64 Chapter Three
This introduced a second relatively well-armed element into society.
It was connected with the knightly establishment of the countryside
only by a series of unstable negotiated truces.
Another way of describing this situation is to say that for several
centuries on either side of the year 1000 the weakness of large territo
rial polities in Latin Christendom required merchants to renegotiate
protection rents at frequent intervals. Moving amidst a warlike,
violence-prone society,^2 European merchants had a choice between
attracting and arming enough followers to defend themselves, or,
alternatively, offering a portion of their goods to local potentates as a
price for safe passage. In other civilized societies (with the possible
exception of Japan), merchants were less ready to use arms on their
own behalf and more inclined to cater to preexisting rent and tax-
based authorities and depend upon their protection.
The merger of the military with the commercial spirit, characteristic
of European merchants, had its roots in the barbarian past. Viking
raiders and traders were directly ancestral to eleventh-century mer
chants of the northern seas. A successful pirate always had to reassort
his booty by buying and selling somewhere. In the Mediterranean,
the ambiguity between trade and raid was at least as old as the
Mycenaeans. To be sure, trading had supplanted raiding when the
Romans successfully monopolized organized violence in the first
century B.C., but the old ambiguities revived in the fifth century A.D.
when the Vandals took to the sea. Thereafter, from the seventh cen
tury until the nineteenth, cultural antipathy between Christian and
Moslem justified and sustained a perpetual razzia upon the seas that
bounded Europe to the south.
The knightly Latin Christian society that defined itself in the cen
tury or so before the year 1000 proved capable of far-ranging con
quest and colonization. The Norman invasion of England in 1066 is
the most familiar example of this capacity; but a geographically more
- The rise of knighthood did not produce a submissive, nonviolent peasantry in
Europe. Habits of bloodshed were deep-seated, perennially fed by the fact that Euro
peans raised both pigs and cattle in considerable numbers but had to slaughter all but a
small breeding stock each autumn for lack of sufficient winter fodder. Other agricultural
regimes, e.g., among the rice-growing farmers of China and India, did not involve
annual slaughter of large animals. By contrast, Europeans living north of the Alps
learned to take such bloodshed as a normal part of the routine of the year. This may
have had a good deal to do with their remarkable readiness to shed human blood and
think nothing of it. Cf. the Saga of Olav Trygveson for the primal ferocity of northern
Europe. Also Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy; Warriors and
Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (London, 1973), pp. 96, 117, 163, 253,
and passim.
