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  1. Home
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  3. The New Cambridge Medieval History
  • Cited by 6
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1999
Online ISBN:
9781139055734
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521362894
Subjects:
Area Studies, European History 1000-1450, British History: General Interest, History, European Studies
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - British & European History
Series:
The New Cambridge Medieval History (5)
Information

Book description

The fifth volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History brings together studies of the political, religious, social and economic history of the whole of Europe and of the Mediterranean world between about 1198 and 1300. Comprehensive coverage of the developments in western Europe is balanced by attention to the east of Europe, including the Byzantine world, and the Islamic lands in Spain, north Africa and the Levant. Thematic articles look at the fine arts, the vernacular, communications and other aspects of a period in which the frontiers of Latin Christendom were expanding vigorously outwards; and attention is paid to the frontier societies that emerged in Spain, the Baltic and the Mediterranean islands.

Reviews

‘This volume is a monumental achievement for which the editor and his contributors deserve thanks. The bibliographies, maps and index are excellent, and the frontispiece of the golden Augustalis coin of Frederick II is stunning.’

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

‘… this is a solid achievement of lasting value.’

Source: Journal of Ecclesiastical History

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Contents

Page 2 of 3

Contents
  • 16 - The kingdom of Sicily under the Hohenstaufen and Angevins
    pp 498-522
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Sicilian kingdom, encompassing also the south of Italy, contained a great variety of lands, with distinctive economic, ethnic, religious and political characters. In the thirteenth century, the ready availability of staple goods was, rather, seen as a source of wealth to whichever would-be conqueror acquired control of the kingdom. Charles, count of Anjou, the brother of King Louis IX of France, had appeared on the papal shortlist as a possible leader of an invasion of southern Italy as far back as 1252. Charles's growing interest in Balkan affairs is seen as part and parcel of the traditional concerns of the Norman and Hohenstaufen kings of Sicily. The 1270s saw a series of small-scale campaigns in the Balkans against the armies of Michael VIII. The Angevins had to withstand a siege of Durazzo in 1274, but were unable to avoid humiliation in battle at Berat in 1281.
  • (a) - The Latin empire of Constantinople and the Frankish states in Greece
    pp 523-542
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The western or Latin conquest of Constantinople on 13 April 1204 heralded a new era in the history of the Byzantine lands, known in the west as Romania. The internal structure and development of the Latin empire was rather complex. The principality of Morea, the third major Frankish state of Latin Romania, survived the Latin empire by some 170 years. The establishment of Latin rule over extensive portions of Romania opened the way to western immigration and settlement in the territories on a scale much larger than before 1204. The breakdown of imperial government in the years immediately preceding and particularly those following the fall of Constantinople the archontes in many areas of Romania exercised effective rule over the local population. One of the most important economic effects of the Latin conquest of Constantinople was the opening of the Black Sea to unrestricted western commerce.
  • (b) - Byzantium in exile
    pp 543-568
  • View abstract

    Summary

    It was in the words of Byzantine contemporaries a 'cosmic cataclysm'. The Byzantine ruling class was disorientated and uprooted. Michael Autoreianos was duly ordained patriarch at Nicaea on 20 March 1208. His first official act was to crown and anoint Theodore Laskaris emperor on Easter Day. Thus was a Byzantine empire recreated in exile in Nicaea. Theodore Laskaris died in 1221. His death was followed by civil strife, out of which his son-in-law John Vatatzes emerged as victor. Germanos II bowed to one of the facts of Byzantine political life: emperors were always likely to use Orthodoxy as a weapon or a bargaining counter in their foreign policy. The Byzantine emperor sought to counter the Angevin threat in various ways. He strengthened the sea walls of Constantinople. The lesson of the Fourth Crusade was its vulnerability to an attack from the sea. Michael Palaiologos therefore wooed Venice to prevent it from joining the Angevin camp.
  • (a) - The thirteenth-century crusades in the Mediterranean
    pp 569-589
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In thirteenth century, crusading in the east was shaped by some principal factors. In the winter of 1200-01 the crusade's leaders sent six envoys to Italy, including the expedition's future historian, Geoffrey de Villehardouin. They were to negotiate terms for the army's transport to the east with the Italian maritime cities. In 1213, less than a decade after the failure of Fourth crusade, Innocent III issued the bull Quia maior, a call for a new expedition to the east. In the previous year thousands of German and French adolescents had attempted to go to the assistance of the Holy Land by marching to Mediterranean ports, at which they hoped that shipping would be provided. By September 1218 it was clear that the crusading army would have to remain in the field for some time. Fresh troops, mainly fro.
  • (b) - The crusader states
    pp 590-606
  • View abstract

