saladin’s first great triumph was the recapture of Jerusalem in 1187, which provoked a new, and third, crusade (1189–92). This could achieve little against him, though it further intensified the irritation of Muslims who now began to show a quite new and unprecedented bitterness and ideological hostility towards Christianity. Persecution of Christians followed and with it began the slow but irreversible decline of the formerly large Christian populations of the Muslim lands.

Saladin founded a Muslim dynasty, the Abbuyid sultans, which ruled the Levant (outside the crusader enclaves), Egypt and the Red Sea coast. It lasted until it was replaced by rulers drawn from its own palace guards, the Turkic Mamluks. These were to be the destroyers of the remaining crusader conquests in Palestine. The revival of the caliphate which followed at Cairo (it was given to a member of the Abbasid house) is of small significance in comparison with this. It registered, nevertheless, that so far as Islam still had a preponderant power and a cultural focus, both were now to be found in Egypt. Baghdad was never to recover.

The Mamluks had another great achievement to their credit by that time. It was they who finally halted the tide of a conquest far more threatening than that of the Franks, when it had been rising for more than half a century. This was the onslaught of the Mongols, whose history makes nonsense of chronological and territorial divisions. In an astonishingly short time this nomadic people drew into their orbit China, India, the Middle East and Europe and left ineffaceable marks behind them. Yet there is no physical focus for their history except the felt tents of their ruler’s encampment; they blew up like a hurricane to terrify half a dozen civilizations, slaughtered and destroyed, and conquered and reorganized on a scale the twentieth century alone has emulated. They demand to be considered alone as the last and most momentous of the nomadic conquerors.

To find their origins we need to go to the eastern parts of Central Eurasia in the middle part of the first millennium AD. The Turk expansion had pushed other peoples to the margins, and some of those who did not want to submit went south, where they settled inside and immediately outside what had been the Han empire. A group of peoples speaking the languages of the family called Mongolic, who had long demanded the attention of Chinese governments, gradually became part of the confused pattern of politics of fifth- and sixth-century China. Some of them played a key role in the setting up of new dynasties – both the Sui and the Tang were half Mongolic in origin. Others lived beyond the Chinese sphere. There had been Mongolic elements in many of the great nomadic federations of the first millennium AD – the Avars, the Turk and probably also the Huns. In the latter half of the ninth century and the early years of the tenth, one group, the Khitan, organized its own state and broke into northern China, where they set up the Liao dynasty which ruled Manchuria, eastern Mongolia and large parts of the Chinese north from 916 to 1125.

The Liao dynasty undoubtedly provided inspiration for other Mongolic groups living to the north of China to begin thinking of themselves as more than herders, servants or craftsmen. But in the early twelfth century, when the Liao state collapsed spectacularly under pressure from its enemies, all Mongolic tribes were to suffer the negative consequences. Pressure from their ethnic rivals set off fierce struggles for supremacy among the surviving Mongolic clans, and drove one young man named Temujin to extremes of bitterness and self-assertion. The date of his birth is uncertain, but in the 1190s he became khan to his people. A few years later he was the khagan among the tribes he called the Mongols and was acknowledged as such by being given the title of Chinghis Khan (‘universal lord’). By an Arabic corruption of this name he was to become known in Europe as Genghis Khan. He extended his power over other peoples in Central Asia and in 1215 defeated the Jin state in northern China and Manchuria, set up by Jurchens (ancestors of the Manchu). This was only the beginning. By the time of his death in 1227, the boy from the eastern steppe had become the greatest conqueror the world has ever known.

He seems unlike all earlier nomad warlords. Chinghis genuinely believed he had a mission to conquer the world. Conquest, not booty or settlement, was his aim and what he conquered he often set about organizing in a systematic way. This led to a structure which deserves the name ‘empire’ more than do most of the nomadic polities. He was superstitious, tolerant of religions other than his own paganism and, said one Persian historian, ‘used to hold in esteem beloved and respected sages and hermits of every tribe, considering this a procedure to please God’. Indeed, he seems to have held that he was himself the recipient of a divine mission. This religious eclecticism was of great importance, as was the fact that he and his followers (except for some Turks who joined them) were not Muslim, as the Seljuks had been when they arrived in the Middle East. Not only was this a matter of moment to Christians and Buddhists – there were both Nestorians and Buddhists among the Mongols – but it meant that the Mongols were not identified with the religion of the majority in the Middle East.

In 1218 Chinghis Khan turned to the west and the era of Mongol invasions opened in Transoxiana and northern Iran. He never acted carelessly, capriciously or without premeditation, but it may well be that this first attack was provoked by the folly of a Muslim prince who killed his envoys. From there Chinghis went on to a devastating raid into Persia, followed by a swing northward through the Caucasus into south Russia, and returned from there having made a complete circuit of the Caspian.

All this was accomplished by 1223. Bukhara and Samarkand were sacked with massacres of the townspeople which were meant to terrify others who contemplated resistance. (Surrender was always the safest course with the Mongols and after it several minor peoples were to survive with nothing worse than the payment of tribute and the arrival of a Mongol governor.) Transoxiana never recovered its place in the life of Islamic Iran after this. Christian civilization was given a taste of Mongol prowess by the defeat of the Georgians in 1221 and of the southern Russian princes two years later. Even these portentous events were only the overture to what was to follow.

Chinghis died in the east in 1227, but his son and successor, Ögedei, sent forces back west after completing the conquest of northern China. In 1236 his armies poured into Russia. Under the command of Chinghis’s grandson Batu and the military strategist Subutai they took Kiev and settled on the Lower Volga, from where they organized a tributary system for the Russian principalities they had not occupied. Meanwhile they broke into Catholic Europe. The Teutonic knights, the Poles and the Hungarians all went down before them. Cracow was burnt and Moravia devastated. A Mongol patrol crossed into Austria, while the pursuers of the king of Hungary chased him through Croatia and finally reached Albania before they were recalled.

Batu’s main forces left Europe when they learnt of Ögedei’s death in 1241, going back to honour the dead khagan and participate in the election of his successor. A new one was not chosen until 1246. A Franciscan friar attended the ceremony (he was there as an emissary of the pope); so did a Russian grand duke, a Seljuk sultan, the brother of the Abbuyid sultan of Egypt, an envoy from the Abbasid caliph, a representative of the king of Armenia, and two claimants to the Christian throne of Georgia. The election did not solve the problems posed by dissension among the Mongols and it was not until another khagan was chosen in 1251 (after his predecessor’s death had ended a short reign) that the stage was set for another Mongol attack.

The new leader was another of Chinghis’s grandsons, Mönke. He was to become one of the greatest khans of the Mongols. His first attacks fell almost entirely upon Muslim lands and provoked unwarranted optimism among Christians, who noted also the rise of Nestorian influence at the Mongol court. The area nominally still subject to the caliphate had been in a state of disorder since Chinghis Khan’s campaign. The Seljuks of Rum had been defeated in 1243 and were not capable of asserting authority. In this vacuum, relatively small and local Mongol forces could be effective and the Mongol empire relied mainly upon vassals among numerous local rulers.

The new campaign was entrusted to the younger brother of the khagan and began with the crossing of the Oxus on New Year’s Day 1256. After destroying the notorious sect of the Assassins en route, he moved on Baghdad, summoning the caliph to surrender. The city was stormed and sacked and the last Abbasid caliph murdered – because there were superstitions about shedding his blood he is supposed to have been rolled up in a carpet and trampled to death by horses. It was a black moment in the history of Islam as, everywhere in the Middle East, Christians took heart and anticipated the overthrow of their Muslim overlords. When, the following year, the Mongol offensive was launched against Syria, Muslims were forced to bow to the cross in the streets of a surrendered Damascus and a mosque was turned into a Christian church. The Mamluks of Egypt were next on the list for conquest when the Great Khan died. The Mongol commander in the west favoured the succession of his younger brother, Kubilai, far away in China. But he was distracted and withdrew many of his men to Azerbaijan to wait on events. It was on a weakened army that the Mamluks fell at the Goliath Spring near Nazareth on 3 September 1260. The Mongol general was killed, the legend of Mongol invincibility was shattered and a turning-point in world history was reached. For the Mongols the age of conquest was over and that of consolidation had begun.

The unity of Chinghis Khan’s empire was at an end. After civil war the legacy was divided among the princes of his house, under the nominal supremacy of his grandson Kubilai, khan of China, who was to be the last of the Great Khans. The Russian khanate was divided into three: the khanate of the Golden Horde ran from the Danube to the Caucasus and to the east of it lay the ‘Cheibanid’ khanate in the north (it was named after its first khan) and that of the White Horde in the south. The khanate of Persia, initially under Mönke’s brother Hulagu, included much of Asia Minor, and stretched across Iraq and Iran to the Oxus. Beyond that lay the khanate of Turkestan. The quarrels of these states left the Mamluks free to mop up the crusader enclaves and to take revenge upon the Christians who had compromised themselves by collaboration with the Mongols.

In retrospect it is still far from easy to understand why the Mongols were so successful for so long. In the west they had the advantage that there was no single great power, such as Persia or the eastern Roman empire had been, to stand up to them, but in the east they defeated China, undeniably a great imperial state. It helped, too, that they faced divided enemies; Christian rulers toyed with the hope of using Mongol power against the Muslim and even against one another, while any combination of the Christian civilizations with China against the Mongols was inconceivable given Mongol control of communication between the two. Their tolerance of religious diversity, except during the period of implacable hatred of Islam, also favoured the Mongols; those who submitted peacefully had little to fear. Would-be resisters could contemplate the ruins of Bukhara or Kiev, or the pyramids of skulls where there had been Persian cities; much of the Mongol success must have been a result of the sheer terror which defeated many of their enemies before they ever came to battle.

In the last resort, though, simple military skill and organizational talent explained their victories. The Mongol soldier was tough, well trained and led by generals who exploited all the advantages which a fast-moving cavalry arm could give them. Their mobility was in part the outcome of the care with which reconnaissance and intelligence work was carried out before a campaign. The discipline of their cavalry and their mastery of the techniques of siege warfare (which, none the less, the Mongols preferred to avoid) made them much more formidable than a horde of nomadic freebooters. As conquests continued, too, the Mongol army recruited specialists among its captives; by the middle of the thirteenth century there were people of all ethnic origins in its ranks. The best of these were given important roles when the conquered territories were reorganized for further mobilization and taxation.

