The Sovereign State and Its Competitors

THE BEGINNING OF THE FRENCH STATE: THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE CAPETIAN DYNASTY (987-1328)

On Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Christian world. He was deemed to be successor to the Caesars and protector of the Roman church. When Charlemagne died, he left to his heirs an area stretching from northern Spain to Poland and from northern Italy to the lowlands.

This great Carolingian Empire was not to last. Shortly after Charlemagne’s death, the empire disintegrated into western, middle and eastern kingdoms. The latter two became the basis for the later German Empire. But the fragmentation did not end there. The lack of established primogeniture, the invasions by Vikings, Saracens, and Maygars, and the decline of the monetary economy eroded any semblance of central authority. In the West-Frankish kingdom, royal authority existed only in a nominal sense.

By the end of the tenth century, feudalism was fully entrenched.² It legitimated itself by justifying the supremacy of warrior and priest, and it subjugated others to menial existence as inferior laborers. Political control had even slipped away from the fifty-five dukes and counts to the level of individual castle-holders.³ The localization of market exchange and legal procedures meant that any identification with a larger political authority evaporated. “France” came to refer only to the area between the Loire and the border of Lotharingen, or sometimes only to the area immediately surrounding Paris.⁴ Even after royal control had extended considerably by 1300, officials in Toulouse would sometimes still speak of “sending messengers to France,” that is, Paris.⁵

It was under these circumstances that Hugh Capet was elected to replace the disputed Carolingian lineage in 987. With him started the dynasty of Capetians which would rule until 1328. After decades of civil war, however, the actual area under their control was not more than a dot on the map of the former West-Frankish kingdom. The royal domain consisted only of the surrounding area of the Île-de-France, some territories around Orléans, and a smattering of even smaller areas. In total it comprised about 2,600 square miles.⁶ Moreover, Hugh Capet had only gained the throne by the support of particular nobles who opposed the Carolingian branch. In 887 the Carolingian line was without a direct heir. In West Francia the nobles then elected Eudes, the Count of Paris, as king.⁷ This was the beginning of the Robertian, later called the Capetian, line. When the fortunes of war turned against Eudes, some nobles favored a return to members of the Carolingian line, even though the succession of Charles the Simple was disputed. The consequence was a century of civil war with nobles frequently switching sides and favoring one house then the other. All in all, royal power meant little to such powerful lords as the dukes of Normandy, Acquitaine, or Burgundy. The king, after all, had only recently been one of their rank. The dukes and counts believed they had established an elective monarchy.⁸

Yet after three centuries of Capetian rule, we find the basis of a sovereign state, so much so that Joseph Strayer, focusing mainly on France, can argue that by 1300 the state had become the dominant form of political organization in Europe.⁹ Although Strayer perhaps overstates the point, his argument is convincing that in France the basis of a sovereign, territorial state had been laid by the beginning of the fourteenth century. By then the Capetians had reduced the power of such rivals as the Counts of Champagne and the dukes of Normandy. They also diminished the vast holdings of the English king.¹⁰ By the end of the thirteenth century, the English king held no more than the area of Gascogny in the southwest (see Maps 5.1 and 5.2).

The Capetians also installed a regular system of administration from the center. From there they supervised local administration by seneschals and baillis. They began to establish various forms of revenue production. The Capetians, particularly Philip the Fair, curtailed the church in their domain and were victorious in their confrontation with the pope.

It would be too much to suggest that we find modern France in the 1300s. There was still a protracted war with England to come, years of religious turmoil, and domestic opposition by cities, nobility, and clergy. Nevertheless, we do already find the essential traits of modern statehood. The first notions of sovereign authority developed in this period. The French king was regarded as emperor in his own kingdom. The beginnings of territorial demarcation by formal boundaries date from that dynasty. Where these boundaries exactly lay was of course a different matter, but there was a distinct territorial unit, a distinct “Regnum Francie.”¹¹ From the Capetian reign also dates the beginning of royal justice and the use of written Roman law—both essential to the concept of public authority.

The Capetians thus curtailed their feudal rivals and constructed a mode of organization that was not based on personal ties nor laid claim to universal domination as did the church and Holy Roman Empire. How did this come about? How did the insignificant royal domain of Hugh Capet expand in the face of opposition by feudal lords, and how did the French king manage to defeat powerful enemies such as the pope where the German emperor had failed?

For some historians, there is no puzzle. Susan Reynolds, for example, suggests that there always existed an idea of the kingdom as a community.¹² Even Fawtier, who greatly extolled the state-making abilities of the later Capetians, argued that the kings differed from other nobles in their ideological position. They were not “petits signeurs” of the Îie-de France but were powerful lords in their own right.¹³

No doubt such social ideas are important, but the existence of a social idea and its influence on political practice are two different things. As I have suggested in previous chapters, ideas can have considerable influence, but they need material bases of support in order to be routinized. Ideas need to be empowered before they can become political practice. Feudal practice differed markedly from the ideal. Vassals often disobeyed the king. Indeed, during the eleventh century, the low-water mark for the Capetian Dynasty, many vassals did not bother to travel to Paris to do homage. Even within the royal domain, the land held directly by the king, he had to fight individual castle-holders. The more powerful lords, such as the Counts of Flanders, the dukes of Normandy, and the rulers of Brittany, would on occasion call themselves rulers over “regna,” rulers of kingdoms in their own right.¹⁴ Moreover, as we have seen, feudal vassalage was not hierarchical. The king himself was indebted to some bishops from whom he held land. Finally, the early Capetian monarchy can hardly be compared with the later kings who claimed exclusive authority and based their rule on Roman law, in which the king was the supreme fountainhead of laws. That qualitative shift from personal rule to public authority was not contained in the earlier medieval notion that the kings had a privileged ideological position as first among equals.

5.1 The Extent of the Capetian Royal Domain (Source: Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, p. 322.)

5.2 France in the Mid-eleventh Century (Source: Elizabeth Hallam, Capetian France, 987-1328. New York: Longman, 1980, p. 5.)

The task before us is to explain how the principle of sovereign, territorial rule emerged and how that principle was empowered. Which material interests and belief systems came together in order for the idea of sovereign, territorial kingship to become the system of rule in France? Indubitably the king had an ideological position which differentiated him from other high lords. But de facto there were dozens, if not hundreds, of independent feudal lords who had little incentive to support royalist centralization. To combat such opposition, the king must have found allies to support him. Who were these political allies of the king?

WHY THE EMERGENCE OF THE FRENCH STATE DOES NOT FOLLOW FROM THE CHARACTER OF WARFARE

In one explanation, changes in the nature of warfare account for the rise of the state. The thesis that the rise of centralized monarchy in France can be explained by war plays an important role in the works of, for example, Charles Tilly, Michael Mann, Richard Bean, and Margaret Levi. Richard Bean explains the rise of states by the changes in the art of war and the ability of sovereigns to tax. Charles Tilly once suggested that “wars made states.”15 Similarly, Margaret Levi suggests that kings provided their subjects with military security in exchange for revenue.¹⁶

Interpretations of these theories are roughly of two varieties. The first variety sees states simply as larger units compared to feudal lordships. Efficiency of scale favored the king over dukes and counts. It is basically a macrostructural account which pays little attention to social bargaining. The operative dynamic consists of Darwinian selection. Smaller units fell by the wayside.

The second, and more persuasive, interpretation explains the emergence of the state by the exchange of revenue for the provision of security by the monarch. From that perspective the king can be seen as the provider of protection in exchange for the consent of individuals to be taxed. Since military security became increasingly expensive because of the ever-rising costs of warfare, taxes had to be raised accordingly.¹⁷ Corresponding with the growth of taxation was the rise of centralized administration and a bureaucratic apparatus.

Can these theories explain the emergence of a sovereign, territorial state in France? Despite their valuable insights, I do not think they ultimately can.¹⁸

Warfare and Efficiencies of Scale

One interpretation of the theory that warfare determines the particular logic of organization argues that the scale of the unit changes in response to the dynamics of warfare. Some types of military technology favor the formation of large political units such as empires. Other types of technology lead to small political organizations such as in feudalism. Changes in military technology thus alter existing efficiencies of scale. The decline of the Roman Empire, for example, can be attributed to the increasing success of cavalry. The efficiency of scale of cavalry favored smaller political units. Hence the Roman borders contracted.¹⁹

In a similar vein, the transition from a feudal system to a system of states is often explained by the rising costs of warfare and the increasing size of armies in the later Middle Ages. The introduction of organized infantry and (cross)bowmen made the feudal mode of warfare obsolete. Heavy cavalry simply could not hold the field against archers and organized infantry.²⁰ The appearance of gunpowder weapons on the battlefield completed the process. The use of artillery required changes in the style of fortification.²¹ All this meant a dramatic rise in the costs of warfare.²² This mode of warfare therefore favored a large tax basis and centralized authority. Feudal units lacked the sheer size required for this warfare. Efficiencies of scale dictated centralization of states.

