Did Thompson ever apply this Turnerian frontier thesis outside the Elbe-Oder country of northeastern Germany and conceive of a medieval frontier advancing, not only from the German border, but from other margins of an expanding medieval Europe, for much the same reasons and by similar methods? So far as I can determine from his published writings--and I have not seen either his private papers, or the notebooks of his students in the graduate seminar he occasionally gave in the twenties at the University of Chicago on "The Frontier and Colonization in the Middle Ages"-- he did so only vaguely. With the German East he at times associates in his books the colonizing activities of the Norsemen, the Normans in England and southern Italy (although elsewhere he rejects these Norman examples), the Crusades and the Spanish Reconquest. But he never seems to have worked out for these areas an American frontier analysis. Nevertheless, partly due to Thompson, partly to the osmotic passage of the frontier concept into historical circles generally, the term "medieval frontier" appears not infrequently in current historical literature on the Middle Ages. Professor Heaton in his distinguished Economic History of Europe discusses rural settlement in medieval Germany and Britain under the rubric of "The Medieval Frontier;" the historians of Russia use the term like B. H. Sumner, whose A Short History of Russia has a heavily Turnerian chapter on the medieval period; and other applications to the Crusades or the Iberian Peninsula occur.

No effort, however, has yet been made to explore the problem as such, to test the validity of a frontier approach in medieval history or, admitting the existence of a medieval frontier, to determine its scope., nature, evolution, and historical significance. No such effort is likely to be made by European historians; they have generally ignored Thompson--and this is especially true of the Germans; or, when like Geoffrey Barraclough, they use him, they delicately separate the factual flesh from the frontier bones. The time therefore seems ripe for someone in this country to examine the subject, not in the hope of providing at this stage definitive answers to the many complex questions that arise, but rather by way of suggesting one of those premature syntheses which, according to Marc Bloch, have at least the merit of formulating, if not resolving, the problems.

Certain preliminary observations may be submitted before attempting a survey of the subject proper. The term "frontier" in American usage means neither a political boundary line (as between, say, medieval France and the Empire) nor a cultural or politico-cultural divide (like, for example, the Taurus Mountains line between the Byzantine and Abbasid empires), but a relatively undeveloped, thinly populated, outlying zone or rimland, a marginal region into which an advanced civilization introduces colonists as permanent settlers. Significant colonization is of the essence of this process; and abundant, readily obtainable land its indispensable accompaniment. Thus, at the start, we may rule out of consideration such cases of medieval expansion as Charlemagne's conquest of the Saxons, the Norman conquest of Sicily or England, the incorporation into medieval Christendom of Poland, Hungary, Kievan Russia or the Scandinavian states. All these, however marginal their geographical position, represent political or cultural conquest and expansion, but not frontier colonization. We must be careful to distinguish also between colonization into, and out from, medieval Europe; the Norsemen, for example, invaded Europe, but only as they became Europeanized could they possibly participate in the expansion of her frontier. Again, while we may speak of a missionary frontier or a commercial frontier, we must not press this analogy too hard; the penetration of extra- European territories by explorers, merchants, missionaries, soldiers and the like may blaze a trail for, and indeed eventually accompany, authentic frontier occupation, but they do not in themselves give to a region frontier status in the American sense. Here lies the weakness of such treatments as, for example, those of Charles Verlinden of Ghent in his attempt to explain late medieval Portuguese and Spanish expansion as due to Italian, and specifically Genoese, mercantile capitalism; as if, to cite a modern parallel, Hong Kong and Australia were comparable cases of British overseas colonization.

Secondly, for the understanding of medieval frontier history it is not necessary to adopt the Turnerian hypotheses as literally as did Thompson or to equate trans- Elbia with the Old Northwest and Kruto's Slavic uprising with the Conspiracy of Pontiac. For Turner, the frontier made us American rather than European, strengthened our national feeling as against sectionalism and state sovereignty, provided the public domain upon which a sturdy, landowning farming class could flourish, and, above all, powerfully promoted democracy in American life. Since Thompson's adoption of the Turnerian thesis in 1913, however, all these doctrines have been vigorously attacked, and Turner has been accused of agrarian romanticism, isolationist neglect of European and Atlantic coast elements in our democratic culture, exaggeration of frontier factors at the expense of more basic internal urban economic causes, and other equally heinous crimes. With this controversy still raging inexhaustibly among our American colleagues, no student of the medieval frontier need commit himself to the Turnerian or any other formula. What is imperative, however, is that he realize that American historians, as those of no other country, have accumulated a rich store of techniques, methods and ideas in frontier history, and that these are capable of application, as Turner himself believed, to the medieval field.