Though his army’s needs were simple, the empire of Chinghis Khan and, in somewhat less degree, of his successors was an administrative reality over a vast area. One of the first innovations of Chinghis was the reduction of Mongol language to writing, using the Turkish script. This was done by a captive. Mongol rule always drew willingly upon the skills made available to it by its conquests. Chinese civil servants organized the conquered territories for revenue purposes; the Chinese device of paper money, when introduced by the Mongols into the Persian economy in the thirteenth century, brought about a disastrous collapse of trade, but the failure does not make the example of the use of alien techniques less striking.

In so great an empire, communications were the key to power. A network of post-houses along the main roads looked after rapidly moving messengers and agents. The roads helped trade too, and for all their ruthlessness to the cities which resisted them, the Mongols usually encouraged rebuilding and the revival of commerce, from the taxation of which they sought revenue. Asia knew a sort of Pax Mongolica. Caravans were protected against nomadic bandits by the policing of the Mongols, poachers turned gamekeepers. The most successful nomads of all, they were not going to let other nomads spoil their game. Land trade was as easy between China and Europe during the Mongol era as at any time; Marco Polo is the most famous of Europe’s travellers to East Asia in the thirteenth century and by the time he went there the Mongols had conquered China, but before he was born his father and uncle had begun travels in Asia which were to last years. They were both Venetian merchants and were sufficiently successful to set off again almost as soon as they got back, taking the young Marco with them. By sea, too, China’s trade was linked with Europe, through the port of Ormuz on the Persian Gulf, but it was the land routes to the Crimea and Trebizond which carried most of the silks and spices westward and provided the bulk of Byzantine trade in its last centuries. The land routes depended on the khans and, significantly, the merchants were always strong supporters of the Mongol regime.

In its relations with the rest of the world, the Mongol empire came to show the influence of China in its fundamental presuppositions. The khans were the representatives on earth of the one sky god, Tängri; his supremacy had to be acknowledged, though this did not mean that the practice of other religions would not be tolerated. But it did mean that diplomacy in the western sense was inconceivable. Like the Chinese emperors whom they were to replace, the khans saw themselves as the upholders of a universal monarchy; those who came to it had to come as suppliants. Ambassadors were the bearers of tribute, not the representatives of powers of equal standing. When in 1246 emissaries from Rome conveyed papal protests against the Mongol treatment of Christian Europe and a recommendation that he should be baptized, the new Great Khan’s reply was blunt: ‘If you do not observe God’s command, and if you ignore my command, I shall know you as my enemy. Likewise I shall make you understand.’ As for baptism, the pope was told to come in person to serve the khan. It was not an isolated message, for another pope had the same reply from the Mongol governor of Persia a year later: ‘If you wish to keep your land, you must come to us in person and thence go on to him who is master of the earth. If you do not, we know not what will happen: only God knows.’

The cultural influences playing upon the Mongol rulers and their circle were not only Chinese. There is much evidence of the importance of Nestorian Christianity at the Mongol court and it encouraged European hopes of a rapprochement with the khans. One of the most remarkable western visitors to the khan, the Franciscan William of Rubruck, was told just after New Year 1254 by an Armenian monk that the Great Khan would be baptized a few days later, but nothing came of it. William went on, however, to win a debate before him, defending the Christian faith against Muslim and Buddhist representatives and coming off best. This was, in fact, just the moment at which Mongol strength was being gathered for the double assault on world power, against Song China and the Muslims, which was finally checked in Syria by the Mamluks in 1260.

Not that this was the end of attempts by Mongols to conquer the Levant. None was successful, though; the Mongols’ quarrels among themselves had given the Mamelukes a clear field for too long. Logically, Christians regretted the death of Hulagu, the last khan to pose a real threat to the Middle East for decades. After him a succession of il-khans, or subordinate khans, ruled in Persia, preoccupied with their quarrels with the Golden and White Hordes. Gradually Persia recovered under them from the invasions it had suffered earlier in the century. As in the east, the Mongols ruled through locally recruited administrators and were tolerant of Christians and Buddhists, though not, at first, of Muslims. There was a clear sign of a change in the relative position of Mongol and European when the il-khans began to suggest to the pope that they should join in an alliance against the Mamluks.

When Kubilai Khan died in China in 1294 one of the few remaining links that held together the Mongol empire had gone. In the following year an il-khan called Ghazan made a momentous break with the Mongol tradition; he became a Muslim. Since then the rulers of Persia have always been Muslim. But this did not do all that might have been hoped and the il-khan died young, with many problems unsolved. To embrace Islam had been a bold stroke, but it was not enough. It had offended many Mongols and in the last resort the khans depended upon their captains. Nevertheless, the contest with the Mamluks was not yet abandoned. Though in the end unsuccessful, Ghazan’s armies took Aleppo in 1299; he was prayed for in the Ummayad mosque at Damascus the next year. He was the last khan to attempt to realize the plan of Mongol conquest of the Middle East set out half a century before, but was frustrated in the end when the Mamluks defeated the last Mongol invasion of Syria in 1303. The il-khan died the following year.

As in China, it soon appeared in Persia that Mongol rule had enjoyed only a brief Indian summer of consolidation before it began to crumble. Ghazan was the last il-khan of stature. Outside their own lands, his successors could exercise little influence; the Mamluks terrorized the old allies of the Mongols, the Christian Armenians, and Anatolia was disputed between different Turkish princes. There was little to hope for from Europe, where the illusion of the crusading dream had been dissipated.

Though Mongol power ebbed away, there came one last flash of the old terror in the Middle East as a conqueror appeared who rivalled even Chinghis. In 1369 Tamerlane, or Timur the Lame (Timur Lenk), became ruler of Samarkand. For thirty years the history of the il-khans had been one of civil strife and succession disputes; Persia was conquered by Timur in 1379. The new khan aspired to rival Chinghis. In the extent of his conquests and the ferocity of his behaviour he did; he may even have been as great a leader of men. None the less, he lacked the statesmanship of his predecessors. Of creative art he was barren. Though he ravaged India and sacked Delhi (he was as hard on his fellow Muslims as on Christians), thrashed the khans of the Golden Horde, defeated Mamluk and Turk alike and incorporated Mesopotamia as well as Persia in his own domains, he left little behind. His historic role was, except in two respects, almost insignificant. One negative achievement was the almost complete extinction of Asiatic Christianity in its Nestorian and Jacobite form. This was hardly in the Mongol tradition, but Timur was as much a Turk by blood as a Mongol and knew nothing of the nomadic life of Central Asia from which Chinghis came, with its willingness to indulge Christian clergy. His sole positive achievement was unintentional and temporary: briefly, he prolonged the life of Byzantium. By a great defeat of an Anatolian Turkic people, the Ottomans, in 1402, he prevented them for a while from going in for the kill against the eastern empire.

This was the direction in which western Asian history had been moving ever since the Mongols had been unable to keep their grip on Seljuk Anatolia. The spectacular stretch of Mongol campaigning – from Albania to Java – makes it hard to sense this until Timur’s death in 1405, but then it was obvious. Before that, the Mongols had already been overthrown in China. Timur’s own legacy crumbled, Mesopotamia eventually becoming the emirate of the attractively named Black Sheep Turks, while his successors for a while still hung on to Persia and Transoxiana. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Golden Horde was well advanced in its break-up. Though it could still terrorize Russia, the Mongol threat to Europe was long over.

By then, Byzantium was at its last gasp. For more than two centuries it had fought a losing battle for survival, and not merely with powerful Islamic neighbours. It was Europeans who had first reduced Byzantium to a tiny patch of territory and had sacked its capital. After the mortal wound of 1204 it became merely a small Balkan state. A Bulgarian king had seized the opportunity of that year to assure his country’s independence as one of several ephemeral successor states which made their appearance. Furthermore, on the ruins of Byzantine rule there was established the new western European maritime empire of Venice, the cuckoo in the nest which had been in the first place bribed to enter it. This former client had by the middle of the fourteenth century taken from the Byzantine heritage the whole Aegean complex of islands, with Rhodes, Crete, Corfu and Chios. During that time, too, Venice had kept up a bitter commercial and political struggle with her rival, Genoa, which had herself by 1400 acquired control of the southern coast of the Crimea and its rich trade with the hinterland of Russia.

In 1261 the Byzantines had won back their own capital from the Franks. They did so with the help of the Osmanlis, the power that had made Anatolia Turkish. Two factors might still benefit the empire: the crucial phase of Mongol aggression was past (though this could hardly have been known and Mongol attacks continued to fall on peoples who cushioned her from them), and in Russia there existed a great Orthodox power which was a source of help and money. But there were also new threats and these outweighed the positive factors. Byzantine recovery in Europe in the later thirteenth century was soon challenged by a Serbian prince with aspirations to empire. He died before he could take Constantinople, but he left the empire with little but the hinterland of the capital and a fragment of Thrace. Against the Serbs, the empire once more called on Osmanli help. Already firmly established on the Asian shores of the Bosporus, the Turks took a toehold in Europe at Gallipoli in 1333.

The best that the last eleven emperors, the Palaeologi, could manage in these circumstances was a rearguard action. They lost what was left of Asia Minor to the Osmanlis in 1326 and it was there that the fatal danger lay. In the eastern Black Sea they had an ally in the Greek kingdom of Trebizond, a great trading state which was just to outlive Byzantium itself, but in Europe they could hope for little help. The ambitions of the Venetians and Genoese (who by now dominated even the trade of the capital city itself), and the king of Naples, gave Byzantium little respite. One emperor desperately accepted papal primacy and reunion with the Roman Church; this policy did little except antagonize his own clergy and his successor abandoned it. Religion still divided Christendom.

As the fourteenth century wore on, the Byzantines had a deepening sense of isolation. They felt abandoned to the infidel. An attempt to use western mercenaries from Catalonia only led to their attacking Constantinople and setting up yet another breakaway state, the Catalan duchy of Athens, in 1311. Occasional victories when an island or a province was retaken did not offset the general tendency of these events, nor the debilitating effect of occasional civil war within the empire. True to their traditions, the Greeks managed even in this extremity to invest some of these struggles with a theological dimension. On top of all this, the plague in 1347 wiped out a third of what was left of the empire’s population. In 1400, when the emperor travelled the courts of western Europe to drum up help (a little money was all he got) he ruled only Constantinople, Thessaloniki and the Morea. Many in Europe now spoke of him, significantly, as ‘emperor of the Greeks’, forgetting he was still titular emperor of the Romans.

