“Thanks be to God.” In this sense Constantinople was taken so that the saints could
get better homes.
IRELAND
In 1169 the Irish king of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada (Dermot MacMurrough),
enlisted some lords and knights from England to help him first keep, then expand, his
kingdom. The English fighters succeeded all too well; when Diarmait died in 1171,
some of the English decided to stay, claiming Leinster for themselves. The king of
England, Henry II, reacted swiftly. Gathering an army, he invaded Ireland in 1171.
The lords of the 1169 expedition recognized his overlordship almost immediately,
keeping their new territories, but now redefined as fiefs from the king. Most of the
native Irish kings submitted in similar manner. The whole of one kingdom, Meath,
was given to one of Henry’s barons.
The English came to stay, and more—they came to put their stamp on the Irish
world. It became “English Ireland”: England’s laws were instituted; its system of
counties and courts was put in place; its notions of lordship (in which the great lords
parceled out some of their vast lands to lesser lords and knights) prevailed. Small
wonder that Gerald of Wales (d.1223) could see nothing good in native Irish culture:
“they are uncultivated,” he wrote, “not only in the external appearance of their dress,
but also in their flowing hair and beards. All their habits are the habits of
barbarians.”^24
*****
In the fifty years before and after 1200, Europe, aggressive and determined,
pushed against its borders. Whether gaining territory from the Muslims in Spain and
Sicily, colonizing the Baltic region and Ireland, or creating a Latin empire at
Constantinople, Europeans accommodated the natives only minimally. For the most
part, they imposed, with enormous self-confidence, their institutions and their
religion.
Self-confidence also led lords and ladies to pay poets to celebrate their
achievements and bishops and townspeople to commission architects to erect
towering Gothic churches in their midst. Similar certainties lay behind guild statutes,
the incorporation of universities, the development of common law, and the Fourth
Lateran Council’s written definitions of Christian behavior and belief.
An orderly society would require institutions so fearlessly constructed as to be