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The Black Death of 1348–9 is the most catastrophic event in recorded history, and this study—the Ford Lectures of 2019 at Oxford University—offers a major re-evaluation of its immediate impact and longer-term consequences in England. It draws upon recent inter-disciplinary research into climate and disease; renewed interest among econometricians in the origins of the Little Divergence, whereby economic performance in parts of north-western Europe began to move decisively ahead of the rest of the continent on the pathway to modernity; a close re-reading of case studies of fourteenth-century England; and original new research into manorial and governmental sources. The Black Death is placed within the wider contexts of extreme weather and epidemiological events, the institutional framework of markets and serfdom, and the role of the law in reducing risk and shaping behaviour. The government’s response to the crisis is re-considered to suggest an innovative re-interpretation of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. By 1400 the main effects of plague had worked through the economy and society, and their implications for England’s future precocity are analysed. This study rescues the third quarter of the fourteenth century from a little-understood paradox between plague and revolt, and elevates it to a critical period of profound and irreversible change in English and global history.

This book is concerned with the modes and procedures of Anglo-papal diplomacy in the period 1305–60, when diplomatic affairs between England and the papacy intensified following the transfer of the papal curia to southern France in 1305 and on account of the on-going Anglo-French hostilities, which resulted in the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337. On the one hand, the book investigates how diplomatic and administrative practices developed in England and at the papal curia from a comparative perspective, whilst, on the other, it questions the legacy and impact of international and domestic conflicts on diplomatic and administrative practices. In Part I, the book explores how foreign and diplomatic relations, conducted through both official and unofficial diplomatic communications among polities, prompted the need to adapt and ‘translate’ different traditions in order to forge a ‘shared language of diplomacy’. This was achieved thanks to the adaptation of house styles, formularies, and ceremonial practices, as well as through the contribution of intermediaries and diplomatic agents acquainted with different diplomatic and legal traditions. Part II of the book further assesses the impact of political change and conflict on administrative and diplomatic practices by means of four relevant case studies.

Part I of this book is an in-depth examination of the characteristics of the Tuscan aristocracy across the first two and a half centuries of the second millennium, as studied by Italian historians and others working within the Italian tradition: their origins, interests, strategies for survival and exercise of power; the structure and the several levels of aristocracy and how these interrelated; the internal dynamics and perceptions that governed aristocratic life; and the relationship to non-aristocratic sectors of society. It will look at how aristocratic society changed across this period and how far changes were internally generated as opposed to responses from external stimuli. The relationship between the aristocracy and public authority will also be examined. Part II of the book deals with England. The aim here is not a comparative study but to bring insights drawn from Tuscan history and Tuscan historiography into play in understanding the evolution of English society from around the year 1000 to around 1250. This part of the book draws on the breadth of English historiography but is also guided by the Italian experience. The book challenges the interpretative framework within which much English history of this period tends to be written—that is to say the grand narrative which revolves around Magna Carta and English exceptionalism—and seeks to avoid dangers of teleology, of idealism, and of essentialism. By offering a study of the aristocracy across a wide time-frame and with themes drawn from Italian historiography, I hope to obviate these tendencies and to appreciate the aristocracy firmly within its own contexts.

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.

This book examines the formation of the Christian ascetic tradition in the western Roman Empire during the period of the barbarian invasions, c.400–600. In an aggressively competitive political context, one of the most articulate claims to power was made, paradoxically, by men who had renounced ‘the world’, committing themselves to a life of spiritual discipline in the hope of gaining entry to an otherworldly kingdom. Often dismissed as mere fanaticism or open hypocrisy, the language of ascetic authority, the book shows, was both carefully honed and well understood in the late Roman and early medieval Mediterranean. It charts the development of this new moral rhetoric by abbots, teachers, and bishops from the time of Augustine of Hippo to that of St Benedict and Gregory the Great.

This book examines the course and significance of English politics in the reign of Edward II through a study of the career of one important magnate, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke from 1307 to 1324. It is not, however, intended as a biography. The Earl of Pembroke has been chosen to illustrate the problems of the period from the point of view of a magnate who, for most of his career, was closely associated with the monarchy and with the making and performance of royal policy. In this sense Pembroke represents the opposite side of the coin to Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, the King's opponent. Detailed coverage of the period starts in 1312, when Pembroke first became of real importance, and continues until his death is 1324.