Although the mode of warfare did change in the later Middle Ages and particularly during the Renaissance, we cannot see the emergence of sovereign states simply in terms of efficiencies of scale. First of all, this explanation is too deterministic.²³ Because of its macrostructural bias, it implies a uniform outcome of technical shifts. Essentially it contends that Darwinian selection leads to a single response. In reality, however, the impacts of technological changes are always mediated through the dominant groups in power.²⁴ To reinforce this point, one need only realize that the impact of military technological changes led to widely diverse outcomes throughout Europe. Although the technologies of war were generally available—that is French, Italian, and German actors all had roughly similar access to such technologies—they did not have the same political effect. Many parts of Europe did not centralize. Witness Germany and Italy, which decentralized, and they survived well into the nineteenth century. The nature and size of units in these two areas had little to do with the nature and availability of military technology but were instead the result of different political strategies and alliances—as we will see in the chapters ahead.²⁵ The interaction between emperor, feudal lords, and towns, not the character of warfare at the time, explains the decentralization of Germany and Italy. And perhaps most significantly, these small units survived well beyond the military revolution of the fifteenth century.

Moreover, this “efficiency-of-scale” argument suggests a functional, teleological process. It posits states as the inevitable result of exogenous constraints and thus commits the fallacies of unilinear explanations which I have criticized in earlier chapters. Society does not necessarily generate the most efficient solution to an environmental change. Society consists of a variety of identifiable actors who pursue a complex set of objectives. Political entrepreneurs seek to expand their power, burghers seek economic security, peasants might desire less control by their feudal and ecclesiastical lords, and so on. Out of these competing interests come social alliances which create institutions. One cannot argue that a particular institution emerged as an efficient response to the environmental stimulus. That would be to deduce preferences from outcomes. Although selection clearly occurs, the selective process only explains the subsequent relative efficacy and efficiency of that institution vis-à-vis other institutional arrangements. It does not explain the reasons why individuals preferred one type of institution over another, or how that preference won out in the political process. One cannot simply say that states emerged because they waged war more effectively and more efficiently than feudal organization. One can perhaps say that states survived because they were better at waging war than synchronic and rival forms of political organization. We know with twenty-twenty hindsight that states survived while other forms of organization atrophied or died out. As in all evolution, death is the final arbiter. But one must distinguish the causes for the emergence of territorial states from the reasons why they survived in the long run. One cannot deduce which forces gave rise to the first states from the continued survival of states. One must first explain the variation in individual choices and political bargains before one can explain why sovereign, territorial states proved more successful than their synchronic institutional rivals.

Finally, one might also argue against the efficiency-of-scale theory that the issue of relative efficiency and effectiveness is actually one of efficiency of institutional makeup rather than size.²⁶ For example, the revenues of some Italian city-states were equivalent if not higher than those of rival states. The Netherlands and England managed to defeat far larger and more populated enemies by virtue of their ability to raise revenue, stemming from well-defined property rights, and their overall economic strength. Size is an imperfect predictor of success in military competition.

The French State as a Protection Bargain

A stronger version of state formation by war sees the rise of the state as the result of a political bargain. Given the change in the nature of warfare, individuals perceived the king to be the logical provider of protection, and in exchange for that protection they consented to taxation. Such accounts are more persuasive than simple efficiency-of-scale arguments because they are able to suggest reasons for the institutional variation across Europe, and they are less determinist in that the impact of technology is viewed as mediated by social groups and political entrepreneurs.²⁷ The question is whether the king was indeed the logical provider of protection and whether protection explains the rise of a centralized, sovereign monarchy.

Although this account is more powerful, it too is flawed. First, it tends to deduce preferences from outcomes.²⁸ Since history has moved in the direction of states, we deduce from the outcome that individuals “contracted” for that result. Such views suggest that changes in the character of war inexorably forced social actors to accept the dominance of a central authority. It is clear, however, that feudal aristocracy had very good material and ideological reasons to prevent centralization of the means of violence.²⁹ The question is, why did the feudal nobility not succeed in preventing the adoption of these new techniques of warfare and new systems of raising revenue?³⁰

Second, the implications of changes in military technology were not straightforward. For example, it was not clear if the construction of stone castles made local resistance easier or whether it led, because of higher expenses, to more centralization.³¹ Although we can say from our contemporary vantage point that feudal cavalry was gradually becoming obsolete, this was not immediately perceived by its practitioners. Mounted knights remained a critical element of armed force well into the fifteenth century. It is also clear that other areas with a high degree of insecurity did not centralize. Witness the German Empire; there feudal lords dominated the king. In short, one cannot unequivocally argue that the change in military technology necessitated political bargains for central protection by the king. The implications of such change were far from clear.

Third, the historical evidence suggests that the success of the Capetian kingdom preceded the expensive developments of large infantry armies, artillery, and redesigned fortifications. By 1300 the royal domain encompassed the area west of the Rhône, along the Saône and Meuse rivers to the east, the Scheldt River in the north, and the Pyrenees as the southern boundary.³² In short, the small domain of the early Capetians around Île-de-France and Orléans had almost expanded to France’s contemporary size between 1000 and 1300. The most significant developments in military technology and strategy came after this centralization and expansion.³³ Medieval armies remained relatively small.³⁴ Artillery was first invented in the early fourteenth century and did not make its appearance on the battlefield until after several decades. Hand firearms only appeared in the sixteenth century. Consequently both Tilly and Bean see the major military changes occurring after 1400. Geoffrey Parker locates the military revolution in the sixteenth century, as does Lawrence Stone. Stone tellingly suggests that central administration preceded and made possible modern warfare rather than the other way round. We should also recall that the centralized domain that the Capetians had built up was most threatened in the Hundred Years War when the kingship was contested. The strong principalities reasserted their political power with some success when the kingdom was challenged by England.³⁵ Warfare, in other words, threatened to fragment rather than centralize the kingdom.

Fourth, it was not obvious that the early Capetian kings were the logical providers of protection. I do not think that “monarchs needed more funds to win battles and were the obvious persons to organize war.”³⁶ As I have already pointed out, the king was in title defender of the realm, but pragmatically the noble domains were larger, produced more revenue, and could bring more military resources to bear on any opponent. The royal domain was very small. Even vassals who had paid homage to the Capetian king, and castellans within the royal domain, would on occasion rebel. If there was a preference for larger units with greater military strength, then the larger duchies and counties should have been preferred. Considering the weak position of the Capetian Dynasty at the outset, it is unclear why they would be the preferred providers of protection.³⁷ For such explanations to be able to account for the growth of royal control, they need to explain how the weak Capetian kings could become the providers of protection in the first place.

Fifth, the explanation that individuals consented to royal rule for protection only applies to areas where such control had already been established. Why would individuals outside the domain seek protection from the king? If one was not under the factual control of the king, it is difficult to argue that the king would be a better provider of protection. The king of France, from a purely material perspective, did not possess the resources to be the most efficient provider of protection. This type of argument tends to beg the question. It suggests that the king can legitimate and expand his rule as the provider of protection and therefore can raise taxes. It does not explain how the king achieved such a capability in the first place.

One might counter my argument by suggesting that analysis of state revenue indicates that most of royal revenue was devoted to war. I agree that this was the case until the rise of the welfare state and the increasing involvement of the state with modern economies. Fiscal historical analysis demonstrates this quite clearly. But this in itself does not explain the emergence of a sovereign, territorial state in France and other institutional arrangements elsewhere. Whereas the primary expenditures of the Capetian monarchy were devoted to war, this was also true for other logics of organization. City-leagues, city-states, and feudal lordships all undoubtedly devoted the major portion of their expenditures to war.³⁸ In short, the level of war expenditure in any one type does not explain individuals’ institutional preferences to choose one type over the other. I do not deny that governments spent most of their resources on warfare, but that in itself does not explain why some governments were based on sovereign, territorial forms of organization whereas other governments exercised power on nonsovereign and nonterritorial principles.

We need, therefore, to explain the social processes by which a weak French king expanded his domain without having great material resources at his disposal. Like Strayer, I suggest that state formation was due to the acquiescence of privileged classes.³⁹ I argue that the emergence of the towns permitted new social bargains, which enabled the Capetian kings to centralize their authority. There were benefits for the bourgeois to side with the French king and support his policies against the nobility and church.

