CITIES AND TOWN The medieval city.pdf

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Series Foreword
twelfth century that jihâd was revived in the wars with the Latin Christian
Crusaders. Most of the Crusades did not result in victory for the
Latin Christians, although Nicholson concedes they slowed the advance
of Islam. After Jerusalem was destroyed in 1291, Muslim rulers did permit
Christian pilgrims to travel to holy sites. In the Iberian Peninsula,
Christian rulers replaced Muslim rulers, but Muslims, Jews, and dissident
Christians were compelled to convert to Catholicism. In northeastern
Europe, the Teutonic Order’s campaigns allowed German colonization
that later encouraged twentieth-century German claims to land and led
to two world wars. The Albigensian Crusade wiped out thirteenth-century
aristocratic families in southern France who held to the Cathar
heresy, but the Hussite crusades in the 1420s failed to eliminate the Hussite
heresy. As a result of the wars, however, many positive changes occurred:
Arab learning founded on Greek scholarship entered western
Europe through the acquisition of an extensive library in Toledo, Spain,
in 1085; works of western European literature were inspired by the holy
wars; trade was encouraged and with it the demand for certain products;
and a more favorable image of Muslim men and women was fostered by
the crusaders’ contact with the Middle East. Nicholson also notes that
America may have been discovered because Christopher Columbus
avoided a route that had been closed by Muslim conquests and that the
Reformation may have been advanced because Martin Luther protested
against the crusader indulgence in his Ninety-five Theses (1517).
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Courtly Love, and the Troubadours, by ffiona
Swabey, singles out the twelfth century as the age of the individual, in
which a queen like Eleanor of Aquitaine could influence the development
of a new social and artistic culture. The wife of King Louis VII of
France and later the wife of his enemy Henry of Anjou, who became king
of England, she patronized some of the troubadours, whose vernacular
lyrics celebrated the personal expression of emotion and a passionate declaration
of service to women. Love, marriage, and the pursuit of women
were also the subject of the new romance literature, which flourished in
northern Europe and was the inspiration behind concepts of courtly love.
However, as Swabey points out, historians in the past have misjudged
Eleanor, whose independent spirit fueled their misogynist attitudes. Similarly,
Eleanor’s divorce and subsequent stormy marriage have colored
ideas about medieval “love courts” and courtly love, interpretations of
which have now been challenged by scholars. The twelfth century is set