A Short History of the Middle Ages Fourth Edition

without wealth or lively patterns of exchange. In the first place, money was still

minted, but increasingly in silver rather than gold. The change of metal was due in

part to a shortage of gold in Europe. But it was also a nod to the importance of small-

scale commercial transactions—sales of surplus wine from a vineyard, say, for which

small coins were the most practical. In the second place, North Sea merchant-sailors

—carrying, for example, ceramic plates and glass vessels—had begun to link northern

Francia, the east coast of England, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea. Brisk trade gave

rise to new emporia and revivified older Roman cities along the coasts. In the third

place, a gift economy—that is, an economy of give and take—was flourishing. Booty

was seized, tribute demanded, harvests hoarded, and coins struck, all to be

redistributed to friends, followers, dependents, and the church. Kings and other rich

and powerful men and women amassed gold, silver, ornaments, and jewelry in their

treasuries and grain in their storehouses to give out in ceremonies that marked their

power and added to their prestige. Even the rents that peasants paid to their lords,

mainly in kind, were often couched as “gifts.”

POLITICS AND CULTURE

If variations were plentiful in even so basic a matter as material and farming

conditions, the differences were magnified by political and cultural conditions. We

need now to take Europe kingdom by kingdom.

Francia

Francia comes first because it was the major player, a real political entity that

dominated what is today France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and much

of Germany. In the seventh century, it was divided into three related kingdoms—

Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy—each of which included parts of a fourth,

southern region, Aquitaine. By 700, however, the political distinctions between them

were melting, and Francia was becoming one kingdom.

The line of Clovis—the Merovingians—ruled these kingdoms. (See Genealogy

2.2: The Merovingians.) The dynasty owed its longevity to biological good fortune

and excellent political sense: it allied itself with the major lay aristocrats and

ecclesiastical authorities of Gaul—men and women of high status, enormous wealth,

and marked local power. To that alliance, the kings brought their own sources of

power: a skeletal Roman administrative apparatus, family properties, appropriated

lands once belonging to the Roman state, and the profits and prestige of leadership in