THE CONFLUENCE OF MATERIAL INTERESTS OF MONARCHY AND TOWNS

As discussed in Chapter 4, the impact of trade was relatively modest in France compared to Italy and some of the German areas. Although regional trade did lead to the formation of new towns, these towns were relatively small. France remained bereft of long-distance trading centers. Only in Flanders, whose count was technically a vassal of the king, did towns of considerable size emerge, because of their connection with the wool trade.⁴⁰ The type of trade in which most towns engaged was basically of low volume and low added value. Most of the goods in which merchants of the French towns dealt were agricultural, bulk commodities. The French did not tie in to the long-distance trade that the Italians developed in the Mediterranean and that the Hanseatic cities developed in the north.⁴¹

TABLE 5.1

Estimated Population of Major French Towns^a

Town	Population	Year
Beziers	14,000	early 14th century
Lyons	30,000	early 14th century
Montpellier	40,000	1300
Narbonne	25,000	1300
Orleans	25,000	1300
Paris	60,000	1250
Paris	80-120,000	early 14th century
Paris	80-210,000^b	1400
Strasbourg	25,000	1300
Toulouse	25,000	early 14th century

Sources: Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 186; Mundy and Riesenberg, The Medieval Town, pp. 30, 66; Hilton, English and French Towns, pp. 45, 51, 96-99.

^a From the wide variation in Paris’s population, the reader can surmise the difficulties in estimating town populations. Records were often inaccurate, quite often described only the amount of hearths (the basic tax unit), and sometimes involved deliberate misrepresentations, for example, when towns were asking for more churches. For a discussion of the difficulties of this enterprise, see Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 186f; Hilton, English and French Towns, p. 51.

^b I have omitted the estimate by Hohenberg and Lees who suggest that Paris’s population in 1400 might have been as large as 275,000. The Making of Urban Europe, p. 11. This strikes me as too high given the other estimates. J. C. Russell argues that Paris had upward of a 100,000 people in 1348. “Population in Europe 500-1500,” pp. 34-35. Ennen notes that most towns in the Middle Ages were relatively small, usually not above 10,000. Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 185. By way of comparison, London probably had in the neighborhood of 40-50,000 inhabitants in the fourteenth century. For a comparison with Germany and Italy, see Chapters 6 and 7.

As suggested in Chapter 4, the particular impact of this trade had two consequences. First, the size of the towns and their moderate revenues prevented them from acting independently (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2). Unlike Venice or Florence, whose revenues and military power equaled that of any sovereign, territorial state, the French towns needed some form of organization to pool their economic and political resources to gain their objectives. Yet as Robert Fawtier suggests, they could not become independent or form leagues because they were too small.⁴²

Second, the nature of the trade, with its low profit margins, was an inducement to search for forms of organization that could reduce costs and introduce more certitude in the business environment. The towns would prefer a system with standardized taxes and more regulation of weights and measures. In economic terms, the towns would prefer a form of political organization that could reduce transaction and information costs.⁴³

TABLE 5.2

Estimated Population of Major Flemish Towns

Town	Population	Year
Antwerp	5,000	1347
Antwerp	20,000	1440
Bruges	50,000	1300
Bruges	125,000	1400
Brussels	30,000	1300
Ghent	60,000	1300
Ghent	70,000	1400
Louvain	45,000	1300

Sources: Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 187; Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, p. 11. Blockmans suggests that Ghent, Antwerp, Bruges, and Brussels were all larger than 32,000 in 1450 and that there were seven other towns that were between 16,000 and 32,000. “Princes Conquérants et Bourgeois Calculateurs,” p. 175. J. C. Russell argues that Ghent was larger than 50,000 by 1348, whereas Bruges’s population was between 20,000 and 50,000 that same year. “Population in Europe, 500-1500,” pp. 34-35. Mundy and Riesenberg give a rough estimate suggesting that the larger Flemish towns were between 20,000 and 40,000 in size. The Medieval Town, p. 30.

Although the expansion of trade provides for a first approximation of the institutional preferences of the French towns, it alone does not explain political outcomes. We can conjecture from the size and revenues of towns and the nature of their trade what the burghers preferred, but those preferences, of course, need not have translated into outcomes. Other social groups and political actors—aristocracy, church, and king—might have had alternative preferences. Moreover, although trade might have improved the relative position of the towns, it is by no means certain that the towns would be able to overcome political opposition to the institutional arrangements they desired. In short, we need a more detailed look at how political coalitions were constructed and what types of organization the participants of those coalitions preferred.44

The emerging towns thus had become important actors in the politics of late medieval France because as new partners they could alter the existing political coalitions; “towns now held the key position in the political order.”⁴⁵ My argument in this section focuses on the affinity of interests between the French monarchy and the burghers on taxation and administration. The analysis of royal taxation reveals how both monarchy and mercantile groups preferred regularized taxation which also allowed for urban negotiation. The development of centralized administration enabled the king to construct a bureaucracy on a nonfeudal basis. Moreover, it offered the bourgeoisie and lesser nobility career opportunities and input into royal decision making. Although the church was initially a powerful ally of the French king, it inevitably became one of his opponents because of its universal claims to authority.

The increasing ability to raise revenue was thus fundamental to the formation of a stronger, more centralized monarchy. More specifically, it enabled the Capetians to construct an army and an administration that were based on monetary payment rather than in-kind transfers. This differed from the personalized structure of feudal obligations.⁴⁶ This also allowed the king to later encroach upon the influence of Rome. Alternative sources of royal revenue gave the papacy less leverage on the king. Finally, the gains in revenue allowed the king to pay off opponents whom he could not challenge directly.⁴⁷

The nature of taxation also reveals the ability of the state to impose demands on society. Since taxation for any length of time requires at least a minimum of compliance, analysis of taxation also indicates something about social acquiescence to the objectives of the taxing authority.⁴⁸ The particular nature of the tax illuminates the political relations between actors. Who are the actors on which the heaviest demands are imposed? Who are exempted? The nature of taxation reveals how costs and benefits are distributed in a society and thus illuminates underlying social coalitions.

By the end of the fifteenth century the French kings, building on the early efforts of the Capetians, had established a system of regularized taxation, administered by a central bureaucracy. The taille, the direct royal tax, accounted for 85 percent of the entire revenue.⁴⁹ How did the kings establish this revenue basis given that early medieval taxation was haphazard and irregular?⁵⁰ The basis for royal taxation of the kingdom was laid by the Capetians and was later formalized and regularized by the successors of the Valois Dynasty.

The Correspondence of Urban and Royal Interests in Standardized Taxation

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the taille was far from popular. The taille was a direct, personal tax levied on commoners, and it denoted servility. It was levied by any lord and was thus called the seigneurial taille.⁵¹ Neither clergy nor those with some form of military obligation were subject to it. Moreover, the taille was imposed on an irregular basis and varied in its incidence. The tax was “a levy effected by the lord on whatever his subjects had put by, as often as he felt need of it.”⁵² It was thus particularly unappealing for merchants. The abbot of Saint-Denis, an ecclesiastical lord, noted how the bourgeois complained about the taille. “For that custom seemed to the said bourgeois inordinately bad and hateful, in that it kept them in constant fear; and so, not daring to display their goods, they made little gain. Wherefore, not only were outsiders afraid to settle in the town, but even the natives were impelled to move elsewhere.”⁵³ Stephenson goes on to note that the abbot conferred the arbitrary and unpredictable assessment to a fixed rent and left the raising and allocation of the tax to the citizens.

Furthermore, since the taille was a tax that was due any lord to whom that person was subject, and since infeudation could work on many levels, an individual might owe tax to a variety of authorities. Several lords might seek to extract revenue from the subject, and thus each would search for the very limit of what the taxed laborer could possibly sustain. The conflicting set of jurisdictions made taxation very ambiguous. If a commoner owed several lords taille, who was to be paid first? This form of taxation, the old form of the taillage, was thus neither for the commoner nor the lord efficient.

The economic upswing of the late medieval era sowed the seeds for change. The growth of the towns and their increased wealth made them attractive sources of revenue for the king, ecclesiastical lords, and aristocracy. One way to tap this new source of wealth was to charter new towns or to grant more liberties to those already in existence. Because the economic boom led to labor scarcity, chartering new towns and offering them liberties were strategic policies to attract more labor.⁵⁴ King and higher lords gained by attracting more subjects; “lords began to vie with one another in guaranteeing privileged status to residents within their jurisdiction.”⁵⁵

Commoners benefited from this process. Aside from having to pay the taille, rural laborers were also subject to other taxes and feudal exactions. The ability to evade such forms of taxation, by moving to a chartered town and by paying a fixed taille to the chartering king or lord, must have seemed attractive.⁵⁶ Towns made it standard practice to grant freedom to any individual who had resided in that town, uncontested, for a year and a day.⁵⁷ They thus provided a commoner the opportunity to escape the burden of serving a multitude of masters as a peasant.

