Europe: A History (70 page)
Walled cities, like walled castles, reflected the insecurities of the countryside. Their ramparts, their gates and towers were designed to protect an oasis of safety. But they also fostered distinct social communities, which increasingly sought to give themselves a separate legal and political identity. They coalesced around ports and river-crossings, around markets, or around the residences of counts and bishops. Many nascent towns failed and relapsed into obscurity; but by the twelfth century several regions of Europe were beginning to show pockets of vigorous urbanization. The Italian port cities of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa led the way. They were soon rivalled by the cities of Lombardy and of the Rhineland, and by clusters of textile towns—Florence and Siena in Tuscany, Ypres, Bruges, and Ghent in Flanders. London and Paris grew for political as well as for economic
reasons. The largest of them had populations of 50,000 or more, and rising.
[FIESTA]
Urban society was marked by the formation of a class of burghers, who organized themselves against the more numerous artisans and rootless elements. The important thing was that most of these city-dwellers in the West freed themselves from the feudal relations prevailing beyond the city walls. ‘Freedom became the legal status of the bourgeoisie … no longer a personal privilege, but a territorial one, inherent in the urban soil.’
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Slavery on the Muslim model, however, was common, especially in Italy. Special charters were issued to cope with the influx of Jews brought in by Mediterranean trade,
[GHETTO]
Trade patterns were determined by a handful of well-tried routes. Venice and Genoa took over from Constantinople as the organizers of trade with the Levant. The North Sea routes were built up in response to the demand for English wool. Lombardy and the Rhineland stood at either end of the transalpine corridor. From 1180 the Counts of Champagne established an early form of free-trade zone, whose fairs became the clearing-house of international commerce,
[GOTTHARD] [HANSA]
In the second half of the eleventh century, in many parts of Western Europe, a series of seemingly unconnected innovations set long-lasting processes in motion. Institutions were starting to gel; temporary expedients turned themselves into plans for a long-term future.
On 14 April 1059 Pope Nicholas II decreed that papal elections should be conducted by the College of Cardinals. The move was designed to assert the independence of the Papacy and to avoid the scenes of the previous year, when two rival popes had been appointed by two rival factions. For centuries, the traditional appointment of popes by ‘the people and clergy of Rome’ had left them at the mercy of local politics. More recently, the German emperors had assumed the practice of nominating candidates. Now the Papacy was taking the necessary steps to free itself from external control. The Roman Curia, the papal court and government, was first mentioned shortly afterwards,
[CONCLAVE]
In August 1059, at Melfi in Apulia, Robert Guiscard, fourth of twelve sons of Tancred d’Hauteville, was invested by the Pope with the Duchy of Apulia and Calabria, together with the ‘future’ Duchy of Sicily. In return, if he could seize the allocated lands, Duke Robert was to pay the Pope a fee of twelve pence per ploughland. At the time, the treaty represented just another twist in the Papacy’s tortuous diplomacy. Ever since their arrival in Calabria in 1017, the Norman adventurers had been opposed by Rome; indeed, in the middle of the Schism with Byzantium in 1054, having marched south with a German army, Pope Leo IX had been the Normans’ prisoner. But now Nicholas II decided to do business with them. What he could not have foreseen was that the d’Hautevilles would put their plans so promptly into practice. They crossed the Straits of Messina in 1060 and started the systematic conquest of Sicily from the Saracens. Within a decade they had both captured Palermo and driven the Byzantines from their last Italian
foothold at Bari. In due course the Norman conquests in the south were united into one ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’, which survived until the days of Garibaldi.
FIESTA
I
N AD
1000 the Doge of Venice took the title of Duke of Dalmatia after capturing the strongholds of the Adriatic pirates at Curzola and Lagosta. It was Venice’s first step to becoming a naval power. The ceremony of the
Sposalizio del Mar
, the ‘Wedding of the Doge and the Sea’, where a regatta of bedecked gondolas parades down the Grand Canal, began that same year. It used to be the centrepiece of Venice’s annual Ascension Day Fair, the
Sensa
, but now forms part of the
Regata Storica
in September.
