God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Rather different demographic and economic patterns survived outside the heartlands of settled communities, around the geographic margins of the region – the Atlantic seaboard, the fringes of the Sahara, the plains, forests, steppes and tundra north of the Black Sea and Carpathian mountains, north and east of the Elbe towards the Arctic Circle – as well as in the areas within the settled regions on the edge of cultivatable land – deserts, mountains, marshes and islands. Many places on the periphery of the region harboured nomadic tribes, shifting Turkish alliances in the Eurasia steppes; Bedouin in the deserts of the Near East; seasonal herdsmen such as the Lapps near and beyond the Arctic Circle. These groups depended on varying degrees of intimacy with their settled neighbours; most of the Bedouin and many of the Turkish nomads had accepted Islam; waves of Turkish invasions from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries into the Balkans and Near East, followed by the Mongols from the Far East in the thirteenth century, highlighted this relationship. Similar mechanisms of exchange between the central lands and the geographic fringes applied to the non-nomadic peoples of northern Europe, Basques, Irish and the Scandinavians commonly known as the Vikings. In northern and north-eastern Europe, paganism flourished and resisted the cultural penetration of Christianity unenforced by commerce or conquest. Christianity (or Islam) was not necessary for the creation of stable cultural and political institutions. The eastern Baltic only began to be converted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Lithuania remained staunchly pagan until the late fourteenth century and then converted on its own terms for political reasons.

The oldest institution in western Europe in the eleventh century, selfconsciously tracing an uninterrupted history back a thousand years, was the papacy. Originally one of five patriarchs of the early church (Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria being the others), the bishop of Rome claimed primacy as the successor to SS Peter and Paul, the guardian of these founding saints’ bones (supposedly buried beneath St Peter’s basilica) and the diocesan of the seat of empire, from the Emperor Constantine (306–37) and the fourth century, a Christian empire. After the Arab invasions of the seventh century, only Rome and Constantinople remained in Christian hands; Jerusalem had fallen to the Muslims in 638. The absence of a western Roman emperor after 476 drew the pope and the eastern, Byzantine, emperor closer together, if in an uneasy relationship. The absence of effective imperial power in Italy had propelled the papacy into a position of temporal authority over the city of Rome and, in theory at least, parts of the central peninsula. Papal spiritual authority was enhanced by its sponsorship of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century and of the Frisians and continental Saxons in the eighth.

In the early eighth century, the Byzantine emperors’ flirtation with Iconoclasm (rejecting the religious efficacy of images, icons, etc.) and their inability to protect Rome and the pope from the Lombard rulers of northern Italy persuaded Popes Gregory III (731–41), Zacharias (741–52) and Stephen II (752–7) to enter into alliances with the Franks, the rulers of a large kingdom that stretched from modern south-west France to the Rhineland and the Low Countries. As part of this new orientation of policy, the papal court (or Curia) concocted the so-called Donation of Constantine, one of the most powerful forgeries in world history only properly exposed in the fifteenth century. This claimed that, on becoming a Christian, the Emperor Constantine surrendered his imperial authority to Pope Sylvester I (314–35), who returned it while retaining pre-eminence over the other patriarchates, theoretical temporal jurisdiction over the western empire and direct rule of Rome, its surrounding region and Italy in general. This forgery formed one basis for the later papal insistence on its claims to a state in central Italy and its wider assertion of primacy over imperial authority in western Europe.