God's War: A New History of the Crusades

This applied even to the most centralized state of western Europe, the kingdom of the English. Formed through the tenth-century conquest by the kings of Wessex of their northern neighbours, England developed a distinctive system of government in which public justice, coinage, markets, taxation and defence rested with the royal authority, as did control of the church. The king’s authority was mediated through local officials, a relatively efficient and sophisticated bureaucracy and a dense pattern of aristocratic and noble patronage. In Christian Europe, only in Byzantium had the techniques and institutions of government reached a more complicated and comprehensive form. Yet England’s northern and western frontiers remained uncertain, and the kingdom itself was repeatedly invaded and, in the eleventh century, twice conquered, by the Danes (1013–16) and the Normans (1066–70). The very efficiency of the English government’s capacity to tap the kingdom’s wealth made England an inviting target; the centralization of institutions and power facilitated successful conquest. France could not be conquered by a battle. With only a little exaggeration, England could, a sign of relative strength not, paradoxically, weakness. The European significance of the Norman Conquest can be found in the reorientation of English and hence British Isles politics towards north-west Europe rather than Scandinavia. English money transfused the economy of northern France. Continental habits of religious observance, styles of art and architecture and institutions of scholarship were now open to England and the English. In some instances the confrontation was painful, the imposition of foreign ways on a reluctant and far from culturally inferior conquest. In others, contact was as benign as the millennia of peaceful trade across the English Channel. Along with English wool to feed the cloth factories of Flanders and English scholars attending the new continental universities, notably Paris, the ease of assimilation into the continental European community was recognized by the enthusiastic participation by those who regarded themselves as English, as well as the descendants of their conquerors, in the crusades.

For all its elaborate institutions of government, the English state was created and maintained by armed force. After 1066, England was invaded in 1088, 1101, 1139, 1153, 1216–17; civil wars involving the English king or regent were fought 1087–8, 1100–1106, 1123–4, 1139–53, 1173–4, 1191, 1215–17. Yet warfare provided one building block of statehood. This was equally true of the Scandinavian kingdoms that emerged in the late tenth century from the fragmented politics of the Viking age. Denmark had received Christianity under Harold Bluetooth (950–86) and consolidated its territorial and national identity through conquest, both in the Baltic and across the North Sea. Slightly later, in the early eleventh century, Norway followed a similar pattern of royal conversion, rivalry with Scandinavian neighbours and foreign conquest. In 1066, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England had to defeat a king of Norway before he faced the duke of Normandy. From the twelfth century, crusading provided the Scandinavians with the useful mixture of legitimate war and an ideology of supremacy and colonialism to extend their interests eastwards, the Danes into Estonia and the Swedes into Finland.