The European calendar is packed with festivals that feature every sort of procession, masked parade, dance, fair, or games. Many of them, such as the
Bloemen Curso
in Haarlem, the
Midsommer
in Sweden, or the beer-swilling
Oktoberfest
in Munich, celebrate the passing of the seasons. The days of
Fasching
which occur throughout Germany and Austria, like the fire-burning
Dozynki
in Poland, are pagan survivals. France’s
fêtes des vignerons
are the wine-growers’ equivalent of harvest festivals.
Many others have religious connections. The
Carnaval
or ‘Farewell to the Flesh’, held on
Mardi Gras
or ‘Pancake Tuesday’, is best known in Nice. It marks the last day before the fast of Lent. The Easter
Semana Santa
in Seville sees penitents parade in high-pointed black hats. Corpus Christi is another day for general Christian witness, as are Whitsun and the Feast of the Blessed Virgin (15 August). At Sainte-Marie de la Mer near Arles, gypsies from many countries carry their icon of the Virgin into the sea. The procession of the Holy Blood at Bruges and the
Ommegang
in Brussels honour local relics.
Many fiestas take the form of public contests. Such are the highland games in Scotland, the
course à la cocarde
in the Roman arenas at Arles and Nîmes, the bull-running at Pamplona, and the magnificent horseback races of the
Palio
at Siena.
Most often, however, Europeans set out to remember the dramatic events which, like the
Sposalizio
, pepper the history of their cities:
| Moros y Cristianos | Alcoy (Alicante) | the Christian conquest of 1227 |
| Lajkonik | Cracow (Poland) | the Mongol raids (13th c.) |
| Giostra del Saracino | Arezzo (Italy) | (jousting): the Saracen wars |
| Jeanne d’Arc | Orléans (France) | the siege of 1428 |
| Fürstenhochzeit | Landshut (Bavaria) | the Bavarian-Polish wedding of 1475 |
| Escalade | Geneva (CH) | the Savoyard assault of 1602 |
| Guy Fawkes | England | Gunpowder Plot, 1605 |
| Up Helly Aa | Lerwick (Shetland) | Viking rule, 751 |
| Meistertrunk | Rothenberg (Germany) | the siege of 1631 |
| Vikingspillene | Frederikssund (Denmark) | discovery of a Viking ship, 1950 |
Old or new, fiestas are annual events. They cement local pride to the continuity of the passing centuries.
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Yet nothing is so grand as the festivals and parades which accompany military victories. In June 1940 the Wehrmacht marched symbolically through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Five years later, in Red Square, the Wehrmacht’s banners were piled up high at Stalin’s feet. In the Allied countries, though not in Germany, 11 November has been honoured for decades with solemn pomp as ‘Remembrance Day’.
GHETTO
I
N
many Italian cities, walled and gated quarters reserved for Jews had existed at least since the eleventh century. They resulted from the concordance of view between the municipal magistrates, who demanded segregation, and the Jews’ own religious laws, which forbade residence among Gentiles. In Venice, the Jewish quarter was called //
Ghetto
, either from a contraction of
borghetto
or ‘little town’ or from a deformation of the
gietto
or ‘foundry’ which had once existed there. The name came to be used across Europe. Major ghettos were created in Prague, Frankfurt, Trieste, and in Rome, where the ghetto was maintained from 1536 to 1870.
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Formal ghettos were unknown, however, in the Jews’ main refuge in Poland-Lithuania, where royal charters of protection were in force from 1265. Several Polish cities, including Warsaw, enforced statutes
de non tolerandis Judaeis
, which excluded Jews from districts under municipal jurisdiction. (Nobles, peasants, and officers of the Crown were similarly excluded.) The effect was to channel Jewish residence on to noble-owned land in the immediate vicinity of the city gates. Small Jewish
shtetln
or ‘townlets’ also grew up under noble patronage alongside manorial centres in the countryside. The Jews of Poland-Lithuania possessed both local autonomy and, in their Council of the Four Lands, their own central parliament.
