WHETHER OR NOT IMAD AL-DIN was exaggerating when he claimed that in 1187, the year of Hattin and the conquest of Jerusalem, Saladin freed 20,000 prisoners and captured 100,000, there is no doubt that the fate of prisoners of war played a considerable role in the diplomacy and political maneuvering of the period. According to Ibn al-Athir, widely acknowledged as the most impartial Muslim historian of the time, Saladin's decision to release some of Count Raymond of Tripoli's knights had materially helped to precipitate the whole dramatic sequence of events:

Whether or not this particular act of Saladin's had quite as much impact as Ibn al-Athir thought, the prisoner question was undoubtedly central to the climax of the Third Crusade: the surrender of Acre on 12 July 1191 and the agreement that the garrison would be freed in return for 1,600 of Saladin's prisoners, the Holy Cross, and a ransom of 200,000 dinars; then, after the breakdown of negotiations, the brutal aftermath: the massacre of the greater part of the garrison on 20 August. No one has demonstrated more effectively than Richard Abels how the ways in which prisoners of war were dealt with can be made to reveal a great deal about a society's norms, values, institutions, and mentalities. Given that the treatment of those defeated in crusading warfare occupied a central place in his 2008 article on cultural representation and the practice of war, I hope that this chapter can serve as a counterpart to that one – especially since, like him, I too have vivid memories of the flow of that conversation between us, Bernard Bachrach and Stephen Morillo, over a sufficiency of beer and curry, to which he attributed the germ of the idea for his paper.

Eadmer of Canterbury's Historia Novorum is a truly remarkable example of the historian's craft: ‘a highpoint of medieval history writing, in terms of method one hardly ever again equalled; in the clear demarcation of the theme and in his carrying it through, Eadmer is far superior to his contemporaries’. This clarity of focus may well derive from the circumstance that, as Martin Rule, the Historia's Rolls Series editor, wrote in 1884, ‘he is less of an historian than a hagiographer’. In other ways too, the Historia is an extraordinary work. As William of Malmesbury noted, ‘Eadmer set down everything so clearly that it all seems to be happening before our very eyes’. In control of material and vivid language, he was unquestionably ‘an artist’.4 But he was an artist in the precarious position of being very close to his hero, Archbishop Anselm. According to William of Malmesbury, ‘after Eadmer had put him to bed, Anselm would not get up, or even turn over in bed, unless Eadmer told him to’.

That in Books V and VI, in which the theme of Canterbury's relations with York became a consuming one, Eadmer ‘took to lying’, is well known. The implication of this judgement is that in Books I to IV, in his treatment of Anselm's archiepiscopate, Eadmer did not lie, or at least not significantly. In his preface to the Vita Anselmi, Eadmer himself, referring to those four books, described the Historia Novorum as a work of ‘uncontroverted truth’ (inconcussa veritate). Indeed, both the Vita Anselmi and the first four books of the Historia Novorum, both in their earliest known versions completed by 1114, have been described as ‘historical sources of exceptional quality and veracity’. They are unquestionably books of exceptional quality. Here I wish to focus on the question of veracity. It is very likely that William of Malmesbury was referring to Eadmer when he wrote of a ‘completely truthful person whom I know well’. But this Eadmer was also the authority for William's acceptance of the notorious Canterbury forgeries as genuine papal documents.

Those historians whose own focus has been on Anselm's life and thought, above all Richard Southern and Sally Vaughn, have on the whole seen Eadmer as a truthful author.

In few spheres is the contrast between the Danish and Norman Conquests greater than in relation to slavery and slave-raiding. The Danish Conquest was followed by the continuation, quite possibly the intensification, of these practices. To say this is emphatically not to endorse the traditional custom, once very strong in Ireland, of blaming heathen Vikings for introducing the good Christian people of Britain and Ireland to ‘bad habits’. Slavery and slave-raiding appear to have been features of nearly all societies around the world ‘since time immemorial’. But it is to accept the likelihood that all sorts of cross-North Sea contacts, including slaving, increased after 1016. I see nothing implausible in William of Malmesbury's assertion, despite its much later date, that Earl Godwine's first wife, Cnut's sister, had made a fat profit through the ‘hideous traffic’ of buying slaves in England, especially young and attractive girls, and selling them in Denmark. By contrast the Norman Conquest was followed by the demise of these practices. True, if Normans had conquered England in 1016, they might well have taken many captives to sell in Normandy, where, as the tale of Moriuht's search for his wife and child reveals, there was still an active market in slaves. On the other hand, had the Danes conquered England in 1066, there is no reason to think they would have presided over slavery's disappearance. According to Adam of Bremen, writing in the 1070s, the Danes of Zealand were still deeply involved in the Baltic slave trade.