The Turks surrounded the capital on all sides, and had already carried out their first attack on it. There was a second in 1422. Emperor John VIII made a last attempt to overcome the strongest barrier to co-operation with western and central Europe. He went in 1439 to an ecumenical council sitting in Florence and there accepted papal primacy and union with Rome. Western Christendom rejoiced; the bells were rung in all the parish churches of England. But the Orthodox east scowled. The council’s formula ran headlong against its tradition; too much stood in the way – papal authority, the equality of bishops, ritual and doctrine. The most influential Greek clergy had refused to attend the council; the large number who did all signed the formula of union except one (he, significantly, was later canonized), but many of them recanted when they went home. ‘Better,’ said one Byzantine dignitary, ‘to see in the city the power of the Turkish turban than that of the Latin tiara.’ Submission to the pope was for most Greeks a renegade act; they were denying the true Church, whose tradition Orthodoxy had conserved. In Constantinople itself priests known to accept the council were shunned; the emperors were loyal to the agreement but thirteen years passed before they dared to proclaim the union publicly in Constantinople. The only benefit from the submission was the pope’s support for a last crusade (which ended in disaster in 1441).

In the end western and eastern Christendom could not make common cause. The infidel was, as yet, battering only at Europe’s outermost defences. French and Germans were absorbed in their own affairs; Venice and Genoa saw their interests might lie as much in conciliation of the Ottomans as in opposition to them. Even the Russians, harried by Tatars, could do little to help Byzantium, cut off as they were from direct contact with her. The imperial city, and little else, was left alone and divided within itself to face the Ottomans’ final effort.

The Ottomans, as they became known in Europe, were Osmanlis, one of the Turkic peoples who had emerged from the collapse of the sultanate of Rum. When the Seljuks arrived there they found on the borderlands between the dissolved Abbasid caliphate and the Byzantine empire a number of Muslim marcher lords, petty princes called ghazis, sometimes Turkish in origin, lawless, independent and the inevitable beneficiaries of the ebbing of paramount power. Their existence was precarious, and the Byzantine empire had absorbed some of them in its tenth-century recovery, but they were hard to control. Many survived the Seljuk era and benefited from the Mongol destruction of the Seljuks at a time when Constantinople was in the hands of the Latins.

One of these ghazis was Osman, a Turk who may have been an Oghuz. He showed leadership and enterprise, and men gathered to him. His quality is shown by the transformation of the word ‘ghazi’: it came to mean ‘warrior of the faith’. Fanatical frontiersmen, his followers seem to have been distinguished by a certain spiritual élan. Some of them were influenced by a particular mystical tradition within Islam. They also developed highly characteristic institutions of their own. They had a military organization somewhat like that of merchant guilds or religious orders in medieval Europe and it has been suggested that Europeans learnt in these matters from the Ottomans. Their situation on a curious borderland of cultures, half-Christian, half-Islamic, must also have encouraged their ambition. Whatever its ultimate source, their staggering record of conquest rivals that of Arab and Mongol. They were in the end to reassemble under one ruler the territory of the old eastern Roman empire and more.

The first Ottoman to take the title of sultan did so in the early fourteenth century. This was Orkhan, Osman’s son. Under him began the settlement of conquered lands which was eventually to be the basis of Ottoman military power. Like his foundation of the ‘Janissaries’, the new infantry corps which he needed to fight in Europe, the change marked an important stage in the evolution of Ottoman empire away from the institutions of a nomadic people of natural cavalrymen. Another sign that things were settling down was Orkhan’s issue of the first Ottoman coinage. At his death he ruled the strongest of the post-Seljuk states of Asia Minor as well as some European lands. Orkhan was important enough to be three times called upon by the Byzantine emperor for help, and he married one of the emperor’s daughters.

His two successors steadily ate up the Balkans, conquering Serbia and Bulgaria. They defeated another ‘crusade’ against them in 1396 and went on to take Greece. In 1391 they began their first siege of Constantinople, which they maintained successfully for six years. Meanwhile, Anatolia was absorbed by war and diplomacy. There was only one bad setback, the defeat by Timur which brought on a succession crisis and almost dissolved the Ottoman empire. The advance was then resumed and the Venetian empire now began to suffer, too. But for Byzantine and Turk alike, the struggle was essentially a religious one and its heart was the possession of the thousand-year-old Christian capital, Constantinople.

It was under Mehmet II, named the Conqueror, that in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks and the western world shuddered. It was a great victory, depleted though the resources of Byzantium were, and Mehmet’s personal achievement, for he had persisted against all obstacles. The age of gunpowder was now well under way and he had a Hungarian engineer build him a gigantic cannon, whose operation was so cumbersome that it could only be moved by a hundred oxen and fired only seven times a day (the Hungarian’s assistance had been turned down by the Christians though the fee he asked was a quarter of what Mehmet gave him). It was a failure. Mehmet did better with orthodox methods, driving his soldiers forward ruthlessly, cutting them down if they flinched from the assault. Finally, he carried seventy ships overland to get them behind the imperial squadron guarding the Horn.

The last attack began early in April 1453. After nearly two months, on the evening of 28 May, Roman Catholics and Orthodox alike gathered in St Sophia and the fiction of the religious reunion was given its last parade. Emperor Constantine XI, eightieth in succession since his namesake, the great first Constantine, took communion and then went out to die worthily, fighting. Soon afterwards, it was all over. Mehmet entered the city, went straight to St Sophia and there set up a triumphant throne. The church which had been the heart of Orthodoxy was made a mosque.

This was only a step, great as it was; the banner of Ottoman success was to be raised yet higher. The invasion of Serbia in 1459 was almost at once followed by the conquest of Trebizond. Unpleasant though this may have been for the inhabitants, it would merit only a footnote to the roll of Turkish conquest were it not also the end of Hellenism. At this remote spot on the south-eastern coast of the Black Sea in 1461 the world of Greek cities made possible by the conquests of Alexander the Great gave its last gasp. It marked an epoch as decisively as the fall of Constantinople, which a humanist pope bewailed as ‘the second death of Homer and Plato’ (following words with action, he then took command of a crusading army, but died before it could leave its base at Ancona).

From Trebizond, Turkish conquest rolled on. By 1463 the Turks had taken the Peloponnese, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Albania and the Ionian islands followed in the next twenty years. In 1480 they captured the Italian port of Otranto and held it for nearly a year. In 1517 Syria and Egypt were conquered. They took longer to pick up the remainder of the Venetian empire, but at the beginning of the sixteenth century Turkish cavalry were near Vicenza. Belgrade fell to them in 1521, and a year later Rhodes was seized. In 1526 at Mohacs the Turks wiped out the army of the Hungarian king in a defeat which is remembered still as the black day of Hungarian history. Three years later they besieged Vienna for the first time. In 1571 Cyprus fell to them and nearly a century later Crete. By this time they were deep into Europe. They again besieged Vienna in the seventeenth century; their second failure to take it was the highwater mark of Turkish conquest. But they were still conquering new territory in the Mediterranean as late as 1715. Meanwhile, they had taken Kurdistan from Persia, with whom they had hardly ceased to quarrel since the appearance of a new dynasty there in 1501, and had sent an army as far south as Aden.

The Ottoman empire was to be of unique importance to Europe. It is one of the big dividers, marking off the history of its eastern from that of its western half. It was crucial that the Church survived and was tolerated in the Ottoman empire. That preserved the heritage of Byzantium for its Slav subjects (and, indeed, ended any threat to the supremacy of the patriarch at Constantinople either from the Catholics or from ethnic Orthodox Churches in the Balkans). Outside the former empire, only one important focus of Orthodoxy remained; significantly, the Orthodox Church was now the heritage of Russia. The establishment of the Ottoman empire for a time sealed off Europe from western Asia and the Black Sea and, therefore, in large measure from the land routes to East and Central Asia. The Europeans had really only themselves to blame; they had never been (and were never to be) able to unite effectively against the Turks. Byzantium had been left to her fate. ‘Who will make the English love the French? Who will unite Genoese and Aragonese?’ asked one pope despairingly; not long after, one of his successors was sounding out the possibilities of Turkish help against France. Yet the challenge had awoken another sort of response, for even before the fall of Constantinople Portuguese ships were picking their way southwards down the African coast to look for a new route to the spices of Asia and, possibly, an African ally to take the Turks in the flank from the south. People had mused over finding a way around the Islamic barrier since the thirteenth century, but the means had long been inadequate. By one of history’s ironies they were just about to become available as Ottoman power reached its mighty peak.

Behind the Ottoman frontiers a new multi-racial empire was organized. Mehmet was a man of wide, if volatile, sympathies and later Turks found it hard to understand his forbearance to the infidel. He was a man who could slaughter a boy, the godson of the emperor, because his sexual advances were refused, but he allowed a band of Cretans who would not surrender to sail away after the fall of Constantinople because he admired their courage. He seems to have wanted a multi-religious society. He brought back Greeks to Constantinople from Trebizond and appointed a new patriarch under whom the Greeks were eventually given a kind of self-government. The Turkish record towards Jew and Christian was much better than that of Spanish Christians towards Jew and Muslim. Constantinople remained a great cosmopolitan city (and with a population of 700,000 in 1600, one far larger than any other in geographical Europe).

The early Ottomans also allowed a transformation of identities quite unique at the time, with very open access to peoples both to join the Ottoman state and – often in the process – to become Turk. It is likely that this attitude had much to do with the hybridity that had been incorporated into Turkic identities already under the old Turk empires. In some cases force was used to convert others to a new identity. But in most cases it proceeded over time, such as when most inhabitants in Anatolia came to form a Turk, and then a Turkish, national identity, irrespective of whether they had Turkic ancestry or not. For others, becoming a Turk meant becoming a Muslim and a servant of the Ottoman dynasty. George, the last Roman Orthodox mayor of Kanina, a town in southern Albania, turned Turk in 1398, with the result that his family kept that office until 1943, while providing the Ottomans with a host of local officials, plus three country governors, four field marshals (two Turkish, one Egyptian, one Greek) and a grand vizier on the way.

Thus the Ottomans reconstructed a great power in the eastern Mediterranean and the sixteenth century was a great one for Islamic empire. But this was not only true in Europe and Africa; while the Ottomans rebuilt something like the Byzantine empire, another power was emerging in Persia which was also reminiscent of the past. Between 1501 and 1722 the Safavid dynasty ruled Persia, uniting all the Persian lands for the first time since the Arab invasions had shattered the Sassanids. Like their predecessors, the Safavids were not themselves Persian. Since the days of the Sassanids, conquerors had come and gone. The continuities of Persian history were meanwhile provided by culture and religion. Persia was defined by geography, by its language and by Islam, not by the maintenance of national dynasties. The Safavids were originally Turkic, ghazis like the Osmanlis, and succeeded, like them, in distancing possible rivals. The first ruler they gave to Persia was Ismail, a descendant of the fourteenth-century tribal ruler who had given his name to the line.