2
No Jews were permitted to reside in Russia prior to the partitions of Poland. After the partitions, Catherine II turned Russia’s ex-Polish provinces into the core of a huge Jewish ‘pale of settlement’ (see Appendix III, p. 1311). But closed ghettos of the Western type did not reach Eastern Europe until the Nazi advance of 1939–41.
To escape from the ghetto was no simple matter. Would-be escapees had to defy the laws and customs both of the Gentile and of the Jewish communities, and to risk dire penalties. Until modern times, formal conversion was often the only practical way out.
Before the conquest of Sicily was complete, the Papacy decided to back another Norman adventurer. In 1066 William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, was sent the banner of St Peter to bless his expedition against England. From Rome’s point of view this was another move to build up a body of papal supporters who were independent of the Empire. From William’s point of view it was a means of persuading his troops to fight. (He later repudiated the papal claim to a deal similar to the one agreed over Sicily.) But once again fortune favoured the venture. Having waited many weeks to cross the Channel, the Normans attacked the Anglo-Saxon army waiting at Hastings. Harold of England, having been given the time to return from the north, where he had defeated his other rival, Harold of Norway, was confident of further success. But on 28 September he died in battle, pierced through the eye by a Norman arrow. William, now the Conqueror, was crowned in Westminster Abbey at Christmas. The kingdom of England, like Sicily, was parcelled out among the Norman knights and turned into a model feudal kingdom. (The English claim that it has never been conquered since.)
In March 1075 a new Pope, Gregory VII (1073–85), enunciated the twenty-seven propositions of his
Dictatus Papae
(the Pope’s Supremacy). He claimed supreme legislative and judicial power within Christendom, together with the right to depose all princes, both temporal and spiritual. Soon afterwards, in synod, he formally ordered the excommunication of all secular rulers who invested candidates for church appointments without reference to ecclesiastical authority. The Pope, formerly Hildebrand, a Tuscan monk and the principal adviser of the preceding popes, had been elected by the cardinals in the new manner. The Emperor, Henry IV (r. 1056–1106), had not been notified, let alone consulted. A major conflict between Empire and Papacy was unavoidable. It was the start of the Investiture Contest.
Despite the high-flown legal and theological language in which it was conducted, the Investiture Contest was a straightforward struggle for power. Was the Emperor to control the Pope, or the Pope to control the Emperor? The agreed theory was simple: Latin Christendom was supported by two pillars of authority—the temporal, headed by the Emperor, and the spiritual, headed by the Pope. But the relationship between the two was open to interpretation. In the imperial view, the Pope should have confined his attentions to the spiritual sphere. In the papal view, just as earth was below heaven, so the Emperor should submit to the will of the Pope. The propositions of Hildebrand’s
Dictatus
were uncompromising:
2. The Roman Pontiff alone merits the Catholic or ‘universal’ title.
3. The Pontiff alone can depose and absolve bishops.
12. The Pontiff is permitted to depose emperors.
16. The Pontiff alone can convene a General Synod.
20. No one can condemn a decision of the Holy See.
HANSA
A
s German colonists and crusaders moved eastwards along the Baltic shore, it was natural that commercial interests would follow. Equally, in a region emerging from the Viking Age, it was only to be expected that merchants established in Baltic and North Sea ports would band together for protection. The first such
hansa
or ‘commercial association’ was established at Wisby on the island of Gotland in 1161 under the name of the ‘United Gotland Travellers of the Holy Roman Empire’. Within a century, a far-flung confederation of
am-see staten
or ‘free cities of the sea’ had developed from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Finland.
