Extending royal authority

As Henry I sought to extend his authority over the relatively welldefined territories of England and Normandy, King Louis VI of France (1108–1137) and his son Louis VII (1137–1180) sought to improve their position relative to that of their great vassals, including Henry himself. At the beginning of his reign, as noted above, Louis VI directly controlled only a small fraction of the territory he theoretically ruled as king —the ‘royal domain’— and that area itself could be profoundly unstable. Local nobles engaged in private warfare and created a general atmosphere of fear. The contemporary writer Guibert of Nogent (c. 1060–c. 1125), wrote that a castellan named Thomas of Marle, ‘a robber of paupers and pilgrims to Jerusalem’, resisted royal authority, sought to consolidate his power, and committed countless crimes (related in stomach-churning detail) against the defenseless. It has been calculated that, in his time as a warrior, first as a prince and then as a king, Louis VI responded to some 27 documented cases of local violence or oppression. The biographer Suger insists that Louis VI could repay violence for violence. When he attacked a disruptive vassal named Ebles of Roucy, ‘the plunderers were themselves plundered and the torturers were tortured with the same or even more pain than they had used to torture others.’ Louis VI’s primary task, then, was to bring peace to the royal domain while simultaneously keeping an eye on his most dangerous vassals. Before his reign was half over, he had largely succeeded in bringing peace to the area around Paris.

He had several assets to help him consolidate his gains. First, the French crown had been safely in the hands of his Capetian dynasty since the tenth century. Most Capetians had the good fortune of long reigns, so succession disputes were rare, and at any rate Louis VI had been designated king in his father’s lifetime (possibly to guard against a rival reviving the memory of Frankish elective kingship). In addition, despite periods of relative weakness, and some rather disreputable and much-censured sexual misbehavior by his father Philip I, Louis VI’s forebears had managed to create an air of sacrality about them; they had relatively few major disputes with the Church. Because authority in France was so fragmented, the French kings had never attained the level of control over bishops that the English and German kings had, and therefore lay investiture was a less pressing issue. Louis VI tended to negotiate with the Church regarding episcopal appointments rather than to make bold claims of theocratic kingship in order to get their way. Although France had its own version of the Investiture Controversy under Philip I, by Louis VI’s reign it had been essentially resolved, and he enjoyed mostly amicable relations with the papacy. The French kings demonstrated the sacred character of their kingship frequently and ostentatiously. The great royal abbey of St Denis, just outside Paris and rebuilt in the middle of the twelfth century, testified to royal holiness through its new Gothic elements. As early as the reign of Robert II ‘the Pious’ (996–1031), the Capetians had been thought to have the power to cure skin diseases —either scrofula or leprosy, depending on the source— as a reverberation of the healing powers of Christ. This power was also imputed to English kings, but they were apparently less successful at it.

The French kings also had more concrete, and more easily documented, means of securing their domain. Philip II had established small administrative units called Prévôtés, to allow for more orderly and manageable organization at the local level. These units were administered by royal agents, prévôts, who collected revenue, looked to royal interests, and tried to ensure some modest consistency in the meting out of justice. During the reigns of Louis VI and his son Louis VII (1137–1180), the prévôts would prove an effective means of extending royal power. But nothing was quite so effective at representing royal authority than the presence of the king himself, and French royal court was constantly traveling. Louis VI benefitted from a small core of trusted advisors, literate men with connections who helped regularize the business of government. Under mostly competent leadership, the production of written charters increased during the century: whereas an average of 5.7 royal charters per year survive from Philip I’s reign, the figure increases to 14.0 for Louis VI, and 28.1 under Philip II ‘Augustus’ (1180–1223).

Despite early difficulties with local uprisings in the royal domain, the Capetians always had their eye on the rest of France, and they intervened when they could, generally with a view to checking the power of the great princes, especially the dukes of Normandy, as Louis VI did repeatedly in the 1110s. Louis also intervened in a succession dispute in Flanders in 1126. In 1137, just before his death, he married the soon-to-be Louis VII to Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine, which loosely joined the royal domain to much of the territory of southern France (though Eleanor’s lands were not formally integrated into those of Louis). Louis brought Eleanor with him on the Second Crusade, where she was rumored to have had dalliances with at least one other man. Partly for this reason, but also because she did not produce an heir, Louis had the marriage annulled in 1152, leading to one of the more significant instances of dynastic politics impinging on the conjoined history of France and England.

John Cotts - Europe's Long Twelth Century- Order, Anxiety and Adaptation, 1095-1229

I’ve been backreading your blog and history posts about TOG for the past couple of days and loving it so much! You are so great at explaining the context around these fictional characters to understand them so much better.

