review

Chris Wickham

Making Europes

The double celebration of 1992, Maastricht and Columbus, spawned a

double debate, each prolonged way beyond its intrinsic interest by media
attention and its acolyte, academic scrutiny: it may be years before any of
us will be able to read with enthusiasm another book or article on either
the identity of Europe or the irruption of Europeans into America. Each
of the two debates was and is characterized by celebrators and detractors,
people following the long tradition of enthusiasm for European
superiority and people concerned to deconstruct and otherwise under-
mine it, arguing that Europe is imaginary, a long-standing way of
defining Us against Them, and that its hegemony over the world is
illusory or shameful. Personally, I have no trouble identifying with the
second group, but actually a third group is more interesting, for it is
comprised of people who try to sidestep the moral issue and focus on
explanation: how concepts of Europe arose and what they meant at
different times, and why it actually was that parts of western Europe were
able to conquer and transform most of the rest of the world in the modern
period. If the focus is deep enough, the separate Maastricht and Columbus
debates here merge into one, for both have common roots in the central
Middle Ages, when the polities of Latin Christendom were beginning to
define themselves as Europe, a Europe moreover already keenly and
rapaciously expansionist. It is at this meeting-place that Robert Bartlett
has placed his new book, The Making of Europe*; one of the things he has
explicitly tried to do is, precisely, to explain the double face of Latin
Europe in the four hundred years before the Black Death, brusquely
expansionist and, simultaneously, increasingly homogeneous. The
memory of the staleness of 1992 gives an edge to ones interest in seeing
how well he has succeeded.

Even the explanatory focus of the third approach is perpetually haunted

by the moral debate, for any discussion of European identity, no matter
how scientific, risks falling into teleology, again from two directions. The
European identity teleology is expressed in the long-standing preoccu-
pation with when Europe was made, when we finally became Us, the
quintet of France, Germany, Italy, England and (eventually) Spain which

* Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change
9501350, Penguin, London 1993, 8.99.

133
could gain sufficient common identity for their different expansions
actually to be seen as European expansion. Hence the vast number of
books with the same titles, listed for example in two recent critical articles
in History Workshop by Timothy Reuter and Ross Balzaretti: The Birth of
Europe, The Childhood of Europe, The First Europe, The Origins of Europe, The
Making of Europe (already in 1932: that time, as at others, the wonder
ingredient for Europeanization was a form of Catholicism). All these are
books by medievalists; many of them have a very naive image of
European supremacy, and most have a fairly un-thought-out idea of what
Europe actually is. Then as now, however, as Reuter remarks, To
invoke Europe was . . . to pursue a deliberate rhetorical stategy; as Miri
Rubin (in the same issue) and Balzaretti further stress, it covers up huge
differences in real lived experience.1 Indeed, European identity, if it is to
be understood at all except rhetorically, must be faced as a problem, head
on.

The second teleology, that involving the capacity of Europeans to

expand, is better founded and, for that reason alone, in some ways more
insidious: for there is no doubt that nine or ten European states did
directly control nearly all the world at different times between 1750 and
1950, and were busily engaged in transforming it economically. It is
therefore only too easy to focus ones attention on those features of
European history that make the area special, different, more adventurous
and creative, as withto take one recent high-quality exampleMichael
Manns preoccupation with what he calls the leading edge of power.2
Any discussion of European development that concentrates too much on
creativity, without rooting it very deeply in the stable and ongoing
experience of production and exploitation that characterized all societies,
whether European or not, risks falling into this teleology, with only those
elements which make Europe special declared worthy of interest.