    Summary

    At first sight it may seem surprising that the truncated and war-ravaged remnants of the crusader states should have lasted as long as they did. Directly after the Third Crusade there were few places in the Latin Kingdom other than Tyre and Acre that could have held out against full-scale assault. It is difficult to estimate the military resources at the disposal of the rulers of kingdom of Jerusalem in the thirteenth century. The ability of the military Orders to build and garrison substantial fortresses, take a share in the defence of the cities. The ports of the Latin east thus became the entrepots in what was evidently a most lucrative commerce. Trade and the wealth generated by trade were of the utmost importance to the rulers of Latin Syria. In the decades immediately following the Third Crusade the chief theatre of conflict in the east was Antioch.
  • (a) - The rise of the Mamluks
    pp 607-621
  • View abstract

    Summary

    During Saladin's lifetime, his empire had been run as a family business, with his kinsmen controlling large, semi-independent principalities, only loosely responsive to the sultan's authority. After Saladin's death those kinsmen, based in Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo, fought amongst themselves for supremacy in Egypt and Syria. They were supported in their struggles by small armies composed of freeborn Kurds and Turks, as well as Turkish Mamluks. Under the Ayyubids, and, later, the Mamluks, the mutqa collected his pay himself in the form of taxes, levied usually in kind on a designated village or agricultural estate. As-Salih Ayyub's Mamluk regiment was garrisoned in a fortress on an island in the river Nile and for this reason they were known as the Bahri Salihi Mamluks. The Christians in the south declared their neutrality in the imminent conflict between the Mongols and the Mamluks.
  • (b) - The Maghrib
    pp 622-635
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The triumph of Islam in the Maghrib was the victory of the pure faith of the Prophet over adawa, enmity to the Law on the part of pagans, Christians and Jews, and all Muslims blinded by the ramifications of traditional jurisprudence. The definition of the new faith was that of the great theologian al-Ghazali at the end of the eleventh century, as preached in the Maghrib at the beginning of the twelfth by the Mahdi Ibn Tumart. Less ominous but more serious in the long term was the situation in the eastern Maghrib or Ifriqiya, where the Almohads were faced with a mercurial enemy composed of Almoravids, Arabs and Turks. The creation of a new empire in the central Maghrib was a novel enterprise which threatened the monarchies of Ifriqiya and Morocco. In effect, the Moroccan sultan transferred his capital to his camp, which he built into a replacement for the city he had surrounded.
  • (c) - The Nasrid kingdom of Granada
    pp 636-643
  • View abstract

