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Conquest? What conquest? The other dramatic events that really mattered in 1066
1066 is synonymous with the battle of Hastings. Yet while Duke William was launching his conquest of England, the rest of Europe had its own crises to contend with. Charles West takes us on a tour of the continent during a dramatic year
Published: January 26, 2026 at 4:00 PM
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It was the summer of 1066 and two powerful leaders were rallying their supporters behind them and preparing for war. Their clash would result in political chaos, the spilling of much blood, and one of those leader’s violent deaths. Yet the people of England barely noticed.
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That’s because the clash took place hundreds of miles to the south-east on the Italian peninsula, and it involved two figures – a renegade cleric named Arialdo and Guido da Velate, the archbishop of Milan – who have rarely troubled British history books. These two men had been butting heads since the 1050s and, by 1066, their intense rivalry had pitched the city-state of Milan into chaos.
The trouble started when Arialdo and his supporters began accusing Milan’s formidable clerical elite of corruption, chiefly because the city’s priests were married – a longstanding local practice that many non-Milanese found deeply shocking. Things quickly turned violent: armed skirmishes erupted on the streets. The showdown was soon heading for a bloody denouement.
We might suppose that the pope in Rome would take a dim view of an open rebellion against the clerical hierarchy in a major Italian city. But from the middle of the 11th century, the papacy was occupied by men who agreed that the Catholic church was in desperate need of an overhaul, and so they sided with Arialdo. In March 1066, Pope Alexander II went so far as to excommunicate Archbishop da Velate because of the charges Arialdo laid against him. It was a radical move. And it backfired spectacularly.
The canny archbishop was able to spin his excommunication to his benefit by positioning himself as the champion of Milanese traditions against toxic ‘external’ interference. An enraged local populace turned on Arialdo and chased him out of the city. In June 1066, while he was making his way to Rome, emissaries of da Velate hunted down Arialdo and murdered him.
In 1066 Pope Alexander II (second from left) excommunicated the Archbishop of Milan, who was accused of corruption | Credit: Getty Images
Mob power
1066 is surely the most famous date in all of English history, synonymous with one event: Harold II and William of Normandy’s bitter struggle for the throne of England. We think of charging Norman knights and Anglo-Saxon foot soldiers, of the battle of Hastings and a famous arrow in the eye – all recorded in exquisite detail by the Bayeux Tapestry.
Yet as Arialdo’s fate on the road to Rome proves, the Norman conquest was far from the only significant event to occur in Europe in 1066. In fact, while Norman and Anglo-Saxon forces slugged it out at Hastings, people from Spain to Scandinavia, Kyiv to Constantinople were embroiled in events every bit as momentous as those unfolding in England. By exploring those events in the round, we can build a better picture of the currents convulsing the lives of the people of Europe in the late 11th century.
- Read more | 1066: who was the rightful king?
Take Arialdo’s uprising in Milan as an example. This wasn’t just an urban revolt, but also a sign of how western Europe was being shaped by its growing economy in the late 11th century. After the fall of the Roman empire, many western European towns had shrunk to a shadow of their former selves. But from the ninth century, or perhaps earlier, they had been steadily growing again. In 1066, Milan’s population had grown large enough for urban mobs to prove seriously troublesome for governing elites – as Archbishop da Velate discovered. This posed a problem that had not been encountered in the Christian west for centuries.
A knight is purified in a medieval relief from a holy-water font in northern Italy. By the late 11th century, urban mobs were increasingly challenging clerical elites in cities such as Milan | Credit: Getty Images
Life on the frontline
Milan wasn’t the only conurbation to be rocked by significant violence in 1066. The city of Barbastro is located in what’s now north-eastern Spain, but in the 1060s it was on the frontier between Muslim Iberia – also known as Al-Andalus – and the Christian kingdoms of the north. That placed it right on the frontline of one of the most contested swathes of territory in 11th-century Europe.
Barbastro had been in Muslim hands since the Arab conquest of Iberia in the eighth century. All that was to change dramatically in 1064. For, two years before the Norman conquest of England, a Christian force besieged and conquered the city. The composition of this army was varied – and even included some Normans – but it was probably led by Sancho Ramírez, ruler of the kingdom of Aragon.
Pope Alexander II – the same pontiff who would go on to excommunicate the archbishop of Milan – was involved, actively encouraging the siege. In a letter referring to the troops participating in the attack on Barbastro, he wrote that, “by the authority of the holy apostles Peter and Paul, we both lift their penance and make a remission of their sins”. Exactly what he meant by this terse statement has been widely debated. But on the face of it, it sounds a lot like the terms given by Pope Urban II to participants of the First Crusade three decades later in 1095.