Bartlett had a difficult path to walk, then, when writing this book. I will
argue below that he has not entirely avoided the second teleology, but
that he has dealt very firmly, and in some respects definitively, with the
first. This alone would make his book extremely interesting. To a
professional medievalist, furthermore, a third problem presents itself:
how to write a general survey of the central medieval period in English
that is not in some measure simply a rewriting of Richard Southerns 1953
masterpiece, The Making of the Middle Ages, which, although a short work,
has had something of the effect on English-speaking medievalists that
Marc Bloch and Georges Duby have had on everyone else. Here, too,
Bartlett is interesting, for in my view he is one of only three such
historians who have ever successfully managed itthe others being
Alexander Murray, with his 1978 book Reason and Society in the Middle
1
T. Reuter, Medieval Ideas of Europe and Their Modern Historians, History
Workshop 33, 1992, pp. 17680 (p. 180 for the quote); R. Balzaretti, The Creation
of Europe, ibid., pp. 18196; M. Rubin, The Culture of Europe in the Later
Middle Ages, ibid., pp. 16275. The classic text here is D. Hay, Europe. The
Emergence of an Idea, Edinburgh 1957, which has influenced very many later
surveys.
2
M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume I, Cambridge 1986, e.g. pp. 50810.
I have criticized this view in Historical Materialism, Historical Sociology, NLR
171, pp. 6378.

134
Ages, and Susan Reynolds, with her Kingdoms and Communities in Western
Europe of 1984. The success of all three in part derives from the fact that
they treat things other than the traditional central problems so well
discussed by Southern, such as feudal/aristocratic power and Church
reform. Murray, the most arcane of the three, linked the breakthroughs in
intellectual knowledge in the period (reason) to the developing structure
of society; Reynolds, perhaps more compellingly, posed the changes of
the whole period in terms of changing patterns of collective activity.3
Bartlett, for his part, has done it by shifting his attention from the core
lands of the Latin West to the periphery, the areas of initial Western
expansion, above all the Celtic lands, the western Slav lands, Muslim
Spain and the Crusader states. It must be clear that each of these three
works can only be fully persuasive as a general survey insofar as it can
convince us that its chosen focus actually does have the power that
Southerns had, to stand for medieval development as a whole. Here too
there are some problems in Bartletts choice, as we will see, although they
must be set against one of his greatest strengths, an interest in far more of
the geography of Europe than that normally held by anyone writing in the
field.
Bartletts book roughly divides into three. His concern is to show how the
basic political, social and institutional structures of Latin Europe (i.e. the
parts of Europe which used Latin as a literary and liturgical language)
spread from the core, the old Carolingian lands (France, Germany and
Italy), England and the north Spanish fringe, as in 950, to an area more
than double in size by 1350, which included the whole of modern Europe
eastwards to Estonia, Poland and Hungary. In the first section, he
concentrates on aristocratic expansion, its technological basis and its
ideology. Three central chapters match this with accounts of peasant
migration and urban settlement in the outer lands of Europe (notably the
German Ostsiedlung in eastern Europe and the English occupation of
Ireland). The last third of the book looks at ethnic relations in the
periphery, in law courts, in the Church, and in towns, and at the rise of
racism at the end of his period. He concludes with two survey chapters, on
Europeanization and on political sociology, which sum up the
implications of these three approaches to the material.
It must be stressed, however, that this pattern is only a convenient
structure, to give cohesion to his argument; it does not restrict in any way.
Bartlett constantly and deftly moves from idea to ideaas, for example,
when he notes (p. 68) in the middle of a discussion of military technology
that an interest in castle-building in some respects turned traditional
geographies inside out, privileging marginal but defensible terrain rather
than cultivated fields; or as when in his section on towns (p. 182) he shows
that English immigrants into twelfth-century Dublin came from towns in
England, not from the countryside, thus changing our entire sense of the
cultural profile of the earliest Anglicization of Ireland. He is particularly
strong on the effective use of the striking example, whether it is the
extraordinary success of a small French aristocratic family, or the
3
R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, London 1953; A. Murray, Reason
and Society in the Middle Ages, Oxford 1978; S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities
in Western Europe, 9001300, Oxford 1984.

135
influence of the law of Lbeck, or the literary and legal interests of an
archbishop of Lund, or the way that both the Scottish and the
Mecklenburg ruling families steadily abandoned Scottish and Slavic
names like Donald and Pribislaw in favour of common European stock
names such as Henry and John. He can balance Irish, Polish or Spanish
examples in a single argument without eliding their specificities, and does
so constantly. This is an easy book to read and absorb, without being in
any way simplistic, as also Southern was before him, and it will be read by
non-medievalists too.