At first, Ismail was only the most successful leader of a group of warring Turkic tribes, rather like those further west exploiting similar opportunities. The Timurid inheritance had been in dissolution since the middle of the fifteenth century. In 1501 Ismail defeated the people known as the White Sheep Turks, entered Tabriz and proclaimed himself shah. Within twenty years he had carved out an enduring state and had also embarked upon a long rivalry with the Ottomans, even seeking support against them from the Holy Roman Empire. This had a religious dimension, for the Safavids were Shias and made Persia Shia, too. When in the early sixteenth century the caliphate passed to the Ottomans they became the leaders of Sunni Muslims who saw the caliphs as the proper interpreters and governors of the faith. The Shias were therefore automatically anti-Ottoman. Ismail’s establishment of the sect in Persia thus gave a new distinctiveness to Persia’s civilization which was to prove of great importance in preserving it.

His immediate successors had to fight off the Turks several times before a peace was made in 1555, which left Persia intact and opened Mecca and Medina to Persian pilgrims. There were domestic troubles too, and fighting for the throne, but in 1587 there came to it one of the most able of Persian rulers, Shah Abbas the Great. Under his rule the Safavid dynasty was at its zenith. Politically and militarily he was very successful, defeating the Uzbeks and the Turks and taming the old tribal loyalties which had weakened his predecessors. He had important advantages: the Ottomans were distracted in the west, the potential of Russia was sterilized by internal troubles and Mughal India was past its peak. He was clever enough to see that Europe could be enrolled against the Turk. Yet a favourable conjuncture of international forces did not lead to schemes of world conquest. The Safavids did not follow the Sassanid example. They never took the offensive against Turkey except to recover earlier losses and they did not push north through the Caucasus to Russia, or beyond Transoxiana.

Persian culture enjoyed a spectacular flowering under Shah Abbas, who built a new capital at Isfahan. Its beauty and luxury astounded European visitors. Literature flourished. The only ominous note was religious. The shah insisted on abandoning the religious toleration which had until then characterized Safavid rule and imposed conversion to Shia views. This did not at once mean the imposition of an intolerant system; that would only come later. But it did mean that Safavid Persia had taken a significant step towards decline and towards the devolution of power into the hands of religious officials.

After Shah Abbas’s death in 1629 events rapidly took a turn for the worse. His unworthy successor did little about this, preferring to withdraw to the seclusion of the harem and its pleasures, while the traditional splendour of the Safavid inheritance cloaked its actual collapse. The Turks took Baghdad again in 1638. In 1664 came the first portents of a new threat: Cossack raids began to harry the Caucasus and the first Russian mission arrived in Isfahan. Western Europeans had already long been familiar with Persia. In 1507 the Portuguese had established themselves in the port of Ormuz where Ismail levied tribute on them. In 1561 an English merchant reached Persia overland from Russia and opened up Anglo-Persian trade. In the early seventeenth century this connection was well established and by then Shah Abbas had Englishmen in his service. This was the result of his encouragement of relations with Europe, where he hoped to find support against the Ottomans.

The growing English presence was not well received by the Portuguese. When the English East India Company opened operations they attacked its agents, but unsuccessfully. A little later the English and Persians joined forces to eject the Portuguese from Ormuz. By this time other European countries were becoming interested, too. In the second half of the seventeenth century the French, Dutch and Spanish all tried to penetrate the Persian trade. The shahs did not rise to the opportunity of playing off one set of foreigners against another.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Persia was suddenly exposed to a double onslaught. The Afghans revolted and established an independent Sunni state; religious antagonism had done much to feed their sedition. From 1719 to 1722 the Afghans were at war with the Safavid shah. He abdicated in that year and an Afghan, Mahmud, took the throne, thus ending for a while Shia rule in Persia. The story must none the less be taken a little further forward, for the Russians had been watching with interest the progress of Safavid decline. The Russian ruler had sent embassies to Isfahan in 1708 and 1718. Then, in 1723, on the pretext of intervention in the succession, the Russians seized Derbent and Baku and obtained from the defeated Shias promises of much more. The Ottomans decided not to be left out and, having seized Tiflis, agreed in 1724 with the Russians upon a dismemberment of Persia. That once great state seemed to be ending in nightmare. In Isfahan a massacre of possible Safavid sympathizers was carried out by orders of a shah who had now gone mad. There was, before long, to be a last Persian recovery by the last great Asiatic conqueror, Nadir Kali. But though he might restore the Persian empire, the days when the Iranian plateau was the seat of a power which could shape events far beyond its borders were over until the twentieth century, and then it would not be armies which gave Iran its leverage.

If the comparison is with Byzantium or the caliphate, then Europe west of the Elbe was for centuries after the Roman collapse an almost insignificant backwater of world history. The cities in which a small minority of its people lived were built among and of the ruins of what the Romans had left behind; none of them could have approached in magnificence Constantinople, Córdoba, Baghdad or Chang’an. A few of the leading men of its peoples felt themselves a beleaguered remnant and so, in a sense, they were. Islam cut them off from Africa and the Middle East. Arab raids tormented their southern coasts. From the eighth century the strange and unexpected violence of the Norse peoples we call Vikings fell like a flail time and time again on the northern coasts, river valleys and islands. In the east, throughout, there were new peoples from Central Eurasia moving in or moving through. Europe had to form itself in a world where everything seemed to be in flux.

The foundations of a new civilization had to be laid in a time when much from the past seemed to have been lost, and where what had replaced it seemed confrontational and frightening. Europe would long be a cultural importer. It took centuries before its architecture could compare with that of the Mediterranean classical past, of Byzantium or the Asian empires, and when it emerged it did so by borrowing the style of Byzantine Italy and the pointed arch of the Arabs. For just as long, no science, no school in Europe could match those of Arab Spain or Asia. Nor could western Christendom produce an effective political unity or theoretical justification of power such as the eastern empire and the caliphates; for centuries even the greatest European kings were hardly more than barbarian warlords to whom men clung for protection and in fear of something worse.

Had it come from Islam, that something might well have been better. At times, such an outcome must have seemed possible, for the Arabs established themselves not only in Spain but in Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and the Balearics, and it was long likely that they might go further. They had much more to offer than the Scandinavians, yet in the end the northerners left more of a mark on the kingdoms established by earlier migrants. As for Slavic Christendom and Byzantium, both were culturally sundered from Catholic Europe and able to contribute little to it. Yet they were a cushion which shielded Europe from the full impact of eastern nomads and of Islam. A Muslim Russia would have meant a very different history for the world.

Roughly speaking, western Christendom before AD 1000 meant half the Iberian peninsula, all modern France and Germany west of the Elbe, Bohemia, Austria, the Italian mainland and England. At the fringes of this area lay uncivilized, but Christian, Ireland and Scotland, and the Scandinavian kingdoms, which were – as they would remain for two centuries – in flux. To this area the word ‘Europe’ began to be applied in the tenth century; a Spanish chronicle even spoke of the victors of 732 as ‘European’. The area they occupied was all but landlocked; though the Atlantic was wide open, the Norwegian settlements west of Iceland foundered, while the western Mediterranean, the highway to other civilizations and their trade, was an Arab lake. Only a thin channel of sea-borne communication with an increasingly alien Byzantium brought Europe some relief from its introverted, narrow existence. Men grew used to privation rather than opportunity. They huddled together under the rule of a mixed warrior class which they needed for their protection.

By the tenth century things seemed to settle down. The Magyars were checked, the Arabs were beginning to be challenged at sea, and the Vikings were on the road to Christianity (though still a complex and unchecked military force). The approach of the year 1000 was no portentous fact for most Europeans; they were unaware of it, for counting by years from the supposed birth of Christ was by no means yet the rule. That year can serve, none the less, very approximately, as the marker of an epoch, whatever the contemporary significance or lack of it of that date. Not only had the pressures upon Europe begun to relax but some signs of recovery were already visible. Some basic political and social structure seemed to be falling into place, and its Christian culture had already much of its peculiar flavour.

The eleventh century was to begin an era of revolution and adventure, for which the centuries sometimes called the Dark Ages had provided raw materials. As a way to understand how this happened, a good starting-point is the map.

Well before this, three great changes were under way which were to shape the European map we know. One was a cultural and psychological shift away from the Mediterranean, the focus of classical civilization. Between the fifth and eighth centuries, the centre of European life, in so far as there was one, moved to the valley of the Rhine and its tributaries. By preying on the sea-lanes to Italy and by its distraction of Byzantium in the seventh and eighth centuries, the Arabs, too, helped to push the core of Europe back to what later would become the centre of a reinvigorated civilization.

The second change was more lasting, a gradual advance of Christianity and settlement in eastern Europe. Though far from complete by 1000, the advance guards of Christianity had by then long been pushed out well beyond the old Roman frontier. The third change was the slackening of outside pressure. The Magyars were beginning to be incorporated in the tenth century; the Norsemen who were eventually to provide rulers in England, northern France, Sicily and some of the Aegean came from the last wave of Scandinavian expansion, which was in its final phase in the early eleventh century. Europe was no longer to be just a prey to outsiders. True, even 200 years later, when the Mongols menaced her, it must have been difficult to feel this. None the less, by 1000 she was ceasing to be wholly plastic.

Western Christendom can be considered in three big divisions. In the central area, built around the Rhine valley, the future France and the future Germany were to emerge. Then there was a west Mediterranean littoral civilization, embracing at first Catalonia, the Languedoc and Provence. With time and the recovery of Italy from the post-Roman centuries, this extended itself further to the east and south. A third Europe was the somewhat varied periphery in the west, north-west and north where there were to be found the first Christian states of northern Spain, which emerged from the Visigothic period; England, with its independent Celtic neighbours, Ireland, Wales and Scotland; and lastly the Scandinavian states.

We must not be too categorical about such a picture. There were areas one might allocate to one or other of these three regions, such as Aquitaine, Gascony and sometimes Burgundy. Nevertheless, these distinctions are real enough to be useful. Historical experience, as well as climate and ethnic group, made these regions significantly different, yet of course most men living in them would not have known in which one they lived; they would certainly have been more interested in differences between them and their neighbours in the next village than of those between their region and its neighbour. Dimly aware that they were a part of Christendom, very few of them would have had even an approximate conception of what lay in the awful shadows beyond that comforting idea.

The origin of the heartland of medieval western Europe was the Frankish heritage. It had fewer towns than the south and they mattered little; a settlement like Paris was less troubled by the collapse of commerce than, say, Milan. Life centred on the soil, and aristocrats were successful warriors turned landowners. From this base, the Franks began the colonization of Germany, protected the Church and strengthened and passed on a tradition of kingship whose origins lay somewhere in the magical powers of Merovingian rulers. But for centuries, state structures were fragile things, dependent on strong kings. Ruling was a very personal activity.

