Intro of Medieval Europe 500-1500 Book

List of illustrations     ix
List of boxes     xi
Illustration acknowledgements     xiii
Concepts and Interpretive Frameworks     1
The terms 'Middle Ages', 'humanism', 'Renaissance' and 'Reformation'     2
Periods and types of society     3
Regional diversity     5
Which Europe?     6
From scarcity to hegemony     7
Further reading     8
The Roman Legacy     10
Disintegration of the Empire     10
The structure of government     10
A state economy     13
Ruralization     14
The Eastern Roman Empire     15
Justinian     16
Implosion and consolidation     18
Renewed expansion     19
Further reading     20
The Migration Period     22
Waiting for the barbarians     22
Tribes, peoples and ethnogeneses     24
Migrations     26
Backgrounds: push and pull factors     26
Chronology     29
The barbarian kingdoms     32
Barbarian kingship     32
The barbarian kingdoms in the West     33
Segregation orintegration?     35
Proto-nation formation     36
The Arab conquests     37
Further reading     40
Christianity and Islam: The Establishment of Two World Religions     42
The Christian Church in the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages     42
The relationship between emperor and pope     44
Material wealth, accumulation and distribution     45
Church organization     46
The clergy and its tasks     46
Church hierarchy: episcopate and diocese     48
Metropolitans and archbishops, patriarchs and pope     48
Church parishes     49
Church councils     49
Religious doctrine, orthodoxy and heterodoxy     50
Sainthood and saints     53
Monasticism and the monastic life     54
Spreading the faith     56
Missions and conversion     56
Christianization and syncretization     61
Islam     64
Further reading     66
Society and Economy in the Early Middle Ages     69
Early medieval society     69
Transformation: the aristocracy     69
Demotion: the free fighting men     70
Promotion: the slaves     72
Serfdom, lordship over land and the manorial system     73
Trade and gift-exchange     77
Frisians and Vikings     79
Further reading     82
The World of the Franks     84
The Merovingians     84
The origins of the Carolingian dynasty     86
The century of the Carolingians     88
Patrimony and state     91
Honour and blood     91
Vassals and benefices     92
An incipient state     93
The fiction of a united empire     97
Counts and hereditariness     98
Dynamic peripheries     99
Britain     99
Moorish Iberia     100
The Vikings     103
Further reading     105
Accelerated Growth     107
Population growth     107
Volume and nature of agricultural production     107
New forms of authority     112
The 'banal revolution'     112
Regional differences and feudo-vassalic 'packaging'     114
Changes in the surplus extraction. Adjustments in the demesne economy     116
Knights and peasants in the medieval image of society      117
Horsemen become knights     117
Courtly culture: new rules for moving in high circles     119
Tendencies towards classification and separateness     122
Peasants     124
Further reading     126
Religious Renewal and Reform, 1000-1250     128
Aspirations to reform     128
Pope versus emperor: the investiture controversy     128
Papal claims to the highest authority in the world     133
The popes as leaders of the Church     134
Reformation and renewal in monastic life     136
Cluny and the Ecclesia cluniacensis     136
The new orders     139
Vita apostolica and the new spirituality     140
The mendicant orders     141
The faithful become visible     145
God's peace and God's truce     145
Among the believers     146
The creation of a persecuting society     149
Further reading     150
Early Kingdoms and Territorial Principalities, 900-1200     153
The imperial dream     153
East Frankish and West Frankish kingdoms     153
The establishment of the German kingdom     155
The imperial Church      156
Restoration of the emperorship     157
Empire and priesthood     158
The battle on two fronts of the Salian House     159
The Mediterranean ambitions of the Hohenstaufen     160
Italy     163
Emperor and pope     164
Vassal states in central Europe?     165
France: the concentric model     166
The making of England     170
Iberia     173
The institutionalization of the state     177
The dynamics of monarchy     177
Kingship becomes an office     179
Servants of the state     180
A show of strength in Gothic style     182
Further reading     183
Weakening Centres of Power in the East and the Beginnings of European Expansion     186
The West becomes more aggressive     186
Shifting centres of gravity     187
The multicultural East     189
The impulse for the crusades     190
Crusades, crusader states and western colonies in the East     191
The later crusades     196
The spread of faith and colonization     197
Take off to a commercial revolution     200
The transport revolution      202
Progress in organization     203
The commercialization of the countryside     210
Goods and money     212
Further reading     214
The Urbanized Society     217
The phenomenon of the town     217
The scale of towns and of urbanization     217
The morphology of the medieval town     220
Autonomy     222
Urban privileges     222
Public order     224
Public office and common good     227
Social relationships     229
Patrician government     229
Urban society     232
Craft guilds     234
Networks of towns     237
Further reading     239
Thinking About Man and the World     241
A Greek legacy: the medieval view of the world and mankind     241
Universe, earth, man, spirit     241
The heavy burden of auctoritas     243
The higher education programme of late Antiquity in the early Middle Ages     246
The Carolingian renaissance     247
The twelfth-century renaissance: an intellectual revolution?     248
Literati, collectors and translators     249
The revival of Aristotle      250
The influence of the new logic     251
Natural philosophy and metaphysics     254
The formation of universities     254
University scholarship and the intellectual crisis at the end of the thirteenth century     257
University scholarship in action     257
University scholarship in crisis     259
William of Ockham     260
Ockham and the debate about universalia     260
Ockham's theology     262
Aristotle criticized     262
The humanism of the late Middle Ages     264
Studia humanitatis and the new humanism in Italy     264
The new humanism outside Italy     267
Further reading     269
Between Crisis and Contraction: Population, Economy and Society in the Late Middle Ages     271
War, famine and pestilence     271
Famines and subsistence crises     271
The mystery of the Black Death and its echo epidemics     274
The damage and suffering of war     276
Theories on demographic decline and economic development     276
Europe 1300: a society under pressure?     277
The agrarian crisis of the late Middle Ages     278
Symptoms      278
Solutions     279
Economic crisis or contraction?     282
Characteristics of late medieval society     282
Openness and closure     282
The position of women     284
Social contrasts and social conflicts     287
Contrasts between town and country     287
A new 'culture of revolt'?     287
A world of ubiquitous poverty     291
Further reading     293
The Consolidation of States     296
From principality to state     296
Types of sovereign government     296
State-making through warfare     297
The Holy Roman Empire: balance of powers     299
Iberia: kings and cortes     301
Scandinavian dynastic unions     301
Central Europe and the Baltic     302
Driving forces in the formation of states     305
Dynasties, territories, institutions, peoples     305
War     306
State institutions and social order     309
Supreme law courts     309
Bureaucratization     311
Taxation     313
The subjects     317
Balance of powers     320
Contrasts. New empires in the East: Riurikid Russia and the Ottoman Empire     321
Riurikid Russia     321
The formation of the Ottoman Empire     323
Further reading     325
Crisis in the Church and the Reorientation of the Faithful, 1250-1500     328
Who leads Christendom?     328
New ideas on the relationship between spiritual and secular power     330
The popes in Avignon and the bureaucratization of the Curia     332
The Great Schism and the conciliar movement     333
Religious life in the late Middle Ages     334
Observantism and the new secular movements     335
Devotion and mysticism     337
The religious perception of ordinary believers     338
Further reading     343
New Times?     346
Acceleration     346
The medieval roots of modern culture     349
Index     353