The towns were eager to capitalize on this newfound opportunity for freedom. Because of their growing importance and because of the competition between rival lords, they could make considerable demands. They often formed communes, sworn associations of equals. One of the most important demands of the communes was the decrease in burdensome taxes and exactions. The privileges granted in the Charter of Lorris by King Louis VII in 1155 were imitated throughout northern France. Some of its provisions illustrate the nature of urban demands.

2. No inhabitant of the parish of Lorris shall be required to pay a toll or any other tax on his provisions.

9. No one, neither we or any other, shall exact from the burghers of Lorris any tallage, tax, or other subsidy.

15. No inhabitant of Lorris is to render us the obligation of corvée.⁵⁸

During this process of chartering and granting liberties to towns, the taille went through a transformation. Although it was still a tax on commoners, it became more and more institutionalized. This benefited the bourgeois. The tax became a fixed incidence rather than an irregular levy.⁵⁹

The tax was increasingly paid by the town as a whole. Indeed towns would negotiate for the right of self-assessment.⁶⁰ The distribution of the tax burden would lie with the town leadership.⁶¹ By acting as a group, the town could negotiate with the taxing party on the incidence level. The regularity and predictability of the taille in its new form also made it easier to anticipate as an expenditure in the normal practice of business. “It made more sense to pay the king’s predictable taxes than to continue to yield to the irregular exactions of the local nobility.”⁶²

Towns constantly sought to adjust the level of taxation. The king or his intermediaries, the seneschals and baillis, thereupon engaged in ad hoc negotiations. The assessment would then be fixed for the town as a whole, with the individual tax incidence determined by local town patricians. This enabled the town oligarch to engage in patronage and allocate the burden according to local power constellations.

To a considerable extent this ad hoc bargaining was due to nonpolitical conditions. The size of the country and the variety of customs, languages, and absence of efficient administration made localized bargaining unavoidable.⁶³ Furthermore, the gradual incorporation of various areas into the royal domain was accomplished by a process of mutual acquiescence, marriage alliances, and sometimes force. But in all cases such incorporation was based on particularistic deals. Unlike the forced centralization of Anglo-Saxon England after Hastings and the conquest of Wales, centralization of France was never a decisive process.⁶⁴ Local laws and customs remained constant obstacles to central administration. The seneschals and baillis, as upper administrators, could be mainly recruited from the center. The lower level administrators, however, were necessarily from the area in which they operated.⁶⁵ The king needed to be sensitive to local customs and established prerogatives.

This ad hoc procedure, however, also had political benefits for king and towns. From the monarch’s perspective, it allowed the king to divide possible opposition. Indeed, the national assembly of the three estates seldom met to discuss taxation matters. If convened by the king, they were usually brought together to demonstrate their agreement with a particular policy. From the towns’ perspective, local bargaining suited the patrician ability for patronage and left the opportunity to renegotiate bargains.⁶⁶ Political negotiations thus took place within the local representations or by informal procedures. “There were many interests which a town might have to discuss with the government; but was it necessary to discuss them in an assembly? Backstairs representations and bargaining with their ruler were a perpetual theme throughout the period in towns which varied in their status from that of Lyons to that of Millau.”⁶⁷

This also allowed the king to be selective with the benefits he wished to distribute. The liberties that some towns would gain need not be given to others. This strategy allowed the king to clamp down on the independence of towns once this power basis was secure.⁶⁸

The chartering of towns thus particularly favored powerful lords such as the king and dukes and thus decreased the power of independent castle-holders and lesser lords. It worked against political fragmentation. This process, however, particularly favored the king for several reasons. First, according to feudal theory, the king formed the top of the feudal hierarchy and hence had the legal ability to create new feudal relations.⁶⁹ Towns were willing to put this social idea into political practice and thus favored a more centralized system. Consequently, towns did not overtly contravene feudal theory. Instead they understood their association, the commune, to be a physical body which could be incorporated into the feudal system just as any vassal. But because they sought to be independent, they attempted to be placed as high as possible in the feudal hierarchy. The best possible situation, therefore, was to be the direct vassal of the king and nominally not subject to any other lords. “It was an attempt of communities to rise by force of union in the feudal hierarchy and themselves to rank side by side with feudal seigneurs; sometimes as their vassals, but whenever possible, as suzerains themselves and tenants-in-chief of the Crown, privileged and independent of all but nominal allegiance.”⁷⁰

To acknowledge vassalage to a lesser lord would mean that the town acknowledged that it was also subject to the feudal superiors of that charterer of the town. Since towns strove for the maximum amount of independence and the least amount of burdens, they tended to favor royal protection over that from other lords.⁷¹ It allowed them to get rid of crosscutting obligations and the exacting taxes of their lords. Ecclesiastical overlords were particularly disliked. Laon, for example, killed its ecclesiastical lord, the bishop, and sought royal tutelage. Rheims chased the archbishop out of town and claimed communal rights under protection of the king. Lyons, an important trading town, likewise sought protection from the king, Philip the Fair.⁷²

Lesser lords lost out for additional reasons. The uncultivated areas in which new towns were settled often belonged to high lords since no manorial holders had yet established themselves. Moreover, lesser lords often lacked the revenue to set up fairs and establish towns. Poggi notes that towns preferred larger territorial organizations to facilitate trade.⁷³ In short, lesser lords had less to offer.

The second major factor favoring the king over other lords was the basically antiseigneurial disposition of the towns.⁷⁴ The towns did not merely want another feudal lord; they wanted a different basis of rule altogether—a rule that fit that of more rational, central administration. The villes libres and the communes, sworn associations of equals, were antithetical to the feudal, personal mode of obligation.

The idea of personal bondage disappeared within the walls of the towns; the innumerable relationships of dependence in the countryside—in short, the feudal ordering of society—were broken and subdued. This was the burghers doing, and it laid the basis for their subsequent designation of the proper relationship of the individual to this state as “citizen of the state, not a subject.”⁷⁵

This does not mean that the inhabitants of the cities were equals in terms of power and wealth. The towns had their own division of patricians and poor. However, the difference with the feudal order was that the cities lacked fixed stations and personal bondage. There was relative social mobility and juridical equality.

Finally, the kings deliberately pursued the alliance with the towns as part of their overall strategy to centralize the kingdom. Hence they were willing to offer the towns better deals than some of their comital and ducal rivals. For example, the granting of favorable terms to Lorris by King Louis VII contrasted with the County of Champagne wherein serfdom remained more prevalent.⁷⁶ When the kings acquired new territories in Poitou, Normandy, and the Midi, they solidified urban loyalty by granting the burghers generous privileges and liberties.⁷⁷ Even where the king was not yet established, he would intervene in affairs beyond the royal domain by offering towns protection.⁷⁸

Kings thus faired particularly well by pursuing urban tutelage, and kings were well aware of their advantages. John Baldwin describes how Philip Augustus chartered seventy-four towns during his reign. Chartering did not always entail forming new towns but also the granting of specific urban liberties and customs to existing ones. “Recognizing the importance of the growing urban communities produced by the upswing of commercial activity in the early twelfth century, these kings issued charters to towns throughout the northern half of France.”⁷⁹ Elizabeth Hallam confirms Baldwin’s observations: “Often such successes [of communes seeking independence from overlords] were gained initially by an appeal to the king for support. . . . The territorial princes and the king profited from the communal movement as far as they could.”⁸⁰

From the thirteenth century onward, revenue started to flow increasingly from new monetary sources rather than from traditional agrarian incomes.⁸¹ Thus the taille that Philip Augustus collected was predominantly from the towns, not from peasants. Towns and commerce produced about 20 percent of total ordinary income, with most of this coming from the tailles. The agricultural domain still produced most of the income, about 50 percent of total ordinary income, through farm produce and tolls. Church and justice only contributed 5 percent and 7 percent respectively, with a host of other categories making up for the rest.⁸²

When the political bargain broke down or did not yield sufficient results, the French kings would divert the burden to groups who were not crucial to his objectives. Properties and money of Jews were confiscated, or the Jews were taxed inexorably. Defaulting on loans from Italian bankers was another remedy. Philip the Fair accused, imprisoned, and executed the Templars who had acted as the Treasury after he had defaulted on loans from Italian bankers. Their goods became part of royal revenue. Such strategies were, however, onetime actions. Likewise the debasement of coinage was a practice that could only yield momentary benefits. Unlike confiscation of the properties of differentiated groups such as Jews or Templars, debasement of coinage proved to be highly unpopular and encountered social opposition. Philip the Fair had to cease the practice.⁸³ Thus, periodic revenue-raising methods were dramatic, but at the heart of the basic revenue process lay a social coalition of commoners and kingship with more regularized means of taxation. Although there was no direct royal tax over the kingdom by the end of the Capetian reign, the Capetian kings had, through changes in the nature of taxation and exactions, laid the basis for its introduction shortly thereafter. Strayer believes that Philip the Fair was the first king to impose general taxes.⁸⁴ Overall, the monarchy gradually expanded its general revenue intake. A very rough set of estimates is suggestive of an upward trend (see Table 5.3).

