From around the year 1000 Europe’s population boomed, in tandem with a surge in agricultural production. The Medieval Climate Optimum was kind to farmers, and huge new tracts of land were brought under the plough through forest clearances and marsh-draining. Territory was seized from itinerant, pagan Slavs and put under Christian ploughs – a process which started with the Carolingians and continued under the crusaders.24 New farming technologies were developed, with heavy ploughs improving soil quality and the ‘three-field’ crop rotation system preventing soil exhaustion. Shipbuilding also improved, making long voyages by sea safer and faster – whether those voyages were for Viking-style slave-taking and monastery-plundering or buying and selling goods in foreign markets. And from the time of Charlemagne onwards, western Christian monarchs slowly began to stake their claims to ever-larger kingdoms, subjecting them to deeper mechanisms of royal control and governance which (in theory at least) made longer overland trading journeys safer and more secure.
Kitap: Powers and Thrones
Haçlı Sembolünün Doğuşu
Urban commanded all who wished to participate to mark themselves out from their neighbours by fixing a sign of the cross to their shoulders or chests, before going out into the world to spread the word and prepare for departure. Although the term ‘crusade’ was not yet coined, Urban had created the first crusaders.
Karolenj Ordu Yapısı
Squabbling and skirmishing were embedded into the Carolingian world, but much of the toughest fighting took place on the frontiers against Saxons, Slavs, Danes and Spanish Muslims. As a result, Carolingian foreign policy demanded very large, highly mobile armies that could move long distances at pace. To serve this need, Charlemagne demanded all significant landowners make themselves or a representative available for his army. He also developed corps of horsemen who could ride both to and into battle. In 792–3 Charlemagne issued a law ordering all cavalrymen to carry a spear, to be thrust and stabbed towards the enemy, rather than thrown, javelin-style. This proved so effective that over the following two centuries spear-wielding horsemen became an increasingly important part of western medieval armies. The Latin term for such men was miles (plural: milites); the Old German term kneht. By the eleventh century the word had entered Old English as cnihtas, from which today we have the word knight.
Karolenj Devrinde Manastırların Yaygınlaşması
Carolingians founded and enriched monasteries and other Christian holy sites. Large amounts of moveable wealth were placed in the hands of monks: physically the weakest men in society.
The reasons for this explosion in monasticism around the turn of the first millennium have been hotly debated by historians. Many factors played a part. One elemental cause may have been climate change. Between around 950 and 1250 global temperatures in the northern hemisphere rose, and although this rise was by no means evenly felt across the globe, it provided the longest sustained period of benign climate conditions in the west since the Roman Climate Optimum. Although as we shall see, the so-called Medieval Warm Period would not last throughout the Middle Ages, it made conditions in Europe relatively favourable to agriculture. This natural advantage coincided with the development of new horse-harnesses and large iron ploughs (‘heavy’ ploughs) which allowed massively more efficient large-scale agriculture.25 And as this technology combined with the effects of a fluctuating climate, landholding became ever more profitable and landowners had ever more disposable income to spend. But what to spend it on? One very good answer was: salvation.
Carolus Kral Etimolojisi
His Latin name – Carolus – has passed into many modern European languages such as Polish (król), Bulgarian (kral), Czech (král) and Hungarian (király) as the literal meaning for ‘king’.5