THE TOTALITY OF THE PAPAL REVOLUTION

The search for a basic cause of historical change, and the very division of causes into basic causes and secondary causes, may obscure the fact that great revolutions do not occur without the coincidence of a great many different factors.

Thus the Papal Revolution may be viewed in political terms, as a massive shift in power and authority both within the church and in the relations between the church and the secular polities; also it was accompanied by decisive political changes in the relations between western Europe and neighboring powers. The Papal Revolution may also be viewed in socioeconomic terms as both a response and a stimulus to an enormous expansion of production and of trade and to the emergence of thousands of new cities and towns. From a cultural and intellectual perspective, the Papal Revolution may be viewed as a motive force in the creation of the first European universities, in the emergence of theology and jurisprudence and philosophy as systematic disciplines, in the creation of new literary and artistic styles, and in the development of a new social consciousness. These diverse political, economic, and cultural movements may be analyzed separately; yet they must also be shown to have been linked with one another, for it was the linking of them all that constituted the revolutionary element in the situation.

Political changes. The major political shifts in power and authority within the church and in its relations with secular rulers have been described in preceding pages.

For centuries there had been constant military incursions into Europe from the north and west by the Norsemen, from the south by the Arabs, and from the east by the Slavs and Magyars. The whole of Western

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Christendom "was a beleaguered citadel which only survived because its greatest enemy, Islam, had

reached the end of its lines of communication, and its lesser enemies (the Slavs, the Hungarians, and the Vikings) were organized only for raids and for plunder." 20 It was the role of the emperor to mobilize soldiers, especially knights, from among the various peoples of the empire, to resist by military force these pressures from the outside. He also had enemies within_________________________________________________________ to the west the French

kings were not always friendly, and across the Alps the princes of northern Italy were openly hostile. Thus Europe was turned in upon itself, with its main axis running from north to south. At the end of the eleventh century, however, the papacy, which for at least two decades had been urging secular rulers to liberate Byzantium from the infidels, finally succeeded in organizing the First Crusade ( 1096_1099). A second crusade was launched in 1147 and a third crusade in 1189. These first crusades were the foreign wars of the Papal Revolution. They not only increased the power and authority of the papacy but also opened a new axis eastward to the outside world and turned the Mediterranean Sea from a natural defensive barrier against invasion from without into a route for western Europe's own military and commercial expansion. 21_

The crusades had a counterpart in the extensive migration into northern and eastern European territories (the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary, and other regions) which took place in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries.

Socioeconomic changes. Political changes of such magnitude could not have occurred without comparable changes in the economy and in the social structure connected with the economy. Such changes did take place, but it is difficult to determine their relationship to the political changes. In some instances they appear to have been causes, in others conditions, and in still others effects.

The late eleventh and the twelfth centuries were a period of great acceleration of economic development in western Europe. As R.W. Southern has put it, "That moment of self-generating expansion for which economists now look so anxiously in underdeveloped countries came to Western Europe in the late eleventh century." ²² New technological developments and new methods of cultivation contributed to a rapid increase in agricultural productivity and to a consequent expansion of trade in agricultural surpluses in the countryside. ²³ These factors, in turn, facilitated a very rapid increase in population; although reliable figures are scarce, it seems likely that the population of western

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Europe as a whole increased by more than half, and possibly doubled, in the century between 1050 and 1150, whereas in the preceding centuries, under conditions of subsistence agriculture and military invasions, it had remained virtually stationary and at times had even declined. The expanding population spilled over into many hundreds and even thousands of cities and towns that emerged in western Europe for the first time since the decline of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The emergence of cities and towns is perhaps the most striking socioeconomic change of the late eleventh and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The merchant class, which in 1050 had consisted of a relatively few itinerant peddlers, increased sharply in numbers and changed drastically in character in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries, first in the countryside and then in the cities and towns. Commerce overland and overseas became an important aspect of western European economic and social life (as it had been in the eastern Mediterranean, continuously, for over a thousand years). Fairs and markets became important economic and social institutions. Credit, banking, and insurance developed, especially in long-distance trade. Concomitant with the growth of commerce was the growth of manufacture of handicrafts, and this was accompanied by the widespread formation of craft guilds. Often the guilds played a major role in city or town government.

The expansion of commerce and the growth of cities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries have led many twentieth-century economic and social historians, among them Henri Pirenne, to place the origins of Western capitalism in that period.

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manorial system became almost universal in western European agriculture; before then, a substantial percentage of peasants were living in villages as autonomous landholders, working their own land. Also in that period the character of the feudal bond between lord and vassal was substantiall y changed by the introduction of the practice of substituting monetary payments for military and other feudal obligations.

Cultural and intellectual changes. In the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries western Europe experienced not only political and economic explosions but also a cultural and intellectual explosion. This was the time when the first universities were created, when the scholastic method (as it later came to be called) was first developed, when theology and jurisprudence and philosophy were first subjected to rigorous systematization. This period marked the beginning of modern scientific thought. 24

It was also the period of^, transition first to Romanesque and then to Gothic architecture; it was the age when the first great European cathedrals were started -- St. Denis and Notre Dame de Paris, Canterbury and Durham.

This was the age when Latin as a scholarly language was modernized and when vernacular languages and literature began to take their modern form. It was the period of great epic poetry (the Song of Roland, the Arthurian epics) and of courtly lyrics and romances (the writings of Bernard de Ventadour). ²⁵ It was a time of remarkable growth of literacy among the laity, and of the earliest development of national cultural sentiments in most of the countries of western Europe.

Three other basic changes in social consciousness contributed to the transformation of the cultural and intellectual life of the peoples of western Europe in the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries: first, the growth of the sense of corporate identity of the clergy, its selfconsciousness as a group, and the sharp opposition, for the first time, between the clergy and the laity; second, the change to a dynamic concept of the responsibility of the church (considered primarily as the clergy) to reform the world, the saeculum (considered primarily as the lay world); and third, the development of a new sense of historical time, including the concepts of modernity and progress.