Frankish ways and institutions did not help. After Clovis, though there was dynastic continuity, a succession of impoverished and therefore feeble kings led to more independence for landed aristocrats, who warred with one another; they had the wealth which could buy power. One family from the eastern parts came to overshadow the Merovingian royal line. It produced Charles Martel, the soldier who turned the Arabs back at Tours in 732 and the supporter of St Boniface, the evangelizer of Germany. This is a considerable double mark to have left on European history (St Boniface said he could not have succeeded without Charles’s support) and it confirmed the alliance of Martel’s house with the Church. His second son, Pepin the Short, was chosen as king by the Frankish nobles in 751. Three years later, the pope came to France and anointed him king as Samuel had anointed Saul and David.

The papacy needed a powerful friend. The pretensions of the emperor in Constantinople were a fiction and in Roman eyes he had fallen into heresy, in any case, through taking up iconoclasm. To confer the title of ‘patrician’ on Pepin, as Pope Stephen did, was really a usurpation of imperial authority, but the Lombards were terrorizing Rome. The papacy drew the dividend on its investment almost at once. Pepin defeated the Lombards and in 756 established the Papal States of the future by granting Ravenna ‘to St Peter’. This was the beginning of 1,100 years of the pope’s temporal power, the secular authority enjoyed by the pope over his own dominions as a ruler like any other ruler.

From the new Romano-Frankish axis stemmed the reform of the Frankish Church, further colonization and missionary conversion in Germany (where wars were waged against the pagan Saxons), the throwing back of the Arabs across the Pyrenees and the conquest of Septimania and Aquitaine. These were big gains for the Church. It is hardly surprising to find Pope Hadrian I no longer dating official documents by the regnal year of the emperor at Byzantium, and minting coins in his own name. The papacy had a new basis for independence. Nor did the new magic of anointing benefit only kings. Though it could replace or blur mysteriously with the old Merovingian miracle-working and raise kings above common men in more than their power, the pope gained the subtle implication of authority latent in the power to bestow the sacral oil.

Pepin, like all Frankish kings, divided his land at his death but the whole Frankish heritage was united again in 771 under his elder son. This was Charlemagne, crowned emperor in 800. The greatest of the Carolingians, as the line came to be called, he was soon a legend. This increases the difficulties, always great in medieval history, of penetrating a man’s biography. Charlemagne’s actions speak for certain continuing prepossessions. He was obviously still a traditional Frankish warrior-king; he conquered and his business was war. What was more novel was the seriousness with which he took the Christian sanctification of this role. He took his duties seriously, too, in patronizing learning and art; he wanted to magnify the grandeur and prestige of his court by filling it with evidence of Christian learning.

Territorially, Charlemagne was a great builder, overthrowing the Lombards in Italy and becoming their king; their lands, too, passed into the Frankish heritage. For thirty years he hammered away in campaigns on the Saxon marches and achieved the conversion of the Saxon pagans by force. Fighting against the Avars, Wends and Slavs brought him Carinthia and Bohemia and, perhaps as important, the opening of the route down the Danube to Byzantium. To master the Danes, the Dane Mark (March) was set up across the Elbe. Charlemagne pushed into Spain early in the ninth century and instituted the Spanish March across the Pyrenees down to the Ebro and the Catalonian coast. But he did not put to sea; the Visigoths had been the last western European sea-power.

Thus he put together a realm bigger than anything in Europe since Rome. Historians have been arguing almost ever since about what its reality was and about what Charlemagne’s coronation by the pope on Christmas Day 800 – and his acclamation as emperor – actually meant. ‘Most pious Augustus, crowned by God, the great and peace-giving emperor’ ran the chant at the service – but there already was an emperor whom everybody acknowledged to be such: he lived in Constantinople. Did a second ruler with the title mean that there were two emperors of a divided Christendom, as in later Roman times? Clearly, it was a claim to authority over many peoples; by this title, Charlemagne said he was more than just a ruler of Franks. Perhaps Italy mattered most in explaining it, for among the Italians a link with the imperial past might be a cementing factor as nowhere else. An element of papal gratitude – or expediency – was involved, too; Leo III had just been restored to his capital by Charlemagne’s soldiers. Yet Charlemagne is reported to have said that he would not have entered St Peter’s had he known what the pope intended to do. He may have disliked the pope’s implied arrogation of authority. He may have foreseen the irritation the coronation would cause at Constantinople. He must have known that to his own people, the Franks, and to many of his northern subjects he was more comprehensible as a traditional Germanic warrior-king than as the successor of Roman emperors, yet before long his seal bore the legend Renovatio Romani imperii, a conscious reconnection with a great past.

In fact, Charlemagne’s relations with Byzantium were troubled, though his title was a few years later recognized as valid in the west in return for a concession to Byzantium of sovereignty over Venice, Istria and Dalmatia. With another great state, the Abbasid caliphate, Charlemagne had somewhat formal but not unfriendly relations; Harun al-Rashid is said to have given him a cup bearing a portrait of Chosroes I, the king under whom Sassanid power and civilization was at its height (perhaps it is significant that it is from Frankish sources that we learn of these contacts; they do not seem to have struck the Arab chroniclers as important enough to mention). The Umayyads of Spain were different; they were marked down as the enemies of a Christian ruler because they were near enough to be a threat. To protect the faith from pagans was a part of Christian kingship. For all his support and protection, though, the Church was firmly subordinate to Charlemagne’s authority.

When Charlemagne’s men brought materials and ideas from Ravenna to beautify his capital Aachen, Byzantine art, too, began to move more freely into the north European tradition, and classical models still influenced his artists. But it was its scholars and scribes that made Charlemagne’s court most spectacular. It was an intellectual centre. From it radiated the impulse to copy texts in a new refined and reformed hand called Carolingian minuscule, which was to be one of the great instruments of culture in Europe (and, in the end, a model for modern typefaces). Charlemagne had hoped to use it to supply an authentic copy of the Rule of St Benedict to every monastery in his realm, but the major expression of a new manuscript potential was first evident in the copying of the Bible. This had a more than religious aim, for the scriptural story was to be interpreted as a justification of Carolingian rule. The Jewish history of the Old Testament was full of examples of pious and anointed warrior-kings. The Bible was the major text in the monastic libraries which now began to be assembled throughout the Frankish lands.

Charlemagne’s empire marked a shift in the centre of cultural gravity in Europe, away from the classical world and to the north. The emperor’s person played an important role in this. He was striving to make the transition from warlord to ruler of a great Christian empire, and he had remarkable success in his own lifetime in so doing. Typically, although he never learnt to write, he taught himself to speak passable Latin. Clearly his physical presence was impressive (he probably towered over most of his entourage), and men saw in him the image of a kingly soul, gay, just and magnanimous, as well as that of the heroic paladin of whom poets and minstrels would be singing for centuries. His authority was a more majestic spectacle than anything seen in western Europe since the fall of Rome. When his reign began, his court was still peripatetic; it normally ate its way from estate to estate throughout the year. When Charlemagne died, he left a palace and a treasury established at the place where he was to be buried. He had been able to reform weights and measures, and had given to Europe the division of a pound of silver into 240 pennies (denarii) which was to survive in the British Isles for 1,100 years.

Charlemagne thought in traditional Frankish terms of his territorial legacy. He made plans to divide it and only the accident of sons dying before him ensured that the empire passed undivided to the youngest, Louis the Pious, in 814. With it went the imperial title (which Charlemagne gave to his son) and the alliance of monarchy and papacy; two years after his succession the pope crowned Louis at a second coronation. Partition was only delayed by this. Charlemagne’s successors had neither his authority nor his experience, nor perhaps an interest in controlling fissiparous forces. Regional loyalties were forming around individuals and a series of partitions finally culminated in one between three of Charlemagne’s grandsons, contained in the Treaty of Verdun of 843, which had great consequences. It gave a core kingdom of Frankish lands centred on the western side of the Rhine valley and containing Charlemagne’s capital, Aachen, to Lothair, the reigning emperor (thus it was called Lotharingia) and added to this the kingdom of Italy. North of the Alps, this united Provence, Burgundy, Lorraine and the lands between the Scheldt, Meuse, Saône and Rhône. To the east lay a second block of lands of Teutonic speech between the Rhine and the German marches; it went to Louis the German. Finally, in the west, a tract of territory including Gascony, Septimania and Aquitaine, and roughly the equal of the rest of modern France, went to a half-brother of these two, Charles the Bald.

This settlement was not long untroubled, but it was decisive in a broad and important way; it effectively founded the political distinction between France and Germany, whose roots lay in west and east Francia. Between these two regions there were already important distinctions. But the third unit had much less linguistic, ethnic, geographical and economic unity. Lotharingia was there in part because three sons had to be provided for. Much future Franco-German history was going to be about the way in which this area could be divided between neighbours bound to covet it and therefore likely to grow apart from one another in rivalry.

No royal house could guarantee a continuous flow of able kings, nor could they for ever buy loyalty from their supporters by giving away lands. Gradually, and like their predecessors, the Carolingians declined in power. The signs of break-up multiplied, an independent kingdom of Burgundy appeared and people began to dwell on the great days of Charlemagne – a sure symptom of decay and dissatisfaction. The histories of the west and east Franks diverged more and more.

In west Francia the Carolingians lasted just over a century after Charles the Bald. By the end of his reign Brittany, Flanders and Aquitaine were to all intents and purposes independent. The west Frankish monarchy thus started the tenth century in a weak position and it had the attacks of Vikings to deal with as well. In 911 Charles III, unable to expel the Norsemen, conceded lands in what was later Normandy to their leader, Rollo. Baptized the following year, Rollo set to work to build the duchy for which he did homage to the Carolingians; his Scandinavian countrymen continued to arrive and settle there until the end of the eleventh century, yet they soon became French in speech and law. After this, the unity of the west Franks fell even more rapidly apart. From confusion over the succession there emerged a son of a count of Paris who steadily built up his family’s power around a domain in the Île de France. This was to be the core of the later France. When the last Carolingian ruler of the west Franks died in 987, this man’s son, Hugh Capet, was elected king. His family was to rule for nearly 400 years. For the rest, the west Franks were divided into a dozen or so territorial units ruled by magnates of varying standing and independence.

