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A New Civilization Emerges in Western Europe Author: Stearns, Peter N.;Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B. Date: 1992 Economy And Society In The Postclassical Centuries While culture provided the clearest cement for Western society during the medieval centuries, framed of course by the institutional sweep of the Catholic church, a number of common features also described economic activity and social structure. Here too, the postclassical West demonstrated impressive powers of innovation, for the hold of classical patterns was slight. As trade revived by the 10th century, the West became something of a common commercial zone. Most regions produced primarily for local consumption, as was true in agricultural societies generally. But Italian merchants actively sought cloth manufactured in the Low Countries, and merchants in many areas traded for wool grown in England or timber supplies and furs brought from Scandinavia and the Baltic lands. Great ports and trading fairs, particularly in the Low Countries and northern France, served as centers for Western exchange, as well as markets for a few exotic products such as spices brought in from other civilizations. Furthermore, despite great diversity in local detail, something of a common spirit and some common institutions developed in medieval social and economic life, and these in turn expressed important features of the larger civilization of the postclassical West. Western thinkers of this time liked to picture their society in rather simple terms, not unlike the metaphors of classical India. Borrowing from classical Greek and Roman concepts, John of Salisbury, an English churchman, likened society to the human body: Peasants were the feet, without which society could not function. Knightly warriors were the hands, to defend. Priests provided heart and soul, and the king was the head. Each part was essential, but each fit into a clear hierarchy in which lower segments were properly ruled by those above. Except for priests, most people were born into their status, with privileges or limits legally defined. In fact, postclassical Western society was more complicated, and it evolved toward ever-greater complexity. The West did not develop a caste system, despite the emphasis on inherited positions, for there was always some mobility and creation of new groups. The landlord-serf relationship, which was both political and economic, remained crucial, but it tended to change considerably as peasants gained greater freedom of maneuver. Even under powerful landlords, rural villages regulated agriculture and controlled some land for common use, giving a strong community flavor to peasant life. Some peasants began producing for sale to urban markets, thus generating tensions with village traditions as well as with landlord control. As in most agricultural societies, economic demands conditioned family life, as families formed the chief units of agricultural production. Choosing a spouse who was a good worker and winning an appropriate dowry or inheritance were vital ingredients of family life - and marriages, typically arranged by parents, placed economic criteria above all else. Children were expected to work at an early age, while adult men and women roughly divided labor between field and household. Agricultural Change The improvements in agriculture after A.D. 800 brought important new ingredients to rural life. Some peasants were able to shake off the most severe constraints of manorialism, becoming almost free farmers with only a few obligations to their landlords, though rigid manorialism remained in place in many areas. Noble landlords still served mainly military functions, for ownership of a horse and armor were prerequisites for fighting until the end of the medieval period. But while most nobles shunned the taint of commerce - like aristocrats in many societies, they found too much money-grubbing demeaning - they did use trade to improve their standard of living and adopt more polished habits. The courtly literature of the late Middle Ages reflected this new style of life. As many lords sought improved conditions, they were often tempted to press their serfs to pay higher rents and taxes - even as serfs themselves were gaining a new sense of freedom and control over their own land. This tension produced, from the late Middle Ages until the 19th century, a recurrent series of peasant-landlord battles in Western society. Peasants sought what they viewed as their natural and traditional right to the land, free and clear of any exactions. They talked of Christian equality, turning phrases such as "When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then a gentleman?" A more complex economy clearly brought new social strains, not totally unlike the recurrent wave of popular unrest in China or the rural risings in the Middle East, where religion helped prompt egalitarian sentiments as well. Yet on the whole the conditions of Western peasants improved during the most dynamic part of the Middle Ages. Landlord controls were less tight than they had become in other societies such as the Middle East. Western agriculture was not yet particularly advanced technologically, compared for example with East Asia, but it had improved notably over early medieval levels and also surpassed the productivity of the classical Mediterranean world. Cities And Commerce Gains in agriculture of course promoted larger changes in medieval economic life. Urban growth allowed more specialized manufacturing and commercial activities, which in turn promoted still greater trade. Banking was introduced to the West, spearheaded by Italian businessmen, to facilitate long-distance exchange of money and goods. The use of money spread steadily, to the diimay of many Christian moralists and many ordinary people who preferred the more direct, personal ways of traditional society. The largest trading and banking operations, not only in Italy but in southern Germany, the Low Countries, France, and Britain, were clearly capitalistic. Big merchants invested