The Carmelite Order began when a group of hermits settled in a regulated community on Mt Carmel in the kingdom of Jerusalem in the first decade of the 13th century. As the hermits began to found new houses across Christendom, they adopted mendicant practices and developed legendary traditions designed to extend their putative history back before 1200. The Carmelite historical legendary sought to associate generic eremitical monasticism and its Old Testament precursors with the Carmelite Order in order to claim that the Order, founded by Elijah, represented the oldest form of monasticism. This book examines the processes entailed in creating Carmelite history, analyses Carmelite historical narratives written between c.1280 and c.1530, and offers interpretations of the main techniques and arguments deployed in their construction. The wider context of historical writing in other religious orders is also considered, both for comparative purposes and to examine the reception of Carmelite arguments among contemporaries.

This is a book about the medieval obsession with defining and practising superior conduct and the social consequences that followed from it. It is also a book about how historians since the seventeenth century have understood medieval conduct, because in many ways we still see it through the eyes of the writers of the Enlightenment. This is nowhere more so in its defining of superior conduct on the figure of the knight, and categorizing it as Chivalry. Using for the first time the full range of the considerable twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature on conduct in the European vernaculars and in Latin, the book describes and defines what superior lay conduct was in European society before Chivalry, and maps how Chivalry emerged and redefined superior conduct in the last generation of the twelfth century, and suggests how and why it did. The emergence of Chivalry was, however, only one part of a major social change, because it also made necessary a new and narrower definition and understanding of what Nobility was, which had consequences for the medieval understanding of gender, social class, violence, and the limits of law. The book tackles social change on a European scale and in the emerging understanding that twelfth- and thirteenth-century elite society was a predominantly literate one. Indeed, the majority of the many male and female writers on conduct used here (mostly for the first time in a social history book) were not churchmen, but lay people giving their opinion on their own society and its problems.

Medieval Europe was a rapidly developing society with a problem of violent disorder. This study reveals that chivalry was just as much a part of this problem as it was its solution. Chivalry praised heroic violence by knights, and fused such displays of prowess with honour, piety, high status, and attractiveness to women. Though the vast body of chivalric literature praised chivalry as necessary to civilization, most texts also worried over knightly violence, criticized the ideals and practices of chivalry, and often proposed reforms. The knights themselves joined the debate, absorbing some reforms, ignoring others, sometimes proposing their own. The interaction of chivalry with major governing institutions (‘church’ and ‘state’) emerging at that time was similarly complex: kings and clerics both needed and feared the force of the knighthood. This book lays bare the conflicts and paradoxes which surrounded the concept of chivalry in medieval Europe.

Integrating the brilliant biography of Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne (953-65) and brother of Emperor Otto I, written by the otherwise obscure monk Ruotger, with the intellectual culture of Cologne Cathedral, this book provides a study of actual politics in conjunction with Ottonian ruler ethic. Our knowledge of Cologne intellectual activity in the period, apart from Ruotger, must be pieced together mainly from marginal annotations and glosses in surviving Cologne manuscripts, showing how and with what concerns some of the most important books of the Latin West were read in Bruno's and Ruotger's Cologne. These include Pope Gregory the Great's Letters, Prudentius's Psychomachia, Boethius's Arithmetic, and Martianus Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury. The writing in the margins of the manuscripts, besides enlarging our picture of thinking in Cologne in itself, can be drawn into comparison with the outlook of Ruotger. Exploring how distinctive Cologne was, compared with other centres, this book brings out an unexpectedly strong thread of Platonism in the 10th-century intellect. The book includes a critical edition of probably the earliest surviving, and hitherto unpublished, set of glosses to Boethius's Arithmetic, with an extensive study of their content.

