Making of Europe

What made this outward push possible was less a matter of ideology than of tools, and Bartlett is unusually concrete about them. The first was military. The mounted, armored knight, backed by the castle, gave a small group of newcomers a lopsided advantage over lightly armed local populations. A castle was a machine for holding conquered ground with few men: it turned a raid into a permanent occupation. Across the frontiers of the High Middle Ages, the castle is the physical signature of the Frankish advance.

The second tool was economic and demographic. The core of Europe was growing — more people, more land under the plow, better yields from the heavy plow and three-field rotation. That surplus population had to go somewhere, and lords on the frontier were happy to receive it. Recruiters, sometimes called locators, went into crowded districts and signed up settlers with concrete promises: a measured holding, an initial rent holiday, and a favorable legal status. Whole villages in the east were founded on this model, laid out on a grid, populated by people who had moved hundreds of miles.

It is easy to describe expansion as a set of institutions and forget that it was made of people leaving home. Bartlett keeps the human movement in view. Flemings drained coastal marshes and then took their expertise east. Germans crossed the Elbe and Oder into Slavic country. Normans and English pushed into Wales and Ireland. Christian settlers moved south into reconquered Iberia, repopulating towns that changed hands by war. These were not armies alone; they were farmers, brewers, weavers, priests and their families, remaking landscapes in a familiar image.

For the newcomers, the frontier could be a place of opportunity — better terms than they had known at home, land of their own, a freer legal status. Bartlett resists a simple story of victors and losers, but he does not soften the fact that this was conquest. Somebody was already living on the land. Slav, Balt, Irish, Welsh, Muslim and Jewish populations found themselves absorbed, displaced, subordinated, or in some cases assimilated into the incoming order on unequal terms.

Step back from the villages and charters and a larger claim comes into focus, one that gives Bartlett's book its provocative edge. The mechanisms Europeans refined during their internal expansion did not simply end when the frontiers filled up around 1350. They became a repertoire — a set of practices for taking, holding and settling land that could be carried elsewhere. When European ships reached the Atlantic islands, the Americas and beyond, they were not improvising. They were reaching for tools they had already built at home.

The continuities are specific. The chartered settlement laid out on new ground; the grant of land and legal privilege to lure colonists; the frontier lord holding territory from a fortified point; the church arriving to convert and consolidate; the legal machinery that sorted the conquerors from the conquered by descent. Each of these has a medieval European ancestry. Bartlett notes that the very words and habits of the later colonizers — plantation, conquest, the treatment of natives as a legally distinct category — echo practices worked out on the Elbe, in Ireland, in Andalusia centuries earlier.

Return to that peasant family loading its cart near the Rhine. Bartlett's achievement is to make us see that their small, hopeful journey east was one thread in something enormous: the assembly of Europe itself. Not a continent that always existed, waiting to act on the world, but a thing built between roughly 950 and 1350 out of settlement, charters, castles and conquest, radiating outward from a modest Frankish core until it reached the sea in every direction.