I read your post about how sodomy was sort of a lesser sin that someone should fast with bread and water for, especially compared to like magic and stuff, and I was wondering if you knew anything about how medieval Muslims viewed it? Like at a similar magnitude, or not a problem or highly frowned upon? I’ve read fics all over the spectrum, so I’m wondering if you have any actual historical/research insight you could bring?

Thanks! 💜

Thanks so much!

I will say that I work on gender, social, and queer history in medieval Europe, so by nature I know more about medieval Christian views on sodomy, but I do know something about medieval Islamic views as well. I answered this ask, which has a fairly decent list of scholarly work on queer premodern (and some modern) Muslims. (It also has a list on Muslims in medieval Europe more generally.)

I will also reinforce that obviously the views of sodomy as a sin in medieval Europe changed over time, but at the time period that I most often get asked about in regard to TOG (i.e. the First Crusade/eleventh century) it was indeed a fairly venial sin that wasn’t singled out above others. This changed as the twelfth century went on, and it became more harshly stigmatized, at least in ecclesiastical and clerical opinions, but this doesn’t necessarily coincide with a broader social stigma. (See Peter the Chanter complaining bitterly about how much queer stuff is happening in Paris at the end of the twelth century; the continued valorization of homoromantic bonds, which got even MORE valorized as chivalry developed; etc). There was never a time where medieval people we would identify as LGBT were accepted uncritically at all levels of society, but there sure as hell aren’t any times now either (and modern homophobia is often a lot more stringent, explicit, and exclusionary than any medieval variants thereto).

Anyway, about Muslims. Khaled al-Rouahyeb has written a very interesting-looking book (which I note I have not personally read yet, but I want to) entitled Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, which argues essentially that the category of “homosexuality,” i.e. specifically male/male sexual activity and identity/orientation, didn’t really exist in premodern Islamic sexual polemics and ethics, at least as we would define it. Instead, the narrative centered on whether the sexual partner was active (penetrating) or passive (penetrated), and like other cultural taboos around mlm sex, being the active/top partner in penetrative sex (since you were the phallic/manly partner) was generally okay, but being the penetrated person coded you as female and therefore inferior and suspect in your manhood. (Obviously, in mlm anal sex, someone has to be penetrated, so someone always ends up as the morally suspect half in that scenario.) This fits with medieval Islamic attitudes toward sex more broadly. The ghazals, or Arabic love poems, often contain intensely homoerotic images and themes as well as male/female ones. Probably the most notable in this regard was Abu Nuwas, an eighth/ninth-century Persian poet who has occasionally been viewed as a little TOO risque for general consumption. This doesn’t mean, again, that queer activity was a-okay across the board, but it existed in a complex and culturally and literarily negotiated sphere and there were certainly areas where it was practiced rather openly, just as it was in the medieval Western world. As I talked about in the long ask I answered, the twin cultural correlation of “Saracens” and “sodomites” (just like “Muslims” and “gays” in right-wing paranoia today) in medieval Europe also reflected a belief that the Islamic world was more accepting of non-heterosexual behavior, and that this was therefore, in the Catholic Christian institutional view, a Bad Thing. I take care to specify that since as we’ve seen, plenty of medieval Europeans themselves didn’t give a rat’s ass what the church said and carried on being queer anyway.

Also, Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople in 1453, was pretty openly bisexual; he slept with both men and women, and one of his lovers was allegedly Radu the Fair, the brother of Vlad Dracula. In other words, at least for a late medieval Ottoman sultan, he could do whatever he liked in the bedchamber, with whoever, and judgments on the gender of his partners didn’t really enter into it. This gave rise to a certain brand of hysteria in Western Europe. The propaganda surrounding the fall of Constantinople contained an element of painting Mehmed as even more of a threat because of his liberate sexuality. In short, to put it bluntly, it was “the scary Muslim sultan will rape your children, including the boys,” which is pretty recognizable from its almost exact use in right-wing fearmongering about the evil pederastic gays today. Mehmed’s identity as the Muslim conqueror of the most important Christian city in the world, and someone who was known for being flexible in his sexual preferences, made it very easy to construct him as a hysterical boogeyman.

Obviously, most Arab/Islamic countries today have strict legal and official policies on homosexuality, but that doesn’t mean gay Muslims don’t exist (quite the contrary) or that these attitudes are universally accepted just because they happen to be the law. (Just like Americans disagree, often vehemently, with their government’s official policy.) Nor does it reflect anything about the complexity of homosexuality or mlm acts in the premodern Islamic world. (Anyone who calls medieval Islam “barbaric” has absolutely NO fucking clue what they’re talking about, take it from me.) So basically, Joe, as a queer/gay Muslim, experienced the same broad spectrum of attitudes, texts, and views on his preferences that Nicky would and did as a western European, and there was plenty of room for tolerance, tacit acceptance, literary celebration, or clerical condemnation of such, depending on when and where we’re talking about, and this varied by culture, society, and geography.

Thanks for the question!

