BAPTIZING EUROPE
- Continental Identity in Medieval Europe
by Christian Villumsen
BACKGROUND
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have reached an agreement.” Those were the words of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen on the last day of the European summit after the expansion of the European Union had been announced. The negotiations had intensified during the Danish presidency and had paved the way for ten new member states. This expansion closed one of the final chapters in the story of a divided European continent; a state which had existed since the Cold War. The reason I mention this is because during the Middle Ages Europe was a fragmented continent of warring states that fought for power and the scraps the decline of the Roman empire had left behind. Europe was a continent of kingdoms and principalities, where local magnates held power – or at least the power that mattered.
One thing, however, did bind this divided continent together: Christianity. This relatively new denomination, at least according to Rome, was already known in the territories we now know as France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the British Isles, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia and Scandinavia – territories that became known as respublica christiana (the Christian Community). These territories, especially Scandinavia and Hungary, did, however, not start out as members of this “holy community – their roles will become clear later. During the reign of Charles the Great (757-814) Europe was relatively safe but after his death his empire was divided into three parts (the former Carolingian Empire, the Christian Spain and the British Isles) because his son Louis the Pious (778-840) never achieved to do for the empire what his father had done. It is therefore also no surprise that Central Europe came under attack from all sides. Arabs ravaged the Mediterranean, Viking attacks terrorized northern Europe and Eastern Europe (Hungary) was invaded by the Magyars. The threat from the Vikings and the Magyars ended in the year 972 when these two peoples converted to Christianity and thereafter Europe was only threatened by the Arabs and internal power struggles.
A UNIFIED CHURCH
Europe continued to be a divided continent even after “the savages” had converted. Many reasons have been named as the cause but the fact that even the church was divided seems to be the most likely factor. Rome experienced a minor civil war when three popes all declared that they were the successors of St. Peter and therefore rightfully entitled to become the next pope. We don’t know if it was the threat of a major conflict within the Christian world that prompted Emperor Henry III of Germany (1039-56) to travel to Rome to resolve the situation and we probably never will but Henry, nevertheless, solved the problem by removing all three popes and installed one of his own loyalists. While Henry III cleaned up the Roman mess and his son Henry IV had been appointed secular leader of the church Hildebrand, a reformer within the church had been inaugurated as pope and had taken the name Gregory VII as a tribute to Gregory VI (whom Henry III had deposed) and Gregory I, who later became known as Gregory the Great. Gregory VII was largely responsible for the unification of the church because of his reforms that e.g. ended papal tolerance to imperial meddling into affairs of the church. This potential conflict was avoided in 1122 when the church and Holy Roman Emperors concluded an agreement, which became known as the Concordat of Worms. This agreement gave the emperors the right to invest bishops with secular symbols of authority in their governed territories, but not with sacred symbols of authority. Furthermore the Concordat decreed that the clergy had to imitate the earliest form of life, which was described in the Acts of the Apostles 4:32: “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things in common.”
Gregory and all other reform-friendly popes wanted to return to the time of Pope Gregory the Great and become servus servorum Dei (servant of God’s servants) because this was the path to become ruler of all and thereby uniting Europe under the papal banner.
The church was very powerful at this moment in history and its influence was spreading. Robert Bartlett describes the phenomenon in his book “The Making of Europe” as being similar to that of the Americanization that took place in Europe after the Second World War; a dominant culture spreads into adjacent territories and thereafter dominates them. Europe saw two such cultures: the Frankish and the German. These two cultures could actually be combined into one because Charles the Great built up an empire which also consisted of parts of the territory we now call Germany. Both cultures had the Christian faith in common and were both eager to spread the word. The church of course led the conversion-campaign in Medieval Europe, but the church was not solely responsible for the spread of Christianity. European aristocrats often send their children away to foreign states in order to place them in positions of power, either by marriage and political ingenuity as was the case with e.g. Naples and Hungary or by military might. Bartlett writes that up to 80% of European royalty had ties to France with the exception of three kingdoms: Sweden, Denmark and Poland. The aristocracy and royalty in these three countries traditionally married into German families. This tendency shows with all certainty that Europe may have been more unified than originally believed – a unification of both faith and blood.
MY NAME IS …
It is perhaps a bit premature to talk about unification but one cannot deny that the peoples of continental Europe had the similar mentalities regarding many things, e.g. the names that were given to newborn children. It was not unusual for the person responsible for naming the children to name them after the saints that meant most to them. It was, in fact, also customary to take on a new name if one married a person of a different nationality and preferably a name common to the area of which one were to live. This was done in order to avoid being looked upon as a foreigner as was the case of the two Bohemian princesses Swatawa and Markéta, who became the German Countess Luitgard and Queen Dagmar of Denmark. Another example regards the expansion of the French aristocracy. The children that were sent out to be married eventually lost contact with their homeland and became more and more a part of their societies.
