The First New World

...the Ottoman invasion—were starting to draw ethnic lines more tightly elsewhere as well...

...By the end of The Making of Europe, the harsher conditions of the 14th and 15th centuries—the catastrophic plague of 1347-50, responsible for killing perhaps a third of Europe's people...

...the planters of Virginia had already been planters of Ireland"—and not merely metaphorically...

...In 1169 a group of Anglo-Norman knights crossed St...

...Still, he insists, "For most of the Middle Ages and in most parts of Europe," except Flanders, the Rhineland and England, "it was more common for lords to have land and lack men to work it than the reverse...

...The Irish were despoiled of their lands and generally excluded from guilds, town citizenship, public office, and the higher ranks of the Church...

...Everywhere in this borderland, immigrants from the center had the upper hand, but they did not always dominate events entirely...

...Bartlett's third novelty is his focus on the "frontier" of medieval Europe, where languages, cultures, races, and religions clashed...

...Primogeniture too had its economically rational side: It kept estates intact and thus made it possible to rent out large blocks of land to the most efficient farmers, who could afford to pay the highest rents...

...The consequences of this migration were partly undone by the post-World War II transfer of Silesia and most of East Prussia to Poland, and...

...This was not true of feudalism as a whole, though, particularly during the period 950-1350 covered by Bartlett...

...That was nonetheless preferable to the fate of Ireland, which was divided among many fractious kingdoms and had no ruler capable of sponsoring a similar defense...

...the political disintegration within nations...

...For one thing, he shows how the overpopulation that generated the "making of Europe" was caused less by numbers in themselves than by the growing acceptance of primogeniture: the inheritance of virtually all of a noble family's property by the eldest son, whose younger brothers were therefore compelled to become the strong right arm of the dispersion...

...To be sure, Bartlett thinks that Latin Europe's population did rise, and quite significantly—at rates comparable to the very high ones of early modern times...

...In Scotland, for example, a Celtic dynasty controlled the pace of change by inviting Norman knights into the country from England, endowing them with fiefs and titles, and encouraging them to set the tone at Court...

...An essentially common set of institutions came to prevail from Spain to Lithuania as the charters, laws and practices of the central region were copied wholesale...

...Although the author is not of course covering wholly new ground, his approach is unusual in at least three ways...

...The core of the EC consists of six states—Belgium, France, Germany...

...Formerly cosmopolitan Spain was the scene of anti-Semitic massacres and expulsions, and the Mudejars (Muslims living under Christian rule) were progressively deprived of their legal autonomy and their culture...

...colder temperatures...

...Very often, the lords had to attract peasant settlers and townsmen with grants of liberty and low taxes...

...as late as the 10th century, it was invaded from the north by the Vikings, from the east by the Magyars, and from the south by the more civilized Arabs...

...The strategy enabled the country to survive as an independent state, albeit one that in the opinion of many of its inhabitants had suffered a kind of internal conquest...

...These newcomers had a wide and deep impact, but they did not change the fundamentally English nature of England or the fundamentally Irish nature of Ireland...

...George's Channel, ostensibly to restore the ousted King of Leinster, one Dermot McMurrough, to his throne...

...The princes and nobles who organized the peopling of the new areas were, he says, true "entrepreneurs of conquest" inspired by God and glory, but above all by greed...

...In addition, they were almost totally deprived of judicial standing, for the "exception of Irishry" permitted Englishmen to ignore any charge brought by natives, including murder...

...A third stream of emigrants went from Normandy, Flanders and France to England, where they uprooted the native aristocracy, and from England to the south and east of Ireland, whose Celtic inhabitants were dispossessed...

...But with the coming of the new millennium these penis started to recede, and despite the old empire's disintegration into a variety of kingdoms, grand duchies and so forth, the culture it embodied began expanding on all frontiers...

...Eastern Europe's guilds, towns and military orders began to limit membership to Germans...

...Another substantial stream of knights, burghers and peasants left France and Flanders for Spain, helping its Christians defeat, and at times expel, the Muslims and resettle their lands...

...Here the metamorphosis was complete and permanent, with later events only entrenching it...

...English "planters" were forbidden to adopt local dress, speech or ways...

