The High Middle Ages and the Apex of Church Power

198 Pages·2014·1.22 MB·English

by  Curtiss Cline

The High Middle Ages
and the
Apex of Church Power
* The Return of the Crossbow and Its Implications for Europe
• The Crossbow: Weapon of the Devil

• In 1139, Pope Innocent II issued a papal bull or a religious law or ruling,
forbidding the use of crossbows.
• According to Webster, a crossbow is a weapon for shooting quarrels that
consists of a short bow mounted crosswise near the end of a stock.

• According to the Pope, the crossbow was an instrument of Satan, hateful
to God and unfit for Christians.

• So what was the Pope's beef with the crossbow?

• To a modern audience, a ban on a lethal weapon does not seem so
strange.

• Maybe the Pope just wanted to reduce bloodshed among Christians, yet
such a ban was unheard of in the 12th century.

• The Church clearly had no problem with Christian violence.

• They'd already sent the rulers of Europe on one crusade at the end
of the 11th century and would do so twice more in the 12th century
alone.
* The Return of the Crossbow and Its Implications for Europe

• The Crossbow: Weapon of the Devil

• So how do we explain this unprecedented prohibition on the
crossbow?

• The answer is simple: the crossbow threatened to undermine
the very foundations of medieval society.

• Crossbow vs. Armored Knight

• You see, before the crossbow came on the scene, the ultimate killing
machine in Western Europe was the armored knight.

• Their mounts made them quick and maneuverable, while their
armor made them nearly invincible.

• The only force that could challenge an armored knight was another
armored knight.

• However, these knights were dreadfully expensive to outfit and maintain.

• The knights themselves required nearly a decade of training.
* The Return of the Crossbow and Its Implications for Europe

• Crossbow vs. Armored Knight

• Their arms and armor required skilled craftsmen and lots of metal,
and their horses consumed vast amounts of food.

• By contrast, a crossbowman didn't require much training at all.

• With its simple point-and-click interface, a couple of weeks was all it
took to master the crossbow.

• A crossbow is a relatively cheap piece of equipment.

• It requires very little metal, especially compared to a full set of
plate armor.

• Most importantly, using a crossbow doesn't entail feeding a horse all
year just to go to battle for a couple weeks.

• Yet that was not the worst of it.
* The Return of the Crossbow and Its Implications for Europe

• Crossbow vs. Armored Knight

• For you see, the crossbow packs a great deal of punch into a bolt -
enough punch, in fact, to pierce through plate armor, the very thing
that made the armored knight seem invincible.

• This meant that a knight - a member of the nobility, Europe's
apex warrior - with his expensive armor, horse, and a lifetime of
training could be brought down by a peasant with a week's
training and a crossbow.

• The Armored Knight's Importance to Feudal Society

• Big deal, you might say; new technology replaces old technology.

• This sort of thing happens so much in our world today that it's hard to
remember that entire ways of life can come to be built upon a technology
and its replacement can upset an entire civilization.

• Such was the case in Medieval Europe.
* The Return of the Crossbow and Its Implications for Europe

• The Armored Knight's Importance to Feudal Society

• The overturn of the armored knight would not have been such a big
deal were it not for the fact that Charlemagne had engineered the
entire feudal system for the purpose of generating armored knights
for his army.

• In the Roman Empire, membership in the aristocracy had been
limited to those from ancient families - or those with enormous
wealth and land that went with being from an ancient family.

• In Charlemagne's time, all the ancient families were dead and
forgotten, what wealth there was had long been pillaged, and
the land was an open frontier, owned by no man.

• Recognizing the importance of the armored knight in warfare
and having limited resources at his disposal, Charlemagne had
taken his greatest and most loyal warriors and made an
aristocracy of them by giving them plots of land to rule, or fiefs.

• These fiefs were enough to support the newly made lord,
allowing him to train and outfit knights.
* The Return of the Crossbow and Its Implications for Europe

• The Armored Knight's Importance to Feudal Society

• In exchange for his fief, the feudal lord provided armored
knights and foot soldiers to his king when he called.

• This feudal system allowed Charlemagne to call on a powerful
army without having to outfit and train them himself.

• Thus, in essence, the entire aristocracy of Medieval Europe owed their
lofty position to the importance of knights on the battlefield.

• If a peasant with a crossbow could take down an aristocratic knight,
what was the point in having aristocrats?

• What purpose did the aristocracy serve any longer?

• A New Opportunity for Kings

• This very question was being asked in the courts of kings across Europe.

• You see, kings have always had a sort of love/hate relationship with their
feudal lords.
* The Return of the Crossbow and Its Implications for Europe

• Yes, it is nice to have an army of invincible killing machines at your
beck and call, especially one that you don't have to pay for.

• The problem is that the knights and armsmen of feudal lords are
loyal to their feudal lord, who supported and trained them, not to
their king, who just calls upon them.

• This made it very hard for a king to enforce his will on his lords, since
they were all quite heavily armed and nearly as powerful as the king
himself.

• Thus, feudal lords were as dangerous a weapon as they were useful.

• Push one too hard, and your own sword could turn on you.

• Of course, a king would have knights and soldiers of his own, but the cost
of outfitting and maintaining knights was so cripplingly expensive that a
king would bankrupt himself trying to build an army on his own.

• The best he could hope for was enough of an advantage over his
lords to intimidate them into falling in line.
* The Return of the Crossbow and Its Implications for Europe

• With the crossbow, all of that changed.

• A king could outfit a company of crossbowmen at a fraction of
the cost of a cavalry unit.

• They did not even have to be trained; any old peasant could do
it.

• All you had to do was give him a crossbow, feed him when
there was fighting to be done, and then set him back to hoeing
fields when the war was over.

• This made crossbowmen an excellent alternative to knights,
and kings began building large armies of cheap crossbowmen.

• This, in turn, gave kings a lot more power to enforce their
will on the nobility.

• If a noble wanted to lead his armored knights in rebellion,
the king had an army of crossbowmen to mow those
lovely knights down.
* The Return of the Crossbow and Its Implications for Europe

• This did not mean that the aristocracy was no longer needed.

• Centuries had entrenched the feudal system as the most
effective form of administration for a kingdom.

• Kings needed their lords to help them rule their countries.

• It did not even mean that knights were no longer needed.

• Armored knights continued to charge across medieval
battlefields for centuries to come.

• Armored cavalry remained an important part of every
medieval army until the ascent of gunpowder in the 15th
century.

• What the ascension of the crossbow meant was that knights
were no longer as important as they used to be, and kings
gained more authority and power over their feudal lords.