A third prerequisite is that of defining or demarcating the base area from which the medieval frontier advances. Carlton J. H. Hayes once delivered a presidential address to this Association entitled "The American Frontier-Frontier of What?" The same question is in order here: the medieval frontier--frontier of what? From the frontier standpoints the Middle Ages begin with the collapse of the Roman fortified border defense system, the limes; and only after some four centuries of profound territorial and cultural chance do there emerge in the ninth and tenth centuries the topographic outlines of a recognizable proto-Europe. This I would take to be the base-Europe from which the medieval world outthrusts. In the West it would include the Spanish Christian states of the Cantabrian-Pyrenean cordillera, Anglo-Saxon England, and the Carolingian Empire; in the East, Kievan Russia, the Balkan principalities, and the Byzantine Empire.

Lastly, there is the matter of the forces within this early Europe making for frontier expansion. As against Thompson's Turnerian inclination to regard the frontier as a safety-valve, the outlet for the discontents of a depressed peasantry, it seems sounder to give much stronger emphasis to positive causes--to all the dynamic forces of medieval growth, whether political, economic, religious, social, technological or psychological, that we are accustomed to list in explaining internal medieval evolution from the ninth century on, and which apply no less to external expansion. Among these, as particularly relevant, may be specifically mentioned the rapid increase of rural population, the changes of the medieval agricultural revolution, the power and wealth drives of kings and nobles, the insatiable landhunger of peasants, the recovering dynamic of religious proselytism, and the radiation of mercantile Urbanism.

The history of the medieval frontier falls naturally into three principal chronological subdivisions: an early stage, the ninth and tenth centuries; a middle stage, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries; and a late stage, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

In the period of the early medieval frontier, three far-flung sectors are involved. In Spain the ninth and tenth centuries witness the first significant southward march of the Reconquest. Under Ordon~o I and Alfonso III colonists move down from the mountain fastnesses of the Asturian kingdom and its flanking marchlands of Galicia and heavily castellated Castile into the rolling plains and river valleys of the long-empty northern Meseta country between the mountain and the Douro. Simultaneously, from Navarre and the eastern counties all the way to Barcelona, a slower but parallel advance begins. In roughly the same period, the German East frontier moves forward from the essentially defensive Carolingian border marches running from Denmark to the Adriatic. Spearheaded by the campaigns and colonizing activities of the Saxon kings Henry I and Otto I, this eastward drive throws back the Slavic tribes across the middle Elbe and between the Saale and upper Elbe, while at the same time spilling down the Danube valley into the great forests of the Bohmerwald and Wienerwald. Both in Spain and Germany the same frontier phenomena appear: extensive occupation of new land, with or without royal permission, in the form not only of great domains but innumerable small freeholds; the colonizing activities of kings, nobles and newly established bishoprics and monasteries; and the establishment of fortified burgs and villages to which settlers are attracted.

The third frontier of this stage was the Kievan Russian, where marginal expansion of settled districts was promoted by royal aristocratic and peasant settlement to the north, east and south of the Dnieper-centered principality. In the first two directions this advance was against the forest, -- "la lutte contre l'arbre." To the south, however below forest-protected Kiev, it entered the steppe, the domain of the mounted Patzinak warriors. Here ca. 1000, under Vladimir, the Russians were attempting to push forward their fortified burgs or gorods, apparently connecting them with long lines of ramparts and stockades to halt the fierce cavalry attacks of the plains horsemen; and here there develops the first Russian cavalryman as the frontier counterpart of the Patzinak, the bogatyr, the forerunner of that late medieval plainsman, the Cossack.

