Archibald R. Lewis

The closing of the mediaeval frontier 1250-1350

HISTORIANS whose field of study is American history have long found the concept of the frontier useful and meaningful in explaining the American past. In a recent important book an American historian, Walter Prescott Webb, has extended this concept to include the entire Western European world during the period from 1500 to the present. On the whole, however, historians whose interest is the Middle Ages have made little use of a frontier thesis to explain developments in Europe during the mediaeval period, except in regard to the German advance into Slavic Europe beyond the Elbe. This is a surprising fact, for few periods can be better understood in the light of a frontier concept than western Europe between 800 and 1500 A.D. This article is then an attempt to open up what appears to be a fruitful field for historical speculation by examining a crucial period of Western European history in the light of a frontier thesis. We must begin this examination by briefly noting that from the eleventh to the mid-thirteenth century Western Europe followed an almost classical frontier development. Indeed in some respects one might carry the beginnings of this development back to the Carolingian era of the ninth century. For our purposes, however, this is not necessary. We can begin our survey with that impetus to expansion and growth which started again after the stimulus of the Carolingian Empire and Viking expansion had ended and a new growth had begun about the year 1000 A.D. Starting about this period then what were the frontier bases of the newly emerging Western Europe for the next two and a half centuries? First let us examine Western Europes frontiers themselves. Early in the eleventh century Western Europeans began to advance their frontiers South into the Mediterranean into regions where Carolingian and Ottonian efforts had been unsuccessful. In the next two centuries this resulted in most of Spain being successfully wrested from Moorish control, in an occupation of the Balearics, Sardinia, Corsica, and in a Norman conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily, which were lost by Byzantium and Islam. Nor did this advance stop there. The early Crusades added Cyprus, Palestine, and Syria to Western European control, and after 19204 Crete, the Aegean Islands and much of the Byzantine Empire had been con-

The Islamic World and the Latin West, 1350–1500

The century and a half just before Western Europeans moved out into the wider world during the great age of discovery and expansion which began with Columbus and Vasco da Gama was crucial in the long-term relationship that developed between the Latin West and the Islamic world nearby. And it was in this period that these two great world civilizations formed attitudes towards each other that still govern much of how they interact today. It is in an attempt to clarify the importance of these years that I am addressing you medievalists today. About the middle of the fourteenth century, when our story begins, the Moslem world had just ended a dismal period perhaps its most dismal since it had moved east and west from Arabia in the early seventh century. Two forces had all but torn it asunder. One was the expansion of a crusading Latin Europe, which during these years had resulted in the conquest of most of Moslem Iberia except for Granada, opened the Straits of Gibraltar to northern European shipping, and had come to dominate the waters of the entire Mediterranean-Black Sea complex and its islands. Though by 1291 these Latins had lost Syria and Palestine to the Mamluks, Western Europeans were moving deep into North African territory and by way of a number of routes were penetrating the Islamic world to reach central Asia, India, and China.

Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America

George Peddy Cuttino, distinguished scholar of diplomatic and diplomacy, died in Atlanta, Georgia, on 4 October 1991 in his seventy-eighth year. He was born in Newman, Georgia, on 9 March 1914. When Cuttino entered Swarthmore College in 1931, he assumed that he was heading towards a career as a diplomat, but Mary Albertsons seminar soon turned his thoughts to medieval history. After graduating with highest honors in 1935, he received an M.A. from the University of Iowa the following year. He then proceeded on to Oxford, the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, and for the next two years he studied at Oriel College. Maurice Powicke, already the Regius Professor, was his official tutor, but increasingly he sought guidance and inspiration from Vivian Galbraith, then a Reader in Diplomatic and the scholar whom Cuttino regarded as having had the greatest formative influence on his own development. He received his D.Phil. in 1938, after which he spent a postdoctoral year at the University of Londons Institute of Historical Research.

Seigneurial Administration in Twelfth Century Montpellier

MEDIAEVAL historians have rightly stressed in recent years the importance of the growth of non-feudal administration in the twelfth century as a key to much of Europes later institutional history and development. Largely as a result of this, there have been exhaustive studies of the growth of Englands Curia Regis and judicial system, Frances Parlement, baillis and seneschals, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilys unique institutions, and the Byzantine Empires self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Norman and Flemish institutional developments in government have been minutejy examined and important work has been done on similar trends in Italy. Southern France, however, has been relatively neglected, as has Spain. Much work is needed before any clear, definitive picture of institutional development in this area emerges. Sometimes, a study in the small helps to clarify the larger pattern. Such a study can be made of the development of Montpelliers seigneurial administration in the twelfth century. It is almost a truism to say that two forces worked to mould and shape Montpelliers seigneurial government and institutions between the years 1100 and 1206. One was the older force of feudalism,1 drawing its strength from the relationships and patterns of life which had grown up in the region during the anarchy and disorder prevailing in the ninth, tenth, and early eleventh centuries. The other was the new power and influence of the bourgeoisie arising from the world of commerce and industry which was transforming so much of twelfth century Europe. The bourgeoisie by 1206 had won an important victory over the older force of feudalism and had become the dominant power in the town. Their victory was never a complete one, for feudalism was never completely routed. Down to 1294, when Montpellier came under the direct rule of the centralizing French monarchy, the towns institutions reflected a mixture of both the feudal and the bourgeois spirit, with the latter much in the ascendancy. Feudalism in various forms survived in the region right down to the French Revolution. Historians have often stressed the basic antagonisms between these two forces in the Middle Ages. This antagonism undoubtedly existed, but it was never constant. In the forms and pattern of seigneurial administration they reached a large measure of accommodation during the course of the twelfth century in Montpellier. Neither completely destroyed the other. Each influenced and changed the forms of seigneurial administration to the mutual benefit of seigneur and bourgeoisie. A study of their developing modus vivendi makes this abundantly clear.