If the continuation of customary practice after 1016 seems unproblematic, that is certainly not the case with its discontinuance after 1066. It is ‘very puzzling’, ‘one of the most intractable problems’. While Domesday evidence suggests that, in Essex at least, slave numbers dwindled markedly between 1066 and 1086, no strictly contemporary comment on that stage of the process is known to survive. Given how little written material survives from those twenty years this is hardly surprising. Nonetheless one consequence of the absence of comment is that it is difficult to work out just what the changing number means. The scale and nature of slavery in 1066 are themselves problematic.

In 1227 a priest, known today as Henry of Livonia, finished writing a history of events in his part of the world (the modern Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia) during the previous thirty or so years. His chronicle, by far the best of the written sources for the conquest and conversion of the pagan peoples of the region by military and missionary forces largely coordinated by the recently founded Latin church of Riga, is one of the most important of all sources for the conduct of war in the European Middle Ages. What Henry wrote about sieges and battles is undoubtedly valuable; these encounters were the action highlights of war and as such have long been of interest to medieval chroniclers and modern military historians. But rather less attention has hitherto been paid to what he wrote about the more mundane subject of raiding – almost certainly the most common form of warfare throughout the Middle Ages, and probably throughout most of world history too. As the first European author to describe what previous chroniclers had either disregarded as unremarkable routine or had, in twelfth-century England, treated rhetorically as barbaric atrocity, his insider's account of the early thirteenth-century conquest of Estonia, an unusually dispassionate narrative of raid and counter-raid, offers revealing insights into the obscure subject of the conduct of war in earlier centuries.

Henry and the Church of Riga

Nothing is known about Henry's earlier life apart from what can be inferred from his chronicle. This suggests that, no matter whether his parents were German or not, he was educated in north Germany, perhaps in the Magdeburg region and/or the monastery of Segeberg in Holstein, and that he entered the Baltic region in the service of Albert of Buxtehude, bishop of Riga/Livonia, probably in 1205, the year from which his narrative became noticeably more detailed.3 In 1208 he was made a priest and was sent to minister to the newly-baptized Letts living in the valley of the Ümera (Jumar), a tributary of the river Gauja (Aa), to the northeast of Riga. Here, right on the frontier of Latin Christendom, he was, in his own words, “exposed to many dangers.” In 1211 Estonian raiders burned his church down; in 1223 they plundered or burned his crops, houses, and belongings and stabled their horses in his (by now stone-built?) church.

‘If our Christian faith admitted such a thing’, wrote William of Malmesbury, ‘it might be said that just as the soul of Euphorbus is supposed to have passed into Pythagoras of Samos, so also did the soul of Julius Caesar pass into King William’. This, the concluding sentence of chapter 320 of the Gesta Regum, combining a reference to Julius Caesar with an allusion to Ovid's Metamorphoses, is a spectacular demonstration of Rod Thomson's comment on William of Malmesbury's pen portrait of Rufus: ‘It is a sign of William's particular engagement with his subject that more classical reminiscences are deployed by him in characterising Rufus in the Gesta Regum than any other [person].’ In other ways too William took a great deal of trouble over his characterisation of Rufus. For Heinz Richter, a German student of twelfth-century English historical writing deeply impressed by William's skill in understanding and delineating personality, the portrait of Rufus was his masterpiece. William would surely have been pleased that his characterisation of the king has been identified as ‘the most complete and balanced’ of those composed by the next generation of chroniclers and, in consequence, as the one ‘upon which subsequent historians have primarily relied’. In this essay, however, I shall begin by arguing that nearly all subsequent historians – though not Richter – have overemphasised the darker colours in that portrait, in one case even suggesting that ‘when William talked of Rufus's resemblance to a Roman emperor, Nero might have been a better comparison’.

Without question, William's opinion of the king was far more balanced than Eadmer of Canterbury's. He saw some redeeming features where Eadmer, singlemindedly making his case that Anselm was in no way to blame for the difficulties faced by churches in England, was determined to see none. Although William admired and was influenced by Eadmer's vivid prose, his own values were much more open to the secular world. He not only added much that was in Rufus's favour, but at several key points, he silently disassociated himself from his predecessor's version of events. It has been suggested that the historian was ‘captivated by the king's dry wit.