This study offers a major reinterpretation of medieval political thought by examining one of its most fundamental ideas. If it was axiomatic that the goal of human society should be the common good, then this notion presented at least two conceptual alternatives. Did it embody the highest moral ideals of happiness and the life of virtue, or did it represent the more pragmatic benefits of peace and material security? Political thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham answered this question in various contexts. In theoretical terms, they were reacting to the rediscovery of Aristotle's Politics and Ethics, an event often seen as pivotal in the history of political thought. On a practical level, they were faced with pressing concerns over the exercise of both temporal and ecclesiastical authority — resistance to royal taxation and opposition to the jurisdiction of the pope. In establishing the connections between these different contexts, this book questions the identification of Aristotle as the primary catalyst for the emergence of ‘the individual’ and a ‘secular’ theory of the state. Through a detailed exposition of scholastic political theology, it argues that the roots of any such developments should be traced, instead, to Augustine and the Bible.

In the early 15th century, the general council assembled at Constance and, representing the universal Church, put an end to the scandalous schism which for almost forty years had divided the Latin Church between rival lines of claimants to the papal office. It did so by claiming and exercising an authority superior to that of the pope, an authority by virtue of which it could impose constitutional limits on the exercise of his prerogatives, stand in judgement over him, and if need be, depose him for wrongdoing. In so acting, the council gave historic expression to a tradition of conciliarist constitutionalism that long competed for the allegiance of Catholics worldwide with the high papalist monarchical vision that was destined to triumph in 1870 at Vatican I and to become identified with Roman Catholic orthodoxy itself. This book sets out to reconstruct the half-millennial history of that vanquished rival tradition.

This is an account of religious belief and conflict in the strategically important province of Inner Austria between 1580 and 1630. It shows how Protestantisation in the first half of the 16th century was linked to communication with the Protestants of the rest of the Empire, and to the failure of ecclesiastical reform in the church province of Salzburg, of which Styria formed part. The Protestant success of 1578, however, proved deceptive because it lacked constitutional substance, and was defended by an inherently weak union of the Inner Austrian estates. The book analyses the aims, achievements, and shortcomings of the Habsburgs' confessional crusade in Styria, showing how although the progress of Protestantisation was reversed, the Counter-Reformation left an ambivalent legacy to the modern Austrian state.

The Crusader States and their Neighbours explores the military history of the medieval Near East, piecing together the fault-lines of conflict which entangled this much-contested region. This was an area where ethnic, religious, dynastic, and commercial interests collided and the causes of war could be numerous. Conflicts persisted for decades and were fought out between many groups including Kurds, Turks, Armenians, Arabs, and the Crusaders themselves. This book recreates this world exploring how each faction sought to advance its own interests by any means possible, adapting its war craft to better respond to the threats posed by their rivals. Strategies and tactics employed by the pastoral societies of the Central Asian Steppe were pitted against the armies of the agricultural societies of Western Christendom, Byzantium, and the Islamic World, galvanizing commanders to adapt their practices in response to their foes. Today, we are generally encouraged to think of this era as a time of religious conflict and yet this vastly over-simplifies a complex region where violence could take place for many reasons and peoples of different faiths could easily find themselves fighting side-by-side.

The fifty years that followed Mehmed II's capture of Constantinople in 1453 witnessed a substantial attempt to revive the crusade as the principal military mechanism for defending Christian Europe against the advance of Ottoman Turks. This study investigates the origins, character, and significance of this ambitious programme. It locates it against the broad background of crusading history, and assesses the extent to which protagonists and lobbyists for a crusade managed to refashion crusading to meet the Turkish threat, combining traditional practices with new outlooks and techniques. It pays particular attention to diplomatic exchanges and political decision-making, military organization, communication, and devotional behaviour. The book demonstrates the impressive scale of the effort that was made to create a crusading response to the Turks. Crusaders were recruited in very large numbers between 1454 and 1464, and in 1501–3 substantial sums of money were raised through the vigorous preaching of indulgences in the Holy Roman Empire. But while the crusading cause was recognized as important and urgent, the mobilization of resources was prejudiced by the volatile nature of international politics, and by the weakness of the Renaissance papacy. Even when frontline states such as Hungary and Venice welcomed crusading contributions to their conflicts with the Ottomans, building robust structures of cooperation proved to be beyond the ability of contemporaries. As the Middle Ages drew to a close, the paradox of crusade was that its promotion and finance impacted on the lives of Catholics more than its instruments affected the struggle for domination of the Mediterranean Sea and south-eastern Europe.