The third impediment to French royal authority lay in the loose legal concept of sovereignty, which tended to be explained and conceived in personal not institutional terms. Thus a landowner, knight, lord or count could take as his overlord anyone from whom he held land, leading to a cat’s cradle of overlapping lordships. In time, centripetal legal and political forces could turn this fluid system to the king’s benefit, but not until the thirteenth century. This personal system of lordship also ignored the boundaries of kingdoms. The count of Flanders held lands from Artois to the river Scheldt; for those which lay in the kingdom of France, the count was a subject of the king of France; for those in the empire, the emperor was his overlord. Two masters; one count; one count, two sets of subjects with wholly different technical allegiances, the king of France or Germany; a political and legal minefield. Viewed from Capetian Paris, the most dramatic and potentially dangerous of these personal international lordships concerned that of the kings of England. In 1066, the duke of Normandy, William the Bastard, invaded England and succeeded in establishing himself as king of the English. As a consequence, from 1066, with a few brief interruptions (1087–96; 1100–1106; 1138–54), the duke or regent of Normandy was also king of England. As a result of dynastic inheritance and a military and political victory in a long English civil war, in 1154 the situation was further complicated when Henry, count of Anjou, also duke of Normandy by inheritance from his mother and duke by marriage of Aquitaine, became king of England. Henry II, the first of the Angevin (i.e. Anjou was his partrimony) kings of England, was overlord to far more of France than his supposed French sovereign Louis VII: Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Brittany, Poitou, the duchy of Aquitaine, the Limousin, Gascony and parts of the Auvergne, with unachieved claims to parts of Languedoc. These French lands were passed on more or less intact to Henry’s son Richard I, a fact that made his relations with his crusading partner Philip II of France during the Third Crusade (1190–91) awkward, to say the least. Only after Philip II’s conquest from John of all the Angevin lands north of the Loire in 1202–4 could the Capetians begin to assert practical sovereignty over their whole kingdom.
Neither the Angevins nor their Norman predecessors as kings of England were in any meaningful sense English. It is wholly wrong to imagine that the lands they held in France were English lands. They were the personal dynastic inheritance of the rulers. In that sense, they typified a Europe that contained no nation states in the manner understood in modern Europe, although cultivating a sense of shared national identity was a feature of the kingdoms that emerged across Europe after the tenth century. The histories of France, Germany, Italy and Spain – and indeed of all the regions discussed including the Near East in this period – underline that the later political organization of Europe or western Asia was not inevitable; frontiers, traditions and nationalities were mutable, even accidental, certainly not innate.
This applied even to the most centralized state of western Europe, the kingdom of the English. Formed through the tenth-century conquest by the kings of Wessex of their northern neighbours, England developed a distinctive system of government in which public justice, coinage, markets, taxation and defence rested with the royal authority, as did control of the church. The king’s authority was mediated through local officials, a relatively efficient and sophisticated bureaucracy and a dense pattern of aristocratic and noble patronage. In Christian Europe, only in Byzantium had the techniques and institutions of government reached a more complicated and comprehensive form. Yet England’s northern and western frontiers remained uncertain, and the kingdom itself was repeatedly invaded and, in the eleventh century, twice conquered, by the Danes (1013–16) and the Normans (1066–70). The very efficiency of the English government’s capacity to tap the kingdom’s wealth made England an inviting target; the centralization of institutions and power facilitated successful conquest. France could not be conquered by a battle. With only a little exaggeration, England could, a sign of relative strength not, paradoxically, weakness. The European significance of the Norman Conquest can be found in the reorientation of English and hence British Isles politics towards north-west Europe rather than Scandinavia. English money transfused the economy of northern France. Continental habits of religious observance, styles of art and architecture and institutions of scholarship were now open to England and the English. In some instances the confrontation was painful, the imposition of foreign ways on a reluctant and far from culturally inferior conquest. In others, contact was as benign as the millennia of peaceful trade across the English Channel. Along with English wool to feed the cloth factories of Flanders and English scholars attending the new continental universities, notably Paris, the ease of assimilation into the continental European community was recognized by the enthusiastic participation by those who regarded themselves as English, as well as the descendants of their conquerors, in the crusades.
For all its elaborate institutions of government, the English state was created and maintained by armed force. After 1066, England was invaded in 1088, 1101, 1139, 1153, 1216–17; civil wars involving the English king or regent were fought 1087–8, 1100–1106, 1123–4, 1139–53, 1173–4, 1191, 1215–17. Yet warfare provided one building block of statehood. This was equally true of the Scandinavian kingdoms that emerged in the late tenth century from the fragmented politics of the Viking age. Denmark had received Christianity under Harold Bluetooth (950–86) and consolidated its territorial and national identity through conquest, both in the Baltic and across the North Sea. Slightly later, in the early eleventh century, Norway followed a similar pattern of royal conversion, rivalry with Scandinavian neighbours and foreign conquest. In 1066, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England had to defeat a king of Norway before he faced the duke of Normandy. From the twelfth century, crusading provided the Scandinavians with the useful mixture of legitimate war and an ideology of supremacy and colonialism to extend their interests eastwards, the Danes into Estonia and the Swedes into Finland.
At every stage and in every corner of the Afro-Eurasian region under discussion, the ubiquity of organized violence, of public and private warfare, has been inescapable. War provided the glue to cement together political institutions and assert governmental authority over areas. It supplied the pivot of civil and international disputes. It also provided occupation for nobles, aristocrats and the wider urban and rural population; by service for the upwardly ambitious, the physically suited or the otherwise unemployed; or by non-combatant engagement in the extensive social, economic and commercial networks that were required to sustain armies of whatever size. Across the whole region one of the most characteristic figures was that of the warrior plying his trade; the mamluk or Kurdish mercenaries who maintained regimes in the Near East; the Flemish and other mercenaries who supported kings and their rivals in northern Europe; the Varangian guards, northern European émigrés in the service of the Byzantine emperor. Some effectively professional fighting men did very well. The former Varangian Harold Hardrada (d. 1066) ascended to the throne of Norway; the Norman freebooter Robert Guiscard (d. 1085) became ruler of southern Italy; his great-nephew Tancred (d. 1112) rose from landless gentility to be prince of Antioch; the exiled Rodrigo Diaz, the Cid, of Castile (d. 1099), sold his sword and his soldiers to the highest bidders on all sides of the Christian–Muslim conflict before taking Valencia to rule for himself; after failed careers as a cleric and then Anglo-Norman noble, Baldwin of Boulogne (d. 1118) used his military and generalship skills to install himself as ruler of Edessa in the Jazira beyond the Euphrates before assuming the crown of Jerusalem; the Kurdish mercenary captain Yusuf Ibn Ayyub (d. 1193) became Sultan of the Near East: he is better known as Saladin.