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counts anxious to secure their authority launched the
Peace Movement, directed against the turbulent ambitions of these rising lords. Involvement of “the people” was “only a parenthesis.” At this time the milites,
far from representing a desired ally, were defined only
by their dangerous and disruptive faults.
It would require a transformation of these denounced faults into remedial virtues and a reliance on
the milites as an ordo of warriors at all social ranks to
create an ideology of chivalry. The Peace Movement,
Flori says, had not forged a chivalric ethic, but it had
contributed greatly to a mentality for those who were
increasingly called chevaliers.
By around 1030, the rising curve of social, political,
and military capacities of the knights had not yet intersected the descending curve of royal power and characteristic royal attributes to give ideological substance
to an ordo militaris. Though the church and the aristocracy had to deal with the milites, the common function of warriors recognized as a social necessity had not
yielded a common status. Flori looks ahead chronologically to see this development emerging as warriors
earned significant merit: as the great invasions of northerners, Hungarians, and “Saracens” threatened Europe, as popes blessed warriors who helped to preserve
the papal state, as the reconquista began in the Iberian
Peninsula, and, of course, as armed pilgrims set off for
Jerusalem.
For nearly a generation now, intense scholarly investigation and debate have continued to address significant issues analyzed in this book and to raise new questions. Particular attention has focused on the
interpretive nerve points of a “feudal revolution” in the
years around the turn of the first millennium in which
unrestrained violence is thought to have produced a
new society, and on the very concept of a general “peace
movement” that responded to this violence. If Flori
shows caution and qualification on such points, some of
his views inevitably now confront challenges and a reframing of the issues. Important as the formative force
of ideas was, must chivalry be read exclusively as an
ideology emerging from changing clerical thought?
What graph of royal power best traces its fortunes over
the period studied? What evidence provides us with insight into countryside violence and its effects? What
motives and key participants animated ideas on the
Peace of God? Yet Flori’s general conception of valorizing ideas shifting slowly and powerfully as glaciers
over the first millennium remains crucial, and it supports his insistence that chivalry itself emerged only
slowly in the twelfth century. This book remains the
starting point for future discussion.
R. W. KAEUPER
University of Rochester
NIKOLAOS G. CHRISSIS. Crusading in Frankish Greece: A
Study of Byzantine-Western Relations and Attitudes,
1204 –1282. (Medieval Church Studies, number 22.)
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. 2012. Pp. xlii, 335. €90.00.
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On April 12, 1204, the desperate soldiers of the troubled Fourth Crusade succeeded where armies of Arabs,
Persians, and Slavs had previously failed: they captured
the ancient city of Constantinople. Although the crusade had been launched to shatter the Muslim hold on
Jerusalem, it ended by looting the greatest Christian
city in the world. Amid the broken ruins of the Byzantine Empire, the western crusaders proceeded to
build a new state, referred to by modern historians as
the Latin Empire of Constantinople. It was a pitiful
thing, struggling for survival in the treacherous Balkans
for nearly six decades before collapsing with a whimper.
The Latin Empire (1204 –1261) has long remained
understudied, traditionally appealing neither to medievalists nor to Byzantinists. Strangely, it has also attracted little interest among crusade historians, despite
the wide diversification of the field in the past twenty
years. In this book, Nikolaos G. Chrissis seeks to correct
this oversight by focusing his attention on the crusaders’
shifting agenda for Greece during the thirteenth century. The Latin Empire, he points out, was a crusader
state no less than others in Syria, the Baltic, and Iberia.
It thus requires examination as a crusade destination
before it can be set into the larger ideology of contemporary crusading. In this regard, Chrissis aspires to do
for the Latin Empire what Jonathan Phillips did for the
Latin East in his Defenders of the Holy Land: Relations
between the Latin East and the West, 1119–1187 (1996).
On every level, this book is a success. A study of this
sort could easily have descended into a bland survey of
papal registers. Chrissis makes use of the registers, to
be sure; indeed, they form the lion’s share of his source
material. But he tempers their testimony with a variety
of chronicles, letters, histories, and other materials
from all sides of the struggle. Indeed, his coverage of
edited materials seems to be comprehensive. This
breadth allows him to uncover an evolving attitude toward the new Greek conquests not only in Rome, but
across Europe.
Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) had strongly opposed
the Fourth Crusade’s diversion to Constantinople,
though like everyone else he considered the conquest
to be the work of God. For Innocent, the Latin Empire
was a means to restore the Greek people to unity with
Rome and a tool to support crusades to the Holy Land.
It was not an end in itself. Nonetheless, Innocent was
willing to help when conditions called for it. Chrissis
cleverly teases out the details of a crusade led by Bishop
Nivelon of Soisson in 1207, demonstrating that it was no
“phantom crusade,” as Robert Lee Wolff long ago suggested.
Initially, Honorius III (1216–1227) continued Innocent’s policy toward the Latin Empire. While threatening a crusade to rescue Peter of Courtenay in 1217,
he nonetheless forbade those who had taken the cross
for the Fifth Crusade to fulfill their vows in this way.
However, after the collapse of the Fifth Crusade,
Honorius not only supported a crusade to defend Thessalonica, but for the first time attached to it the same
indulgence associated with crusades to the Holy Land.
