Who is Telling the Truth about the Middle Ages?
Modern media has performed yeomen’s work in maintaining the concept of the ‘Dark Ages’ and the dreaded Feudal System. But how can one discover the truth?
Dashing Childhood Dreams
The Middle Ages had always fascinated me as a child, to the point where the only topic that piqued my interest was of knights and castles. As I learned more about chivalry and knights, it became clear that the knight was more than just a courageous warrior—he was the embodiment of the medieval period. This thought had established itself early on, though not consciously, as I continued to fervently search for more books on the topic.
Over time, as I became old enough to watch R-rated movies, I began to explore the world of Hollywood’s medieval iterations, hoping that it would mirror what I had learned. To my utter dismay, the things I so dearly loved, like knights, castles, churches, and majestic landscapes were replaced with scoundrels, dungeons, foreboding temples, and bleak fields of mud. Curiously, around that same time in my life I had also been fascinated by the First World War, and could not help but think that the movie producers had conflated the two topics.
As if running a non-stop relay, high school picked up where Hollywood left off, pushing more tropes about sadistic knights who misused women, or greedy clerics who abused women, or castle dungeons where witches were imprisoned. While sitting in my high school world history class listening to pedestrian recapitulations of Edward Gibbon’s conspiracy theories regarding the Fall of Rome and these utterly ‘dark’ times, I started to wonder why they hated the Middle Ages so passionately.
The incessant and coordinated pummeling of the same narrative in both the entertainment and education industries had succeeded in breaching my mind by the time I went to college—little did I know that the assault would only continue.
The demonization of the Middle Ages and all of its associated structures had such tremendous effect that I even forewent the idea of pursuing a degree in history, favoring instead the STEM fields, which had hitherto been promoted as pure, unadulterated science. My suspicion is that many students followed the same trajectory, passing on the humanities after listening to years of indoctrination regarding their presumed frivolity.
A Rediscovery
After beginning my doctoral studies in Art History, I was reading through the charters of the Abbey of Otterberg searching for names of the elusive ministeriales. Suddenly, a realization crept its way into my mind—this is the medieval period as described by those who lived it! After all those years of reading secondary sources or hearing lectures in school, I had never read more than a couple dozen charters until then.
What authority does a medical doctor have, who has never examined a body? Likewise, what authority does a teacher of history have, who has never read the primary sources? As with all periods of history, not focusing on the primary sources or viewing medieval social structures and events through a modern lens will unquestionably lead to inaccurate and imprecise conclusions.
The immediate result of discovering the stories of real people from the charters was liberating. The historical glaucoma caused by years of propagandistic misinformation began to clear, leaving me with the actual history quite literally in my hands.
What is it that I read?
The charters were sometimes transcriptions from Latin into German, and sometimes simply Latin. Most were very short and concise, as the charters of the abbey concerned the usual suspects. More importantly, they are filled with vibrant stories, mostly concerning the illegal movement of border stones, which were at time serious and at other times bordered on hilarity. To summarize: these were the stories of everyday people encountering the same problems as us.
On occasion, the topic would become more somber, when addressing the estate of a deceased patron or abbot, who had become sort of dear to me, like when a character in a favorite novel or movie dies. The more dire topics included theft and the nuisance of vagabonds—usually with regard to the border stones—but rarely did I encounter violence. In fact, after reading nearly 2000 such charters from the registers of abbeys, bishoprics, and the empire, I came upon a single murder!
So much for dark and dreary times, where everyone scampered around from hut to hut fearing the next robber or greedy prelate. This isn’t to say that the Middle Ages were a rosy period, void of adversity. The medieval period certainly had its share of violence, warfare, and crime—but not nearly of the same magnitude as is often taught.
Generally speaking, the topics of warfare, feuds, and high-level crime in the HRE were restricted to the domain of the nobility and imperial ministeriales. The other ministeriales and common folk had less access to that realm and typically resorted to petty crime—if any crime at all.
Even in the event of a war campaign, the common folk (i.e. peasantry) did not play a major role and were typically not so affected. Furthermore, the destruction was very limited due to the relatively small forces that anyone could muster.
How did the Feudal System work in the HRE?
The HRE was not known for its unbreakable unity in which a call-to-arms was patriotically answered. Instead, it usually consisted of the imperial ministeriales being sent around the empire to beg the nobles—and fellow ministeriales—to support the emperor. The answer was typically no, unless they could offer land, status, or wealth. That is one reason why Emperor Henry IV resorted to raising an army of almost exclusively ministeriales in the late 12th century, because at that time, they had far less agency in their decision making, and the nobles despised their emperor.