...Although encyclopedias currently define it as the whole continental landmass from the Atlantic to the Urals, when Poles and Hungarians speak of wanting to rejoin Europe they mean the European Community, not Russia, and it is no mere prejudice that accounts for this usage...

...Racism as we know it was rare in the early Middle Ages: In many parts of Europe what Bartlett calls the "immigrant, settler aristocracies" of the frontier, like the Normans in England, eventually fell into native ways...

...Then, too, the area formed a distinct cultural unit more advanced than most of its neighbors, and it was from this center, the stronghold of the Roman Catholic Church and of feudalism, that civilization reached Poland and Hungary...

...Another distinctive feature of the book is its stress on the systematic, indeed virtually capitalistic, nature of the expansion in the High Middle Ages...

...Hundreds of thousands of emigrants had left the central lands—often as conquerors, occasionally at the invitation of native rulers—and appropriated new feudal fiefs, cleared new farms, planted new towns and cities, and raised new Roman Catholic churches and cathedrals, until the springtime of expansion was halted by the disasters of the 14th and 15th centuries...

...But in Ireland the English authorities tried to impose virtual apartheid in the districts they subdued...

...Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—whose territories belonged in the eighth and ninth centuries of the Common Era to the empire ruled by Charlemagne...

...In this twilight of the Middle Ages, "the mental habits and institutions of European racism and colonialism" were born, says the author: "The conquerors of Mexico knew the problem of the Mudejars," with their alien culture and religion...

...This, says Bartlett, was "The most extreme form of legal discrimination in the colonized peripheries of Europe"-worse than the treatment of Pagans in Eastern Europe and of Muslims in Spain, despite the fact that the Irish embraced Christianity long before their oppressors did...

...By 1350 Latin Europe was about twice as big as it had been four centuries earlier...

...In such places, the coming of feudalism had a distinctly modernizing effect...

...Bartlett follows several different movements of population...

...At first, however, "Latin" Europe was highly vulnerable...

...protracted warfare among them...

...Procedures for establishing fiefs, farmsteads, towns, and cities were no less standardized (and hence economically rational) than those for developing modern-day Levittowns...

...In the tribal societies of the pre-emigration periphery of Europe, by contrast, claims to property had been more broadly diffused among landowning families...

...In his remarkable volume, Bartlett has elucidated the making not only of Europe but of our own country and of the modern world as a whole...

...They had no incentive to maximize monetary incomes, because the undeveloped state of commerce furnished little for money to buy, so chiefs instead rented out their holdings in very small parcels, aiming to maximize the number of fighting men at their command...

...It failed to achieve its avowed objective, re-Christianizing the Holy Land, but did help to plant the idea of "Christendom" as a discrete civilization in the minds of Europeans...

...in the past several years, by the departure of the Volksdeutsche from Eastern Europe...

...During the next several centuries much of the south and east of the island was brought under English control...

...Andrews, in Scotland...

...Feudal," to most of us...

...From a demographic standpoint, the most important is the Ostsiedlung, the stream of settlers who migrated in the 12th and 13th centuries from overcrowded western Germany and Flanders into Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Brandenburg, Prussia, and the Baltic littoral, where they sometimes displaced and sometimes made their homes among the Slavs, the Magyars, the Balts, and the Estonians...

...What has endured is the Christianization of the native peoples, who in the High Middle Ages started looking "westwards to Germany and to Rome for their cultural and religious models," as they still do...

...Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh, who conceived the idea of settling North America with Englishmen, had been planters in "England's first colony," and both had committed atrocities against the Irish that unpleasantly call to mind the atrocities soon thereafter committed against the American Indians...

...Finally, there was the symbolically important "emigration" of the Crusades, the initial common enterprise of Europe...

...means "backward," and it is true that the basic territorial units of Latin Europe were fiefs whose holders were bound to their lords by ties of personal loyalty, an arrangement that no doubt harks back to the heroic models of the past...

...The era of proliferation, which created the Europe the Poles and the Hungarians want to re-enter, is the subject of an absolutely first-rate new book: The Making of Europe (Princeton, 432 pp., $29.95), by Robert Bartlett, a professor of history at the University of St...