Yet, for all Alexander’s words of encouragement, the Christian triumph in Barbastro was short-lived. Thanks to the efforts of Ahmad al-Muqtadir, the emir of Zaragoza, by 1066 Barbastro was back in Muslim hands – and would remain so for nearly four decades. While kingdoms in the north of Spain, such as Castile and Aragon, did make major territorial gains late in the 11th century, the fate of Barbastro proves that there was nothing inevitable about the Christian reconquest of Iberia.
The Christian reconquest of Spain, depicted in a 13th-century manuscript. Events in Barbastro in the mid-11th century suggest this was a messy, contested affair | Credit: Bridgeman Images
Pagans v Christians
Most of Europe in 1066 lay under Muslim or Christian control. But this was not the case everywhere. In the far north, the Sámi peoples, who lived chiefly from their reindeer herds, steadfastly resisted efforts to convert them to Christianity. So, too, did Slavic-speaking peoples around the Baltic coastline, including a group in present-day north-eastern Germany known as the Wends, who fended off various invasions from Saxony in the east.
In the summer of 1066, this resistance crystallised into an uprising against a man called Gottschalk, one of the Wends’ own rulers. Gottschalk had converted to Christianity and wanted the pagan populace to follow suit, but they took a different view. The uprising claimed the lives of not only Gottschalk but also, in November that year, John Scotus, a missionary from Scotland or Ireland, who had become bishop of Mecklenburg in modern-day Germany.
If a contemporary chronicler named Adam of Bremen is to be believed, John’s murder was particularly grisly. “And because [John] confessed Christ, he was beaten with cudgels and then was led in mockery through one city of the Slavs after another,” Adam tells us. “Since he could not be turned from the profession of Christ, his hands and feet were lopped off and his body was thrown upon the road. Cutting off his head, the barbarians fixed it on a spear and offered it to their god Radegast in token of their victory.”
Debate has gone back and forth as to how literally we should take Adam’s account, since Christian monks’ descriptions of pagan practice were always heavily layered with their presumptions. What can’t be disputed, however, is that this part of Europe remained pagan for nearly another century. The allure of monotheism was not irresistible.
A Shaman’s drum made from wood and reindeer skin by the Sámi people, who lived in the far north of 11th-century Europe | Credit: British Museum Images
Families at war
To the east of the pagan people of the Baltic coastline lay Kyivan Rus. This was medieval Europe’s largest territory – stretching from the Gulf of Finland down to modern-day Ukraine – and, from 978 until his death in 1015, it was dominated by Volodymyr the Great. He was a formidable ruler who had converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988 as part of an alliance with the Byzantine empire, fought wars of conquest, and sired many children. That was all well and good, but four decades later, Volodymyr’s propensity for producing offspring was causing problems.
In the 1060s, Rus was ruled over by one of Volodymyr’s grandsons, Iziaslav I, and his wife, Gertrude of Poland. Iziaslav had reigned as Grand Prince of Kyiv since 1054 but, by the middle of the following decade, his position was increasingly being challenged by rival relatives. By 1068, such was the intensity of the dynastic struggles, that Iziaslav and Gertrude were forced to flee into exile in Poland. There they sought help from Gertrude’s family. Her nephew agreed to help and, with a contingent of Polish warriors behind him, Iziaslav returned to power in Kyiv in 1069. We have some insight into Gertrude’s state of mind at this perilous moment in her life, thanks to the survival of a remarkable manuscript, now in the town of Cividale in northern Italy. It’s a psalter – a book of psalms – and was originally made in the 10th century. Yet it somehow ended up in Gertrude’s hands.
While the book was by this point perhaps a century old, Gertrude made adjustments to it, including copying personal prayers into its margins and blank spaces. These heartfelt additions give a sense of her anxieties as she resided in a foreign, turbulent country: “O holy Helena, most Christian of queens… I beg you humbly … that you may deign to turn the hearts of your servants to peace and love and affection towards me, as our Lord Jesus Christ opened the heart of your emperor [Constantine] to remember you, and filled it with love.”
Even though this piece of evidence is unique to Gertrude, she was hardly the first elite woman in 11th-century Europe to find herself in a country with which she was no longer familiar. At that point, kings tended to prefer marrying women from abroad, just as William the Conqueror chose the daughter of the Count of Flanders as his wife. The result was a criss-crossing of dynasties taking place over several generations.
A proud teacher
If the examples on these pages teach us anything, it’s that 1066 witnessed no shortage of wars and rebellions. Yet there’s much more to the late 11th century than violence and unrest. To illustrate this point, let us turn to a letter from a scholar named Goswin, schoolmaster in the cathedral in Mainz, to a former student called Walcher.
In the letter, Goswin thanked his former pupil for sending him a book, which Walcher had personally copied after reading. Strikingly for the modern reader, Goswin suggested that the excellent quality of the scribal work justified the corporal punishment he had inflicted upon Walcher when he taught him as a child.