^{TABLE 5.3}

Some Estimates of Annual French Royal Revenue¹

Reign	Revenue	Year
Louis VII (1137-1180)	30-60,000 l.p.	no year
	60,000 l.p.	no year
	228,000 l.p.^b	no year
Philip Augustus (1180-1223)	100-103,000 l.p.	1202
	228,000 l.p. approx.	1228
Louis IX (1226-1270)	200-250,000 l.p.	1250
	250,000 It.	no year
Philip the Fair (1285-1314)	450,000 l.p.	1290
	550,000 l.t.	no year
	650,000 l.p.	1290s

Sources: Hallam, Capetian France, pp. 167, 292; Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 298; Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, p. 152f.; Jordan, Louis IX, p. 79; Given, State and Society, p. 135; Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 258, particularly note 59.

^a These figures should be treated with great caution. Extraordinary revenues, such as feudal reliefs and revenue from tithes for Crusades, might have greatly altered these estimates in certain years. Where no year is given, the revenue is a suggested average for that reign. Four livres parisis (l.p.) equal 5 livres tournois (l.t.). Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. xvii.

^b This very high estimate is from Fawtier, Capetian Kings of France, p. 100.

Tax Exemption and Pensions for the Nobility

Being a vassal meant that one had to aid his lord in military service. Each vassal had to bring a certain amount of men to the field. Usually the fixed period for such service was about forty days. Special regulations pertained to the Crusades which, of course, necessitated more time.

Increasingly from the twelfth century onward, the king or great lords to whom service was due would accept monetary compensation in lieu of service, the payment of scutage.85 This could be paid at any level of the military order. The higher the feudal rank, the higher the payment due since one not only had to substitute service for oneself but also for one’s subordinate vassals and their knights. This was a deviation of feudalism proper since it replaced service inkind with a monetary payment by vassals. As a consequence, by enabling the king and high lords to obtain mercenaries, the warrior aristocracy eroded the very basis of its existence.

A second deviation from feudalism was, in turn, monetary payment by the king for specific services. In the traditional feudal system, vassals put their military skills at the disposal of their overlord. In return, the overlord granted them land, titles, and shares in the spoils of war. Once rewarded, the king effectively lost control over these vassals. However, as the king built up a centralized administration, he paid his men in money. As Strayer points out, Philip the Fair established fixed sums of payment and pensions after service. The royal administration thus became an attractive source of employment for the middle- and lower-range aristocrats. They performed administrative, judicial, military, and financial tasks. But they did this on the basis of payment rather than exchange military service for land.

With troops at his disposal to whom he need not forfeit land, the king had increasingly less reason to require powerful lords such as the Counts of Foix or Champagne to serve militarily and bring troops to the field. Moreover, it was questionable whether the king had the capability to enforce obligations on powerful dukes and counts. Rather than rely on those who by feudal theory were his vassals, but in fact were his rivals, the king preferred to acquire military service by payment.⁸⁶ This was another reason why towns were important for royal objectives. The towns provided troops through the military levy and provided revenue for mercenaries.⁸⁷

Rather than confront the high lords, the king sought to appease them by sharing the proceeds of centralization. In some cases kings would grant considerable pensions and rents to nobles to accede to royal demands or dissuade them from forming alliances against him. For example, nobles who resided in areas that became part of the royal domain would receive pensions of several hundred pounds and were thus pulled into the royal orbit.⁸⁸ Philip the Fair paid the duke of Brabant a pension of 2500 l.t. (livres tournois) to remain neutral and not aid the Count of Flanders who was in rebellion. He offered the Count of Hainaut 6000 l.t. annual rent.⁸⁹ To put it bluntly, money bought allies. Nobles also routinely received a percentage of tax receipts for their area. When the royal taille became increasingly regularized from the 1380s onward, the clergy and nobility were exempted. This was to be the French system for the next few centuries. “The direct tax system of seventeenth century France was largely in place by 1379.”⁹⁰ This is one of the reasons why representation never became as important as in England. The French nobility took little interest in the meetings of the estates.⁹¹ They were appeased by their tax exemption and pension schemes.

In short, the French king was too weak to tax the nobles. Instead he obtained revenues from other sources and bought noble acquiescence by tax exemption or outright payments.

The End of a Beautiful Friendship: Paris Confronts Rome

The church had acquired considerable holdings throughout the Middle Ages. Indeed, in some sense we might regard the monasteries of Europe as the innovators in agricultural production.⁹² The church’s wealth was also due to its control of wills and marriages. Such acts required oaths taken before God and were thus under the exclusive jurisdiction of the church. To secure salvation, people would often include the church in their wills. Because they could guarantee the validity of oaths, and signed documents in general, the clergy were natural notaries. They were, for example, witnesses for royal edicts. It is obvious, then, that the church must have appeared as a lucrative revenue source for aggrandizing kings and lords.

The kings of France were able to extract considerable revenue from the church. Initially this was possible because the papacy and the Capetian kings were allies. Indeed, the church recognized the right of the king to nominate certain bishops and derive revenue from those bishoprics.⁹³ Eventually, however, the principle of royal sovereignty and the transterritorial jurisdiction of the church clashed. When that confrontation finally came, after the Capetian kings had already made significant inroads into consolidating the realm, the king of France emerged victorious.

There were historical and theoretical justifications for secular taxation of the clergy. Taxes raised for the “defense of the faith” accorded with church policy. Such taxes were upheld by the theory of the just war.⁹⁴ In its starkest form, a just war might consist of a crusade against enemies of the faith—Muslims or heretics. The most common type of taxation was payment of the tenth. That is, a payment of ten percent of the value of moveables in possession of the church. The pope could motivate secular rulers to embark on crusades to the Holy Land by making such sources of revenue available. It should be clear, without denying the religious motives of kings and high nobility, that one way to obtain considerable amounts of revenue was to take up the cross.⁹⁵

The granting of ecclesiastical taxes allowed the pope to acquire allies against his spiritual and secular enemies alike. The papacy supported the buildup of centralized kingdoms in order to form a counterweight to the secular challenges by the German emperor and the Normans in southern Italy. Indeed, after the Germans had acceded to the Norman state through marriage alliances, it was the French, with papal support, who displaced the Germans in southern Italy in the middle of the thirteenth century. The French king was also a useful ally in combatting heretical movements such as those of the Cathars in southern France.

Conversely the king also needed the church for a variety of reasons. The church offered institutional resources besides revenue. It was a model of efficient hierarchical organization which collected revenue from faraway parishes. It also managed to dispense authority by an effective administrative machinery. And, most important perhaps, the clergy were men of knowledge who could be used within the royal bureaucracy. Thus, the chancellor was, from the end of the Carolingian Empire until Philip Augustus’s reign, a member of the clergy. In return for such service, the king would often grant his clerks a small benefice and perhaps a pension. In accepting, they would become nominal vassals of the king. For clerical members, service to the king was also a stepping stone in the administration of the church. In an environment where church and secular authority sought each other’s support, clerks who worked as liaisons made rapid promotion. Finally, the church was an attractive ally to the king because it could even provide military resources. In 1194, for example, twenty monasteries provided the king with 1,500 sergeants.⁹⁶

The church was also important for the king for legitimacy. The church had the juridical ability to absolve oaths between vassals and an excommunicated member of the church. Excommunication was thus a powerful tool because it released lords from their formal duty to abide by the oath they took to serve the king. As long as the king sought legitimacy as the highest overlord in the feudal hierarchy, he needed the church’s sanction.

In conclusion, the alliance of pope and king was beneficial to both actors in many ways. The pope gained a secular defender to carry out the task of Rome. The king gained a source of revenue, able administration, and basis for legitimation. And so it is not surprising to see Louis IX (1226-1270), crusader in Egypt, Montaillou, and Tunisia, become St. Louis, blessed by the church.

Despite all the benefits that cooperation between church and king yielded, however, their alliance was ultimately based on divergent interests. At the heart of the king’s endeavor lay an attempt to obtain sole control over the resources within his domain and to expand the area of that domain. This clashed with the church’s claim of jurisdiction over all clerical affairs and of ultimate superiority over rulers on secular matters as well. “The Church never accepted the royal right to tax as a matter of principle.”⁹⁷ The breach between pope and king came only one generation after St. Louis. It was his own son, Philip IV, Philip the Fair, who brought matters to a head.

