Описание
2 Introduction
that they were European achievements, or that their history was Euro¬
pean history. Above all, it is not the same thing as saying, what is often
said, that these legacies shaped or formed Europe. They did not. They
provided an essential stock of materials, certainly -social, economic and
institutional as well as cultural and intellectual - but from that stock, as
we shall see repeatedly, the men and women of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries took what they wanted for their own intricate and highly
idiosyncratic construction, and discarded what they did not want. ‘Not
only is it proper for the new to change the old,’ wrote Arnold of Regens¬
burg around 1030, ‘but if the old is disordered it should be entirely
thrown away, or if it conforms to the proper order of things but is of
less use it should be buried with reverence’1. His contemporaries and
successors more commonly deprecated innovation as dangerous and
disreputable, and modestly insisted that they themselves were doing
nothing more than restoring broken and tarnished heirlooms to some¬
thing approaching their pristine glory. The truth is that when they did not
find whatthey needed among the relics of the past, whether it was a collar
to enable their few and precious horses to draw heavy loads without
throttling themselves, or a harsher but more efficient principle to govern
the inheritance of landed property, they did not hesitate to invent it.
The example of the horse collar, which seems to have appeared in the
ninth century and was essential to the agrarian and transport revolutions
of the eleventh and twelfth, is a reminder of the remarkable achieve¬
ments of the Carolingian centuries. By the same token the emergence of
inheritance by primogeniture, no less essential to the articulation of the
characteristic and unique social structure of ancien regime Europe, con¬
firms that the decisive developments and the decisive choices which
made Europe came after, not before, the millennium. The map of Char¬
lemagne’s Empire (Map 1) anticipates that of the European Economic
Community as it was established in 1956, and the European Union
which has now extended far beyond those frontiers honours its most
distinguished servants with a prize that bears his name. Nevertheless, the
Carolingian Empire was a successor state, the greatest of many in the
crumbling peripheries of the Roman Empire. It had yet to develop
permanent or characteristic forms of its own. In particular, it lacked
the urban life, with its need and capacity to organize the life of the
countryside around it, which is and which defines civilization. The seeds
of the future were there, of course, as they always are, and had begun to
germinate; but they did not grow and bear fruit until the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, and then not by unaided nature, but because they were
arduously and skilfully cultivated.
The construction of a new civilization required profound changes in the
economic and political organization of the countryside, amounting to a
Детали
- Год издания
- 2000
- Format