It is because of the stimulus of Bartletts book, then, that it is worth

looking at some of its underlying themes. Not all of them are made
explicit by Bartlettnotwithstanding his sophistication, as seen for
example in his final sociological chapter, he is not much more interested in
theory than are the great majority of historiansbut the themes are all, I
think, reasonably clear in the text; and they all connect with the issues
raised at the start of this article. I will discuss his idea of Europe, and then
set out four, linked, ways in which I think his chosen focus is problematic.

Core and Periphery

Bartlett actually does not talk about Europe much, except as a

geographical expression; his protagonists are members of a more precise
entity, Latin Christendom. He knows the problems about how Europe
is socially constructed; indeed, the first words of the book show it:
Europe is both a region and an idea. He does, however, aim to show how
Europe actually did come together as a homogeneous entity. He does this,
first, by arguing that Latin Christendom itself had a sort of political
coherence, at least once popes emerged as international political figures in
the late eleventh century; people identified themselves as part of the gens
christiana, the Christian people, a quasi-ethnic term, and they meant by this
Latins, rather than Christians as a whole (pp. 2505). This common
religious framework permitted the spread of standard religious institu-
tions, such as bishoprics (pp. 518) and monasteries (pp. 25560), as well
as legitimizing the idea of the crusade, which extended from its first locus,
the Holy Land, northwards to the German frontier as well (pp. 2608).

So far so good; the argument up to here is uncontroversial. Bartlett goes

further at this point, however, by discussing the steadily more
homogeneous institutions of Latin Europe explicitly in terms of
Europeanization, explaining that this has neither more nor less meaning
than Americanization has today (p. 269). Throughout the book, Bartlett
shows that the conquest institutions at all the edges of Europe had
striking similarities: the legal framework for the peasant colonization of
new land, for example, was much the same from Poland to Aragn (pp.
11718). Essentially, he is arguing that the experience of conquest was
lived by conquerors and settlers in much the same way everywhere: that in
some respect, maybe, that experience showed up a pre-existing structural
similarity in societies in the core area,4 but that, whatever caused it, the