The conflict started with the war in Acquitaine. Ever since Eleanor of Acquitaine had married the English king in 1152, Acquitaine had been under English control. In 1294, Philip the Fair sought to raise an army and invade it. In order to do so, he imposed taxes on the church under his territorial control. The pope decided that this was not a war to defend the faith, nor a case of legitimate self-defense. Hence he decided that no clerical duties were due. This became the first conflict between Philip and Boniface VIII.

Boniface excommunicated Philip and ordered the important French prelates to come to the pope for counsel. Contrary to the pope’s expectations, many of the French prelates did not come. They feared a loss of their benefices should they go to the pope. The fortunes of the French monasteries, bishoprics, and parishes depended more on good relations with the French secular authority, which was close at hand, than on the distant dictates of the pope.

The pope soon came to realize how badly he needed secular support. The king forbade any revenues from the ecclesiastical authorities in France to leave the country. This hurt the pope since the revenues from France were the most important source of finance for papal opposition to the German emperor. To make things worse, the pope’s legitimacy was called into question by powerful opponents in Italy. The pope, therefore, had to yield. Philip’s army then occupied Acquitaine.⁹⁸

Six years later a similar conflict occurred. Once again Philip the Fair sought to expand his domain by force. This time it was Flanders that opposed the king. And again Philip imposed taxes in opposition to the church’s wishes. Against all odds, the Flemish decimated the king’s men near Courtrai.⁹⁹ Simultaneous with this defeat occurred a conflict over final jurisdiction. In 1300 a bishop in Languedoc, Bernard Saisset, had been arrested on grounds of treason, blasphemy, and insulting the king. Despite being a bishop and thus only subject to canon law, he was tried by royal officials and thrown into jail. This represented an important assertion that the king had supreme jurisdiction, even over members of the clergy. The pope rescinded his earlier compromise, “Etsi De Statu,” made in 1297 after the conflict over Acquitaine, and months of mutual accusations followed. Finally the pope summoned the French prelates to come to Rome in the fall of 1302.

Claiming a national emergency because of Courtrai, Philip refused to let them go. Only half of the summoned prelates disobeyed Philip, which demonstrated the divided loyalties of the local clergy.¹⁰⁰ Pope Boniface, enraged by this defiance and perhaps encouraged by the king’s setbacks in Flanders, thereupon issued the famous papal bull “Unam Sanctam”: there was but one authority sanctioned by God. Secular authority was subject to the religious authority. The pope’s solution to the Gelasian theory of the two swords was thus not a reconciliation of the two but a clear advancement of supremacy of the church over ecclesiastical and temporal matters. In short, sovereign authority and universalist claims clashed head-on.

In the final act of this drama, Nogaret, an advisor to the king, left for Italy with his troops. He colluded with the domestic opposition of the pope, the Colonni, and took the pope prisoner at his summer residence. The pope was soon released but apparently died of shock two weeks later. The subjection of the papacy to Paris was symbolized by the move of the papacy to Avignon, just outside the French realm but well within the Capetian’s sphere of influence.¹⁰¹

Philip’s argument was not with the church per se. Indeed, we have already noted that the clergy, like the nobility later, became officially exempt from the royal taille. The king’s strategy was directed against the limitation of his sovereignty by an authority outside the kingdom, which had denied him access to revenue and which denied him supreme jurisdictionary power on all matters within the kingdom. “As for the two powers with claims to world domain, the empire and the papacy, each of them was pursuing an ideal which could not be in accordance with the particular ideas of the kings of France.”¹⁰² Philip argued that there were kings before popes, hence popes could not be superior. Unlike the German emperor, the French kings had the means to back up their claims.

The Benefits of Royal Administration

For the early Capetians, private household and public administration were virtually synonymous. The king’s personal staff were at the same time his important advisors. The butler, master of the stables, and chamberlain were not merely his personal helpers but were influential in policy making; “the King’s court, the centre of government was nothing but an enlarged household.”¹⁰³ As the kingdom expanded, the inner cohort increased in size. Nevertheless, the inner sanctum of personal advisors, the Curia Regis (council of the king), did not differentiate itself by functions. It remained a nonspecialized council consisting of the king’s entourage.

Scarcely three centuries after the ascent of the Capetian Dynasty, however, royal administration consisted of distinct departments. These were functionally specialized and oversaw provincial field agents on a regular basis. Taxation, judiciary, police, and military functions had to a considerable extent been centralized and affected the activities of society on a regular basis.

The growth and nature of centralized administration reveal the strategy of the king to extend his power. Royal administration provided the king with the ability to carry out an antifeudal policy through professional agents who were less inclined to pursuing their own interests than vassals who were remunerated in-kind.¹⁰⁴ The administration also provided the bourgeois with career opportunities, standardized rule, and adjudication, while simultaneously allowing for local bargaining and input from the third estate.

The extension of royal administration took place in roughly four phases.¹⁰⁵ The logic behind each particular type of administration reveals the constraints under which kings had to work, the reasons why they favored particular types of administration over others, and how each different structure reflected the social alignments of the period.

The Capetian kings did not operate in a historical vacuum. In many ways their bureaucracy reflected similar administrative processes of the fifth century. The Merovingian kings sent out general field agents (pagi), who were often rewarded with land grants since coinage had became scarce after the Roman retreat.¹⁰⁶ Charlemagne reversed this process. Because of centralization and stability, currency came back into use and the field agents could be paid rather than rewarded with land.¹⁰⁷ These were not permanent or hereditary positions. To ensure that his orders were obeyed, the emperor sent personal supervisors into the field (missi dominici). These supervisors spoke on his behalf. That is, they represented the emperor with full powers and traveled the provinces in his capacity. After Charlemagne, the system rapidly fell into disuse. As discussed earlier, feudalism proper formally established itself. Administratively this meant that the pagi, the emperor’s representatives, consolidated themselves into larger counties or duchies which in turn were subinfeuded to viscounts. All of these offices became hereditary and factually independent entities.

From this weak basis the Capetians set out to establish an effective bureaucracy. In the early Capetian administration, the kings sent out provosts (prévôts), general field officers.¹⁰⁸ They were supposed to raise revenue, perform judicial functions, and keep the peace. Such provostships were farmed offices; entrepreneurs entered bids for the provost position of certain territories.¹⁰⁹

The interests of provosts and king were in many ways compatible. Because the income of the provostship, which gradually became a hereditary post, depended on the proceeds he managed to raise, the provost was always eager to extend his control over more taxable subjects. Thus the provost encroached upon actors outside the domain who were nominally subject to the king but factually independent. Within the kingdom they opposed exemptions for social groups such as the church. In so doing they furthered the interests of the king who likewise wanted to expand the domain.

In the second phase, around the latter part of the twelfth century, the Capetian kings started to exert more influence over their field agents. They sent itinerant, generalist supervisors into the field. Partially influenced by the Norman efficiency of administration and the Carolingian notion of missi dominici, the kings established bailiffs (baillis). In the more recently acquired areas of the kingdom they were called seneschals.¹¹⁰

Again the logic of this administrative order is illustrative of the deeper purposes of the French kings. First, the bailiffs were appointed to control provost abuse of their position and to make sure enough of the revenues came through. Moreover, bailiffs were to control various provostships which were aggregated into bailiwicks. With this larger administrative unit, the bailiffs could claim jurisdiction in feudal disputes between lords whose areas laid within the bailiwick. For that reason, Fesler has called this a deliberate antifeudal strategy. Lastly, the bailiffs were generalists who duplicated the royal presence in the field.¹¹¹

In the third phase of extension of royal administration, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, bailiffs were permanently stationed in particular areas. Because of the expansion of the domain, itinerant bailiffs proved to be less effective. Moreover, on-site permanence may have enhanced their ability to supervise the provosts. The thirteenth century thus saw the establishment of a real centralized bureaucracy. The number of bailiwicks doubled during that century to about two dozen, with each of them comprising three to sixteen provostships. (Estimates vary because different regions were organized differently)

The bailiffs maintained their generalist character. They represented the king in the field and were thus the highest officials outside Paris. They raised revenue, or rather they were the hierarchical superiors of the provosts. They sat as judges and performed police and military functions. The bailiffs acted as the court of the king acted, and their salaries were compatible with the advisors to the king in Paris.

The recruitment pattern of the bailiffs further demonstrates the antifeudal strategy of the king. Initially the clergy played an important role as royal administrators. However, they could not function as bailiffs. Members of the clergy could not fulfill the military functions required of bailiffs, nor could they pass blood sentence, for example, the death penalty. In addition, bailiffs could not be recruited from higher nobility, for bailiffs were the king’s instruments against his political rivals. They were therefore recruited from the bourgeoisie and lower nobility. “They were normally laymen, often of bourgeois or lesser knightly origin rather than noble families.”¹¹² Jean Dunbabin stresses the importance of nonpersonal ties in such administration. The bourgeois were, furthermore, preferred administrators because they were literate and numerate.¹¹³ Business knowledge was applicable to running a government.