By the first half of the eleventh century, it should be noted, all three of these early medieval frontiers had slowed down, halted or even retreated: in Spain, the smashing northward campaigns of Almansur; in Germany, the great Slav revolt of 983; and in Russia, the replacement of the Patzinaks by the far more dangerous Polovtsi; all bring to a sombre close this initial period of success. But by the middle of the eleventh century the movement gathers renewed momentum, and the three brilliant climactic centuries of medieval civilization find the frontier pushing forward in five directions.

First, there is the medieval English frontier in South Wales and eastern and central Ireland, a large-scale enterprise of feudal, agrarian, ecclesiastical, and urban colonization that is nearly always narrowly treated by British and Irish historians in political, military and genealogical terms alone. As my two Virginia students, R. J. Watson and D. G. White, have shown in unpublished master's theses on the Anglo-Welsh and Anglo-Irish frontiers, these first steps in English colonization, one of them involving the first English overseas experiment of this sort, accomplish the occupation of the empty or evacuated fertile lowlands of Glamorgan, Gower and Pembroke ("Little England beyond Wales") in South Wales, and of much of Leinster, Munster and Connaught in Ireland. In both zones typical manorial cropfarming is introduced, with all its institutional and social implications; and in scores of new villages free peasants from Southwestern England and Flanders, that arsenal of frontier hospites for many medieval frontiers, are established in "Englishries" that have long histories. In both regions also the native Welsh and Irish were either incorporated into the new agriculture, often as serfs, or driven into the thin-soiled mountain uplands, where from their scattered hamlets they continued their ancient cattle and sheep farming. In Ireland as in Wales a powerful anti-royal feudality arises, the Marcher Lords and the Irish barons; and both frontiers bring in the Gregorian reformed church, English-orientated monasteries, and foreign-colonized urban centers for the export of agricultural products. It may be observed also that the conquerors and colonists of both Wales and Ireland came from the same regions of England, Flanders and Normandy, and often indeed, from the same families; and that frontier settlement in both countries displays many similarities. In short, we have here a continuous frontier enterprise, pointing significantly westward across the Atlantic.

Second, there is the so-called German East frontier, which by reason of eventual Czech, Polish and Magyar participation really constitutes a Central European frontier. This movement, treated by Thompson, Hampe, K"tschke, Aubin and a host of German specialists in Ostforschung, as well as (from somewhat different premises) by Slavic historians, is easily the best known chapter in the history of medieval colonization; and it is not necessary here to review the successive advances into Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Silesia and Prussia in the north or into the Bohemian rimlands, Austria, Styria, Carniola and Hungary's Transylvanian marches to the southeast. It might however be noted that not only would study of this whole subject greatly profit if it were approached without modern nationalistic prejudices--as has often been pointed out--but that its study should be pursued within the larger framework of the medieval frontier as a whole, of which it is a typical sector. And it may also be suggested that behind the notable failure of the German drive up the Baltic coast lies the inability of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and the Hanseatic League to attract the mass peasant colonization that could alone have transformed the German urban outposts into a solidly based, genuine frontier.

Third, there is the Russian frontier, which in the period 1050-1250 retreats in the south and southeast under growing Polovtsian and Tartar pressure, but which undergoes considerable expansion in the north, especially in the so- called Mesopotamia between the Oka and Upper Volga rivers, where it foreshadows the eventual rise of the Muscovite state. This vigorous, successful frontier, which witnesses the displacement or assimilation of the Finnish tribesmen, the colonizing activities of peasants, churchmen and nobles, the clearing of great tracts of forest, and the laying out of new farmlands, villages, towns, churches and monasteries in the wilderness, has been vividly described by Kliuchevsky, for whom, as he says, "the principal fundamental factor in Russian history has been migration or colonization;" and his disciples, like Miliukov and Sumner, have seen many parallels between medieval Russian and modern American frontier history. In recent decades, however, this northern Russian frontier movement has been discarded or ignored by most Soviet and non-Soviet scholars, and Kliuchevsky's magnificent treatment of it has been largely discredited for two reasons, neither of which appear--to a non-Russian specialist I hasten to add-- either convincing or irrefutable. Presniakov and others have attacked Kliuchevsky, because he tended to explain the northern frontier as an area of completely new settlement, owing its first colonization to the throngs of refugees from the south fleeing before the nomads; and they have pointed out that Rostov and other northern towns date back to the tenth century. Yet it seems possible to correct Kliuchevsky on this point without rejecting, as is now done, his impressive evidence for a great expansion of the Oka-Volga area. The other line of attack, represented by Grekov and other Marxist or Marxist-influenced historians, has been to attribute such a primary, determining weight to urban commercial and industrial factors in medieval Russia as to reduce northern frontier colonization to a minor phase of urban economic growth. But this excessive focus of attention upon the urban center to the neglect of the expanding rural edges seems an unbalanced view, which ignores or misinterprets the dynamic rural expansionism of the Russian north in the twelfth century.