funds in trading ships and the goods they carried, hoping to make large profits on this capital. Profit making was not judged kindly by Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, who urged that all prices should be "just," reflecting only the labor put into the good; but it clearly, sometimes avidly, occurred. Rising trade took a number of forms. There were exchanges between western Europe and other parts of the known world. Wealthy Europeans developed a taste for some of the spices and luxury goods of Asia; the Crusades played a role in bringing these products to wider attention. A Mediterranean trade redeveloped, mainly in the hands of Italian merchants, in which European cloth and some other products were exchanged for the more polished goods of the East. Commerce within Europe involved exchanges of timber and grain from the north for cloth and metal products manufactured in Italy and the Low Countries. England, at first an exoorter of raw wool, developed some manufactured goods for exchange by the later Middle Ages. Commercial alliances developed. Cities in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia grouped together in the Hanseatic League to encourage trade. With growing banking facilities, it became possible to organize commercial transactions throughout much of western Europe. Bankers, including a number of Jewish businessmen, were valued for their service in lending money to monarchs and the papacy. The growth of trade and banking in the Middle Ages served as the genesis of capitalism in Western civilization. The greater Italian and German bankers, the long-distance merchants of the Hanseatic cities, were clearly capitalistic in their willingness to invest considerable sums of money in trading ventures with the expectation of substantial profit. Given the continued dangers of trade by land and sea, the risks in these investments were substantial, but profits of up to 100 percent or more were also possible. In many cities, such as London, groups of powerful merchants banded together to invest in international trade, each buying shares in the venture and profiting or losing accordingly. This was not, by world standards, a totally unprecedented merchant spirit. European traders were still less venturesome and less wealthy than some of their Muslim counterparts. Nor was Western society yet as tolerant of merchants as Muslim or Indian societies. Yet Western commercial endeavors were clearly gaining in dynamism. Because Western governments were weak, with few economic functions, merchants had a freer hand than in many other civilizations. Many of the growing cities, in particular, were ruled by commercial leagues. Monarchs liked to encourage the cities as a counterbalance to the power of the landed aristocracy, and, in the later Middle Ages and beyond, traders and kings were typically allied. However, aside from taxing merchants and using them as sources of loans, royal governments did not interfere extensively with trading activities. Merchants even developed their own codes of commercial law, administered by city courts. Thus the rising merchant class, though not unusual in strength or venturesomeness, was staking out an unusually powerful and independent role in European society. Capitalism was not yet typical of the Western economy, even aside from the moral qualms fostered by the Christian tradition. Most peasants and landlords had not become enmeshed in a market system. In the cities, the dominant economic ethic stressed group protection, not untrammeled profit seeking. The characteristic institution was not the international trading firm, but the merchant or artisan guild. Guilds grouped people in the same business or trade in a single city, sometimes with loose links to similar guilds in other cities. These organizations were new in western Europe, though they resembled guilds in various parts of Asia but with greater independence from the state. They stressed security and mutual control. Merchant guilds thus sought to assure all members a share in any endeavor. If a ship pulled in loaded with wool, the clothiers' guild of the city insisted that all members participate in the purchasing, so that no one member would monopolize the profits. Artisan guilds were composed of the people in the cities who actually made cloth, bread, jewelry, or furniture. These guilds tried to limit membership so that all members would be assured of work. They regulated apprenticeships, to guarantee good training but also to make sure that no member would employ too many apprentices and so gain undue wealth. They discouraged new methods because security and a rough equality, not maximum individual profit, were the goals; here was their alternative to the capitalistic approach. Guilds also tried to guarantee good workmanship, so that consumers would not have to worry about shoddy quality on the part of some unscrupulous profit seeker. Guilds played an important political and social role in the cities, assuring their members of recognized status and, often, a voice in city government. Their statutes were in turn upheld by municipal law and were often backed by the royal government as well. Despite the traditionalism and security-mindedness of the guilds, manufacturing as well as commercial methods did improve in medieval Europe. Western Europe was not yet as advanced as Asia in iron making or textile manufacture, but it was beginning to catch up. In a few areas, such as clock making - which involved both sophisticated technology and an interesting concern for precise time - European artisans in fact had forged a world lead. Furthermore, some manufacturing spilled beyond the bounds of guild control. Particularly in the Low Countries and parts of Italy, groups of manufacturing workers were employed by capitalists to produce for a wide market. Their techniques were simple, and they worked in their own homes, often alternating manufacturing labor with agriculture. Their work was regulated not by the motives of the guilds but by the inducements of merchant capitalists, who provided them with raw materials and then paid them