Introduction: 1199 and All That

Throughout Western Europe, writing of many different kinds became increasingly important for the business of government during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The more routinely that past governments have used the written word, the more advanced they have been thought to be – and the more advanced, the stronger. The development of bureaucratic kingship in England has been a major theme of English historiography, closely linked with what R. R. Davies identified as its ‘informing principle’ – ‘the belief that strong centralized government is a prerequisite of civilized life and human progress’. For English historians of this cast of mind – members of what Tim Reuter called ‘the “Sir Humphrey” school of medieval history’ – the first regnal year of King John (r. 1199–1216), which ran from John's coronation on Ascension day 1199 (27 May) to the eve of Ascension 1200 (17 May), has long enjoyed iconic status. The systematic recording of outgoing documents is widely taken to be a significant indicator of bureaucratic administration, and to all appearances it was in 1199 that the king's secretariat – from about this time sometimes called the ‘chancery’ (L. cancellaria) – began to keep registers in the form of parchment rolls of some of the types of documents which clerks attached to the royal household had long been writing on the kings’ behalf. For V. H. Galbraith, the year 1199 marked ‘the beginning of the deliberate archive-making by the State’, and meant that ‘the sovereign Chancery … could direct and control the administration better than ever before’. The earliest extant roll of charters (solemn grants, often in perpetuity) dates from 1199 (1 John). The earliest extant rolls of letters close (executive writs ordering action to be taken, sent folded and closed with a small blob of wax) date from 1200 (2 John). The earliest extant roll of letters patent (open letters with, like charters, the king's seal hanging from them) dates from 1201 (3 John).

For centuries, the chancery rolls functioned as a principal record of English government: the charter rolls until 1517, the close rolls until 1903, the patent rolls to the present day – a bureaucratic continuity of more than 800 years.

One of the most frequently met generalizations about King John is that he was unfortunate to have lived at a time when those authors who chronicled the events of their own day were churchmen, and that in consequence, above all because of his quarrel with Pope Innocent III, he was doomed to be condemned. ‘Contemporary chroniclers who first sketched King John's character were subject to prejudices or preconceptions that distorted their perceptions. They were churchmen following criteria established by earlier clerical writers for evaluating medieval kings.’ Ralph Turner is in good Protestant company in expressing this view of ‘Papist’ chroniclers. Henry VIII's quarrel with the papacy led to a new and more positive perception of John as an illustrious predecessor of the Tudors. In John Bale's play Kynge Johan (c. 1540) Verity complains of the untruths told by historians. But with the emergence of the cult of Magna Carta in the seventeenth century, John's reputation sank again. For David Hume, John was ‘mean and odious, ruinous to himself and destructive to his people’. In the twentieth century the increasing preference of historians for judicial and financial records led to a tendency to rehabilitate John and a corresponding return to the Protestant view of medieval chroniclers. W. L. Warren, for example, began his lively and deservedly influential book with a chapter entitled ‘The genesis of a sinister reputation’ in which he analysed the differing ways in which chroniclers had treated John and his predecessors. He concluded that the two authors most responsible for ‘the terrible verdict’ on John were two monks of St Albans: Roger of Wendover and, a generation later, Matthew Paris. Admittedly not all chroniclers were monks, and some indeed were critical of the papacy, but since nearly all were ecclesiastics of one sort or another and wrote in Latin, it was easy enough to characterize them as authors who had little or no sympathy for secular values.

Some, however, wrote in French, the language of aristocratic society. Warren mentioned L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, claiming that it ‘assumes a unique importance because it sometimes, but all too rarely, takes us into John's presence’. Yet there is another work, probably written slightly earlier than the biography of the Marshal, also composed in French, and it too sometimes takes us into John's presence: the Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d'Angleterre.

More than a hundred years ago, Ferdinand Lot drew attention to what he called the strange spectacle of Henry II doing homage to Louis VII in 1156: ‘de voir le plus puissant souverain de l'Europe faire hommage de ses possessions continentals au roitelet de Paris’. It was, he felt, difficult to see the reasons for Henry's condescension. This is all the more curious because we have it on the authority of one of the king's own clerks that Henry II thought it inappropriate for a king to do homage. The announcement of the agreement made on 30 September 1174 between Henry and his three eldest sons after the end of their rebellion included the information that the Young King had wanted to do homage to his father, but his father refused to accept it because young Henry was a king (‘quia rex erat’). In the early 1970s Warren Hollister and Tom Keefe made explicit what some earlier historians had implied when they argued that by doing homage for all his continental possessions, Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, Henry ensured that Louis did not support the claims to Anjou made by his younger brother Geoffrey and was thus able rapidly to overcome Geoffrey's resistance. But by that same ritual Henry II became ‘England's first crowned king to do homage to a king of France’. For Hollister, the ‘precedent-shattering’ homage of 1156 ‘marks the death of the Anglo-Norman regnum’.