    Summary

    No account of Islam in the west, nor indeed of the history of thirteenth-century Europe, would be complete that did not take into account the origins of the one Islamic state in Spain to survive throughout the fourteenth and nearly all the fifteenth century, the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. The origins of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada lay in the struggles within southern Spain from 1228 onwards, between factions flying the black banner of the Abbasid caliphs, and the Almohad caliph al-Mamun, who was based in Seville and Granada. Rachel Arie has pointed out that a whole area of the city was laid out to receive the swarm of Muslim refugees moving into Granada. One factor in the survival of Nasrid Granada was the survival of Muhammad I himself. The Majorcan kings had treaties with Granada by the early fourteenth century, and there were Catalan and Italian commercial stations at Almeria and Malaga.
  • 20 - The rise of Aragon-Catalonia
    pp 644-667
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The rise of Aragon' is a term that hides a great deal: in the thirteenth century it was not so much the highland kingdom of Aragon, from which they drew their royal title, as the seaboard county of Barcelona. By the start of the thirteenth century certain broad features can be assigned to Catalonia-Aragon. Under James I, the power and in many respects the character of the monarchy was transformed. His own birth was widely viewed as a miracle, not least because of the cordial loathing of Peter II for Maria of Montpellier, but the true miracle was the survival of Peter's bloodline. In 1233 James, newly victorious in the Balearics, was able to redeem his earlier failure at Peniscola, and to capture Burriana, from which the Muslim population was cleared. Louis IX was another of James I's neighbours, and it is now time to turn to Aragonese relations with the French monarchy and with the rulers of the Pyrenees.
  • 21 - Castile, Portugal and Navarre
    pp 668-700
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Alfonso VIII of Castile's victory in July 1212 reversed the thrust of half a century of peninsular history. Castile had by far the most extensive frontiers to defend, and the cost of doing so and of advancing the Christian reconquest of the peninsula was to cripple its kings throughout the thirteenth century and beyond. It then imposes strains on their realm with which their Navarrese and Portuguese neighbours were largely unfamiliar. In 1214, after hunger had emerged the victor at the siege of Baeza, mutual exhaustion had driven Alfonso VIII and the Almohad caliph in Marrakesh to agree to a truce. While Castile, having absorbed Leon, was striking south, and in the north Navarre was being drawn even further into the French orbit, the young kingdom of Portugal had been experiencing almost uninterrupted political crisis. At the beginning of the reign Sancho had to repel the Marinids whom his father had brought into Castile.
  • 22 - The Mongols and Europe
    pp 701-719
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The founder of the Mongol empire was a chieftain named Temujin, who in the late twelfth century had become leader of one of a number of nomadic tribes which paid tribute to the Chin dynasty in northern China. Rulers who submitted to the Mongols were obliged to make their troops available to the conquerors, and by the time the Mongols reached Europe their armies were made up of numerous elements, both steppe nomad cavalry and horse or foot auxiliaries from sedentary regions. Chinggis Khan never returned to the west, but the Mongol advance in this direction was resumed on the orders of Ogodei. The Mongol campaigns of 1259-60 in eastern Europe and in Syria were therefore the last military efforts of the united empire. When the first news of the assault on the Khwarazmshah had reached the army of the Fifth Crusade at Damietta in 1220, it had been assumed that the victors were Christians.
  • (a) - The Scandinavian kingdoms
    pp 720-742
  • View abstract

