ABSTRACT
Such fundamental and transforming developments took place in political ideas between the mid-eleventh and the late thirteenth century that this period can rightly be seen as being radically different from the early Middle Ages. The background was massive social, economic and political change. This was the time that medieval Europe took off as a civilisation. With the defeat of the last invaders, the Hungarians, western Christendom was no longer a threatened world but was able to expand geographically. The Germans continued the push to the east into Slav lands begun in the mid-tenth century; in the Iberian peninsula the reconquista made dramatic advances in the second half of the eleventh, culminating in the recapture of the old Visigothic capital of Toledo in 1085; Sardinia was conquered from Islam by the fleets of Pisa and Genoa in 1015/16, as was Sicily by the Normans between 1061 and 1091; the Byzantines lost their last toe-hold on the Italian mainland with the fall of Bari in 1071; the First Crusade and its aftermath established the crusading states at Edessa, and in Syria and Palestine at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and, in Scandinavia, Denmark and Norway had been Christianised, officially at least, by the mid-eleventh century, and Sweden in the course of the twelfth. Within western Christendom, the economy, with regional variations, but aided by generally favourable climatic conditions, expanded rapidly through internal colonisation together with an accelerating growth in urbanisation and both long-and short-distance trade. Early medieval society in the west had been overwhelmingly agricultural, and indeed throughout the Middle Ages most people continued to live and work on the land, although by the thirteenth century this was no longer the case in Flanders and Lombardy. The escalating development of city
civilisation provided an environment specifically favourable for intellectual life and in particular for the emergence of universities: the Salerno medical school was the first from the mid-eleventh century; Paris and Bologna provided archetypes in the twelfth. Political ideas became more sophisticated in this urban ambience within a European world which was opening up.
