FEUDAL PARTITION AND CHRISTIAN UNITY Feudalism.—The feudal system (see FEUDALISM), which arose during the 9th century in the Carolingian empire, was based upon the division of the country into very large estates, held by the warrior chiefs, and upon the necessity of their maintaining bands of mounted and armoured soldiers. The soldier was bound to his lord by a ceremony of homage which created a personal bond be tween the lord and his vassal. For his support and the upkeep of these arms the lord gave him horses and servants and a domain with its peasants. The vassal, in exchange, rendered the lord mili tary service and fealty. All lords who bore the title of duke or of count regarded themselves as vassals of the king; the great land owners considered that they held their estates immediately from the king or from some other supreme lord; the fiefs, as these estates are commonly called, from the end of the loth century, became hereditary and the obligation of homage finally amounted to no more than a bare ceremony. The whole country then became divided into fiefs and the owners exercised complete power over their tenants. Europe was divided up into many thousands of in dependent lordships, whose owners behaved as though they were sovereigns. The countryside became covered with fortifications and castles, the seats of different nobles. As in the days before the pax romana, war was again the normal state of Europe.
Originating in France, feudalism finally extended over the whole of Europe with the exception of Russia and the Balkan peninsula, and gave rise everywhere to a similar organization of lay society. In every country there arose an upper class composed of warriors who owned fiefs, divided according to their wealth into: (I) titled princes (in Spain, grandees; in Germany Fiirsten); (2) great lords (in England, barons; in Germany, Herren) ; (3) knights (chevalier or Ritter) . These formed an hereditary aristocracy, to which was added, during the 13th century, the inferior and much more numerous class designated by the vague appellation of gen tlemen (ecuyers, squires, Edelknecht).
The peasants who cultivated the estates of the nobles on a sys tem of fines and corvees, constituted a lower class of little social consequence. The new class of the bourgeois that arose later in the town formed an intermediate class, but the nobles never con sented to regard them as equals. These class divisions were com mon to all countries. Thus, despite the division of political power, the unity of Europe was strengthened through the uniformity be tween the deepest strata of society.
In France the royal title that had been fought for during a century between the Carolingians and the leading families of the district around Paris, after 987 fell into the possession of this family, later known as the Capetians, and finally became heredi tary in it owing to the transmission of the crown without a break from father to son from 987 to 1318. But the king's authority did not run beyond his own royal domain, which was greatly re duced during a century and a half, whereas the dukes and counts who were nominally his vassals, ruled over great territories amounting to States in themselves. Thus the duke of Normandy, even before he had conquered England, was more powerful than the king, and the counts of Anjou (q.v.) who, at the height of their power, possessed the kingdom of England and all the west of France, were for a time incomparably more powerful than the French king. It was not until after Philip Augustus had won from John all the country to the north of the Loire that the royal do main exceeded that of other princes.
In Spain the petty Christian kings of the north, availing them selves of the break up of the Arabian caliphate, extended their authority, at the end of the 11th century, over the centre of the peninsula. The conquest of the south was undertaken along par allel lines by the three kings of Portugal, Castille and Aragon, who succeeded, in the I2th century, in conquering the small Moorish kingdoms of the south with the exception of that of Granada which did not submit until 1492. Each king created a State which formed the nucleus of one of the three nations—Portuguese, Castilians, and Catalans—each speaking its own dialect. (See SPAIN.) Northern and eastern Europe were divided, until the I I th cen tury, among tribes that were still pagan, governed by warrior chiefs, who on their conversion to Christianity, took the title of king. In this way there arose the Scandinavian kingdoms, then the Slav kingdoms of Poland and Bohemia, and the Magyar kingdom of Hungary.
The pope, who had become powerless in the loth century, re gained his authority over the clergy in the 11 th century. In the 12th century he freed himself from the power of the emperor by organizing the college of cardinals; and asserted his authority over the layman by submitting him to ecclesiastical jurisdiction in mat ters of marriage and inheritance, and above all in criminal juris diction against heretics. After the crusade against the Albigenses (q.v.), the pope set up an extraordinary tribunal called the In quisition (q.v.), charged with the extirpation of heresy. The Lateran council, in 1215, imposed upon all princes the duty of exterminating heretics and upon all the faithful, the obligation of confession. Two orders of friars were created—the Franciscans and Dominicans (qq.v.)—who, instead of retiring from the world, lived in the cities among the people and carried on work as preach ers. The uniform system of repression, supervision and preaching, was established in every country in Europe, and thus European unity was set up under the absolute authority of the pope, of ter the model of the imperial Roman system. A Byzantine writer re marked that Pope Innocent III. had become the successor of Caesar rather than of St. Peter (see PAPACY).
The Crusades.—The crusades were an enterprise undertaken in common by the laity and clergy of Europe for the deliverance or defence of the sepulchre of Christ, the object of the veneration of all Europe (see CRUSADES). The pope preached the first crusade and superintended its conduct through a legate ; the other crusades were preached by monks and priests. The princes and the knights assembled their forces for the conquest of the Holy Land. The Italian seaports—Venice, Genoa, Pisa furnished the siege-engines for attacking fortified towns and ships to transport the crusaders. Knights from all the different countries of Europe, united for the first time, learnt to know each other and to organize themselves to work together.
The first result of the crusades was the creation of little ephemeral kingdoms that the Mohammedans were not long in de stroying; the indirect results are still matters of controversy. The z 9th century tended to exaggerate them. There is no longer any means of estimating the part played by the crusades in the social and political evolution of Europe, and we cannot even attribute to them the establishment of commercial relations between Europe and the Levant, nor the introduction into Europe of the industries and arts of Eastern lands like sugar, paper, drugs and articles of luxury. For contact with Arabian civilization had been established on the Mediterranean sea-board through commerce with Moorish Spain, Sicily, Egypt, and the Byzantine empire.