Among the supporters of Hugh’s election was the ruler of the east Franks. Across the Rhine, the repeated division of their heritage had quickly proved fatal to the Carolingians. When the last Carolingian king died in 911 there emerged a political fragmentation which was to characterize Germany down to the nineteenth century. The assertiveness of local magnates combined with stronger tribal loyalties than in the west to produce half a dozen powerful dukedoms. The ruler of one of these, Conrad of Franconia, was chosen as king by the other dukes, somewhat surprisingly. They wanted a strong leader against the Magyars. The change of dynasty made it advisable to confer some special standing on the new ruler; the bishops therefore anointed Conrad at his coronation. He was the first ruler of the east Franks so to be treated and perhaps this is the moment at which there emerges a German state distinct from Carolingian Francia.

But Conrad was not successful against the Magyars; he lost and could not win back Lotharingia and he strove, with the support of the Church, to exalt his own house and office. Almost automatically, the dukes gathered their peoples about them to safeguard their own independence. The four whose distinction mattered most were the Saxons, the Bavarians, the Swabians and the Franconians (as the east Franks became known). Regional differences, blood and the natural pretensions of great nobles stamped on Germany in Conrad’s reign the pattern of its history for a thousand years: a tug-of-war between central authority and local power that was not to be resolved in the long run in favour of the centre as it was elsewhere, though in the tenth century it looked otherwise for a while. Conrad faced ducal rebellion but nominated one of the rebels his successor and the dukes agreed. In 919, Henry ‘the Fowler’ (as he was called), duke of Saxony, became king. He and his descendants ruled the eastern Franks until 1024.

Henry the Fowler avoided ecclesiastical coronation. He had great family properties and the tribal loyalties of the Saxons on his side and brought the magnates into line by proving himself a good soldier. He won back Lotharingia from the west Franks, created new marches on the Elbe after victorious campaigns against the Wends, made Denmark a tributary kingdom and began its conversion and, finally, he defeated the Magyars. His son, Otto I, thus had a substantial inheritance and made good use of it. In disciplining the dukes, he continued his father’s work. In 955 he inflicted on the Magyars a defeat which ended for ever the danger they had presented. Austria, Charlemagne’s eastern march, was recolonized.

Otto’s ambition did not stop there. In 936 he had been crowned at Aachen, Charlemagne’s old capital. Not only did he accept the ecclesiastical service and anointing which his father had avoided, but he afterwards held a coronation banquet at which the German dukes served him as his vassals. This was in the old Carolingian style. Fifteen years later he invaded Italy, married the widow of a claimant to the crown of Italy, and assumed it himself. Yet the pope refused him an imperial coronation. Ten years later, in 962, Otto was back in Italy again in response to an appeal by the pope for help, and this time the pope crowned him.

The Ottonian empire was a remarkable achievement. Otto’s son, the future Otto II, married a Byzantine princess. Both he and Otto III had reigns troubled by revolt, but successfully maintained the tradition established by Otto the Great of exercising power south of the Alps. Otto III made a cousin pope (the first German to sit in the chair of St Peter) and followed him by appointing the first French pope. Rome seemed to captivate him and he settled down there. Half Byzantine by birth, he saw himself as a new Constantine. A diptych of a gospel-book painted nearly at the end of the tenth century shows him in state, crowned and orb in hand, receiving the homage of four crowned women: they are Sclavonia (Slavic Europe), Germany, Gaul and Rome. His notion of a Europe organized as a hierarchy of kings serving under the emperor was eastern. In this there was megalomania as well as genuine religious conviction; the real basis of Otto’s power was his German kingship, not the Italy which obsessed and detained him. Nevertheless, after his death in 1002, he was taken to Aachen, as he had ordered, to be buried beside Charlemagne.

He left no heir, but the direct Saxon line was not exhausted; Henry II, who was elected after a struggle, was a great-grandson of Henry the Fowler. But his coronation at Rome hardly hid the reality; he was a German ruler, not a Roman emperor, at heart. His seal’s inscription read ‘Renewal of the kingdom of the Franks’ and his attention was focused on pacification and conversion in the German east. Though he made three expeditions to Italy, Henry relied there not on government but on politics, the playing off of factions against one another. With him the Byzantine style of the Ottonian empire began to wane.

Meanwhile, Italy had gradually become more and more distinct from the territories north of the Alps. Since the seventh century it had been evolving away from the possibility of integration with northern Europe and back towards re-emergence as a part of Mediterranean Europe. By the middle of the eighth century, much of Italy had been subjugated by the Lombards. However, once the Lombard kingdom had been destroyed by Charlemagne, there was no rival in the peninsula to the Papal States, though after the waning of the Carolingians’ power the popes had to face both the rising power of the Italian magnates and their own Roman aristocracy. The western Church was at its lowest ebb of cohesion and unity and the Ottonians’ treatment of the papacy showed how little power it had.

An anarchic Italian map was another result of this situation. The north was a scatter of feudal statelets. Only Venice was very successful; for 200 years she had been pushing forward in the Adriatic and her ruler had just assumed the title of duke, or doge. She is perhaps better regarded as a Levantine and Adriatic rather than a Mediterranean power. City-states which were republics existed in the south, at Gaeta, Amalfi and Naples. Across the middle of the peninsula ran the Papal States. Over the whole fell the shadow of Islamic incursions as far north as Pisa, while emirates appeared at Taranto and Bari in the ninth century. They were not to last, but the Arabs completed the conquest of Sicily in 902 and went on to rule it for a century and a half with profound effects.

The Arabs shaped the destiny of the other west Mediterranean coasts of Europe, too. Not only were they established in Spain, but even in Provence they had more or less permanent bases (one of them being St Tropez). The inhabitants of the European coasts of the Mediterranean had, perforce, a complex relationship with the Arabs, who appeared to them both as freebooters and as traders; the mixture was not unlike that observable in the Viking descents except that the Arabs showed little tendency to settle. Southern France and Catalonia were areas in which Frankish had followed Gothic conquest, but many factors differentiated them from the Frankish north. The physical reminiscences of the Roman past were plentiful in these areas and so was a Mediterranean agriculture. Another distinctive characteristic was the appearance of a family of Romance languages in the south, of which Catalan and Provençal were the most enduring.

Some of the most important influences on Europe up to AD 1000 came from the north, from where pagan Norsemen had set out to change the history of the British Isles and the northern fringe of Christendom. For reasons which, as in the case of many other folk-movements, are by no means clear (but are possibly rooted in over-population of their barren lands), the Scandinavians began to move outwards from the eighth century onwards. Equipped with two fine technical instruments – a longboat which oars and sails could take across seas and up shallow rivers and a tubby cargo-carrier which could shelter large families, their goods and animals for several weeks at sea – they thrust out across the water for four centuries, and left behind a civilization which in the end stretched from Greenland to Kiev.

Not all sought the same things. The Norwegians who struck out to Iceland, the Faroes, Orkney and the far west wanted to colonize. The Swedes who penetrated Russia and survive in the records as Varangians were much busier in trade. The Danes did most of the plundering and piracy the Vikings are remembered for. But all these themes of the Scandinavian migrations wove in and out of one another. No branch of these peoples had a monopoly of any one of them. After the first generation of outward movement, wherever it went to, trade seems to have become a chief motivating factor for all – like other liminal peoples the Scandinavians became expert traders, operating over great distances.

The Viking colonization of remote islands was their most spectacular achievement. They wholly replaced the Picts in the Orkneys and the Shetland Isles and from them extended their rule to the Faroes (previously uninhabited except for a few Irish monks and their sheep) and the Isle of Man. Offshore, the Viking lodgement was more lasting and profound than on the mainland of Scotland and Ireland, where settlement began in the ninth century. Yet the Irish language records their importance by its adoption of Norse words in commerce, and the Irish map marks it by the situation of Dublin, founded by the Vikings and soon turned into an important trading-post.

The most successful colony of all was Iceland. Irish hermits had anticipated Vikings there, too, and it was not until the end of the ninth century that they came in large numbers. By 930 there may have been 10,000 Norse Icelanders, living by farming and fishing, in part for their own subsistence, in part to produce commodities such as salt fish which they might trade. In that year the Icelandic state was founded and the Thing (which romantic antiquarians later saw as the first European ‘parliament’) met for the first time. It was more like a council of the big men of the community than a modern representative body and it followed earlier Norwegian practice, but Iceland’s continuous historical record is in this respect a remarkable one.

Colonies in Greenland followed in the tenth century; there were to be Norsemen there for 500 years. Then they disappeared, probably because the settlers were wiped out by Eskimos pushed south by an advance of the ice. Of discovery and settlement further west we can say much less. The Sagas, the heroic poems of medieval Iceland, tell us of the exploration of ‘Vinland’, the land where Norsemen found the wild vine growing, and of the birth of a child there (whose mother subsequently returned to Iceland and went abroad again as far as Rome as a pilgrim, before settling into a highly sanctified retirement in her native land). There are reasonably good grounds to believe that a settlement discovered in Newfoundland is Norse. But we cannot at present go much further than this in uncovering the traces of the predecessors of Columbus.

In western European tradition, the colonial and mercantile activities of the Vikings were from the start obscured by their horrific impact as marauders. Certainly, they had some very nasty habits, but some exaggeration must be allowed for, especially because our main evidence comes from the pens of churchmen doubly appalled, both as Christians and as victims, by attacks on churches and monasteries. As pagans, of course, Vikings saw no special sanctity in the concentrations of precious metals and food so conveniently provided by such places, and found them especially attractive targets. Nor were the Vikings the first people to burn monasteries in Ireland.

None the less, however such considerations are weighed it is indisputable that the Viking impact on northern and western Christendom was very great and very terrifying. They first attacked England in 793, the monastery of Lindisfarne being their victim; the attack shook the ecclesiastical world (yet the monastery lived on another eighty years). Ireland they raided two years later. In the first half of the ninth century the Danes began a harrying of Frisia which went on regularly year after year, the same towns being plundered again and again. The French coast was then attacked; in 842 Nantes was sacked with a great massacre. Within a few years a Frankish chronicler bewailed that ‘the endless flood of Vikings never ceases to grow’. Towns as far inland as Paris, Limoges, Orléans, Tours and Angoulême were attacked. Some of the Vikings had become professional pirates. Soon Spain suffered and the Arabs, too, were harassed; in 844 the Vikings stormed Seville. In 859 they even raided Nîmes and plundered Pisa, though they suffered heavily at the hands of an Arab fleet on their way home.

At its worst, think some scholars, the Viking onslaught came near to destroying civilization in west Francia; certainly the west Franks had to endure more than their cousins in the east and the Vikings helped to shape the differences between a future France and a future Germany. In the west their ravages threw new responsibilities on local magnates, while central and royal control crumbled away and men looked more and more towards their local lord for protection. When Hugh Capet came to the throne, it was very much as primus inter pares in a recognizably feudal society.

