The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350

"I have to say that this is a rather odd choice. It doesn’t normally appear on reading lists for the Crusades, and I’m being slightly cheeky by putting it in. But what this book does do—and, in my view, much better than any of its rivals—is explain the Latin Western environment from which crusading emerged. It describes how the heartlands of Europe produced a warrior aristocracy: figures who can be described as ‘of slender means but with a big appetite.’ These warriors headed out from the centre to the peripheries to seize new lordships for themselves—and, in fact, this happened regardless of the faith that was held in some of these locations. “These warriors actually made the whole of the Latin world much more homogenous” What’s interesting about all this is that, in the course of the process, these warriors actually made the whole of the Latin world much more homogenous. By the end of the process, Latin Christendom had far more in common than it did at the start: not just in terms of characteristic religious practices, but also in spheres like government, warfare and trade. Bartlett is particularly strong on the subject of naming patterns. Why is that, across the whole of Europe, you find people called things ‘William’, ‘Robert’ and ‘John’? It is because these names became the standard currency of the medieval West, spreading as the region became much more homogenous. In short: this book has shaped my own studies much more than any other work. I’m really interested in social and geographical mobility—both up and down the ladder and across vast distances. I was never able to explain very much of this before I looked at this book, and that’s why I recommend it so highly. You’re certainly putting me on the spot there! One of the principal trends in medieval studies , over the course of the last thirty years, has been to move away from an excessive French focus—from the idea that France was somehow ‘the norm’, and everything else was wrong. But I suppose I still believe in an old ‘Frankish’ core: the territories of the old empire as run by Charlemagne , which included what is now France, the Low Countries, Germany and northern Italy. That’s the Western European bloc, and it was from there, more than anywhere else, that warriors pushed out into regions like Spain, the British Isles, southern Italy and Sicily, the Baltic and the Holy Land. Some of them were. The crucial point to remember is that some form of violence was almost always happening along Latin Christendom’s frontiers. Quite often, these forms of violence could have a highly significant religious and/or ideological tinge. It is these more loaded encounters that could most easily be converted into full-scale holy wars or crusades. But they remain very complex, for all that. For example, the crusades in the Baltic—which, at times, became almost genocidal—were simple opportunities for plunder, and culture wars, religious wars, all at the same time. In other words, it was possible to try to get rich, and promote Germanisation and Christianity , all as a sort of package. Needless to say, though, it wasn’t always comfortable how those various elements held together. You’re exactly right. One of the key critiques that some scholars make of this book is that Bartlett’s starting date is the year 950. A lot of historians would say that the processes that you are describing are simply what Charlemagne was doing, 150 years earlier, so as to build his own empire. The basic message—which the book says explicitly at its close—is that Europe was not just the driver of one of the world’s great processes of conquest, colonisation and cultural change. It was also the product of one. But it is certainly arguable that the latter process began well before 950."