Chivalry and Courtesy.—From the 12th century onwards the knights organized themselves into a close corporation to which no one was admitted except by a ceremony of initiation. Its members were inspired by an esprit de corps and spared each other mutually in battle. They conducted themselves in accordance with the rules of chivalry, which were inspired before all things by the idea of personal honour. The knightly ideal was that of bravery and loyalty and the sanctity of the pledged word. Later still there was added to this the duty of succouring the weak and the op pressed. The customs of chivalry and the knightly ideal permeated throughout Europe and laid the foundations of a common morality for the whole aristocracy of the continent.
The princely courts, where large numbers of noble courtiers lived in close contact, became under feminine influence the centres of that polite usage known as courtesy, which spread gradually into all the European courts and became the model for the whole aristocracy of Europe. Out of this there arose a new member of society—the lady—a personage unknown to antiquity or to the East, and remaining ever since one of the most original character istics of European society. Before the close of the 12th century there arose in the French courts a new relationship between the sexes, the amour courtois, which was founded on a respect dis played towards a lady to which expression was given in the feudal terms of homage and the service of love. From being a court custom this practice passed into the knightly ideal and was dis seminated by means of romances and poetry, under the form of gallantry, amongst the whole aristocracy of Europe. It introduced into European manners, regard and respect for women, and thus helped to raise the condition cf women in European society to a higher level than that attained by them among other Christian societies.
The University of Paris became the centre of international scholarship. To the lectures came scholars and professors from all Europe, and the most celebrated of its teachers were foreigners, like Thomas Aquinas, Albert the German, Duns Scotus from the British Isles, and Raymond Lulle from Spain. The University of Paris furnished the model for those in England, Germany and all the countries of Europe, with the exception of Italy. Thus Europe had attained to a common system of teaching which differed pro foundly from that of antiquity and the East—a system which has persisted to the loth century, with its same peculiar terms (uni versity, faculty, college, rector, bachelor, master, doctor, examina tion, thesis), and even with its academic dress and insignia. It remains the foundation of the intellectual unity of Europe.
Another form of intellectual unity was afforded by arts and letters. Gothic architecture, originating in France in the 12th cen tury, was introduced into all the Roman Catholic countries of Europe and along with Gothic sculpture, prevailed throughout western Europe, down to the end of the 15th century.
Books written in Latin—the international language of Europe— were addressed to a European public. They treated principally of theology and philosophy (see SCHOLASTICISM) and chiefly ema nated from the universities. In common with scholasticism and the universities, they possessed an international character. Books in the vulgar tongue were primarily addressed to a national public. But certain poems written in Romance, lyrics or epics, songs or ballads were translated or imitated in the languages of other European countries. Thus there arose under French inspiration a common European literature, which is the origin of the prose ro mance, the distinctively literary form of Europe.
The Revival of the Towns.—The towns that in ancient days had been the centres of European civilization had been reduced during the dark ages to the condition of small fortified strongholds in which the few inhabitants lived under the absolute authority of, or even in personal service to a lord. By degrees, as the use of money was restored in Europe, the towns reopened their markets and became once more centres of manufacture. The populations increased and became richer and less dependent upon a lord. The merchants organized a transport system chiefly by sea or along the rivers.
The renaissance of the towns began in Italy in the Mediter ranean ports, which had commercial relations with Constantinople and the Arabic countries which were then more civilized than Europe, and it penetrated into France and Germany through the seaports or towns situated on the highways of international com merce. In eastern Europe, which remained agrarian and but half civilized, the towns developed much later and only began in the i4th century to model themselves on those in the more civilized countries, above all Germany, and were inhabited in part by for eigners who brought with them and kept their own customs and languages.
The political organization of the towns widely differed in ac cordance with their degree of independence towards their respec tive lords. Two Italian seaports Venice and Genoa, and Florence, the centre of the woollen industry, were organized as sovereign States governed by an aristocracy of merchants. The towns in Italy and Germany nominally owing allegiance to the emperor, became under the name of "free cities" or "imperial cities" small independent republics which raised their own troops and coined their own money. The towns organized on a communal basis by an association of the citizens under the charter of the lord, ac quired little by little the power of the lord and were governed by a council and elected magistrates. The towns that formed part of the royal domain in England, France and Spain continued to be governed by the king's representatives. A common characteristic of all European towns was the fixing by a written code of the taxes, fines and penalties due from the inhabitants.
The inhabitants of fortified towns received a new name, in Latin burgesses, from the German word burg meaning a fortress. They formed an intermediary class between the nobles and the peasants. For the most part they consisted of artisans who in the northern countries set up corporations for each particular trade (see GILDS), which laid down regulations for its conduct and super vision. Above the mass of the population there existed an aris tocracy of merchants, lawyers and officials which in France finally came to be known by the name of bourgeois.
In Spain the king of Aragon, who had at his command the naval forces of Barcelona, conquered Sicily and Sardinia. The two great kingdoms of the peninsula were united by the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon with Isabella of Castille in 1474—a marriage which led to the establishment of the Spanish monarchy.
In eastern Europe the three Scandinavian kingdoms were united under the sceptre of the Danish king by the Union of 1397. The grand-duchy of Lithuania (q.v.) was united to the kingdom of Poland (q.v.) through the grand duke's marriage in 1387 with Hedwig, the heiress of Poland. Separated from Germany during the Hussite wars Bohemia formed a national State which was united under the same dynasty with the kingdom of Hungary.