Expansion in Many Forms
Medieval Europe is sometimes imagined as a closed world of villages and castles, but several of its peoples pushed outward by sea and land. Some sought plunder, some land, some religious aims, and many a mixture. The word “conquest” covers very different events: the overthrow of a kingdom, the slow takeover of a frontier region, and the settlement of previously uninhabited islands. This article looks at the main examples and what they had in common.
The Norse Expansion
From around the end of the eighth century, seafarers from Scandinavia began raiding and later settling across a wide area. Their Viking longships, shallow-drafted and flexible, could cross open water and also travel up rivers. Norse groups settled in parts of the British Isles, in northern France, along the rivers of eastern Europe and on North Atlantic islands. Viking settlement abroad included regions of eastern England under Danish influence and the area of Normandy.
The North Atlantic is the clearest case of exploration as well as conquest. Norse settlers reached Iceland in the late ninth century, and Norse Greenland was settled around the end of the tenth century. Icelandic sagas describe voyages to a land called Vinland, and archaeological evidence at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland confirms a brief Norse presence in North America around the year 1000. The Greenland settlements lasted for several centuries before they faded in the later Middle Ages, for reasons historians still discuss.
The Normans
The Normans were descendants of Scandinavian settlers who adopted French language and customs in the region that became Normandy. In the eleventh century, Norman adventurers and warlords operated far from home. In southern Italy and Sicily, they carved out lordships at the expense of Byzantine and Muslim rulers, and eventually created a kingdom there.
The best known of these ventures is the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, led by William, duke of Normandy, who defeated King Harold at Hastings. It was followed by years of military campaigns and the replacement of much of the English ruling class. Later, in the twelfth century, Anglo-Norman lords began the Norman invasion of Ireland, a process that was gradual and incomplete. In all these places, Norman success often depended on castles, mounted warriors and a willingness to marry into local families or take over existing institutions.
The Iberian Peninsula
On the Iberian Peninsula, Christian kingdoms in the north expanded southward at the expense of Muslim-ruled territories over several centuries, a process traditionally called the Reconquista. Historians now debate that term, because it implies a single continuous campaign when relations were often more complicated. Christian rulers sometimes allied with Muslim ones, and Muslim states also fought each other. A major turning point was the Christian victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in the early thirteenth century, after which several large cities in the south, such as Cordoba and Seville, passed to Christian rule. The kingdom of Granada survived until the end of the fifteenth century.
Settlement followed conquest. Kings granted land and privileges to attract settlers, and religious orders and local nobles played important roles in holding frontier territory.
Crusading and Frontier Wars
Religious war added another motive. The Crusades in the eastern Mediterranean, beginning at the end of the eleventh century, led to the founding of Crusader States along the Levantine coast. In northeastern Europe, the Teutonic Knights and others fought wars against pagan peoples on the Baltic shore, combining conversion, conquest and settlement. What matters here is the pattern of expansion in the name of faith, supported by papal approval and the promise of spiritual rewards.
Why It Worked, and What Followed
Several things helped medieval conquerors. Military technology such as heavy cavalry, castles and ships gave an edge over neighbors with different methods. Political divisions among the people being attacked often mattered as much as raw strength. Ambition, religious conviction, population pressure and the search for land and wealth were all part of the picture, and the balance among them differs from case to case.
The consequences were lasting. Conquests changed languages, legal systems, landownership and religion, sometimes violently and sometimes through gradual blending. English, for example, absorbed a large amount of French vocabulary after 1066. Subject populations often suffered displacement, loss of land or lower legal standing, while rulers gained new revenue and titles.
These episodes should be kept apart from the later age of oceanic exploration. Medieval expansion was mostly regional or Atlantic-edge in scale, and travelers who went farther afield for trade or pilgrimage are a separate story from armies and settlers. Still, the same restless movement of people, ideas and goods ran through them all, and by 1500 the map of Europe and its edges looked very different from the one of 500.