The interaction with other societies – violent or not – also had its effects on the Scandinavians themselves. By the turn of the millennium the region was becoming much more integrated with the rest of Europe, and organized in states more similar to those that were found elsewhere. The gradual introduction of Christianity – albeit with strong pagan influences – must have helped with this process, as did the introduction into Scandinavia of the chivalric ideal. More than anyone else, the transitional figure was Olaf II of Norway, who made a half-decent attempt at Christianizing his country and was killed for his efforts in 1030. Olaf had been a Viking in his youth, raiding in the Baltic and along the French coast, and leading an attack on London in 1009. His martyrdom propelled him into sainthood; the pope canonized him in the twelfth century as St Olaf, Rex Perpetuus Norvegiae. War-weariness may also have played a part in stopping the raids; few of those who left came back. A tenth-century couple in southern Sweden engraved a stone ‘in memory of Banki, their son. He owned his ship and sailed east with Ingvar’s force. May God help Banki’s spirit.’

The British Isles had soon become a major region for the Scandinavians, to which Vikings began to come to settle and trade with as well as to raid. A small group of kingdoms had earlier emerged there from the Germanic invasions; by the seventh century many of Romano-British descent were living alongside the communities of the new settlers, while others had been driven back to the hills of Wales and Scotland. Christianity continued to be diffused by Irish missionaries from the Roman mission which had established Canterbury. It competed with the older Celtic Church until 664, a crucial date. In that year a Northumbrian king at a synod of churchmen held at Whitby pronounced in favour of adopting the date of Easter set by the Roman Church. It was a symbolic choice, determining that the future England would adhere to the Roman traditions, not the Celtic.

From time to time, one or other of the English kingdoms was strong enough to have some sway over the others. Yet only one of them could successfully stand up to the wave of Viking attacks from 851 onwards, which led to the occupation of two-thirds of the country. This was Wessex and it gave England its first national hero who is also a historical figure – Alfred the Great.

As a child of four, Alfred had been taken to Rome by his father and was given consular honours by the pope. The monarchy of Wessex was indissolubly linked with Christianity and Carolingian Europe. As the other English kingdoms succumbed to the invaders, it defended the faith against paganism as well as England against an alien people. In 871, Alfred inflicted the first decisive defeat on a Danish army in England. Significantly, a few years later the Danish king agreed not only to withdraw from Wessex but to accept conversion to Christianity. This registered that the Danes were in England to stay (they had settled in the north) but also that they might be divided from one another. Soon Alfred was leader of all the surviving English kings; eventually he was the only one left. He recovered London, and when he died in 899 the worst period of Viking raids was over and his descendants were to rule a united country.

Even the settlers of the Danelaw, the area of Danish colonization defined by Alfred and marked to this day by Scandinavian place-names and fashions of speech, accepted their rule. Nor was this all. Alfred had also founded a series of strongholds (‘burghs’) as a part of a new system of national defence by local levies. They not only gave his successors bases for the further reduction of the Danelaw but set much of the pattern of early medieval urbanization in England; on them were built towns whose sites are still inhabited today. Finally, with tiny resources, Alfred deliberately undertook the cultural and intellectual regeneration of his people. The scholars of his court, like those of Charlemagne, proceeded by way of copying and translation: the Anglo-Saxon nobleman and cleric were intended to learn of Bede and Boethius in their own tongue, the vernacular English.

Alfred’s innovations were a creative effort of government unique in Europe. They marked the beginning of a great age for England. The shire structure took shape and boundaries were established which lasted until 1974. The English Church was soon to experience a remarkable surge of monasticism, and the Danes were held in a united kingdom through half a century of turbulence. It was only when ability failed in Alfred’s line that the Anglo-Saxon monarchy came to grief and a new Viking offensive took place. Colossal sums of tribute, Danegeld, were paid until a Danish king (this time a Christian) overthrew the English king and then died, leaving a young son to rule his conquest. This was the celebrated Canute, under whom England was briefly part of a great Danish empire (1006–35). There was a last great Norwegian invasion of England in 1066 under Harald Hardrada (St Olaf’s half-brother), but it was shattered at the battle of Stamford Bridge, just three weeks before the English met the army of Rollo’s great-great-grandson, William the Conqueror, who had arrived at Hastings from Normandy.

By that time, all the Scandinavian monarchies were Christian, and Viking culture was being absorbed into Christian forms. It left many evidences of its individuality and strength in both Celtic and continental art. Its institutions survive in Iceland and other islands. The Scandinavian legacy is strongly marked for centuries in English language and social patterns, in the emergence of the duchy of Normandy and, above all, in the literature of the Sagas. Yet where they entered settled lands, the Norsemen gradually merged with the rest of the population. When the descendants of Rollo and his followers turned to the conquest of England in the eleventh century they were really Frenchmen, and the war-song they sang at Hastings was about Charlemagne, the Frankish paladin. They conquered an England where the men of the Danelaw were by then English. Similarly, the Vikings lost their distinctiveness as an ethnic group in Kiev Rus and Muscovy.

The only other western peoples of the early eleventh century who call for remark because of the future that lay before them were those of the Christian states of northern Spain. Geography, climate and Muslim division had all helped Christianity’s survival in the peninsula and in part defined its extent. In the Asturias and Navarre, Christian princes or chieftains still hung on early in the eighth century. Aided by the establishment of the Spanish March by Charlemagne and its subsequent growth under the new counts of Barcelona, they nibbled away successfully at Islamic Spain while it was distracted by civil war and religious schism. A kingdom of León emerged in the Asturias to take its place beside a kingdom of Navarre. In the tenth century, however, it was the Christians who fell out with one another and the Arabs who again made headway against them.

The blackest moment for them came at the very end of the century when a great Arab conqueror, al-Mansur, took Barcelona, León and, in 998, the shrine of Santiago de Compostela itself, where St James the Apostle was supposed to be buried. The triumph was not long-lived, for here, too, what had been done to found Christian Europe proved ineradicable. Within a few decades Christian Spain had rallied as Islamic Spain fell into disunion. In the Iberian peninsula as elsewhere, the age of expansion which this inaugurated belongs to another historical era, but was based on long centuries of confrontation with another civilization. For Spain, above all, Christianity was the crucible of nationhood.

The Iberian example suggests just how much of the making of the map of Europe is the making of the map of the Faith, but an emphasis only on successful missions and ties with powerful monarchs is misleading. There was much more to early Christian Europe and the Christian life than this. The western Church provides one of the great success stories of history, yet its leaders between the end of the ancient world and the eleventh or twelfth century long felt isolated and embattled in a pagan or semi-pagan world. Increasingly at odds with, and finally almost cut off from, eastern Orthodoxy, it is hardly surprising that western Christianity developed an aggressive intransigence almost as a defensive reflex. It was another sign of its insecurity.

Nor was it threatened merely by enemies without. Inside western Christendom, too, the Church felt at bay and beleaguered. It strove in the middle of still semi-pagan populations to keep its teaching and practice intact while christening what it could of a culture with which it had to live, judging nicely the concession which could be made to local practice or tradition and distinguishing it from a fatal compromise of principle. All this it had to do with a body of clergy of whom many, perhaps most, were men of no learning, not much discipline and dubious spirituality. Perhaps it is not surprising that the leaders of the Church sometimes overlooked the enormous asset they enjoyed in being faced by no spiritual rival in western Europe after Islam was turned back by Charles Martel; they had to contend only with vestigial paganism and superstition, and these the Church knew how to use. Meanwhile, the great and powerful men of this world surrounded it, sometimes helpfully, sometimes hopefully, always a potential and often a real threat to the Church’s independence of the society it had to strive to save.

Inevitably, much of the history which resulted is the history of the papacy. It is the central and best-documented institution of Christianity. Its documentation is part of the reason why so much attention has been given to it, a fact that should provoke reflection about what can be known about religion in these centuries. Though papal power had alarming ups and downs, the division of the old empire meant that if there was anywhere in the west a defender of the interests of religion, it was Rome, for it had no ecclesiastical rival. After Gregory the Great it was obviously implausible to maintain the theory of one Christian Church in one empire, even if the imperial bishop resided at Ravenna. The last emperor who came to Rome did so in 663, and the last pope to go to Constantinople went there in 710. Then came iconoclasm, which brought further ideological division. When Ravenna fell to the renewed advance of the Lombards, Pope Stephen set out for Pepin’s court, not that of Byzantium.

There were some very bad moments in the two and a half centuries after Pepin’s coronation. Rome seemed to have very few cards in its hands and at times only to have exchanged one master for another. Its claim to primacy was a matter of the respect due to the guardianship of St Peter’s bones and the fact that the see was indisputably the only apostolic one in the west: a matter of history rather than of practical power. For a long time the popes could hardly govern effectively even within the temporal domains, for they had neither adequate armed forces nor a civil administration. As great Italian property-owners, they were exposed to predators and blackmail. Charlemagne was only the first, and perhaps the most high-minded, of several emperors who made clear to the papacy their views of the respective standing of pope and emperor as guardians of the Church. The Ottonians were great makers and unmakers of popes. But the popes had power, too. It was best expressed in ways easily comprehensible to an age used to symbols: the pope conferred the crown and the stamp of God’s recognition on the emperor by anointing him with oil. Perhaps, therefore, he could do so conditionally. Leo’s coronation of Charlemagne, like Stephen’s of Pepin, may have been expedient, but it contained a potent seed. When, as often happened, personal weaknesses and succession disputes disrupted the Frankish kingdoms, Rome might gain ground.

In the ninth century the papacy was being forged as a great instrument of standardization in Europe. In pure power terms, the balance of advantage and disadvantage long tipped to and fro, the boundaries of the effective powers of the popes ebbing and flowing. Significantly, it was after a further sub-division of the Carolingian heritage so that the crown of Italy was separated from Lotharingia that Nicholas I pressed most successfully the papal claims. He wrote to the Frankish claimants, it was said, ‘as though he were lord of the world’, reminding them that he could appoint and depose. He used the doctrine of papal primacy against the eastern emperor, too, in support of the patriarch of Constantinople. This was a peak of pretension which the papacy could not long sustain in practice, for it was soon clear that force at Rome would decide who should enjoy the imperial power the pope claimed to confer. Nicholas’s successor, revealingly, was the first pope to be murdered. None the less, the ninth century laid down precedents, even if they could not yet be consistently followed.