France and England, XIIth century

[…] Across the Pyrenees, the kings of France similarly sought to expand the reach of their authority. Their main antagonists, however, were not Muslims, but the great regional magnates who were nominally their vassals. That one of the vassals, the duke of Normandy, was also the king of England for most of the twelth century meant that each of the kingdoms that flanked the Channel would develop along lines determined in part by the other. When Duke William of Normandy became King of England by right of conquest in 1066, he remained subject to the King of France for his lands in Normandy; he and his successors spoke French and administered their continental possessions separately (William even bequeathed his kingdom and his duchy to different sons). The period plays a pivotal rule in the traditional histories of both countries as well as in the comparative study of the origins of modern states, as scholars have sought twelth-century origins for French absolutism and English constitutional monarchy. Although there can be no question that both kingdoms made strides toward centralized administration, the goals of the kings and their subjects, and their methods for achieving them, had little to do with those of Louis XIV in seventeenth-century France or the early English parliamentarians. But considered in terms of contemporary political culture, the differences between the two countries were striking, and provide great insight into the ways kingship and government were exercised and constrained.

After the Norman Conquest in 1066, English kings enjoyed a measure of control over their government and their nobles that was exceedingly rare. They inherited a relatively sophisticated and centralized administration from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors, and ensured the loyalty of their aristocracy by installing loyal Normans as their barons (after essentially eliminating the Anglo-Saxon nobility). They were efficient and ruthless administrators in their own right, as William I ‘the Conqueror’ (1066–1087) demonstrated through his commissioning of Domesday Book, the famous inquest of property throughout the kingdom. Still, they repeatedly confronted a series of major dilemmas. The Church often interfered with their drive toward administrative and jurisdictional centralization, the nobles required careful consideration and could not be taken for granted, and their commitments on the French mainland made enormous demands on their attention and resources. In some ways, the French kings faced even more daunting challenges. At the beginning of the twelfth century, several of their great regional princes —the duke of Normandy and the counts of Flanders, Champagne, and Anjou— rivaled them in wealth and power, while others, like the dukes of Aquitaine and the counts of Maine and Blois, exercised considerable local autonomy. They directly ruled over only a small region around Paris called the Île de France, which did not itself generate enough wealth to extend their reach. The kings of France, however, did have an air of holiness about them that no other noble in France had. By aggressively asserting the prerogatives of kingship, they enhanced their political position throughout the long twelfth century, until by 1229 they ruled securely over a diverse kingdom whose boundaries were beginning to conform to the ‘hexagon’ of the modern period.

John Cotts- Europe's Long Twelth Century- Order, Anxiety and Adaptation, 1095-1229

Population growth

The central fact of social and economic life in the long twelfth century is remarkable population growth. This demographic explosion had begun to pick up steam about a 100 years earlier and would last, with significant regional variation, until roughly 1300. Any figures, of course, are conjectural and imprecise, the best guesses of scholars working with scattered evidence from monastic account records, manorial surveys (where they exist), archaeological sites, and rare, large-scale inquests like England’s Domesday Book. On the basis of numerous post-war studies and revisions to them, one can reasonably estimate that in the mid-tenth century around 40 million people lived in the lands between Sicily and Scandinavia and between Russia and Ireland. By 1200, that number would balloon to perhaps 65 million, an increase of 50 per cent. A careful study of Picardy indicates that that region had an average yearly growth rate of 0.68 per cent in the last decade of the twelfth century, a very rapid rate for a pre-industrial society. Other areas grew as well, though less markedly. While the estimate of 50 per cent growth applies to England, Scandinavia, and Italy (and France grew by perhaps two-thirds), Eastern Europe, Russia, and Iberia grew by about 20 per cent.

Faced with explaining the proliferation of human life, most scholars accept that regional climate change combined with improved agrarian technology to increase the food supply enough to feed considerably more mouths. Tree-ring studies, ice core and pollen samples, and geological evidence of glacial retreat demonstrate that most of Latin Christendom grew warmer and dryer from the tenth to the twelfth century, despite considerable variation and unpredictability. Based on both documentary and anecdotal evidence, it has been suggested, even assumed, that the comparatively warm, dry climate led to a more favorable environment for agriculture, marked by longer growing seasons. Historians now disagree, however, as to whether improvements such as the horse collar and three-field crop rotation were causes or consequences of the need to feed more and more people; the relationship between these phenomena was clearly complicated. Despite long-term trends toward a gentler climate and demographic growth, the Europeans who reclaimed lands, moved their sheep to higher altitudes in response to receding glaciers, and migrated eastward, were responding to immediate crises and opportunities. Weather and other natural events were pressing challenges that required creativity and perseverance.