Fourth, there is the Crusader East, so often cited as the surpreme example of medieval European expansion, but one which it would seem impossible to classify as a sector of the medieval frontier: It was not a wilderness, it possessed a dense population, and in many respects it was culturally superior to the invading West. Yet the case is not so easily dismissed. Urban II's Clermont address, whatever the precise words, clearly envisaged a Crusade- conquered Holy Land as a Westernized country, affording land and settlement opportunities not only to nobles but to masses of peasants as well. This same view must have been held by the thousands of peasants who with their wives, children, and heavily-laden carts started off for Palestine in 1096. If for these many thousands, as for the pope himself, the Crusade was originally regarded as a possible frontier, it is interesting to speculate, within the frame of reference of medieval frontier history, as to why it did not actually become one. To be sure, the limited amount of land available, and the presence of an indigenous peasantry, told against any considerable rural colonization, although at least the second of these problems was solved on other frontiers by extermination, displacement or assimilation. >From this standpoint, the disastrous failure of the Peasants' Crusade takes on new significance as marking the only large-scale peasant migration to Palestine the Crusades ever succeeded in launching. It seems possible that this fiasco, right at the start of the First Crusade, may have confirmed aristocratic prejudice against lower-class crusaders and blocked subsequent attempts to recruit them, and possibly increased Crusader willingness to accept the Syro-Palestinian peasants already on the land. One can see also how such a policy would have been strengthened by Crusader inexperience in colonizing methods and by the fact that in an arid environment humid zone peasants of manorial background might well have seemed dispensable. Yet on reflection., the fateful decision to rest the Crusader East upon a small aristocratic., and Italian mercantile, minority, absolutely without roots in the Holy Land, may have been the major cause of the early collapse of the Latin Kingdom. The Crusader East was a potential frontier; but it was an abortive one.

The fifth sector, the Iberian, Luso-Hispanic, or Spanish and Portuguese frontier, includes between 1050 and 1250 the main southward surge of the Reconquest against the Muslims of the Taifa kingdoms and their Pyrenean valleys, to sweep beyond the Ebro at Saragossa into the Balearlics and Valencia; the Portuguese--newcomers in a frontier state created by secession from Leon, even as Kentucky from Virginia or Tennessee from North Carolina--expand from small-farming Minho and Beira to latifundial Algarve, along a coastline pointing towards America and Africa; and the Castilians, forcing their stubborn passage across the bleak plains and rocky sierras of the Iberian Meseta, occupy New Castile, Extremadura and Andalusia. Of all these colonizing peoples, the Castilians chiefly confronted and most decisively solved the problems that broke the Crusader East, perhaps, and one which Walter Prescott Webb has so emphasized in his The Great Plains--namely, the adaptation of a humid-zone society, based on abundant rainfall, forest resources, deep fertile soils, and manorial farming, to the arid, treeless, barren plains of inner Iberia. Producing in abundance stalwart, rootless freemen, and colonizing kings, nobles and churchmen who, long before Cortez and Pizarro, proudly styled themselves "conquistador e poblador", these medieval Castilian frontiersmen took early to the horse, indispensable in such terrain for travel and warfare, and unmonopolized by a closed feudal oligarchy. On the rolling Meseta they evolved a novel ranching economy, based upon large fortified rural towns that dominated a village-less countryside,--an economy in which not tracts of land but grazing rights in royal, seigneurial and ecclesiastical domain were basic. Against this background there arose not only the great sheep flocks of the (12) Mesta, so often cited by historians, but the uniquely Castilian ranching of cattle, an industry which with its long-horned stock, its free-riding, bolero-jacketed vaqueros, and its round-ups, brandings and overland drives, was destined to prolong the Spanish Middle Ages in Latin America and the plains of Texas.