4
Something stressed consistently by Reynolds, ibid., e.g. pp. 79; I discuss the
issue further below.

136
similarity in conquest experiences was a strong impulse to greater
structural and cultural conformities everywhere in the Latin world. He
shows how people slowly began to use similar names all over Latin
Europe, as noted above, and how certain political tools, such as silver
coinage and the production of documents, spread across all the polities
from Cork to Jerusalem to Riga (pp. 27088). He argues in fact that what
characterized the Latin world of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was a
variety of legal and institutional blueprints, like the chartered town and
the religious order, which were by now much the same everywhere and
could readily be exported to new regions of the world (pp. 30911): it was
these, above all, that maintained and strengthened a homogeneity that
one can by now genuinely call European. Much of the New World was
taken over with the same procedures, which indeed one can only properly
understand in the light of this medieval background.
I am convinced by this argument. It is different from most of the
arguments about how Europe was born or made, which depend on the
image of a barrier which is broken through, once Europeans finally came
to be creative and inventive, truly Ourselves that is to say. It is a carefully
sociological argument, about real similarities and differences (Bartlett lists
the places it does not work, mostly on the edges of the expanded Europe,
such as Lithuania or western Ireland: pp. 31113). In a simple Popperian
sense, it is scientific because, for once, it is actually falsifiable. It is also not
triumphalistic; European cultural unity in 1300 had its losses as well as its
gains, and its nasty side in a new racism (pp. 23642). In these respects,
cultural and institutional, there was a single Europe by 1300, which
existed notwithstanding the dozens and hundreds of highly diverse local
social realities with hugely different cultural identities and experiences,
that could be found inside it; Bartlett is right to direct our attention to it.
This is a major strength of the book: both as its major rhetorical device, an
integrating element of the type that all books need to maintain their
coherence of argument, and as its most convincing theme. It is set against
other themes and procedures, however, which are more problematic, and
we must now look at these. The first is Bartletts counterposition of core
and periphery. I do not cite this to criticize the categorization in itself.
Bartlett himself does at one point, in fact (pp. 3067), when he notes that a
major feature of the medieval expansion of Latin Europe was precisely the
absorption of peripheries into the core: the German parts of modern
Poland were not colonies of Germany, but copies of it, with the same legal
status; except in the case of Ireland, there were no permanent
dependencies of a modern type. This is true enough, but the core
periphery opposition remains valid at other levels: in a political sense at
the moment of conquest at least; in a cultural sense through the fact that
cultural developments in learning or art tended throughout the Middle
Ages to begin in the centre and radiate outward; in an economic sense in
that, as I would guess, perhaps 75 per cent of the population of Latin
Europe remained in the 40 per cent or so of its land area that could be
defined as the core, including most of its largest towns and its most
powerful political units.
The problem here is simply that Bartlett only discusses the periphery in
any detail; the core barely appears in its own right at all. On one level, this
137
is laudable, to redress the balance; we can easily find out about France or
England elsewhere, if we dont know about them already; it is important
to be forced, in a major survey, to read about Brandenburg and Ulster.
But given the continuing centrality of the core, even when the conquest
principalities had cloned off it, not to have any information about it at all
unbalances the book in a different way. It makes the problem of
explaining the success of European expansion very difficult, as we will see,
for that would necessitate a more detailed analysis of what was going on in
France or Germany or Italy than we ever get (this is particularly true of
Italy; a huge and active city like Milan, for example, only gets one citation
in the index). But it has a more insidious effect, for the core nations, since
they get so little analysis, are made into abstractions in their turn: German
or English conquerors and settlers too often come out of nowhere, as
disembodied forces, to beat hell out of unfortunate Slavs and Celts. Since
we do not hear much about the Slavs or Celts in their natural habitat
either, a point I will come back to, we have a curious experience as we
read: we dont find out about Germans in themselves, or Slavs in
themselves, but only about the effect of the one on the other. This
abstraction underlies the other points I want to make, in fact; it is the near-
inevitable result of leaving so large a geographical hole in the middle of
the analysis.
The question of explanation needs further development here. Bartlett of
course knows that he cannot deal with his theme without trying to explain
why western Europeans wanted to expand outward, and why they were
so much more active and successful at it after 1000 or so than they had
been before. Indeed, when he discusses it, in his chapters 2 and 3, he
devotes some space to what was going on in France and Germany. But he
finds an explanation, the undoubted supremacy of western military
technology (heavy armour, bows, castles), too quickly; once we are here,
by pp. 702, the problem seems to have been solved, and we can go on to
the effects these technologies had on the periperal lands. It isnt solved,
however. The crucial question of why western aristocracies looked
outside their own lands only in the eleventh century is the object of an
unusually tentative and weak analysis (pp. 4351). Why castles, an
undoubted strategic advantage, spread in the West in the tenth and
(especially) the eleventh centuries (pp. 659) is not discussed at all. These
problems point us firmly back to looking at the core lands in their own
terms, and, furthermore, not starting in 950.
Aristocratic Aggression
Bartlett neglects the early Middle Ages. Not that he should have started
his book any earlier; his timescale works very well. But the period before
his 950 starting date tends to get treated with the same sort of indifference
with which modern historians used to treat the Middle Ages (and some
still do): as a pre-historical time, in which nothing much happened except
that the West got invaded a lot (e.g. pp. 2, 292). This image has venerable
antecedentseven Marc Bloch used it, in Feudal Society5but it does not
take much research to find out that the Carolingian empire, in particular
but not only under Charlemagne, was on the attack in ways that
5
M. Bloch, Feudal Society (Eng. trans. London 1961), pp. 3, 526.

