Chapter 9.1 - Land and People in the High Middle Ages

• At the same time, the European population experienced a dramatic increase, virtually doubling between 1000 and 1300, from 38 million to 74 million people.

• This rise in population was physically evident in the growth of agricultural villages, towns, and cities and the increase in arable land. During the High Middle Ages, significant changes occurred in the way Europeans farmed.

• Although the warmer climate played an underlying role by improving growing conditions, another factor contributing to the increased production of food was the expansion of arable land, achieved chiefly by clearing forested areas for cultivation.

• By the thirteenth century, the total acreage available for farming in Europe was greater than at any time before or since.

• Many of these depended on the use of iron, which was mined in various areas of Europe and traded to places where it was not found.

• The plow of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds had been the aratrum , a nonwheeled, light scratch plow made mostly of wood that was sufficient to break the top layer of the light soils of those areas.

• The carruca, a heavy, wheeled plow with an iron plow-share, came into widespread use by the tenth century.

• It could turn over heavy soils and allow them to drain.

• Because the carruca was so heavy, six or eight oxen were needed to pull it, but the oxen were slow.

• In the tenth century, a new horse collar appeared that distributed the weight around the shoulders and chest rather than the throat and could be used to hitch up a series of horses, enabling them to pull the new heavy plow faster and cultivate more land.

• The use of horseshoes, iron shoes nailed to a horse’s hooves, produced greater traction and better protection against the rocky and heavy clay soils of northern Europe.

• The use of the heavy, wheeled plow also led to cooperative agricultural villages.

• People in the High Middle Ages also learned to harness the power of water and wind to do jobs formerly done by humans or animals. Although the watermill had been invented as early as the second century B., it did not come into widespread use until the High Middle Ages.

• The Chinese had made use of the cam in operating trip-hammers for hulling rice by the third century C.

• In either case, by the end of the twelfth century, they were beginning to dot the European landscape.

• The watermill and windmill were the most important devices for harnessing power before the invention of the steam engine in the eighteenth century.

• As a sacrament, marriage was intended to last for a lifetime and could not be dissolved.

• In certain cases, however, the church allowed married persons to separate by granting them an annulment or official recognition that their marriage had not been valid in the first place.

• If it could be established that the couple had not consented to the marriage, that one or the other suffered from a sexual incapacity that prevented the consummation of the marriage, or that the couple was related by blood, the church would approve an annulment of their marriage, and the partners would be free to marry again.

Chapter 9.2 - The New World of Trade and Cities

• During the chaotic conditions of the Early Middle Ages, large-scale trade had declined in western Europe except for Byzantine contacts with Italy and the Jewish traders who moved back and forth between the Muslim and Christian worlds.

• By the end of the tenth century, however, people with both the skills and the products for commercial activity were emerging in Europe.

• By 1100, Italian merchants began to benefit from the Crusades and were able to establish new trading centers in eastern ports.

• There the merchants obtained silks, sugar, and spices, which they subsequently carried back to Italy and the West.

• In the High Middle Ages, Italian merchants became even more daring in their trade activities.

• They established trading posts in Cairo, Damascus, and a number of Black Sea ports, where they acquired goods brought by Muslim merchants from India, China, and Southeast Asia.

• A few Italian merchants even journeyed to India and China in search of trade.

• While the northern Italian cities were busy trading in the Mediterranean, the towns of Flanders were doing likewise in northern Europe.

• Flanders, the area along the coast of present-day Belgium and northern France, was known for the production of much-desired high-quality woolen cloth.

• Flanders’s location made it a logical entrepot for the traders of northern Europe. Merchants from England, Scandinavia, France, and Germany converged there to trade their wares for woolen cloth.

• To encourage this trade, the counts of Champagne in northern France devised a series of six fairs held annually in the chief towns of their territory.

• The fairs of Champagne became the largest commercial marketplace in western Europe where the goods of northern Europe could be exchanged for the goods of southern Europe and the East.

• Northern merchants brought the furs, woolen cloth, tin, hemp, and honey of northern Europe and exchanged them for the cloth and swords of northern Italy and the silks, sugar, and spices of the East.

  The Growth of Cities

• The revival of trade led to a revival of cities. Merchants needed places where they could live and build warehouses to store their goods.

• Towns had greatly declined in the Early Middle Ages, especially in Europe north of the Alps.

• Old Roman cities continued to exist but had dwindled in size and population.

• With the revival of trade, merchants began to settle in these old cities, followed by craft workers or artisans, people who had developed skills on manors or elsewhere and now perceived the opportunity to ply their trade producing objects that could be sold by the merchants.

• In the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the old Roman cities came alive with new residents.

• Usually, a group of artisans and merchants established a settlement near some fortified stronghold, such as a castle or monastery.

• Most towns were closely tied to their surrounding territories because they were dependent on the countryside for their food supplies.

• The revival of trade enabled cities and towns to become important centers for manufacturing a wide range of goods, such as cloth, metalwork, shoes, and leather goods.

• A host of crafts were carried on in houses along the narrow streets of the medieval cities.

• From the twelfth century on, merchants and artisans began to organize themselves into guilds, which came to play a leading role in the economic life of the cities.