for their production. The simple fact was that, by the later Middle Ages, western Europe's economy and society embraced a number of contradictory groups and principles. Commercial and capitalist elements joined against the slower pace of economic life in the countryside and even against the dominant group protectionism of most urban guilds. Most people remained peasants, but a minority had escaped to the cities where they found more excitement, though also increased danger and higher rates of disease. Medieval tradition held that a serf who managed to live in the city for a year and a day became a free person. A few prosperous capitalists flourished, but most people operated according to quite different economic values, directed toward group welfare rather than individual profit. This was not either a static society or an early model of a modern commercial society. It had its own flavor, and its own tensions - the fruit of several centuries of economic and social change. Women And Family Life The increasing complexity of medieval social and economic life may have had one final effect which is familiar from patterns in other agricultural societies: setting new limits on the conditions of women. Women's work remained of course vital in most families. Christian emphasis on the equality of all souls, and the practical importance of monastic groups organized for women, giving some an alternative to marriage, continued to offer distinctive features for women's lives in Western society. The veneration of Mary and other female religious figures gave women real cultural prestige, counterbalancing the Biblical emphasis on Eve as the source of human sin. In some respects women in the West had higher status than their sisters under Islam: They were less segregated in religious services (though they could not lead them) and less confined to the household. Still, women's effective voice in the family may have declined in the Middle Ages. Urban women often played important roles in local commerce and even operated some craft guilds, but they found themselves increasingly hemmed in by male-dominated organizations. By the late Middle Ages a literature arose that stressed women's roles as the assistants and comforters to men, listing supplemental household tasks and docile virtues as women's distinctive sphere. Patriarchal structures seemed to be taking deeper root. The Political Values Of The Middle Ages The key values and tensions of medieval society and culture were expressed in characteristic styles and institutions: the Gothic cathedral, the scholastic Summas, the manors, and the guilds. Medieval politics produced a similar summary expression in the feudal monarchy as it flowered during the High Middle Ages. There was, to be sure, greater basic diversity in medieval politics than in social or cultural forms, and feudal monarchy by no means took hold universally across Western society. However, some of the principles this institution captured were more widely held, wherever feudalism evolved to permit somewhat more centralized governing structures, in duchies or other regional states as well as the more eye-catching kingdoms like England and France. In addition to its unusual, sometimes overwhelming chaos, the early postclassical West developed a number of implicit political principles that were carried over, though also modified, when more sophisticated government structures began to emerge with the rise of monarchies. Principle number one, clearly articulated in Church writings, held that laws of God were superior to those of humans. The Church, as an instrument of God, was separate from the state and in some ways above it, even though in the rough and tumble of actual medieval politics secular rulers often seized the upper hand. Principle number two involved the ineradicable local and regional divisions. Effective imperial governments could not be formed, as the collapse of Charlemagne's empire demonstrated; the West would be politically divided. Even regional governments had to recognize the strength of the local interests and power clusters. Principle number three, closely related to the impediments to centralization, involved the values embodied in feudalism. Feudal bonds - the relationships between lords and vassals - stressed mutuality. Each party in the relationship should contribute, each should gain. Vassals received protection and, usually, land (the fief or feudum, from which feudalism took its name) from their lord; lords won some payments, military service, and loyalty from their vassals. While feudalism permitted hierarchy among lords, it did not permit, at least in theory, unilateral assertions of power. It also encouraged mutual consultation. Vassals were supposed to advise their lords on judicial matters or issues of policy; lords were supposed to consult their vassals, rather than acting arbitrarily. Unadulterated feudalism might of course function very badly. For all the high-sounding principles, there was a great deal of outright bullying and power display among the local lords during the postclassical period, quite apart from ill treatment of the masses of ordinary serfs who were underneath the feudal system. Effective government required some modifications of feudalism. Yet feudalism could be blended with other political systems, without losing many of its distinctive features. Monarchy And Its Limits The new ingredient in medieval politics, as medieval society developed greater vigor from the 10th century onward, was of course the growth of royal power (or in some regions such as much of present-day Belgium, ducal power). Here the key steps are in many ways familiar, for they duplicateo, unwittingly, the centralization principles developed earlier and more extensively in China and elsewhere. Medieval kings followed particular patterns of alliances and gradual aggrandizement because of their initially weak positions, and there were important specific events involved such as the Norman Conquest of England. Centralization is centralization, however, and though often reinvented it has some standard features. Thus, as they