By making their headquarters at Aix-la-
Chapelle (Aachen) the Carolingians had
contributed to a first awakening of the region, which was interrupted by the ravages
of the Norsemen
In the eighth and ninth centuries, the
limits of a northern maritime empire had
already been staked out and sometimes exceeded by the expeditions, invasions
and piracy of the Norsemen. Their venture may have become dispersed over the
broad spaces and coastlines of Europe, but something of it remained in its place of
origin. For some time afterwards, Scandinavian longboats ranged the North Sea
and the Baltic - the Norwegians went to the English coast and the Irish Sea; the
peasants of Gotland sailed into ports and rivers as far away as Novgorod; from
Jutland to Finland there sprang up the Slavonic towns whose remains are now
being uncovered by archaeologists; Russian merchants reached Stettin, hitherto a
completely Slav town. But there was no truly international economy before the
Hanseatic League. Gradually, peaceably, thanks to trading and agreements with
princes, but with the occasional use of force and violence too, this double sea-
space, the North Sea and the Baltic, was taken in hand and organized by the cities,
merchants, soldiers and peasants of Germany.
Europe expanded in many directions which
followed the great Nordic migrations of
the fifth century, as settlement of the ‘Norsemen’ extended beyond the boundaries
of the Roman Empire towards Germany and eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the
only partly- Romanized British Isles. Gradually the seas surrounding the old
continent - the stretch of water encompassing the Baltic, the North Sea, the English
Channel and the Irish Sea - were colonized. Here too, the 'new West' went beyond
what Rome had accomplished: despite her fleets based at the mouth of the
Somme and at Boulogne, Rome had never really ruled these northern waves.
Nevertheless, most important
frontier in European expansion was the internal
frontier of forest, marsh and heath. The uninhabited wastes were reduced in size
as the European peasants cleared the land; as people became more numerous,
they harnessed the power of wheel and windmill; communications were established
between regions once completely foreign to each other; barriers came down;
countless towns sprang up or revived wherever there was a crossroads of trade,
and this was undoubtedly the crucial factor. Europe was suddenly covered with
towns - more than 3000 in Germany alone. Some of them, it is true, were little more
than villages, despite their city walls, harbouring a mere two to three hundred souls.
But many of them grew to become towns of a new and unprecedented kind.
Classical antiquity had
had its free cities, the Greek city-states; but these had been
open to the inhabitants of the surrounding countryside, who were free to come and
go as they pleased. The west European medieval town was on the contrary a
closed citadel behind its walls. 'The wall separates the townsman from the peasant',
as a German proverb says. The town was a world of its own, protected by its
privileges (`the city air makes men free'), an aggressive world and an active force
for unequal exchange. And it was the medieval city - a more or less active ferment
depending on period and place - which, like the yeast in some mighty dough,
brought about the rise of Europe. Can the prominent role of the city be accounted
for by its having been able to expand and develop in an already- structured rural
world, rather than in a vacuum like the towns of the New World (and possibly the
Greek city- states themselves)? In other words, it had ecological material available
to work on, at the expense of which it could grow. What was more, the territorial
state, since it took so long to appear on the scene, offered no competition and
easily and predictably outstripped the slower developments of the more
impoverished south.