The
Bund van der dudeschen hanse
or ‘Hanseatic League’ rose to the peak of its influence in the course of the 14th century. It comprised a series of constituent leagues, whose delegates met regularly to co-ordinate policy. The most important of these was the ‘Wendish-Saxon Quarter’ based on Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck, Wismar, and Rostock. The Westphalian group was headed by Cologne, the Livonian group by Wisby, later by Reval. The three main groups formed the
Drittel
or ‘Triangle’ at the core of the organization. Each of the member cities possessed dependent towns known as
vororte
or ‘suburbs’, whilst the League as a whole established a chain of
kontore
or ‘foreign offices’ from which all members could benefit. Five key offices were maintained: at Bruges—the main terminus of the transalpine trade-route to Venice, at the ‘Peterhof’ in Novgorod (from 1229), at the ‘Steelyard’ in London (1237), at the ‘German Bridge’ in Bergen (1343), and at the annual herring market at Falsterbo in Skania.
Hansa membership was confined neither to Germany nor the littoral. At various times, over two hundred cities belonged to the network. They stretched from Dinant in the West to Oslo in the North and Narva in the East. Major inland members included Brunswick, Magdeburg, Breslau, and Cracow.
The Hanseatic League possessed no formal constitution and no central government. But a body of law and custom accumulated; and from 1373 the Free Imperial City of Lübeck was confirmed as the home of the court of appeal and as the most frequent meeting-place for the League’s triennial
Hansetage
or ‘General Assemblies’. The Law of Lübeck was adopted by many member cities.
In its early days, the League aimed to consolidate the legal rights of anchorage, storage, residence, and local immunity, which its members required to conduct their business. It was also concerned to stabilize currency and to facilitate the means of payment. (The English word
sterling
derives from ‘Easterling’, an epithet widely applied to Hansa merchants.)
Yet the pursuit of mercantile interests soon involved politics. The League’s original weapon lay in the
Verhansung
or ‘commercial boycott’ of
its enemies. But it was gradually obliged to levy taxes and to raise naval forces, first to suppress pirates and then to contest the policies of established kingdoms, especially Denmark. An alliance between Norway, Sweden, and the Hansa was provoked by the Danish sacking of Wisby in 1361. In that first Danish War, the League was heavily defeated. But in the second war of 1368–9, the troops of the League captured Helsingborg, destroyed Copenhagen, and occupied the Sound. By the Treaty of Stralsund (1370), Denmark was forced to concede that no Danish King could be crowned without the League’s approval and the confirmation of its privileges,
[SUND]
Thereafter, the slow decline of the Hanseatic League was the result both of economic and of political factors. The Baltic herring shoals mysteriously relocated to the North Sea in the fifteenth century. In the same period, northern Europe’s centre of commercial gravity was shifting to the Netherlands. The Hansa met increasing difficulty in asserting itself against aggressive modern states such as England, Prussia, and Muscovy. The closing of the Peterhof in Novgorod in 1494 was a sign of the times, as was the closing of the Steelyard in London in 1598. The Hansa received little support from the fragmented authority of the Holy Roman Empire. During the Thirty Years War it was reduced to an active membership of three—Lübeck, Hamburg, and Bremen—who held their last General Assembly in 1669. From then on, the Hansa name was connected only with the independence of those three cities, which stayed apart from the German Customs Union until 1889.
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The legacy of the Hansa long outlived its demise. Over the centuries it had created a way of life whose solid virtues were cemented into every stone of its bustling and elegant cities. To be Hanseatic was to belong to an inimitable, international civilization based on shared values and priorities. Great cities such as Hamburg, Danzig (Gdansk), or Riga were not to share a common political destiny. But they retained a strong sense of their common origins. The citizens of Hamburg still take pride in registering their cars under the ancient municipal formula of ‘HH’—
Hansestadt Hamburg
. Bremeners display ‘HB’; Lübeckers ‘HL’, Rostockers ‘HRO’.
Nazi ideology naturally made great efforts to appropriate the Hanseatic tradition. In a famous Grotemeyer painting of 1942, for example, a medieval wagon train sets out along the Elbe from Hamburg as if to conquer Germany’s
Lebensraum
in the East.
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But this was a gross distortion. In German History, the Hanseatic tradition stands in stark contrast to the Prussianism, nationalism, and imperialism which supplanted it. In European history, it shines as a beacon for all who seek a future based on sturdy local autonomy, international co-operation, and mutual prosperity.