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Chrissis points to the importance of this shift, noting
that Honorius no longer justified the enterprise as a
means toward the deliverance of Jerusalem, but rather
as a war against Greek schismatics.
It was during the pontificate of Gregory IX (1227–
1241) that papal support for the Latin Empire reached
its zenith. Responding to continued bad news from
Greece, Gregory stepped up his crusade efforts there.
However, the pope’s new willingness to allow crusaders
bound for the Holy Land to fulfill their vows in Greece
met with little acceptance. The leaders of the Baron’s
Crusade (1235–1241) were not the only ones who were
sharply critical of this new strategy. In the end, the pope
was unable to provide sufficient crusade support to stop
the empire’s downward slide, and after his death, crusading efforts in Greece quickly waned. Indeed, by 1254
the papacy had shifted its strategy dramatically, seeking
ecclesiastical union with Nicaea with an eye toward a
Greek restoration in Constantinople.
The Greek capture of Constantinople in 1261
prompted Pope Urban IV (1261–1264) to call a new
crusade, but it was soon derailed by Charles of Anjou,
who in 1267 was given rights over the Latin Empire,
provided he reconquered it. Support for Charles’s
planned crusade continued until 1271, when a new
pope, Gregory X (1271–1276), shifted papal policy back
to union. At the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, the
reunification of the churches was proclaimed, thus ending all justification for crusades against Constantinople—that is, until the election of Martin IV (1281–
1285). Given the Greeks’ refusal to implement their
promises of union, Martin excommunicated Emperor
Michael VIII (1261–1282) as a heretic and schismatic,
thus opening the way for Charles’s invasion. It was only
the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 that put an end to those
plans.
With this book, Chrissis places generations of crusading in Frankish Greece firmly into the framework of
the medieval crusading movement. It is an impressive
work, long overdue.
THOMAS F. MADDEN
Saint Louis University
T. M. CHARLES-EDWARDS. Wales and the Britons, 350–
1064. (The History of Wales.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2013. Pp. xx, 795. $185.00.
The first volume of Sir John Edward Lloyd’s History of
Wales, first published in 1911, served for most of the last
century as the foundation stone of Welsh history. T. M.
Charles-Edwards’s new magnum opus will offer a comparable service for the foreseeable future, although it
covers not just Wales but all those regions down the
Atlantic border of northwestern Europe where a Brittonic language was spoken in the early Middle Ages,
from Lowland Scotland in the north to Brittany in the
south. It plots, therefore, the shrinkage of Brittonic and
“ ‘British-ness’ ” into a declining number of western enclaves, focusing down onto Wales late in the period.
This is essential reading for those interested in the early
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history of what are now Wales and Scotland, as well as
histories of religious organization, law and society, the
nature and scale of kingship, and ethnogenesis. It is a
work of extraordinary erudition that brings exceptional
linguistic and historical skills to bear on numerous
problems, summarizes often conflicting opinions, and
offers well-informed judgments. This is an exemplary
work of scholarship.
The introduction lays out and explains the geographical scope of the volume, and then twenty chapters are
divided between four sections: two of those sections are
broadly chronological but with some overlap; one, the
second and shortest, centers on early Welsh society, and
another, the fourth, covers the Welsh Church and religious and literary culture. Some chapters offer chronological analysis, but most are evidence-led, focusing
on inscriptions, charters, or specific works, and utilize
a text-critical approach. Charles-Edwards thus provides
excellent introductions to a range of early medieval
thinkers, from Pelagius and Faustus in the fifth century
A.D. to the author of Armes Prydein in the tenth.
Recurring themes in the book are the decline and
eventual disappearance of British Latin, lost as a spoken language in Wales probably by 700, and the collapse of British identity in areas ruled by English kings.
The latter is interpreted largely as resulting from hardening attitudes under Theodore of Tarsus, who considered British Christians to be heretics; they had been
shielded previously by English kings’ widespread patronage of Scottish bishops with whom the British
Church was in close agreement. Anglicization of large
numbers of Britons followed, therefore, as religious
pressure led to language shift and the abandonment of
traditional practices, defining Wales in the process. In
the Scottish Lowlands the success of Strathclyde in the
tenth and early eleventh centuries attracted large numbers of Gaelic, Scandinavian, and English speakers to
the kingdom, leading to cultural dilution; here Brittonic
did not long survive incorporation into the newly dominant Scotland. Lower but still significant levels of cultural dilution occurred in Brittany, with Romancespeaking communities as well as Brittonic even in the
west.
Gradually, the focus centers increasingly on Wales.
Chapters thirteen to seventeen spell out the history of
interactions between the Britons and the English, and
much of this relates to English overlordship over the
Welsh kings. This combines with the history of the several competing dynasties in Wales itself, where in the
820s the Merfynion from Man replaced the primary dynasty of Gwynedd, descended from Maelgwn, and then
spread out to dominate most of Wales, but were themselves supplanted by new families in the eleventh century. Part four then centers very much on Wales, largely
for lack of evidence from elsewhere, although perhaps
more could have been made of such “ ‘British’ ” cult
sites as St Albans.
The breadth and depth of scholarship on offer is extraordinary, but it does have its limitations. There are
references to archaeological research, but, inscriptions
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