This is a fascinating, three-dimensional picture of the politics, society and religion of medieval Europe, the age that had as its great theme the unity of Christendom. Maurice Keen examines tribal wars, the Crusades, the growth of trade and the shifting patterns of community life as villages grew into towns and towns into sizeable cities. He explores how Papal victories, by blurring the distinction between temporal and spiritual matters, eventually undermined the spiritual authority of the Church. And he discusses how the Hundred Years War escalated from a feudal dispute into a full-scale national conflict, until, by the mid-fifteenth century, changing economic and social conditions had transformed the unity of Christendom into merely a pious phrase.
Preface
1. The Middle Ages and Their Heritage: The Idea of the Unity of Christendom
Section One (c. 800-c. 1046)
2. The Revival of Empire: Charlemagne to Henry III
3. Serfdom and Feudalism
4. Religious and Political Ideals
Section Two (c. 1046-c. 1216)
5. Empire and Papacy: The Beginning of the Struggle
6. The Expansion of Europe
7. New Movements in Thought and Letters
8. The Twelfth-Century Revolution in Government
9. The Crusades
10. Innocent III: The Papacy Triumphant
Section III (c. 1216-c. 1330)
11. The Universities and the Friars: St. Thomas, St. Francis, and Abbot Joachim
12. The Struggle of the Popes and the Hohenstaufen
13. The Crusade in the Thirteenth Century
14. France and England: The Growth of National Communities
15. Boniface VIII and the Onset of Crisis in the Church
Section Four (c. 1330-c. 1460)
16. Economic and Social Development in the Later Middle Ages
17. The Hundred Years War
18. Politics and Political Society in an Age of Wars
19. Upheaval in the Church: Avignon, the Great Schism and the Councils
20. Europe and the Infidel After the Crusades
21. Epilogue: The Break with Traditional Attitudes
Appendix: Tables of the Royal Houses and Popes
Bibliography
Index