138
prefigured much of what Bartlett discusses, and had some of the same
tendencies to homogenize former frontier areas into the central political
system: the most extreme example of this being Saxony, conquered and
forcibly converted in the late eighth century, but by the mid tenth already
sufficiently acculturated to provide the kings of most of the Frankish
world, and to act as one of Bartletts springboards.6
Bartlett is not very interested in states, in fact; he correctly stresses that the
lasting gains for the core societies were made by aristocrats, townsmen
and peasants acting almost entirely on their own, and that state-run
conquest was often less permanent (e.g. pp. 3079). Carolingian
expansion eastwards depended on a certain coherence of central
government that did not last, as also did that of the late tenth-century
German kings, closer to Bartletts purview. But the core area was still
essentially Carolingian in its culture and social structure in the period
when Bartlett begins his book, and this fact determined what homoge-
neity it already had; the particular characteristics of its aristocracy in 950
themselves had a history that goes back to Charlemagne at the latest. Why
did aristocrats only expand outwards after 950, Bartletts problem on pp.
4651? He is uneasy about the major explanation he has to offer, the
narrowing of aristocratic family structures and their tightening around
the male line, I think because he cannot really see how it would work; one
could add that in many of his expansionist areas (Spain for example) it did
not take place at all. He adds to it a vague characterization of a new type of
lesser aristocracy, the knightly stratum, which gained in status rapidly
between 1000 and 1200it may have overloaded the system to such an
extent that expansionary movement abroad was a natural response (p.
51). Well, maybe; but maybe not as well. We know quite a lot about what
knights did in this period; most of them stayed at home, sitting in one or
two castles, fighting their neighbours; they sought to expand without
moving. Only when they had done that did they sometimes look outside.
This, however, was not new. And the answer to Bartletts conundrum
actually seems to me that 9501000 is not very much of a break at all.
Aristocrats had a long history of aggression, both at short and long
distance. A major part of the appeal of Charlemagnes policies is that they
took the Frankish aristocracy of the RhineMeuse heartland of Carol-
ingian power all over Europe: not just in plunder campaigns against
Saxons and Slavs, but as officials in already conquered and absorbed areas,
ex-periphery now turning to core, such as Aquitaine and Italy. Much like
the expansionary Joinvilles of the thirteenth century in Bartletts account
(pp. 258), the Rhenish Guidones of the ninth century found themselves
lords of Spoleto in central Italy and of the Breton march in the west of
France. This was already a broad sweep; they did not need to go farther,
yet. Similarly, one reason why the great West Saxon aristocratic families
of the tenth and early eleventh centuries did not move into the Celtic lands
was that they were fully occupied in taking over the rest of England,
recently unified (i.e. conquered) by the kings of Wessex. Another reason,
I think, for the lack of need felt by these aristocracies to go farther was that
there was plenty of room to expand in their own localities. The
6
Patrick Wormald already made this point in his own review of Bartlett, The
West Dishes It Out, London Review of Books, 24 February 1994.

139
Carolingian world had many relatively independent peasants, in nearly
every region. We know they were under threat from the enriched
aristocracy, for the Carolingians systematically had to legislate to protect
them. The signs are that aristocratic wealth was increasing; presumably at
the expense of their poorer neighbours. After 900, even kings lost the
political initiative to their aristocrats, nearly everywhere in the Latin West
(England is one exception).
This is the framework for what has been called by the French the feudal
revolution: the violent takeover of much of what remained of public
political power by the aristocracy. It is a much discussed issue right now,
and this is not the place to set out the debate.7 It is not very controversial,
nonetheless, that rulers in much of Europe rapidly lost their power to
control most of what went on on the ground, and that aristocracies began
to establish local hegemonies, largely independent of royal or even
comital sanction. These hegemonies involved extensive political control
of neighbouring peasantries, which sometimes included their total
expropriation; indeed, aristocratic power became so complete that its
internal organization became necessarily more complex, with new social
groups scrabbling to join it: hence the rise of the knights. Local power
needed local defence, too: hence the appearance of the private castle. New
ground-rules for local relationships began to appear (the feudalvassalic
bond, for one), and a new political etiquette that did not need the sanction
of kings or their representatives.
It should be clear that this sort of takeover of local power would satisfy
many an aristocrat for a long time. By 1050 or so, however, the situation
had become fixed in many parts of Europe; there was no one left to
dominate except rivals of the same status. At that point, looking
elsewhere might well seem more attractive. Hence, for example, Norman
aristocrats streamed out of Normandy in all directions in the late eleventh
century: following their duke into England in quasi-Carolingian manner,
or occupying bits of southern Italy and, eventually, Syria more or less
autonomously, in ways Bartlett discusses (he gives a good example of it
on pp. 2830)they did not draw much distinction. I would be
surprised, however, if even the Normans, notoriously greedy as they
were, would have gone so far had there been anything left in Normandy
to take.
The expansion of Latin Europe thus seems to me a more on-going process
than Bartlett recognizes. Aristocrats did not suddenly start to move
outwards; they were already at it. The tools they had at their disposal,
such as the castle, themselves had specific histories, rooted in the political
developments of the core areas. So also were the procedures they used,
such as the feudal bond, so widely and systematically adopted in the
peripheral lands. The sort of aggressive takeover of all power that they
practised in places like Ireland and Pomerania had been practised for a
long time at home, even though it had come to be independent of external
control only relatively recently. Bartlett is very interesting on the
difference between this sort of aggression and the more sedate native
predation of the Irish and the Slavs, focused on gaining tribute and slaves,
7
T.N. Bisson, The Feudal Revolution , Past and Present 142 (1994), pp. 642 is
the best and most up-to-date current survey.

