Levi Roach on a revealing analysis of the factors that shaped Europe and its colonising acts
Medieval Europe can feel like a distant world, with little relevance to the present day. In The Making of Europe, Robert Bartlett demonstrates that little could be further from the truth. It was in the Middle Ages that Europe was created as a cultural entity. And it was in these years that many of the traditional characteristics of the continent first came to the fore, including widespread obedience to the Latin (Catholic) church in Rome, and ideals of chivalry and courtly culture.
Bartlett’s story is, fundamentally, one of how political domination drove change. The rise of the modern nation state has done much to obscure the impact of these processes, which saw Francophone aristocrats settle much of Britain and Ireland, and Germanophone elites established across large swathes of Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and Romania, pockets of which survived well into the 20th century.
The result was a Europe in which similar institutions and cultural forms could be found from Gdansk to Toledo and Palermo to Trondheim. Yet one of the results of conquest and cultural change was an increasing sense of western European superiority. It is here that the roots of modern colonialism – with all its violence and chauvinism – are to be sought. The conquerors of the New World brought with them assumptions from the homeland, and applied practices first learned in Spain, Wales, Ireland and eastern Europe. Long before it colonised the rest of the world, Europe had colonised itself.
Levi Roach is associate professor of history at the University of Exeter