In particular, the collapse of papal authority in the tenth century, when the throne became the prey of Italian factions whose struggles were occasionally cut across by the interventions of the Ottonians, meant that the day-to-day work of safeguarding Christian interests could only be in the hands of the bishops of the local churches. They had to respect the powers that were. Seeking the co-operation and help of the secular rulers, they often moved into positions in which they were all but indistinguishable from royal servants. They were under the thumbs of their secular rulers just as, often, the parish priest was under the thumb of the local lord – and had to share his ecclesiastical proceeds in consequence. This humiliating dependency was later to lead to some of the sharpest papal interventions in the local churches.

The great Christian reform movement of the tenth century owed something to the episcopate but nothing to the papacy. It was a monastic movement which enjoyed the support of some rulers. Its essence was the renewal of monastic ideals; a few noblemen founded new houses which were intended to recall a degenerate monasticism to its origins. The most celebrated of these foundations was the Burgundian abbey of Cluny, founded in 910. For nearly two and a half centuries it was the heart of reform in the Church. Its monks followed a revision of the Benedictine Rule and evolved something quite new – a religious order resting not simply on a uniform way of life, but on a centrally disciplined organization. The Benedictine monasteries had all been independent communities, but the new Cluniac houses were all subordinate to the abbot of Cluny itself; he was the general of an army of (eventually) thousands of monks who only entered their own monasteries after a period of training at the mother house. At the height of its power, in the middle of the twelfth century, more than 300 monasteries throughout Europe – and even some in Palestine – looked for direction to Cluny, whose abbey contained the greatest church in western Christendom after St Peter’s at Rome.

This is to look too far ahead for the present. Even in its early days, though, Cluniac monasticism was disseminating new practices and ideas throughout the Church. This takes us beyond questions of ecclesiastical structure and law, though it is not easy to speak with certainty of all aspects of Christian life in the early Middle Ages. Religious history is especially liable to be falsified by records which sometimes make it very difficult to see spiritual dimensions beyond the bureaucracy. They make it clear, though, that the Church was unchallenged, unique, and that it pervaded the whole fabric of society. It had something like a monopoly of culture. The classical heritage had been terribly damaged and curtailed by the foreign invasions and the intransigent other-worldliness of early Christianity: ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ Tertullian had asked, but such intransigence had subsided. By the tenth century, what had been preserved of the classical past had been preserved by churchmen, above all by the Benedictines and the copiers of the palace schools who transmitted not only the Bible but Latin compilations of Greek learning. Through their versions of Pliny and Boethius, a slender line connected early medieval Europe to Aristotle and Euclid.

Literacy was virtually coterminous with the clergy. The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confident that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings were normally illiterate. The clergy controlled virtually all access to such writing as there was. In a world without universities, only a court or church school offered the chance of letters beyond what might be offered, exceptionally, by an individual cleric-tutor. The effect of this on all the arts and intellectual activity was profound; culture was not just related to religion but took its rise only in the setting of overriding religious assumptions. The slogan ‘art for art’s sake’ could never have made less sense than in the early Middle Ages. History, philosophy, theology, illumination, all played their part in sustaining a sacramental culture, but, however narrowed it might be, the legacy they transmitted, in so far as it was not Jewish, was classical.

In danger of dizziness on such peaks of cultural generalization, it is salutary to remember that we can know very little directly about what must be regarded both theologically and statistically as much more important than this and, indeed, as the most important of all the activities of the Church. This is the day-to-day business of exhorting, teaching, marrying, baptizing, shriving and praying, the whole religious life of the ordinary clergy and laity which centred about the provision of the major sacraments. The Church was in these centuries deploying powers which often cannot have been distinguished clearly by the faithful from those of magic. It used them to reassert the power of civilization. It was enormously successful and yet we have almost no direct information about the process except at its most dramatic moments, when a spectacular conversion or baptism reveals by the very fact of being recorded that we are in the presence of the untypical.

Of the social and economic reality of the Church we know much more. The clergy and their dependants were numerous and the Church controlled much of society’s wealth. The Church was a great landowner. The revenues which supported its work came from its land and a monastery or chapter of canons might have very large estates. The roots of the Church were firmly sunk in the economy of the day and to begin with that implied something very primitive indeed.

Difficult though it is to measure exactly, there are many symptoms of economic regression in Europe at the end of antiquity. Not everyone felt the setback equally. The most developed economic sectors went under most completely. Barter replaced money and a money economy emerged again only slowly. The Merovingians began to coin silver, but for a long time there was not much coin – particularly coin of small denominations – in circulation. Spices disappeared from the ordinary diet; wine became a costly luxury; most people ate and drank bread and porridge, beer and water. Scribes turned to parchment, which could be obtained locally, rather than papyrus which was now hard to get; this turned out to be an advantage, for minuscule script was possible on parchment, and had not been on papyrus, which required large, uneconomical strokes. None the less, it reflects difficulties within the old Mediterranean economy.

Though recession often confirmed the self-sufficiency of the individual estate, it ruined the towns. The universe of trade also disintegrated from time to time because of war. Contact was maintained with Byzantium and, further east, with Asia but the western Mediterranean’s commercial activity dwindled during the seventh and eighth centuries as the Arabs seized the North African coast. Later, thanks again to the Arabs, it was partly revived (one sign was a brisk trade in slaves, many of whom came from eastern Europe, from the Slav peoples who thus gave their name to a whole category of forced labour). In the north, too, there was a certain amount of exchange with the Scandinavians, who were great traders. But this did not matter to most Europeans, for whom life rested on agriculture.

Subsistence was for a long time to be almost all that they could hope for. That it was the main concern of the early medieval economy is one of the few safe generalizations about it. Animal manure or the breaking of new and more fertile ground were for a long time virtually the only ways of improving a yield on seed and labour which was by modern standards derisory. Only centuries of laborious husbandry could change this. The animals that lived with the stunted and scurvy-ridden human tenants of a poverty-stricken landscape were themselves undernourished and undersized, yet, for fat, the luckier peasant depended upon the pig or, in the south, on the olive. Only with the introduction in the tenth century of plants yielding food of higher protein content did the energy-return from the soil begin to improve. There were some technological innovations, notably the diffusion of mills and the adoption of a better plough, but when production rose it did so for the most part because new land was brought into cultivation. And there was much to exploit. Most of France and Germany and England were still covered with forest and wasteland.

The economic relapse at the end of antiquity left behind few areas where towns thrived. The main exception was Italy, where some commercial relations with the outside world always persisted. Elsewhere, towns did not begin much to expand again until after 1100; even then, it would be a long time before western Europe contained a city comparable with the great centres of the classical Islamic and Asian civilizations. In this world, possession of land or access to it was the supreme determinant of the social order. Landowners were the lords, and gradually their hereditary status was to loom larger and their practical prowess and skill as warriors was to be less emphasized (though in theory it long persisted) as the thing that made them noble.

The lands of some of these men were granted to them by a king or great prince. In return they were expected to repay the favour by turning out when required to do him military service. Moreover, administration had to be decentralized after imperial times; barbarian kings did not have the bureaucratic and literate resources to rule directly over great areas. Thus the grant of exploitable economic goods in return for specific obligations of service was very common, and this idea was what lay at the heart of what lawyers, looking back at the European Middle Ages later, chose as a key to understanding them, and called ‘feudalism’. It was a widespread, but not universal, phenomenon.

Many tributaries flowed into it. Roman, Germanic and Central Eurasian custom favoured the elaboration of such an idea. Under the Carolingians, the practice began of ‘vassals’ of the king doing him homage; that is to say, they acknowledged with distinctive ceremonies, often public, their special responsibilities of service to him. He was their lord; they were his men. The old loyalties of the blood-brotherhood of the warrior-companions of the chief began to blend with notions of commendation in a new moral ideal of loyalty, faithfulness and reciprocal obligation. Below the free were the slaves, more numerous perhaps in southern Europe than in the north and everywhere showing a tendency to evolve marginally upwards in status to that of the serf – the unfree man, born tied to the soil of his manor, but nevertheless not quite without rights of any kind.

Some people later spoke as if the relationship of lord and man could explain the whole of medieval society. This was never so. Though much of the land of Europe was divided into fiefs – the feuda from which ‘feudalism’ takes its name – which were holdings bearing obligation to a lord, there were always important areas, especially in southern Europe, where the ‘mix’ of Germanic overlay and Roman background did not work out in the same way. Much of Italy, Spain and southern France were not ‘feudal’ in this sense. There were also always some freeholders even in more ‘feudal’ lands, an important class of men, more numerous in some countries than in others, who owed no service for their lands but owned them outright.

There was much room for complexity and ambiguity in the ‘feudal order’ – some men could be both lords and vassals, freemen and serfs. But the central fact of an exchange of obligations between superior and inferior ran through the whole structure and does more than anything else to make it intelligible to modern eyes. Lord and man were bound to one another reciprocally: ‘Serfs, obey your temporal lords with fear and trembling; lords, treat your serfs according to justice and equity’ was a French cleric’s injunction, which concisely summarized a principle in a specific case. On this rationalization rested a society of growing complexity, which it long proved able to interpret and sustain.

It also justified the extraction from the peasant of the wherewithal to maintain the warrior and build his castle. From this grew the aristocracies of Europe. The military function of the system which supported these aristocrats long remained paramount. Even when personal service in the field was not required, that of the vassal’s fighting-men (and later of his money to pay fighting-men) would be. But in the intricate web of vassalage, a king might have less control over his own vassals than they over theirs. The great lord, whether lay magnate or local bishop, must always have loomed larger and more important in the life of the ordinary man than the remote and probably never-seen king or prince. Still, the king’s office was unique; the anointing of the Church confirmed its sacred, charismatic authority. Kings were set apart in the eyes of most men by the special pomp and ceremony which surrounded them and which played as important a part in medieval government as does bureaucratic paper in ours. If in addition a king had the advantage of large domains of his own, then he stood an excellent chance of having his way.

Not always in the technical and legal sense, but in common, everyday sense kings and great magnates were the only men who enjoyed much freedom in early medieval society. Yet even they led lives cramped and confined by the absence of much that we take for granted. There was nothing much to do, after all, except pray, fight, hunt and run your estate; there were no professions for men to enter, except that of the Church, and small possibility of innovation in the style or content of daily life. Women’s choices were even more restricted, and so they were for men as one went further down the social scale. Only with the gradual revival of trade and urban life as the economy expanded was this to change. Obviously, dividing lines are of almost no value in such matters, but it is not really until after 1100 that important economic expansion begins, and only then that we have the sense of moving out of a society that was still semi-barbarous, albeit with pretensions to civilization (but no more) over much of the continent.