140
rather than territory (pp. 3036), but he does not really develop it. I would
myself attribute the accumulative urge of the core aristocracies to the
growing local dominance to which they had become accustomed since the
Carolingians (as well as to the tradition of landlordship which they
inherited from the Roman empiremost of the core lands, except the
obviously new Saxony, had once been Roman). The difference in the rules
of aggression, as well as the difference in technology, was what gave the
French/German/English aristocracies the edge. But how the rules
themselves can be explained needs a fair amount of attention to the
centre.8

The Peasant as Hero

The problem of difference is another issue that needs raising. I have

defended Bartletts choice to stress common patterns rather than local
distinctions; and, indeed, he uses those patterns to draw some very useful
typologies, notably when he distinguishes between different styles of
relationship between centre and periphery. But he tends to look at his
societies from the outside, rather than from within; they are made real by
his use of the telling example, but how they worked internally is
considerably less clear. Two settlement grants, one in Aragn, one near
at the opposite end of Europe, are very similar (pp. 11718);
how did they work out? How did the ecological and the economic realities
of the two areas, the social structures of the settlers, their links to the
previous populations, their different cultural assumptions, work to make
the subsequent histories of the two areas similar or different? A genuine
comparison between the two could be made, if the material allowed (and
it sometimes does, even if maybe not in these particular examples),
precisely because of the similarities in ground-rules in each. I am a
supporter of this sort of sociological comparison, and I would like to see it
everywhere; not everyone might agree. But I was struck, to take one
example, that when Bartlett sought to represent the cultural Europeaniza-
tion of Latin Christendom, he was happy to restrict himself to names and
the growing universality of saints (pp. 27080). This is a pretty minimalist
homogenization. Miri Rubin has remarked robustly that, despite the
(relative) ease of travel in late medieval Europe, and the familiarity of its
social and cultural patterns and its symbols (saints cults as one precise
example), this familiarity was largely illusory: each social and geographi-
cal community gave, in reality, different meanings to each social and
symbolic elements9as, one might add, they still largely do. Bartlett of
course knows this: he has made his choices. But they are not necessarily
the right ones. His interest in common elements is only one side of the
dialectic; to get at the full range of European reality, we need difference
too.
8
I have focused on aristocrats here, for they provided the military strength
necessary to move into the peripheral lands. Peasant migrations had their own
history, however; the uniform clearance leases for internal resettlement in tenth-
century Italy and the desert-to-sown rhetoric of early medieval monasticism are
clear forerunners to the central medieval processes described on pp. 11732 and
1535.
9
Rubin, as note 2, p. 174.