began to expand their resources and aspirations, medieval kings developed small armies of their own, paid for by lands under their direct control, and they ventured a small central bureaucracy. Often they chose urban business or professional people to serve in this bureaucracy, partly because such people had expertise in financial matters and partly because, unlike the aristocracy, they would owe allegiance to the crown alone. French and English monarchs began to introduce bureaucratic specialties, so that some of their ministers would handle justice, others finance, and still others military matters. They found ways to send centrally appointed emissaries to the provinces to supervise tax collection and the administration of justice. It was in this vein that English kings, from the Norman Conquest onward, appointed local sheriffs to oversee the administration of justice. None of these activities gave the monarchs extensive contacts with ordinary subjects; for most people, effective governments were still local. Once the principle of central control was established, however, a steady growth of state-sponsored rule followed. By the end of the Middle Ages, monarchs were gaining the right to tax their subjects directly, and they were beginning to recruit professional armies, instead of relying solely on an aristocratic cavalry whose loyalties depended on feudal bonds or alliances. Several medieval kings, such as Louis IX in France, also gained solid reputations as law givers, which allowed a gradual centralization of legal codes and court systems. Rediscovery of Roman law in countries like France encouraged this centralization effort. Feudal monarchy was always a delicately balanced institution, of which the central government formed only one of the key ingredients. The power of the Church served to check royal ambitions. As we have seen, the Church could often win in a clash with the state by excommunicating rulers and thus threatening to turn the loyalties of the population against them. Although the Church entered a period of decline at the end of the Middle Ages, the principle was rather clearly established that there were areas of belief and morality not open to manipulation by the state. And during most of the Middle Ages, the sheer authority of church organization and religious doctrine made this limitation on royal power a telling reality. The second limitation on the royal families came from the traditions of feudalism and from the landed aristocracy as a powerful class. Aristocrats tended to resist too much monarchical control in the West, and they had the strength to make their objections heard. These aristocrats, even when vassals of the king, had their own economic base and their own military force - sometimes, in the case of great nobles, they had an army greater than that of the king. The growth of the monarchy cut into aristocratic power, but this led to new statements of the limits of kings. In 1215 the unpopular English king John faced opposition to his taxation measures from an alliance of nobles, townspeople, and church officials. Defeated in his war with France and then forced down by the leading English lords, John was forced to sign the Great Charter, or Magna Carta, which confirmed basically feudal rights against monarchical claims. John promised to observe restraint in his dealings with the nobles and the Church, agreeing for example not to institute new taxes without the lords' permission or to appoint bishops without the Church's permission. A few modern-sounding references to general rights of the English people against the state that were included in Magna Carta largely served to show where the feudal idea of mutual limits and obligations between rulers and ruled could later expand. This same feudal balance led, late in the 13th century, to the creation of parliaments as bodies representing not individual voters but privileged groups such as the nobles and the Church. The first full English parliament convened in 1265, with the House of Lords representing the nobles and the church hierarchy, and the Commons made up of elected representatives from wealthy citizens of the towns. The parliament institutionalized the feudal principle that monarchs should consult with their vassals. In particular, parliaments gained the right to rule on any proposed changes in taxation; through this power, they could also advise the crown on other policy issues. While the parliamentary tradition became strongest in England, similar institutions arose in France, Spain, and several of the regional governments in Germany. Here too, parliaments represented the key estates: Church, nobles, and urban leaders. They were not widely elected. Feudal government was not modern government. People had rights according to the estate into which they were born; there was no general concept of citizenship and no democracy. Thus parliaments represented only a minority, and even this minority only in terms of the three or four estates voting as units (nobles, clergy, urban merchants, and sometimes wealthy peasants), not some generalized collection of voters. Still, by creating a concept of limited government and some hint of representative institutions, Western feudal monarchy produced the beginnings of a distinctive political tradition. This tradition differed from the political results of Japanese feudalism, which emphasized group loyalty more than checks on central power. During the postclassical period, a key result of the establishment of feudal monarchy was a comparatively weak central core; although several monarchies gained ground steadily, they wielded very few general powers. This would change, as kings attained far more extensive powers in military affairs, cultural patronage, and the like. However, some solid remnants of medieval traditions, embodied in institutions like parliaments and ideas like the separation between God's authority and state power, would define a basic thread in the Western political process even in the later 20th century. A project by History World International
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