For most of the letter, though, Goswin reminisces about his younger days studying and teaching in Liège. He compared the educational environment of the city favourably to Plato’s academy, while festooning the letter with learned quotations from Horace, Cicero and other classical writers.
Peter Abelard was an important French theologian and philosopher, shown here teaching at the school he established on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève | Credit: Bridgeman Images
But Goswin didn’t only reminisce on past times. He also commented on new trends – unfavourably. These days, he claimed, avarice had taken over everywhere, and he and his fellow scholars were not suitably remunerated for their efforts. The biggest target of his ire, though, was the new generation of students: “Fleeing instruction in the gravity of moral discipline, they are blown about like light chaff in every wind of doctrine… They do homage to vain and pestiferous novelties of phrasings and questions… Also if they gather some scrap of arcane or verbose knowledge, they wander like vagabonds through the fields of learning, discoursing to no one’s satisfaction.”
This might read very much like the complaint of an ageing academic about the frivolities of the young, but it’s been argued that Goswin was actually putting his finger on a genuine development in educational practice. In the mid-11th century, intellectual energy was beginning to drain away from the old and rather conservative cathedral schools such as Mainz or Liège, heirs to the Carolingian Renaissance, and into the more disputatious classes held by a new generation of charismatic teachers. This new wave of educators was epitomised by men such as Peter Abelard of Paris, a firebrand whom, we can safely surmise, Goswin would have disliked immensely.
Heavyweight battles
For all Goswin’s musings on intellectual decay in the continent’s greatest seats of learning, we have to conclude our tour of 1066 Europe by returning to a more visceral theme: conflict. This particular outbreak of bloodletting was on a such a scale that it put even the Norman conquest in the shade.
At the heart of the conflict was one of the world’s great polities: the Byzantine empire. This had dominated much of the Mediterranean world since the fourth century AD when it had emerged as a continuation of the Roman empire (which is why it is often referred to as the Eastern Roman empire). In 1066, with the mighty city of Constantinople as its capital, it stretched from the Adriatic in the west to Antioch on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.
However, by the middle of the 1060s, the empire was coming under pressure from multiple external forces. Turkic-speaking nomads were launching raids across the river Danube in the Balkans, with a particularly large incursion taking place in 1065. Meanwhile, in the eastern provinces, Byzantine forces had to contend with the Seljuk Turks, a powerful nomadic consortium who had converted to Islam, conquered Baghdad, and were now regularly unleashing raids in Anatolia.
A soldier swims to attack an enemy ship in a Byzantine treatise from the conflict-ridden 11th century | Credit: Bridgeman Images
Byzantine historians who recorded these events tended to see them as premonitions of the disaster that would befall the empire a few years later. At the battle of Manzikert in 1071, Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was defeated and taken prisoner by a Turk force led by Alp Arslan, sultan of the Seljuk empire. Romanos was treated honourably by his captors and soon released, but his humiliation unleashed a civil war. On his return to Constantinople, Romanos was brutally blinded by internal enemies and died from his injuries.
For Byzantine historians of the time such as John Skylitzes, the seeds of this defeat were visible years before, because emperors failed to pay enough attention to the military threats menacing their borders. Skylitzes reserved some of his most stinging criticisms for Romanos’s predecessor, Constantine X, observing that: “Far more than anything else, the emperor yearned and desired to increase state revenues and to hear private law cases… while having less to do with other imperial duties, by which I mean maintaining military superiority and the fighting prowess of our soldiers.”
We should beware the hindsight on display here, though. As King Harold and Duke William both discovered at Hastings, battles were unpredictable affairs, and the outcome of Manzikert was never a foregone conclusion. If, in 1066, Constantine X had devoted himself chiefly to the running of his empire, that was because it was, quite reasonably, the top priority. Although there were military problems, he could draw on enormous financial and ideological resources to overcome them. Indeed, these resources allowed Byzantium to effect a recovery and it remained a mighty state into the later 11th century, as the crusaders discovered when they surged east from 1095.
Meanwhile, back in England, the country was reeling from the battle of 1066, and some contemporaries elsewhere in Europe acknowledged its drama. In Bavaria, the chronicler Frutolf of Michelsberg devoted his entire entry for the year 1066 to it. “England was pitifully attacked and eventually conquered by the Norman William, who was made king. Soon afterwards he sent virtually all the bishops of that kingdom into exile and the nobles to their deaths. Those of the middle rank he forced into the service of his knights, and all the wives of the indigenous people into marriage with the newcomers.”
There’s no doubt that the Norman Conquest was an extraordinary event for the English and Normans alike. Yet, taking a wide view, it was just one of the ways in which the tectonic plates of European politics and society were dramatically shifting in the 11th century.
Charles West is a professor of medieval history at the University of Edinburgh and author of Europe in the Eleventh Century: Beyond Revolution and Reform (Oxford University Press, 2025)
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This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
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