This chapter provides a survey of ecclesiastical and monastic organisations and how lay people engaged with them. There was no singular ‘Frankish Church’. There was considerable variation in what people wanted, how the liturgy was arranged, access to church councils and books, and how communities connected to Roman, English, Irish, Spanish, or Byzantine religious worlds. Communities were united by relatively compact beliefs, not least the need for imminent moral reform and penance ahead of an inevitable appearance at Judgement Day – whether it was at hand or far in the future.

In this treatise, Bartolus of Sassoferrato explores the phenomenon of factionalism in the fourteenth-century Italian city republics. He gives an account of the local nomenclature of Guelfs and Ghibellines, relating these labels historically to the papal and imperial camps in the contested region of northern Italy. He explains that, nowadays, such labels have only local relevance, not ideological significance. He then analyses the legality of joining such parties, concluding that if the reason for doing so is to uphold the common good, it is lawful.

The story of Merovingian decline is inexorably linked to that of Carolingian ascent, a coupling that is ubiquitous in the historiographical record. The success of Carolingian propaganda is thus evident in the adoption of its perspective in later works of historiography. While it is now widely held that the death of Dagobert I did not herald the depletion of Merovingian vigor, this view was adopted by numerous post-Carolingian compositions. It is present in the two sources discussed in this chapter, the twelfth-century Chronica of Sigebert of Gembloux and the sixteenth-century Sefer Divrei Hayamim leMalkei Tzarfat uVeit Otoman Hatogar [The Book of the Histories of the Kings of France and the Turkish House of Ottoman] by Yosef Ha-Kohen. Both were composed at considerable remove from the Carolingian period, yet they bear the traces of its historiography’s far-reaching influence. This is especially noticeable in their periodization of the Merovingian era. The chapter will argue that both authors saw the decline of the Merovingian line as a process precipitated by the disastrous reign of Clovis II (d. 657), and that this appraisal influenced their coverage of his successors.

This chapter starts the transition to the period after 1250 and argues that advocacy remained important into the fifteenth century (and later), in part because it was central to debates about imperial and papal authority. Beginning in the twelfth century, both popes and emperors insisted that the German ruler was the special advocate of the Roman Church, but the two sides differed on what this title meant. While the popes asserted that it was the emperor’s responsibility to defend the Church from its enemies and that the popes therefore had a role to play in selecting an able defender, the emperors claimed that as advocates they could exert wide-ranging influence over the Church and even call Church councils when necessary. This conflict not only highlights the inherent fluidity of the role of the advocate centuries after it first appeared but also helps to explain why so many people would continue to want to call themselves advocate during the half-millennium after 1250.

This chapter analyzes the abundant sources that record accusations of violence and other abuses committed by advocates in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. While much of this evidence includes rhetorical flourishes that suggest advocates were barbaric tyrants, a close reading of the sources demonstrates that many advocates employed specific strategies to benefit in corrupt ways from their positions. These included abusing their judicial authority, making excessive demands for protection payments from churches’ dependents and treating ecclesiastical estates like their own property. This chapter also tracks disputes between monasteries and advocates that lasted multiple generations, in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices were deeply rooted in the challenges churches were continuously confronted with when they needed to grant someone else access to their property in order for that person to provide protection and exercise justice.

This chapter focuses on the period between roughly 1050 and 1150, when calls to reform the Church and religious life swept across Europe. The new religious orders that emerged in this period, including the Cistercians, Premonstratensians and Augustinian canons, all sought to limit the influence of secular authorities over their communities. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that – especially in the German-speaking lands – church advocacy was already too entrenched a feature of society for these new orders to ignore it or effectively control it. Someone needed to provide protection and exercise justice over the numerous estates these new foundations were receiving, and nobles had already come to rely on the position of advocate as an effective means of asserting their influence over monasteries and churches. As a result, while Church reformers increasingly sought in this period to regulate and place limits on advocates’ responsibilities, they were unable to prevent high-ranking nobles from accumulating large numbers of church advocacies in their own hands.

This chapter argues that monasteries and churches employed a variety of different strategies to try to counter advocates’ corrupt practices. One of the most popular was forging documents (especially royal privileges) in an effort to alter the terms of their relationships with their advocates. Many ecclesiastics also traveled to the German imperial court or the Papal See in Rome to seek outside support and to request that the ruler or pope remove advocates from their local positions. Requests to the papacy were backed by a growing body of canon law dedicated to the issue of church advocacy. Nevertheless, these strategies were frequently unsuccessful. By the early thirteenth century, it therefore became increasingly common for monasteries and churches to offer their advocates monetary payments in return for those advocates relinquishing all of their rights.