Bailiffs were not indigenous to the areas they supervised. To prevent them from being captured by local interests, they were assigned from the outside. Thus the seneschals, the bailiffs in the south who controlled relatively new areas, were usually brought in from the north. They were rotated every three to four years, could not marry local inhabitants, and could not acquire property in the areas they administered.¹¹⁴

For individuals entering into such high office, this meant career service.¹¹⁵ They were correspondingly rewarded by high pay. Bailiffs would receive from 365 to 700 l.t. a year.¹¹⁶ Pensions were considerable.¹¹⁷ Unlike administrators rewarded by feudal land grants, royal administrators were continually dependent on monetary rewards from Paris.

The bailiffs continued to oversee the lower officials. They acted as the link between center and the lesser ranks. These lesser ranks did, in contradistinction to their superiors, have local roots.¹¹⁸ Often they were indigenous to the area of administration. This, too, was a felicitous way of organizing. Recall from our discussion on taxation that much bargaining took place on local levels. Regional estates were more important than the estates general. Furthermore, local officials who had resided in that area were more knowledgeable of its customs. Prior to the ascendence of Roman law, customary law was still important, particularly in the north where Roman influence had been less strong.

The activities of bailiffs and king mirrored each other. As the king sat in Paris and mediated and judged particular issues on many areas, so the bailiffs represented the king as generalists and exercised regalian authority with the help of the lesser ranks of administration. But just as the center, the Curia Regis, was gradually specialized between the middle of the twelfth century and the end of the thirteenth, so too were the bailiffs increasingly replaced by functionally specialized agents. The end of generalist agents came at approximately the beginning of the fourteenth century. This was the fourth phase in the development of French field administration.¹¹⁹

The reasons for specialization were several. For one, the Curia Regis was gradually differentiated into Parlement, Privy Council, Chamber of Accounts, and Chancery. Hence, the bailiff was from then on supervised by various organs. Furthermore, increasing specialization eroded the position of the bailiff. For example, required knowledge of Roman law led to his replacement by the juges-maires. The increasing desire for control by the center led to reintroduction of touring supervisors, the enquêteur-réformateurs, now ironically to supervise the bailiffs, who were once itinerant supervisors themselves.¹²⁰

To conclude, royal administration was based on and provided opportunities to bourgeois and lesser nobility. “In short, the royal administration was a service which attracted Frenchmen of the middle classes because it offered them a path to wealth, position, and rank.”¹²¹ Elizabeth Hallam makes similar observations: “As the great officials declined in power, the kings drew more and more on men of low birth to carry out routine administrative tasks.”¹²² In this increasing process of rationalized, central administration, higher nobility and clergy were less important, if not outright targets of royal agents.

This administrative system was not simply the reflection of increasing division of labor in society at large. Instead, the internal structure of the administration, and the goals of that administration, reflect a compatibility of bourgeois interests and royal policy.

Philip Augustus II was certainly a true friend of the French bourgeoisie. There were internal reasons for the connection. The royal system of government with its well-paid officials stood much closer to the bourgeois world than to the feudal one which it was to supersede. . . . He also called upon the bourgeoisie to carry out state duties on a grand scale, by giving it a share in the general governmental duties of the country.¹²³

In turn, the king benefited by having a professional and remunerated bureaucracy. No doubt the improved financial position of the king depended directly on the ability to raise revenue (see the discussion above on taxation). This allowed the king to remunerate his officials rather than reward them with in-kind transfers, particularly land grants.¹²⁴ This ability to pay officials increased the loyalty of the king’s officers, since these positions did not provide the same security as feudal land grants which quickly became hereditary. Consequently, remuneration halted the decentralizing tendencies caused by the granting of lands in return for feudal service.

SHARED PERSPECTIVES AND SOCIAL COALITIONS

John Ruggie has rightly pointed out that the transformation from feudal rule to that of the sovereign, territorial state involved an important epistemic shift.125 The transformation did not merely entail a change in who exercised power; it redefined what was to count as power and as legitimate rule. The origins of late medieval ideas, such as public authority rather than personal rule, the position of the king as fountain of law, and the concept of exclusive authority over goods and land, are highly complex and difficult to trace. We can describe the content of such ideas and present a history of their development, but we have not thereby explained their inception.¹²⁶ Therefore, I do not engage in that enterprise. However, following up on the discussion in Chapter 4, I will suggest how some of these ideas, particularly the idea of sovereign authority, became empowered and routinized in late medieval France.

I argue that the social ideals of the bourgeois and the transformation of the institutional order that the towns envisioned corresponded with the views of the Capetians. They had similar views regarding authority and justice. They particularly had a mutual preference for written, Roman law. This was not merely an alternative institutional preference but a conceptual reorientation of what should count as proof and truth. Such reorientation was complex and included clashes on collective versus private property; personal rule and public authority; divine versus secular law; and the challenge of territorial rule to universalist actors.

Early rulers had legitimated themselves as discoverers of law. Greek leaders justified their authority as interpreters of the nomoi, existing norms which only had to be discovered. Similarly, Macedonian kings legitimated their rule by claiming divine status which gave them access to hidden perennial truths. Laws were timeless, divine revelations. They were revealed, rather than made, by those with special status.

The idea that the law originated from the emperor was uniquely Roman. The Romans, however, did not completely develop the modern concept of sovereignty. They developed a notion of internal sovereignty but not of external sovereignty. They did not confer juridical equivalence to other states so that sovereignty could become a principle of international conduct.¹²⁷ Furthermore, the Roman emperor was above the law, but his position did not have the status of an abstract public office. He was not a lawgiver in the modern sense, but it was his personal capacity as emperor that made him fountainhead of laws.

Late medieval kings and emperors returned to this body of law to enhance their position vis-à-vis their rivals. Particularly influential in the later Middle Ages was the Codex Justinianus, the codification of Roman law by the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the sixth century. In the twelfth century, the archbishop of Milan used that codex to argue for the benefit of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa: “What pleases the prince, has the power of law.”¹²⁸

French kings were quick to note that they too were princes. Hence they justified their rule as the sole legitimate authority of adjudication and law making. Scarcely a century later, around 1250, we therefore find the dictum “The King of France is prince in his realm, since he recognizes no superior in temporal affairs.”¹²⁹ That is, the claim of the Holy Roman Emperor that he was supreme fountainhead of all laws was now claimed by the king in his realm. Contrary to the religious view and the view of Aquinas that human law was a manifestation of divine law, the king advanced the idea that law was created and made by mortals.¹³⁰ This changed ecclesiastical kingship into jurisprudential kingship. The king became the embodiment of law: Lex est Rex, “the king is the law.”¹³¹

The church initially supported the claims of the French king. The pope, after all, needed royal support against the German emperor.¹³² Moreover, at that time the king only seemed to claim sovereignty in temporal affairs. Because of this recognition, the French king was able to draw on the support of the church to a much larger extent than the dukes and counts surrounding his domain. Hence, the support of the church for the king was an important factor in the early formation of the concept of sovereignty.

Ultimately, however, this notion of sovereignty was at odds with the concept of universal authority—as we have already seen in the clashes of Philip the Fair and Boniface. Although a completely developed theory of sovereignty only emerged with Bodin in the sixteenth century, the idea had taken hold during the last Capetians. The idea of sovereignty as internal hierarchy and external demarcation had spread over the kingdom, not just the royal domain, by the thirteenth century.¹³³ After Boniface’s defeat, the pope officially conceded the de facto independence of the king. “The bull Rex Gloriae marked the emergence of the King of France as complete sovereign of his kingdom.”¹³⁴

The choice of the king to favor Roman law and society’s willingness to accept that as a basis of authority signified more than simply institutional preferences; it indicated a staggering shift in beliefs. First, Roman law was radically different from the earlier personalized legal systems of the Gothic and Frankish tribes, and it differed from the particularism induced by feudalism. Lawyers’ arguments became based on abstract equity before the law; the law was a text above party and society.¹³⁵

Second, the reliance on written law rather than custom required a profound switch from relying on immediacy of exchange to abstract ties.¹³⁶ Written law was suspect because it could be tampered with, unlike sworn oaths or divine justice which manifested themselves through trial by combat or ordeal. Moreover, given that writing was solely the province of members of the clergy, its accessibility to commoners was limited and hence distrusted. The emerging mercantile interests, by contrast, required exactly the abstraction and certitude that were absent in the old feudal order. Written law fit in the context of the burghers’ literate and numerate understanding of the world.