This may not seem as something of which the church had much to do with, but that changed in the 11th and 12th centuries – more precisely at around 1066. It was relatively easy to guess people’s nationalities by looking at their names, e.g. Mikhail (the Russian or Croatian patron for the ill). The name is well known from the Eastern Bloc and is especially linked with a former president of the Soviet Union (Mikhail Gorbatjov). In England, after the Battle of Hastings, the tendency to name children after English saints changed and gave way for Norman names like William, Henry and Robert. The link to the church was that this trend actually started among high ranking church officials and the aristocracy.
The change was simple but deeply territorial. France and England believed in the same God, but the names in the two countries were completely different. It is today very difficult to find a family in England that does not have a William, Henry or Robert an then we are back at the idea that a dominant culture rubs off on surrounding, and perhaps weaker, cultures and let us be honest, this was not an uncommon phenomenon in the Middle Ages.
HIGHER LEARNING
Another way to spread Christianity was by using the latest trend in Europe, the universities, which the church held power over. People, mostly from the aristocracy and the upper class, became obsessed with education and wanted to learn more. Education in e.g. Denmark was handled by the monasteries until the 12th century and it was therefore not unusual that the training of a priest was conducted at home if the trainee’s father was a priest. The would-be priests managed but without a formal education in the liturgical language, Latin, the young priests had to memorize certain Latin phrases in order to cope. On a positive note a priest was never hard to find but the priest was probably not schooled in Latin. This was however not the case with priests from the city as they were able to travel abroad to receive proper training. The ones that did travel abroad usually went to Paris and not just because the very first university in Europe was founded there but also because that the teaching elite went to Paris in order to share their knowledge. Furthermore Paris was also the European centre for cathedral schools. These schools were not just in Paris but all over Europe. These schools offered a higher form of education and made people pilgrimage to these places. One who made such a journey was Gunnar, who became bishop in Viborg, Denmark in 1222. Paris gave Gunnar the opportunity to create a network of clerical equals, one of which was to become the papal legate. This was in fact a fellow student from Paris named Gregorio of Crescenti, who came to Denmark in 1221 and, via Gunnar, created a clerical friendship network with Viborg diocese.
The story about Gunnar exemplifies the level of international cooperation that took place during the Middle Ages, whether it be clerical or secular. In that kind of society education was the key, which is not unlike today.
Another example of the connection between education and church is Anders Sunesen. He was born into the Danish aristocracy and by that right he was almost certain to play a role within the church. He was archbishop in Lund from 1201-1224 and had traveled through most of the major countries for higher learning, e.g. France, Italy and England. He did this because Denmark did not offer the same level of education as was found in other countries and by knowing that he spearheaded the effort to make education more accessible. He did by writing two works, in Latin of course: the first one was a compendium of Christian verses, which was inspired by the French theologians and the second was a Latin version of the laws of Denmark, that bore the impress of his knowledge of Roman law. He was later stationed in Estonia with the Danish forces, where he was the spiritual head in the battle against the heathen Estonians.
The stories of Gunnar and Anders show us that the universities and the clerical society are intertwined. Within the educated societies people spoke the same language, the liturgical language Latin. Today, we communicate in English if we do not speak the native tongue of a country we are visiting – another example of the fact that Europe, even back then, was getting smaller.
CRUSADING MENTALITY
I have stated that many factors were involved in the unification of Europe, but the single most important thing was probably the crusades. Never before in the history of Europe had one seen such dedication as when Pope Urban II in 1095 in Clermont urged the Christian world to unite against the Muslim threat and to retake the Holy Land. He recruited soldiers from almost every strata of society with France being a major contributor, but countries like Germany, England and Italy also contributed on a large scale. Nothing unifies a world better than the battle against a common foe. We have seen this phenomenon on a global scale with the battle against terrorism and on a more homely scale during the Second World War where the world united against the Axis powers. The majority of crusaders were peasants, who had been captivated by Urban’s rhetoric about cleansing the Holy Land of the infidels. When the army of 15,000 reached Jerusalem only about a tenth of them were knights, which would imply that the price of recruiting a proper army was rather expensive.
When the Christian army stormed Jerusalem and the looting began another form of solidarity showed its face. The infidels – in this case the Muslims – were, according to eye witnesses, rounded up and beaten to within an inch of their lives, and it did not matter if they were woman, children or men. Esmark and McGuire describes it in their book Europa 1000-1300 as a form of religious high and a spiritual cleansing. It went on to the point that the Christian invaders had a saying that went: “heathens are better dead than alive” and the more “merciful”: the faster you kill them the less time they will spend in Purgatory.”
Say what you will about the crusades but they did help on a large scale with the creation of a common European identity. The actual creation did not occur during this time and one can argue that it does not exist even today, but the smaller Europe got the easier it got to cooperate with one another.
Bibliography
Bartlett, Robert
“The Making of Europe”
London, 1994
Esmark, Kim and McGuire, Brian Patrick
“Europa 1000-1300”
Roskilde, 1999
Roach, Andrew P.
“The Devil’s World”
Pearson Education Limited, 2005