The Romans adaptation of Greek philosophy was illustrated by the Stoics and Epicureans. The Stoics held that humanity is determined by the fates of nature, while the Epicureans believed that happiness came from seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Plato was revived by Plotinus and dominated Roman philosophy during the early years of Christianity. Both the missionary zeal of early Christians and the tranquility of Roman administration rapidly spread Christianity. The teachings of Jesus were bolstered by defenders, who gave Christianity form and content. St. Augustine successfully reinterpreted Platonic thought within Christian theology, and the consequent influence on psychology continued well beyond. With the fall of the Western empire, intellectual life came to a virtual halt, and only the monastic movement preserved remnants of Greek and Roman civilization. The papacy assumed a leading role in spiritual direction and civil administration. The power shift to the East saw the Byzantine Empire assume a distinctive Greek character. The rise of Islam threatened the survival of Christianity in the Middle East and in North Africa. But, at the same time, much of the Greek heritage of scholarship was preserved and extended in the great academic centers of medieval Islam.

With the new millennium, papal power sought to restore Christian rule in the Holy Land through a series of eight crusades, but these campaigns were military and political failures, especially at the expense of the Papacy. However, they did succeed in opening the way for the scholarship of the Islamic world to enter western European intellectual life. With the founding of universities, new scholarship slowly emerged. The pioneering teachings of Pierre Abélard, Roger Bacon, and Albertus Magnus led to a revival of interest in the ancient writers with their emphasis on rational thought to secure human knowledge. This movement, called Scholasticism, reached its pinnacle with the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas who sought a reconciliation of Aristotle’s rationalism and Christian theology. A major implication of Aquinas’ success was the acceptance by scholars within the universities and the Church that both reason and faith serve as sources of human knowledge. William of Ockham extended the Scholastic movement and his predecessor Roger Bacon by presented a law of parsimony in scientific explanation, which in turn laid the foundation of empirical science.

When grave illness compelled rulers to plan for the likelihood of a child’s succession, their chief concern was not that their young son would be passed over as king. Instead, most dying rulers focused on making collaborative arrangements for protecting the kingdom and supporting the child in rule. This chapter examines some of the evidence for the preparations dying kings made as they gathered to their side men and women whose involvement would be crucial for the child’s continuing education and the realm’s administration. The first two sections draw attention to shifts over time in familial attendance at royal deathbeds and in the testamentary records of rulers’ intentions. The actions of kings and queens both before and at their deathbeds suggest hesitancy to impose a wardship model upon royal children, especially upon the new boy king, and this royal reluctance is examined in greater detail in the chapter’s third and final part. Even when it became apparent an infant or child would succeed, kings eschewed entrusting their sons and kingdoms to the care of individual magnates, preferring collaborative arrangements in which the queen often took a prominent role.

This chapter comprises a historical survey of the main religious and societal changes that occurred in the 11th and 12th centuries, including the founding of new religious orders (Cistercians, Augustinian canons).

This chapter explores the scene of conflict with a foreign power in Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the history plays 1 Henry VI, King John, and Henry V, in which war with France provides the testing ground for an exploration of the contrast between foreign and native, or national, values. In these plays, Englishness is largely defined in terms of masculine stoicism and canny tactical knowledge, as opposed to French foppishness. The characterization of the English as providentially favored underdogs up against an overconfident enemy present in Henry V and King John recalls Elizabethan conflicts with Spain and the papacy. Gender identity also factors prominently in Shakespeare’s creation of a sense of the foreign, as he describes England’s island geography as a virginal national space to be defended against invasion. At the same time, Macbeth demonstrates that Shakespeare does not shy away from this conflict between foreign and native on the home front.

I focus on why the competition for power among senatorial, imperial, and military elites that had stimulated the recovery of the city of Rome in the face of multiple civic and military crises no longer was effective in the later sixth and early seventh centuries. The end of Rome’s political senatorial aristocracy and its political body, the Senate, is the final “fall” of Rome. In its place, a papal-focused city dependent on Byzantine military might would emerge in the seventh century.

My focus is on elites who competed for influence in the wake of events that the Romans themselves characterized as “crises.” In narrating these five crises, I emphasize the critical role in Rome of senatorial aristocrats and the slow growth of the influence of the bishops and clergy of Rome, two segments of Roman society whose continued focus on the city provides a key thread through these centuries. Although generals and emperors came and went, the institutionalized presence of the senatorial aristocracy, the Senate, and the church persisted. After each crisis, senators reinvested in the city, fueling its resurgence time and again. The bishops, too, returned to the city to restore Christian communities.

Defining an entity so geographically, culturally and linguistically varied as the Latin west is difficult: despite the spectacular achievements of the Carolingians and Ottonians, fragmentation and plurality prevailed. Smaller political structures proved more durable, and, while the English and French realms gained sharper definition from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on, the western empire became a loose federation headed by secular princes, lesser nobles and urban communities – all setting their own codes of conduct. New polities emerged on Christendom’s margins, adopting some Carolingian and Ottonian norms and administrative practices. The church – especially the papacy from the thirteenth century on – set the tone, holding kings and other secular rulers to account, while universities were both agents of clerical control and breeding grounds of dissent. But the range of participants in the political game was expanding, imposing limits on royal power, bringing access to additional resources and offering a potential counterweight to papal power. This was one of the west’s many paradoxes: strong elements of unity alongside the gravitational pull of many different centres.