Why would the nobles and imperial ministeriales necessarily want to leave hearth and home to embark on a journey into the wilderness in the retinue of someone they hated? Such an absence meant less oversight of their lands and the potential danger of another noble usurping their territory. Additionally, the peasantry living on the land relied upon their lord to represent and defend them. In turn, the lord relied upon his peasants to produce the promised crop for that year that he could pay as a tax to his liege lord.
This entire system required mutual reliance, but at the end of the day, the lord of the land took responsibility for both fortune and mishap. A failure to maintain one’s realm—often received as a loan from the liege lord—meant that a replacement would be found. Being replaced was essentially a death knell for a feudal lord, because it not only meant loss of reputation and wealth for him, but for his descendants over generations. Brutality towards one’s peasants was also difficult to hide, considering the network of parish priests, prebendaries, and Teutonic Knights who kept a keen eye out for such injustices.
Besides storing the grain for regional villages brought together by alliances between local lords, and ensuring the proper maintenance of mills, the abbeys also provided legal and canonical support for those villages and their lords. The abbeys were not impartial, nor were they relaxed about abuses suffered at the hands of their adversaries.
The abbots were stern and shrewd negotiators, whose chief concern was the preservation of the realm they occupied. For to lose the respect of one’s enemies was to betray the trust of one’s herd. A wolf left unscathed will always return for more, after all. The abbeys were keenly aware of this and often achieved in nipping such trouble in the bud, but also did not shy away from executing more drastic measures.
The abbeys led by example—however haphazard it sometimes could be—whose chief followers were the local lords. By procuring beneficial relationships with the abbeys, a lord could rest assured that his land would have an extra layer of protection.
Rebuttals
Some may read this and agree full-heartedly in my assessment of the medieval feudal system of the HRE and the role of the abbeys based upon the charters I studied. Others may interpret it as wishful thinking, a romanticizing of inequality, or a naïve fantasy interpolated on the whole empire using data from only one region.
Believe me, I have heard such responses more times than I can count, and usually from the same people who have never read a single medieval charter. The minority of naysayers who have read the primary sources and come to different interpretations, often do so due to the selection of their underlying data.
Researching life in the second half of the 14th century would be a depressing task considering that it was the chronological playground of the plague. Or researching only the horrific pogroms of the Jews over the course of the Middle Ages would be equally disheartening. But not every day was burdened by plagues and pogroms. Nor would these occur as often as is thought. Should the exceptions then dictate the interpretation of the whole?
Any scientist will confidently say that exceptions are important as they do influence the broader canvas, but they are considered exceptions because they do not compose the canvas itself. In the case of my research on the imperial territory of the German Palatinate, I can confidently say that the High Middle Ages were far more peaceful there than in other areas of the empire—not to mention Europe as a whole.
However, the Palatinate was not alone in this. The multiplicity of secular and ecclesiastical powers within a concentrated space created a system in which that power was consistently checked and balanced. Most territories featuring this constellation of powers experienced similar trends. However, other regions in which one ruler—secular or ecclesiastical—consolidated rule were far more susceptible to injustices.
Thus, the interpretation of the feudal system as mostly good or mostly bad depends entirely upon the territory being studied. The politics of the various territories of the HRE varied greatly, and none are comparable to the territories in France or England or Spain—all of which were quite different from one another as well.
One thing that can be said for certain, is that the political structure of the HRE—however accidental it may have been—limited tyrants to a greater degree than in other realms. In fact, tyrants like Emperor Henry IV were not only humbled by the pope, but were dismissed by the electors. It was not a representative democracy, but it lasted longer than any democracy has.
Summary
Any interpretation worth considering must come from someone experienced in consulting the primary as well as the secondary sources. That person must also be forthcoming about those sources and the limitations of their data, as no one has a detailed image of the hundreds of medieval territories that existed. Most importantly, that person must not interpret their data with a modern lens, but instead attempt to place themselves within the context of the period they are researching.
Hollywood and many educators cannot accept that people living in the Middle Ages were not unanimously in support of Revolution. In fact, most probably never even considered the idea!
These modern outlets have not done the work, and unless they can prove otherwise, their conclusions ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
I cannot thank you enough for your scholarship and work here on Substack. I am very interested in the Middle Ages, to say the least, and you save me a great deal of time that would otherwise be spent searching for online resources that are not always easy to track down. In addition to your writing skills, which make the reading a pleasure.