ABSTRACT
The ‘Expansion of Medieval Europe’ is a recognised topic amongst historians of the medieval period. But this raises the difficult question of what the term Europe meant to medieval people, particularly at the beginning of our period. We tend to envisage Europe as a geographic zone, partly because we have a very wide knowledge of the rest of the world which was not shared by people around the year 1000. Our twenty-first century view is rather different from that of the Greeks and Romans who invented the term, and even now there is by no means unanimity on what countries and peoples should be included. Europa remained in the vocabulary of learned men in the early Middle Ages because of their education in Roman literature, but it was rare and only revived towards the end of the eighth century as a description of the dominions of Charlemagne in all their diversity. The Regensberg annalist identified imperium and Europa when he spoke in 888 of the break-up of ‘Europe or the kingdom of Charles’. The word was used in this sense by the Ottonian dynasty of Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries. A famous sequence of manuscript illustrations dating from the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries proclaims the supremacy of either the Emperor Otto II (97383) or Otto III (983-1002) by showing a series of figures representing variously Francia, Italia, Germania, Alamannia, Gallia, Roma and Sclavinia performing homage.1 But although we tend to use the term European in a geographic sense, we are also aware that it implies much more than this – it is shorthand for a shared historical experience and a powerful sense of a community of culture. It is important to recognise that this sense of cultural community is much older than our sense of belonging to a geographic zone. It is out of this that our present identity has sprung. Around the year 1000 ‘Europe’ was a rare term and it is doubtful whether anybody felt it to be a part of their identity. But there was a sense of a wider community to which the elites of the peoples in part of our Europe felt they belonged.
