136 DESTINY DISRUPTED
ignored them; officials treated them rudely; and petty indignities of every
sort were piled upon them.
When they got back to Europe, they had much to swear and gripe
about, but they also had tales to tell about the opulence of the East: the
gorgeous houses they had seen, the silk and satin even commoners wore,
the fine foods, the spices, the perfumes, the gold, the gold ... stories that
stirred up both anger and envy.
The battle of Manzikert in 1071 CE, the one in which the Seljuk
Turks crushed the Byzantines and took their emperor prisoner, came as
stunning news. It also triggered a stream of messages from the Byzantines.
The Byzantine emperors harangued the knights of the West to come to
their aid in the name of Christian unity. The patriarch of Constantinople
sent urgent messages to his diehard western rival, the pope, warning that
if Constantinople fell, the heathen "Mohammedans" would stream right
to Rome.
Meanwhile, with the European economy on the mend, the population
was rising, but European customs had not kept pace in two crucial ways.
First, productive labor was still considered unsuitable to the dignity of the
noble born: their job was to own land and make war. Second, ancient cus-
tom still decreed that when a landowner died, his eldest son inherited the
whole estate, leaving the younger sons to make their way as best they
could. Ironically, this custom of"primogeniture" was only reinforced by an
opposite process at the highest levels, the tendency of kings and princes to
divide their realms among their sons, which fragmented kingdoms into
ever-smaller units. France, for example, had dissolved into semisovereign
units called counties and even smaller units ruled by really minor noble-
men called castellans, whose nobility consisted of possessing one castle and
whatever surrounding area it could dominate. A castle could not be di-
vided among several sons, and so at this level, the level where knights were
generated, the custom of "eldest son inherits all" became pervasive.^1
Every generation therefore saw a larger pool of landless noblemen for
whom there was no suitable occupation except war, and with the invasions
sloping off, there wasn't even enough war to go around. The Vikings, the last
major wave of invaders, no longer posed a threat because, by the eleventh
century they had crammed into Europe and settled down. "They'' had be-
come "us." Even so, the system kept producing knights and more knights.