Third, the idea of exclusive authority over territorial space corresponded with the definition of property rights in Roman law. The early feudal era, by contrast, lacked such well-defined property rights. The medieval idea of possession, seisin, was embedded in a network of overlapping rights and claims. Moreover, the content of Christian doctrine was biased against private property.¹³⁷ Roman law, by contrast, granted to the owner exclusive use and rights. This, coupled with the king’s claim to final jurisdiction,¹³⁸ led to increased royal preoccupation with the specification of property rights.¹³⁹ In addition, Roman law, in contrast to canon law, permitted interest charges.¹⁴⁰ In short, the adoption of Roman law had important ramifications for the conduct of business.

Fourth, Roman law also entailed a different view of what was to count as proof and evidence. It favored written documents and fact finding rather than trial by ordeal or combat.¹⁴¹ Consequently, Louis IX outlawed trial by ordeal and combat in the middle of the thirteenth century.¹⁴² The Capetian kings also passed ordinances against the private feud, judicial duels, and recognized evidence by witnesses and written charter as proof.¹⁴³

Moreover, against localized customs, Roman law posited that there was only one source of law, the written law emanating from the king. “Against the tendencies which would have subordinated the royal authority to feudal law and custom, the administration more or less consciously set Roman law.”¹⁴⁴ Given that the land of the droit coutumier, the North which followed customary law, had about three hundred different customs, standardization was highly important for some measure of legal certitude.¹⁴⁵

The alliance of bourgeois and kingship had, therefore, an important ideological dimension. The legal framework, and ideological legitimation favored by the king, fit the perspectives of the bourgeois better than the medieval mentality favored by nobility and church. Instead of structuring authority through personal ties and lineage, kings and burghers favored authority structured by territorial boundaries. In sum, both king and burghers favored the adoption of a centralized and formalized legal structure based on Roman law. They were both antifeudal and anticlerical.¹⁴⁶ Both benefited from the existence of an exact locus of authority. The emergence of the sovereign state involved a transfer of loyalties to a secular state at the expense of local dynasts and the church.¹⁴⁷

I have highlighted these ideological facets of the development of the French state because they explain why the towns would support the king and how towns and kings recognized that they also had an affinity of material interests besides similar ideological views.¹⁴⁸ Moreover, an account based solely on similar material interests of king and towns does not fully capture the content of their coalition or explain why it remained so durable. The development of the sovereign state involved a leap of faith, or perhaps more accurately a loss of faith, for both king and burghers were willing to abandon beliefs in divine justice and many other norms and principles that laid at the basis of the traditional medieval order.

CONCLUSION

The emergence of a sovereign, territorial state in France was not due to changes in the nature of military force. The foundation of the sovereign state had been laid prior to the military revolutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nor could the kings of France claim any specific authority as protectors of the realm, given that the Capetian Dynasty was quite weak compared to some of their rival lords. Indeed, “foreign” policy of the king initially consisted primarily of diplomacy and warfare with the lords within the kingdom.149 Since these lords de facto provided defense of the common weal in their lordships, people did not see the king as the defender of the realm.¹⁵⁰

Instead, the king’s power grew as a result of support from the burghers for royal policy.¹⁵¹ Because of the expanding market, townspeople were in search of alternative political institutions more conducive to commerce and their way of life. Royal and bourgeois interests converged on the issues of taxation and administration, and they shared similar belief systems. Regular tax revenue was of great importance for royal policy because it allowed the king to weaken the old feudal order. His increased monetary capability also allowed the king to appease the nobility and clergy through side payments of pensions, tax exemptions, and rents.

In return the king offered burghers communal liberties which freed many people from feudal servitude. In addition, the King’s standardization of tax procedures benefited the commercial interests of the burghers. These taxes, furthermore, were levied through local bargaining procedures which allowed both town patriciate and king to negotiate on its incidence level. This bargaining procedure enhanced quasi-compliance. That is to say, by giving the burghers a modest say in the taxation process, the king was assured that shirking would be less than when taxes were raised solely through duress.

Closely related to the king’s ability to tax was an antifeudal and anticlerical mode of administration. Remunerated officials continued to be dependent on the king, in contrast to the fragmentary effects of in-kind transfers such as land grants. But the royal policy was also deliberately antifeudal in that the king devised a system wherein his officials, such as tax farmers and bailiffs, had their own incentives to expand the power of the king at the cost of his rivals. Tax farmers were continuously interested in expanding their share of the tax receipts. Moreover, by moving his higher officials around, the king managed to exert control without having his officials captured by local interests. The king guaranteed the loyalty of his officials by generous salaries and pension systems. For the burghers, this system of administration provided the possibility of local input in the decision-making process. Furthermore, it standardized the administration of justice. Although local customs were still taken into account, the administration became increasingly specialized and controlled from Paris. All this provided for more certainty in the mercantile environment of the bourgeois.¹⁵² Finally, the royal administration created career incentives for bourgeois and lesser nobility. Higher nobility and members of the church meanwhile became less relevant to royal administration.

The French king and the burghers also had different sets of beliefs and social ideas than the church and aristocracy. Against the personal ties of feudalism, merchants posed the depersonalized relation of the written contract. Against customary law and trial by ordeal, they posed Roman law with its well-defined notions of private property, codification, interest charges, and trial by evidence. The development of literacy and the spread of knowledge—at the expense of the church’s monopoly—were actively encouraged by both king and towns. Both, for example, favored language in the vernacular and the foundation of universities.¹⁵³ The king also favored a change in the legal order. He used Roman law with its notion of sovereignty to counteract universal claims by other political actors, particularly the pope. Although the king on occasion utilized feudal theory to justify an enhancement of power, the notion of sovereign authority, circumscribed by territorial markers, was logically different from the personal bonds of feudal authority. The king’s authority was increasingly depersonalized and based on his public role as the maker of law with supreme jurisdiction. It is only, then, after France had embarked on a path of sovereign, territorial rule that the king could become the logical protector of the realm and justify higher taxes for its protection.

Given the nature of side payments to the nobility, one might entertain the view that the rise of the French monarchy was based on a political alliance between king and nobility, with the aim of saving the feudal system. I cannot endorse that view. No doubt the nobility did well in terms of the French pension system and tax exemption.¹⁵⁴ Aristocratic privileges continued well into the eighteenth century and were only brought to an end by the French Revolution. Such accounts wish to denote the political outcome of Capetian centralization as “feudal” in order to place this in a theoretical framework of sequential economic stages.

But the strategy of the French king was antagonistic to feudalism as a political mode of rule. That is, the king explicitly sought to reduce political fragmentation of the French realm. He strove to make French politics ultimately subject to royal control and to act as the sole representative of the French kingdom in international affairs.¹⁵⁵ He obtained this objective by pursuing policies that met the approval of the burghers and towns. The many privileges that the aristocracy maintained until the French Revolution were hardly the same as the large political autonomy of the lords before the success of the Capetian kings. Before the Capetian consolidation, some great lords could call their territories regna—kingdoms in their own right; after the consolidation, they merely had privileges.

Furthermore, the attempt of some of these accounts to put towns within the feudal order is not convincing.¹⁵⁶ I have suggested in this chapter that towns were basically antagonistic to the feudal aristocracy. What is puzzling is that neo-Marxist accounts admit this but nevertheless wish to place towns within feudalism.¹⁵⁷ The alliance between king and towns is best demonstrated by the fact that during the baronial revolts of 1242 and 1314-1325, the towns remained loyal to the king against the aristocracy.¹⁵⁸ A variety of historians believe that this continued beyond the Capetians.¹⁵⁹ Blockmans suggests that this alliance continued into the fifteenth century, and Chevalier extends it even further until the Wars of Religion of the mid-sixteenth century. Parker notes that even during these wars the towns would not ally with the nobles against the king.¹⁶⁰ In short, I maintain that the political fragmentation of the French kingdom had basically come to an end by the late thirteenth century, in no small part because of the alliance of king and towns.

In this chapter I have tried to suggest which material forces and coalitions gave rise to the sovereign state. I have also discussed the underlying conceptual frameworks of different social actors. These facilitated the formation of a social coalition between burghers and king. But they also suggest how the later conceptual development of the “sovereign state” could take hold. Individuals, of course, did not consciously set out to design the abstract notion of the “state.” But in pursuing their own material and ideological interests, they laid the basis for its development and the later emergence of a system of states. Elsewhere, however, individuals developed other institutional arrangements such as the German city-leagues and the Italian city-states. These were likewise responses to the growth of a market economy, but institutionally they were quite different in nature. For a considerable amount of time, it seemed that they, not the sovereign state, were the wave of the future.

CHAPTER 5

The Rise of the Sovereign, Territorial State in Capetian France