John Cotts- Europe's Long Twelth Century- Order, Anxiety and Adaptation, 1095-1229

The Medieval Forest

The face of Christian Europe was a great cloak of forests and moorlands perforated by relatively fertile cultivated clearings. It was rather like a photographic negative of the Muslim east which was a world of oases in the midst of deserts. In the near east timber was rare, in the west it was plentiful; in the east trees meant civilization, in the west barbarism. A religion born in the east under the shelter of palms made a way for itself in the west at the cost of trees, for these were a refuge of pagan spirits and were pitilessly attacked by monks, saints and missionaries. Any progress in medieval western Europe meant clearings, struggle and victory over brushwood and bushes, or, if it was necessary, and if tools and skill permitted, over standing trees, the virgin forest, the "gaste forêt" of Percival, or Dante's selva oscura. What in fact was striking about the medieval topography was that it was a collection of greater or smaller clearings. It was made up of economic, social and cultural cells. For long the medieval west remained a collection, juxtaposed, of manors, castles, and towns arising out of the midst of stretches of land which were uncultivated and deserted. Moreover the word 'desert' at this time meant forest. It was there that the practitioners of fuga mundi, willing or unwilling, took refuge: hermits, lovers, knights-errant, brigands and outlaws.

Thus we find St Bruno and his companions in the "desert" of the Grande Chartreuse and Robert of Molesmes and his disciples in the "desert" of Cîteaux, and Tristan and Iseult in the forest of Morois ('"We return to the forest which protects and guards us. Come, Iseult, my love!"… they went into the tall grass and the bracken, the trees closed their branches over them and they disappeared behind the foliage.') Similarly the adventurer Eustache le Moine, the precursor of and perhaps the model for Robin Hood, took refuge in the woods of the Boulonnais at the start of the thirteenth century. As a place of refuge, the forest had attractions. To the knight it was a world of hunting and adventure […]

For the peasants and a mass of poor working people it was a source of profit. Herds and flocks went there to feed. Above all pigs were fattened there in the autumn. They were a source of wealth to the poor peasant; after the acorns had fallen he would kill his pig, which was a promise of subsistence if not of plenty for the winter. In the forest wood could be cut which was indispensable to an economy that for a long time was short of stone, iron, and coal. Houses, tools, hearths, ovens, and forges, could not exist or operate without wood or charcoal. Wild berries could be picked in the forest; they were an essential contribution to the limited diet of the peasant, and were the main chance of survival in times of dearth. Oak bark could be stripped off for tanning and potash could be made for bleaching and dyeing. Above all, resinous products could be collected for torches and candles, and honey, so sought-after in a world for long deprived of sugar, could be taken from wild swarms. At the start of the twelth century, the anonymous French chronicler- Gallus Anonymus- who had settled in Poland, listed the advantages of that country, mentioning its silva melliflua or forests rich in honey immediately after the healthy air and the fertile soil. Thus a whole army of shepherds, wood-cutters, charcoal-burners (Eustache le Moine, the 'forest bandit', accomplished one of his most successful pieces of brigandage disguised as a charcoal-burner), and gatherers of wild honey, lived off the forest and provided for the sustenance of others. These poor people liked poaching too, but game was first and foremost a product of the chase, which was reserved for the lords. Thus, from the smallest to the greatest, the lords jealously defended their rights over the riches of the forest. The forest baillifs were always on the look out for scrounging villains. Kings were the greatest lords of forests in their realms and energetically endeavoured to remain so. For this reason the rebellious English barons imposed a special Forest Charter on King John in 1215 in addition to the political Great Charter. When, in 1328, Philip VI of France had an inventory drawn up of the rights and resources with which he wanted to constitute a dowry in the Gâtinais for Queen Jeanne of Burgundy, he had a valuation of the forests drawn up separately. Their profits made up a third of the whole of the income from this lordship.

Yet the forest was also full of menace and imaginary or real dangers. It formed the disquieting horizon of the medieval world. The forest encircled the medieval world, isolated it, and restricted it. It was a frontier, the no man's land par excellence between countries and lordships. Hungry wolves, brigands, and robber-knights could suddenly spring out of its notorious dark depths […]

It was easy for the medieval imagination, drawing on an immemorial folklore, to turn these devouring wolves into monsters. In how many hagiographies do we encounter the miracle of the wolf tamed by the saint, such as Francis of Assisi subjugating the savage beast of Gubbio […] Sometimes the forest harboured even more bloodthirsty monsters, which had been bequeathed to the middle ages by paganism, such as the Provençal tarasque subdued by St Martha […]

And yet, even if the horizon of most men in the medieval west, sometimes for the whole of their lives, was the edge of a forest, we must not imagine medieval society as a world of stay-at-homes and stick-in-the-muds who were attached to their patch of ground surrounded by wood. The mobility of men in the middle ages was extreme, even disconcerting, but it is easily explained.

Jacques Le Goff- Medieval Civilization, 400-1500 AD