• By the thirteenth century, virtually every group of crafts-people, such as tanners, carpenters, and bakers, had their own guild, and specialized groups of merchants, such as dealers in silk, spices, wool, or banking, had their separate guilds as well.

• Florence alone had fifty different guilds.

• Some communities were so comprehensive in covering all trades that they even had guilds for prostitutes.

• Craft guilds directed almost every aspect of the production process.

• They set standards for the articles produced, specified the methods of production to be used, and even fixed the price at which the finished goods could be sold.

• Guilds also determined the number of individuals who could enter a specific trade and the procedure they must follow to do so.

• After five to seven years of service, during which they learned their craft, apprentices became journeymen who then worked for wages for other masters.

• To do so, a journeyman had to produce a ‘‘masterpiece,’’ a finished piece in his craft that allowed the master craftsmen of the guild to judge whether the journeyman was qualified to become a master and join the guild.

• Craft guilds continued to dominate manufacturing in industries where raw materials could be acquired locally and the products sold locally.

• It was particularly evident in the ‘‘putting-out’’ or domestic system used in the production of woolen cloth in both Flanders and northern Italy.

• An entrepreneur, whose initial capital outlay probably came from commercial activities, bought raw wool and distributed it to workers who carried out the various stages of carding, spinning, weaving, dyeing, and fulling to produce a finished piece of woolen cloth.

• The entrepreneur collected the final products and sold the finished cloth, earning a profit that could then be invested in more production.

• Woolen industries operated by capitalist entrepreneurs in seventeen principal centers in northern Europe, mostly in Flanders, produced most of the woolen cloth used in northern Europe.

• An Italian chronicler at the beginning of the fourteenth century estimated that the woolen industry in Florence produced 80,000 pieces of cloth a year and employed 30,000 men, women, and children, usually at pitiful wages.

Chapter 9.3 - The Intellectual and Artistic World of the High Middle Ages

• The university as we know it with faculty, students, and degrees was a product of the High Middle Ages.

• The word university is derived from the Latin word Universitas , meaning a corporation or guild, and referred to either a guild of teachers or a guild of students.

• The most famous were Chartres, Reims, Paris, Laon, and Soissons, all in France, which was the intellectual center of Europe by the twelfth century.

• The first European university was founded in Bologna, Italy, and coincided with the revival of interest in Roman law, especially the rediscovery of Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis.

• In the twelfth century, Irnerius, a great teacher of Roman law in Bologna, attracted students from all over Europe.

• To protect themselves, students at Bologna formed a guild or Universitas, which was recognized by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and given a charter in 1158.

• Although the faculty also organized itself as a group, the Universitas of students at Bologna was far more influential.

• It obtained a promise of freedom for students from local authorities, regulated the price of lodging, and determined the curriculum, fees, and standards for their masters.

• The University of Bologna remained the greatest law school in Europe throughout the Middle Ages.

• In northern Europe, the University of Paris became the first recognized university.

• A number of teachers or masters who had received licenses to teach from the cathedral school of Notre Dame in Paris began to take on extra students for a fee.

• By the end of the twelfth century, these masters teaching at Paris had formed Universitas guild of masters.

• By 1200, the king of France, Philip Augustus, officially acknowledged the existence of the University of Paris.

• The University of Oxford in England, organized on the Paris model, first appeared in 1208.

• A migration of scholars from Oxford in 1209 led to the establishment of Cambridge University.

  The Gothic Cathedral

• Two fundamental innovations of the twelfth century made Gothic cathedrals possible.

• The combination of ribbed vaults and pointed arches replaced the barrel vault of Romanesque churches and enabled builders to make Gothic churches higher than their Romanesque counterparts.

• Another technical innovation, the flying buttress, a heavy arched pier of stone built onto the outside of the walls, made it possible to distribute the weight of the church’s vaulted ceilings outward and downward and thereby eliminate the heavy walls used in Romanesque churches to hold the weight of the massive barrel vaults.

• Thus, Gothic cathedrals could be built with thin walls that were filled with magnificent stained-glass windows, which created a play of light inside that varied with the sun at different times of the day.

• Medieval craftspeople of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries perfected the art of stained glass.

• The first fully Gothic church was the abbey church of Saint-Denis near Paris, which was built between 1140 and 1150 at the inspiration of Suger, the famous abbot of the monastery from 1122 to 1151.

• This French Gothic style was seen most brilliantly in cathedrals in Paris , Reims, Amiens, and Chartres. A Gothic cathedral was the work of an entire community.

• Master masons who were both architects and engineers designed the cathedrals.

• The building of cathedrals often became highly competitive as communities vied with one another to build the highest tower, a rivalry that sometimes ended in disaster.

• The cathedral of Beauvais in northern France collapsed in 1284 after reaching the height of 157 feet. Gothic cathedrals also depended on a community’s faith.

• After all, it often took two or more generations to complete a cathedral, and the first generation of builders must have begun with the knowledge that they would not live to see the completed project.

• Most important, a Gothic cathedral symbolized the chief preoccupation of a medieval Christian community, its dedication to a spiritual ideal.

• The Gothic cathedral, with its towers soaring to-ward heaven, gave witness to an age when a spiritual impulse still underlay most of existence.