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17 1 Lineages of Early Modernization the feudal revolution Antiquity had imagined the Centaur; the early Middle Ages made him the master of Europe. Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change In the year 1000 the organization of political power was still fundamentally ancient. Power in ancient society was imposed from above—based on the unlimited exercise of potestas. In the aftermath of “The Feudal Revolution ,” the exercise of power was re-organized around rituals of reciprocity so that social relations would come to be mediated by contractual obligations which were still unequal but essentially unlike what had existed in late antiquity. The cornerstone of feudal society was the revolution in combat technology. This transformation in the means of violence had made mounted knights the rulers of others. Partly because of the critical requirement to feed their war-horses, feudalism developed most completely in the Seine and Thames basins, which were the centers of the French and Anglo-Norman monarchies. In contrast, its development in Germany took an essentially different course which will be discussed at length. That difference is good to think with in understanding the variety of ways in which early modernization led to the creation of novel systems of political power and new modes of family formation.1 1. This chapter provides a top-down discussion of the reorganization of power and social control; a bottom-up explication of these processes is to be found in the third chapter of this book. “Living in the Material World” examines the living conditions of the rural majority of the population and explains how the character of social relations changed in the wake of the feudal revolution of the year 1000. While 1. After the passing of the Justinian pandemic and Charles Martel’s victory at the Battle of Poitiers, which halted the Moslems’ advance in 732, a new society began to take shape in the northwestern region of Europe. This was a confused and contradictory process; it may have begun in the eighth century , but it was only around the year 1000 that historians can speak of a de- finitive turning point.2 In the interim, the Viking and Magyar invasions had acted as “the solvent of Carolingian society,” while Arab Moslems continued to nibble at Europe’s southern flank.3 The end of this external threat was a necessary—but not sufficient—aspect of the reassertion of authority. The new style of warfare had initially contributed to the expansion of the Carolingians’ dominion, but feudalism would later create the seeds of insuperable contradiction which led to their demise. Feudalism developed from a military revolution. The new warfare was based on the mounted horseman’s massive advantage over the foot soldier. Unorganized ground troops were smashed by the cavalry’s shock force. The stirrup enabled the horseman to concentrate the combined force of weight and speed at the point of impact, at the end of his lance, radically enhancing his advantage.4 A key indicator of the military Centaur’s advantage over the foot soldier was provided by his massive iron toolkit: first and 18 / Lineages of Early Modernization the technological and economic aspects of the feudal revolution have been treated in separate chapters, it needs to be understood that they are two sides of the same coin. 2. Even this turning point, the year 1000 in the shorthand version I will employ , is under siege: see Dominique Barthélemy and Stephen D. White, “Debate: The ‘Feudal Revolution,’ ” Past and Present 152 (1996): 196–223. This article was written in response to T. N. Bisson, “The ‘Feudal Revolution,’ ” Past and Present 142 (1994): 6–42. I will try to keep these contending positions in view in the following discussion, although I cannot pretend to give more than my own summary of these arguments and others which I have taken into account. 3. This sense of change and continuity is neatly captured in Geoffrey Barraclough , The Crucible of Europe: The Ninth and Tenth Centuries in European History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), 13–21, 166. Why did the Viking invasions commence around 800? Lynn White suggests that the arrival of the moldboard plow in Scandinavia created a huge agricultural surplus which led to population growth and expansionary pressures (Medieval Technology and Social Change, 54). 4. Maurice Keen suggests that the triumph of the new mode of warfare—“the charge of heavy cavalrymen holding their lances in the ‘couched’ position (tucked firmly under the right armpit and levelled at...

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