THE DIFFICULTIES faced when writing biographically do not need rehearsing and are an important theme of this book, especially when the subject is neither a king, queen nor major ecclesiastic. In the case of an author who wrote over a longish period we should, however, at least be able to trace some aspects of the development of an individual mind over time. The fact that Roger of Howden chronicled contemporary events from 1170 to 1201, and in enough detail to fill five Rolls Series volumes, raises these hopes. Moreover the fact that he dealt with the years between 1170 and 1192 twice over, once more or less contemporaneously in the work known as the Gesta regis, and once when he revised his narrative of those years in the Chronica that he began to compose after 1192, means that we are given a further opportunity to see how his ideas and values had, or had not, changed in the intervening years.

But what do we know about his life? If we know very little about that, then we cannot write any sort of biography in the sense of relating his words to his life. William Stubbs, the great editor of his works, wrote: ‘Of the life of the compiler, editor or author of this work, Roger of Hoveden, but few facts are known, and to these I am sorry to confess that I cannot add a single one.’

Europe is shrinking in an expanding world, running in place while others sprint, and glancing sideways instead of looking forward. If things do not soon change, it will not only count for less in the future but miss out on much of the fun. Don't be morose: remarkable events are unfolding in our time. We are witness to the opening and self-realization of cultures, the birth of modern nationhood in various parts of the globe, and the spread of democracy – even on Europe's doorstep. An adaptive and economically robust European Union (EU) of vigorous nation-states can strengthen this global trend and benefit from it. The EU must first be overhauled, however. Having once been a spur to growth, the EU has become a brake on it, which must be released for Europe to prosper.

The world is enjoying the longest sustained growth spurt in history. In 2004 the international economy grew at the fastest rate in fifty years, more than 5 percent. Every region except Africa, parts of the Middle East, and Europe registered robust gains. Today less than a sixth of the world's population lives in poverty, whose eradication now seems within reach. Growth has been breathtaking in China, much of East Asia, and India, impressive in Latin America, and strong in the United States. Europe lagged behind last year at 2.2 percent, less than half the US rate – an improvement, at least, over the 1.4 percent over the past decade and 1 percent in the 1980s.

It almost had to happen. The crisis, which broke out across Europe in early summer 2005 after the French and Dutch people repudiated the proposed federal constitution, had been mounting for years: the European Union (EU) had somehow lost its legitimacy, and no one could do much about it. The EU was never democratic; it had always been a project run by an elite, which in turn justified its existence by results. For most Europeans this was enough. The public had been led to believe that the EU was a new kind of political and economic organization, for which no substitute existed or could be found; it accepted the claim that history had conferred special responsibilities upon this unique institution for directing an irreversible process of development, which would strengthen Europe both morally and materially. This discredited teleology was the foundation of the EU's existence. To save the EU, one must rethink the whole integration process.

The dead certainties of yesterday ring hollow because the EU has long since broken down. The fallout has been widespread. European diplomacy has degenerated into a free for all, revived old grudges, rekindled ancient enmities, and fouled the political atmosphere. Civility has subsequently disappeared. Cooperation, even on simple matters, has become much more difficult. The US-EU friendship has been another casualty. The rise of demagogic public rhetoric and the popularity of a destructive pseudo intellectual literature, on both sides of the Atlantic, strengthen the absurd impression that Americans and Europeans belong to separate and mutually antagonistic civilizations.

The legitimacy crisis currently facing the European Union (EU) may be partly the consequence of human error or even the result of folly, but at the heart of the problem is structural breakdown. For decades, Europeans overlooked the high-handed and spendthrift ways of the Brussels technocracy out of trust, believing that, in spite of it all, over the long run the EU was an indispensable and irreplaceable engine of progress. The public repudiation of the proposed European constitution has shaken this complacent belief to the roots. No matter how emphatic the rejection, the episode is only a symptom of a deeper malady. The EU should no longer be imagined as a nascent political structure suffering teething problems: it is unsound and unraveling. The design is flawed, and the machinery needs repair. Coordination is lacking. There are no clear demarcations between its main institutions – theEuropean Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament (EP) – or between these institutions and powerful affiliated bodies such as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the European Central Bank. The relationship is equally blurry between the public and private spheres, both of which influence policy making. The dense thicket of snarled transnational structures that inextricably binds the twenty-five member states to Brussels is the cause of endless jurisdictional conflict between the central authorities and the states and among the states themselves. One never knows who or what can speak or act in the name of Europe.