The cities attracted people from the countryside, where the increasing productivity of the farms was freeing many peasants from working on the land. Various mercantile and craft guilds were formed beginning in the 10th century to protect their members’ common interests. The merchants’ guilds and other associations also contributed to the emergence of the sworn commune, or the self-regulating city government, originally chartered by a bishop, count, or king. The city distinguished itself from the countryside, even as it extended its influence there. During the 12th century this distinction was recognized culturally, when the Latin word urbanitas (“urbanity”) came to be applied to the idea of acceptable manners and informed Christian belief, while rusticitas (“rusticity”) came to mean inelegance and backwardness. Despite this awareness, cities had to protect their food supplies and their trade and communication routes, and thus in both southern and northern Europe the city and its contado (region surrounding the city) became closely linked.
In some areas of northern Europe, particular kinds of manufacturing became prominent, especially dyeing, weaving, and finishing woolen cloth. Wool production was the economic enterprise in which the cities of the southern Low Countries took pride of place, and other cities developed elaborate manufacturing of metalwork and armaments. Still others became market centres of essential products that could not be produced locally, such as wine. This specialized production led to the proliferation of long-range trade and the creation of communications networks along the rivers of western Europe, where many cities were located. Although some lords, including the kings of England, were reluctant to recognize the towns’ autonomy, most eventually agreed that the rapidly increasing value of the towns as centres of manufacturing and trade was worth the risk of their practical independence.
Originally a product of the agrarian dynamic that shaped society after the year 1000, the growing towns of western Europe became increasingly important, and their citizens acquired great wealth, usually in cooperation rather than conflict with their rulers. The towns helped transform the agrarian world out of which they were originally created into a precapitalist manufacturing and market economy that influenced both urban and rural development. Reform and renewal
A number of the movements for ecclesiastical reform that emerged in the 11th century attempted to sharpen the distinction between clerical and lay status. Most of these movements drew upon the older Christian ideas of spiritual renewal and reform, which were thought necessary because of the degenerative effects of the passage of time on fallen human nature. They also drew upon standards of monastic conduct, especially those regarding celibacy and devotional rigour, that had been articulated during the Carolingian period and were now extended to all clergy, regular (monks) and secular (priests). Virginity, long seen by Christian thinkers as an equivalent to martyrdom, was now required of all clergy. It has been argued that the requirement of celibacy was established to protect ecclesiastical property, which had greatly increased, from being alienated by the clergy or from becoming the basis of dynastic power. The doctrine of clerical celibacy and freedom from sexual pollution, the idea that the clergy should not be dependent on the laity, and the insistence on the libertas (“liberty”) of the church—the freedom to accomplish its divinely ordained mission without interference from any secular authority—became the basis of the reform movements that took shape during this period. Most of them originated in reforming monasteries in transalpine Europe, which cooperative lay patrons and supporters protected from predatory violence.
By the middle of the 11th century, the reform movements reached Rome itself, when the emperor Henry III intervened in a schism that involved three claimants to the papal throne. At the Synod of Sutri in 1046 he appointed a transalpine candidate of his own—Suidger, archbishop of Bamberg, who became Pope Clement II (1046–47)—and removed the papal office from the influence of the local Roman nobility, which had largely controlled it since the 10th century. A series of popes, including Leo IX (1049–54) and Urban II (1088–99), promoted what is known as Gregorian Reform, named for its most zealous proponent, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85). They urged reform throughout Europe by means of their official correspondence and their sponsorship of regional church councils. They also restructured the hierarchy, placing the papal office at the head of reform efforts and articulating a systematic claim to papal authority over clergy and, in very many matters, over laity as well.
The emotional intensity of ecclesiastical reform led to outbursts of religious enthusiasm from both supporters and opponents. Many laypeople also enthusiastically supported reform; indeed, their support was a key factor in its ultimate success. The increase in lay piety on the side of reform was indicated by the events of 1095, when Urban II called on lay warriors to cease preying on the weak and on each other and to undertake the liberation of the Holy Land from its Muslim conquerors and occupiers. The enormous military expedition that captured Jerusalem in 1099 and established for a century the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, an expedition only much later called the First Crusade, is as dramatic a sign as possible of the vitality and devotion of clerical and lay reformers.
Peter the Hermit leading a Crusade; from Abreviamen de las Estorias, early 14th century, a summary of universal history from the creation of the world to the death of Emperor Henry VII; in the British Library.The British Library (Public Domain)
The First Crusade had other, unintended effects. The success of Genoa, Pisa, and other Italian maritime cities in supplying the Christian outposts in the Holy Land increased their already considerable wealth and political power, which were soon comparable to that of Venice. Proposals for later Crusades often led to searching analyses, not only of specific military, financial, and logistical requirements but also of the social reforms that such ventures would require in the kingdoms of Europe. Finally, by bringing Latin Christians other than pilgrims deeper into western Eurasia than they had ever been before, the Crusade movement led Europeans in the 12th century to a greater interest in distant parts of the world.
The reform movement had a pronounced effect on church and society. It produced an independent clerical order, hierarchically organized under the popes. The clergy claimed both a teaching authority (magisterium) and a disciplinary authority, based on theology and canon law, that defined orthodoxy and heterodoxy and regulated much of lay and all of clerical life. The clergy also expressed its authority through a series of energetic church councils, from the first Lateran Council in 1123 to the fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and greatly enhanced both the ritual and legal authority of the popes.