As we all know, it is this medieval Iberian world of meat-eating Castilians and their predominantly cropfarming and seafaring Portuguese neighbors--a world which was enterprising, adaptable, experienced in colonization, and eventually steeped in the ideology of the Crusades--that in the Later Middle Ages initiates the great European overseas colonizations of modern times. But we do not always perceive the relationship of this Luso-Hispanic achievement to the failure of most other frontiers by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this age of the late medieval frontier, the Crusader East barely survived in a few Mediterranean footholds; the Central European sector had disappeared with the halting of German expansion and the Europeanization of the Baltic-Black Sea belt; a tiny Scandinavian experiment in Greenland was fading into oblivion; and in Ireland English control had shrunk to the Dublin-based Irish Pale, although before long the Tudors would revive the medieval colonization program and, in ways that urgently require study, employ medieval Irish colonizing methods in the settlement of Virginia and New England, the thresholds of the American frontier. Only at the extremes of Europe was the outward movement still on the march: in Russia, where the nation, liberating herself from Tartar domination, was throwing her fur-traders and monk- missionaries into the Arctic tundras and slowly moving towards the challenge of Siberia and the steppelands of the Ukraine; and in Iberia, where the peopling of the Madeiras, Azores and the Brazilian capitanias by the Portuguese, and of the Canaries and the Indies by the Castilians, triumphantly carries forward in the New World the medieval Iberian frontier.

Was the medieval frontier, as Turner said of the American, the most important thing in medieval history? It would be rash to say so; but if internal cultural and institutional growth is the foremost theme of medieval history, the territorial plantation of this burgeoning civilization in new lands is second in importance, and in this phase of medieval achievement the frontier plays a major role. Clearly, it was one frontier, a unity not in geographical contiguity but in its expression of the same deep forces of medieval dynamics and, the basic similarities of its aims, techniques and accomplishments. The frontier created for history not only new lands of European culture, but new peoples--the Portuguese, the Castilians, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Great Russians, peoples who move swiftly to dominate the modern history of their respective countries. It produced a frontier literature in historical works like Helmold's Chronicle of the Slavs or Giraldus Cambrensis' inimitable studies in Welsh and Irish frontier sociology; in heroic works like the Lay of Igor's Campaign or the Poema del Cid; the frontier ballads, romances and bylini that call for collective study. It created in abundance new types of medieval men and women-- the frontier noble, whether he be called bogatyr, caballero, lord marcher or knight; it produced the Military Orders which were so prominent in frontier warfare and colonization; the pioneer woman, of whom we know nothing; the frontier churchman, the colonizing bishop or abbot, the missionary, the priest of the lonely frontier parish; the frontier merchant and the frontier townsman; the land speculator and colonial promoter; above all, the frontier farmer, axe-swinging, plow-guiding or stock-trailing. These are the frontiersmen who pushed forward the edges of medieval civilization, with or without the support of their rulers; these are the people to whom the popes extend encouragement in bulls that culminate in the Inter Caetera of Alexander VI; these are the men whose warlike or peaceful dealings with non-Europeans first raise for medieval thinkers the great questions of the rights of native peoples and the legitimacy of just war against them-- the beginning of the controversies that in the sixteenth century were enlarged to include the Indians of the New World and led medieval-minded Spanish theologians and jurists to lay the foundations of international law and the rights of non-European man. For many medieval men, who never saw the rising royal capitals, the bustling mercantile cities, the ancient feudal domains or the new books and universities of the medieval renaissance, the medieval frontier represented the chief best hope of life, the call to robust adventure and to the risks and rewards of courage and enterprise. And like so many things medieval, the frontier did not end in 1453, or 1492, or 1500, but passed on into the making of modern civilization. It is perhaps time that in our study of medieval history, and especially here in this land of the late medieval frontier, we see it as a whole and pay it the attention it deserves.

C. J. Bishko
University of Virginia