Two great empires and two great branches of the Christian religion were bequeathed by the early and central Middle Ages to later times. The Eastern Empire, based on Constantinople, was a shadow of what it had formerly been. Broken by the Latins in the Fourth Crusade but reestablished (again by Latin intervention) in 1261, the power of the Palaeologi emperors was diminished, their lands largely under alien control. The Holy Roman Empire had lapsed for a time after the death of Frederick II. When the interregnum ended in 1273 the emperors were far less powerful than they had been both inside Germany and in the Italian lands they still nominally ruled. Curiously enough the Orthodox Church in Greek lands and, in the Latin West, the Roman Church were both vigorous, and neither shared the debility of the empires with which they were associated. Indeed, the Roman Church had been in large part responsible for the declining authority of the German empire. In the thirteenth century, fortified by the evangelism of the friars and the intellectual and artistic achievements of great architects and university- trained philosophers and theologians, it had reached the height of its public influence.
Popes had been successful in curbing the power of the emperors, especially in Italy. They had done less to contain the ambitions of kings. In France, in England, and in the kingdoms of Spain, western Europe witnessed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a growth of stronger royal administration and a general acceptance that hereditary monarchy was an unavoidable part of the political life of the great magnates, hitherto content to turn their backs on the crown. This pattern of emergent monarchy was far from universal. The kings of Scandinavia were not powerful, and princes in eastern and central Europe, busily importing administrative institutions from the west, were already encountering resistance among their more influential subjects. Even in the west of the continent government depended still to great extent on the personal qualities of the king. In every part of Europe public order was precariously preserved and, even under strong kings like Edward I of England or Philip IV of France, banditry and ineffective justice could make whole regions miserable for years at a time.
Nor must the historian see too clearly prefigured the vaster unities of later national states. In 1300 it might have seemed that the English king was predestined to dominate the British Isles, the king of Aragon his equally diverse inheritance. Independent Ireland, and a Catalonia still stubbornly resisting Castilian pressure, are today vivid reminders that forces were at work which in the end were to offer effective opposition to governments much more powerful than those of the later Middle Ages.
At the end of the thirteenth century of the towns Europe had become important, as observed above. In monarchies the burgess had, in effect, become identified with the 'third estate,' especially in the representive assemblies which by then were a feature of monarchial administration. In certain parts of Europe the town had gained more than recognition as a source of royal finance. In north and central Italy the towns had enjoyed, especially in the generation after Hohenstauffen power collapsed in 1250, their greatest period of independent development. The inherited tensions of earlier struggles in Italy carried with them the danger of tyrants who would sweep away communal liberty; before 1300 Milan had experienced a period of Visconti rule. Yet the temptation to regard the urban republic as foredoomed to collapse before the rising duke or king must be avoided. Many German cities retained their independence for centuries, and even in Italy Lucca and, more impressively, Venice survived the later Middle Ages and the early modern period as republics.
The frontiers of the European countries at the start of our period were mainly the product of earlier dynastic politics. The Norman duke who became king of England regarded himself as entitled to claim the country he conquered so easily in 1066; a century later his successor Henry II added to Normandy vast territories in France -- Anjou, Maine and Aquitaine. Much of this was lost by King John in 1214, yet the rights he could not lose, nor were French kings ready ruthlessly to expropriate; their vassal of England thus still held Gascony at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Just as wars were occasioned by disputes over inherited or acquired territorial rights, so they could only be permanently ended by marriage treaties which aimed to transcend through dowry and progeny the dilemmas of sovereignty which could not otherwise be resolved. The thirteenth century had not evolved even an elementary system of international law: in place of this there was the Law of Arms and princely matrimony. Any maps of the Middle Ages thus catch Europe at a moment of royal relationships which may or may not be of much significance.
On the other hand earlier centuries had seen the development of some larger loyalties. The widest (and vaguest) of these notions was Christendom, which had crytallized in the eleventh century but which was to be eroded in the later Middle Ages. More immediately relevant were regional affiliations, often (it may be suspected) the reflection of deep cultural and linguistic experience. The king of England and the king of France could depend on an extraordinarily diffuse if ill-defined support, which only declined if and when traditional institutions or sentiments were tactlessly offended. Edward I was accepted by the Scots as, in some sense, their king's superior -- so long as this superiority was not effectively asserted. Part of the secret of successful Aragonese expansion was the willingness of the kings to tolerate wide divergences in their Mediterranean empire, already in existence by 1300, in return for loyalty to the 'Crown of Aragon'. No stronger indication of this profound respect for public authority can be found than in the reestablished Roman Empire of the West: Germans -- magnates, clergy, and townsmen -- were not prepared to jettison an institution which represented their awareness of cohesion, even if they were not prepared to tolerate a powerful emperor.
The play of politics bequeathed to the fourteen and fifteenth centuries was thus between local affinities, inescapable but often tongue-tied, and the bigger programme, of which kings were the principal exponents, though they too, one guesses, were not always conscious of the degree to which they were innovating. The actors in this European drama were seldom in possession of the plot and indeed there was not one plot but many. The broadest pattern of action one can discern -- the prince against the great landed magnates -- had already begun, as can be seen in the England of John, Henry III, and Edward I, the France of St. Louis and the Castile of Alfonso X. The future fortunes of the crown and the nobility in central and eastern Europe had been hinted at in the concessions to magnates and clergy extracted from Casimir II of Poland (d. 1194) and in the Golden Bull (1222) in which Andrew II of Hungary granted away massive privileges to the same groups; but in eastern Europe these developments were obscured for a while by the Mongol invasions of the mid-thirteenth century, which also overwhelmed Kievan Russia.
Properly to understand the varieties of political activity in the later Middle Ages these earlier experiences should be studied and remembered. It is also necessary to examine the main social groups whose ambitions conditioned public life. These are the subject of the next two chapters.