    Summary

    By the Scandinavian kingdoms are understood the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The three Scandinavian kingdoms were established long before 1200, as were also, with some exceptions, the borders that were to remain until the great changes of the seventeenth century. The old military system in the Scandinavian countries was the popular levy, Norse leidang, Danish leding, Swedish ledung, primarily intended for sea warfare. Its origin can probably be traced back to the Viking age in Denmark and Norway. Earlier generations of scholars often described social change in the Scandinavian countries during our period as a transition from a 'society of kindred' to a 'society of the state'. The formation of an elite can be traced in the cultural field as well as in the social, economic and political ones. The growth of public justice is contributed to divisions and competition within the elite.
  • (b) - The military Orders in the Baltic
    pp 743-753
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Any account of military religious Orders in the Baltic begins, of necessity, in the Levant, and must take into account circumstances in the rest of Christendom. Three major military Orders arose in Palestine during the earlier crusades: the Templars, the Order of St John and the German or Teutonic Order. The social origins of the brethren provide clues concerning where the Order was territorially most potent. Expansion beyond the Reich and Palestine came in the early thirteenth century. In 1211 King Andrew II of Hungary, the father of St Elisabeth, invited the Order to Transylvania notionally in order to fight the heathen Cumans. The Order's attempts to have the territory they were defending taken under papal protection resulted in their expulsion by the king in 1225. From 1231 onwards knights of the Order issued forth from their initial base at Thorn, establishing a line of timber fortresses along the Vistula until they reached the coast at Elbing six years later.
  • (a) - The central European kingdoms
    pp 754-778
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Among the Pannonians, three brothers, namely Lech, Rus and Czech, were born to Pan, prince of the Pannonians. These three held the three kingdoms of the Lechites, Russians and Czechs. The kingdom of Bohemia was girt by the Erzebirge mountains to the northwest and the Bohemian Forest in the south-west, while in the south-east the White Carpathians separated the dependent mark of Moravia from Slovakia. The thirteenth century brought a second and consolidatory round of 'westernisation' to central Europe. The greatest impact on Hungary and on central Europe as a whole was made by the Tatar invasions. While the western and southern Polish dukes concentrated their attentions primarily on relations with Bohemia and Hungary, the Mazovian Piasts stood further aloof from western alliances. Political developments in central Europe were attended by religious and economic changes which transformed the central kingdoms from passive recipients of alien culture into active members of Latin Christendom and propagators of her values.
  • (b) - Albania, Serbia and Bulgaria
    pp 779-795
  • View abstract

    Summary

    It is widely accepted that the fall of Constantinople in 1204 brought to its knees an empire which was already on its way to dissolution, notably on its Balkan edges. Three peoples displayed new vigour: the Bulgars, the Serbs and the Albanians, the frontiers between their lands remaining still fluid, especially those between Bulgaria and Serbia. As for Albania, its separate identity was real enough, even though it had not truly broken with Constantinople. There was certainly a religious frontier in the region, but it would be wrong to exaggerate its impermeability, particularly when the Bulgarian and Serbian kings were prepared to make known their readiness to be crowned by the pope. Serbian expansion was henceforth irresistible, leading the region's inhabitants to ignore for too long the Turkish menace which now threatened Byzantium, once again caught between two foes.
  • (c) - Rus′
    pp 796-808
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the thirteenth century Rus was various polities and places which had less and less relationship with one another. The idea of a thirteenth-century Rus is a modern chronological and geographical convenience, not a coherent historical entity. The Kiev-Novgorod axis was the main artery of Kievan Rus in its Golden Age from the late tenth to the early twelfth century. In 1203 Roman lost Kiev, which was taken and sacked by Riurik Rostislavich of Smolensk with help from the Chernigovan Olgovichi and the Polovtsians. The true Riurikid traditionalists were the princes of Smolensk and Chernigov in the centre and the south. Mikhail of Chernigov had fled in 1240 and tried to organise resistance from abroad. By 1246, isolated and outflanked by the rival families, he too made the trip to Sarai. By contrast with Galician prevarication and Chernigovan gesticulation, the north-eastern princes of Vladimir and Suzdal co-operated fully with the Mongols from the very beginning.
  • 25 - The Celtic lands of the British Isles
    pp 809-827
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Wales, Ireland and Scotland all exhibited a cultural, linguistic and social dualism between an anglicised and urbanised south and east and a Celtic-speaking, less populous north and west. In thirteenth century, the coastal plain of south Wales was controlled reasonably securely by the Anglo-Norman Marcher lords. In 1238 all the princes of Wales swore allegiance to Dafydd ap Llywelyn ap Iorwerth at Strata Florida and two years later Llywelyn, a man whose deeds it were difficult to relate, died. The aftermath of Llywelyn's death shows clearly how Welsh inheritance practices could lead to political instability. At the beginning of the thirteenth century it still seemed possible that the Anglo-Norman lords and settlers who acknowledged the authority of the king of England might attain political control of the whole of Ireland. The thirteenth-century kings of the Scots were continental rather than Celtic in the way they avoided the partible inheritance and segmentary competition of their contemporaries in Wales and Ireland.

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