141
My final point is the trickiest to deal with, for it brings us back to the way
the accounting for the specificity of Europe can drift towards a teleology,
and an implicit celebration, of European expansion. Bartlett does not
intend this; but it is there in the book nonetheless. It is easy to tell that he
does not intend it; he goes out of his way to stress the rapacity of his
protagonists. The fact is very clear when he discusses aristocrats; to make
it all the clearer, he has a beautiful chapter on the image of the conqueror,
where he describes how proud they were of their own rapacity, which
indeed the Normans, in particular, deliberately played up to terrorize
their enemies, and which everywhere served to legitimate past conquest
in aristocratic memory (pp. 85101). Later on, his treatment of the
English racial laws against the Irish (always the hardest people to justify
conquering, since they were Latin Christians already, so in many respects
treated the worst) is very cold-eyed (pp. 21417), and leads into a clearly
hostile account of how racist ideas in a modern sense took root on the
edge of Europe (pp. 23642),10 ready for transmission to America (p.
313). Bartletts stance here is in no way celebratory. But he lets his guard
down when he comes to the peasantry, whose colonization of the
periphery he deals with across two chapters. In these, his descriptions are
much more upbeat, as he shows how hard life was among semi-virgin
forests that were, for the first time, being reduced to cultivation by brave
and desperate immigrants.
Here, stripped of the romantic violence of the aristocracy, which Bartlett
does not fall for (though surprisingly many medievalists do), we have
another image: the hard frontiersman. It is perhaps relevant to note at this
point that Bartlett was at Chicago when he wrote much of this book; for
his peasants have more than a whiff of Frederick Jackson Turner. This is,
however, where the trap lies. This Europe may have fewer heroes; but its
practices are heroic. German peasants did indeed introduce heavy ploughs
into eastern Europe, as Bartlett clearly shows (pp. 14852); but in this
context, even though he explicitly distances himself from German
triumphalism, he still spends four pages on ploughs, whereas his
recognition that Spanish Christian settlers had to learn irrigation from the
Muslims, an issue which these days has a huge bibliography, gets only
seven lines. Similarly, although he correctly recognizes that the cereal
monoculture developed by the Germans in the East is not automatically
superior to agricultural traditions that use wasteland as a resource (pp.
1526), and indeed can lead to a less healthy population, this cereal
tradition is still the focus of his interest in his text. What the Slavs had
done in eastern Europe before the settlers came, how they related to and
humanized their landscape, is hardly dealt with at all. They are
consciously recognized (e.g. pp. 141, 154, 160, 165), but in practice they
are discussed only as a counterpoint to what German colonizers did. They
appear in other parts of the book as resisters, or as imitators of German
social structures or military technology, but in these crucial chapters they
are virtually absent. Precisely because Bartlett does not intend to give this
impression, it is all too clear when one notices the absence. In the terms of
10
Not that their development depended more than partially on centreperiphery
tensions in themselves: as Bartlett remarks, but does not develop (p. 236), the
treatment of Jews in the core lands prefigured the whole process. See, for the early
period, R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Oxford 1987.

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the 1992 debates, the analogy seems to me this: one would have difficulty,
these days, in writing about the introduction of cereal cultivation to the
Midwest or of sugar cane to Hispaniola and Brazil without giving some
attention to the ecological procedures of the Indians; and if one did, ones
ideological position would be clear. Bartlett has forgotten, in his careful
distancing from excessive triumphalism, that European civilization has
not needed individual heroism to present itself as victorious.

The Making of Europe is a rich, elegantly written, stimulating book. It is

full of insights. It was never so clear to me how important language was
for ethnic identity by Bartletts period (pp. 198204), for example, or that
the cost of sea passage would itself dramatically limit the scale of
migration to Ireland or Estonia (p. 112), or how similar coins and charters
were to each other as movable repositories of power (pp. 2868). I am
flicking through the book as I write; there are insights on nearly every
page, neat and memorable phrases too. As I said earlier, this is a book that
needs to be taken seriously, and I have tried to do so; it would be scarcely
worthwhile to look at the intellectual underpinnings of the huge majority
of history books, and the problems I have posed for Bartletts approach
can be found in far more acute form in the works of other historians.
History is an un-self-aware discipline, with an inbuilt hostility to explicit
model-building; indeed, people who try to construct their arguments on
the basis of coherent theory are regarded by many as not historians at all.
As a result of this it is only too easy to deconstruct the ideas of most of its
practitioners. Bartlett is a more serious matter. On his last page, he makes
his own contribution to 1992 with his usual incision of phrasing: Europe,
the initiator of one of the worlds major processes of conquest,
colonization and cultural transformation, was also the product of one.
There we have it, no matter whether that latter process began in 950, or
750, or earlier still.

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