1. Stephen Jay Gould, The Pandas Thumb (1980), p. 28.
2. To understand my argument, it is critically important to recognize that this book is not an account, nor a critical evaluation, of general theories of state emergence. A discussion of “the origins of the state” means widely different things within anthropology, sociology, political science, and economic history. Depending on the focus, a widely divergent chronology and different accounts of the origins of the state emerge. Much of the anthropological and sociological literature, for example, is concerned with the rise of formal political organization as compared to tribal or kinship associations. Thus city-states, empires, and leagues are all considered to be forms of states, that is, formal governments. From that perspective, European states emerged very early. See, for example, W. G. Runciman, “Origins of States: The Case of Archaic Greece,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 24 (July 1982), pp. 351-377. For many others, explaining the emergence of the state means accounting for the development and expansion of government. For example, analyses of when formal administrative procedures were installed, or when governmental revenue reached a certain level, are of this type. Or statehood is equated with the nation-state, a phenomenon attributed to the eighteenth century. I do not use the term state in those meanings.
3. Indeed, the very term international presupposes a differentiation between domestic and international affairs—a distinction that only became meaningful after sovereign authority had become a constitutive principle of the international order. Diverse conceptions of the state are described by J. P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (July 1968), pp. 559-562. The state can be seen as an aggregate set of functions, as an autonomous actor vis-à-vis society, or as a unit in international relations. In this work I am concerned with the last of these meanings.
4. See Benn’s definition of sovereignty. He notes seven different meanings, but they basically narrow down to the notion of internal hierarchy and external demarcation by borders. Stanley Benn, “Sovereignty,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy vol. 7/8 (1967), pp. 501–505. Hinsley’s definition is similar: “at any rate, the idea of sovereignty was the idea that there is a final and absolute political authority in the political community . . . and no final and absolute authority exists elsewhere.” E H. Hinsley, Sovereignty (1986), p. 26.
5. Two essays that discuss the material and conceptual implications of sovereignty are: Friedrich Kratochwil, “Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality: An Inquiry into the Formation of the State System,” World Politics 39 (1986), pp. 27-52; and J. L. Holzgrefe, “The Origins of Modern International Relations Theory,” Review of International Studies 15 (1989), pp. 11-26. Hinsley also notes this conceptual aspect: “Although we talk of it loosely as something concrete . . . sovereignty is not a fact. It is a concept which men in certain circumstances have applied.” Hinsley, Sovereignty, p. 1.
6. For example, Rosecrance suggests that interdependence has fundamentally altered states’ objectives. Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State (1986). For an early view that nuclear weapons would change the nature of territorial states, see John Herz, “Rise and Demise of the Territorial State,” in The Nation-State and the Crisis of World Politics (1976), pp. 99-123. John Ruggie draws attention to the ecological problematique in his Planetary Politics: Ecology and the Organization of Global Political Space, forthcoming. For the impact of international financial markets, see Ralph Bryant, International Financial Intermediation (1987).
7. The literature here is vast. To name but a few contemporary examples that have put the historical and future development of the state back on the agenda, see, for example, Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (1990); Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (1985); John Hall, States in History (1986). Several recent sets of essays have probed the possibility of change in the current system, for example, James Caporaso, ed., The Elusive State (1989); Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges (1989); James Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (1992).
8. I use Gilpin’s definition of systems change. Systems change is a transformation in the nature of the constitutive units. An example of such a change is the decline of empires in favor of feudal organization. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (1981), pp. 39, 40.
9. In methodological terms, the previous focus has been on explaining by the method of agreement. That is, the previous literature focused on locating the critical, similar, independent variable that could explain the similarity in outcome—the emergence of the state—in a variety of contexts. However, since some of the independent variables correlate, for example, the growth of the economy and the change in military technology, there is no unique explanation. I submit that comparing by difference is more fruitful. Given a similarity of some independent variables, which variation among the other independent variables might account for the different outcomes? See Skocpol’s discussion in Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984), pp. 378, 379. Similarly, Given has argued that history has paid little attention to the merits of a variation finding strategy to explain phenomena across two or more cases. James Given, State and Society in Medieval Europe (1990), pp. 36, 251.
10. This is not simply due to material resources. Indeed, as Braudel argues, initially the balance swung against states in favor of the cities. As will be clear from my case studies, these alternatives could for many centuries raise armies and extract taxes on a par with any state. Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World (1984), p. 91.
11. Zolberg makes a similar argument for the integration of internal analysis and the study of competitive dynamics between units. Aristide Zolberg, “Strategic Interactions and the Formation of Modern States: France and England,” International Social Science Journal 32 (1980), pp. 687-716.
12. I am interested in the de facto emergence of sovereign states and the gradual empowerment of the idea of sovereignty. I am, of course, fully cognizant of the fact that the theoretical articulation of the idea only occurred with Bodin (several centuries after the first claims that kings were sovereign in their own realm). Hinsley even argues that the idea was only fully articulated with Vattel in 1758, because only then was the idea of a Christian community abandoned. E H. Hinsley, “The Concept of Sovereignty and the Relations Between States,” in W. J. Stankiewicz, ed., In Defense of Sovereignty (1969), p. 283.
13. Because of the variant impact of trade, in terms of volume and added value, the European towns did not all have the same preferences. This will provide a first estimate of the type of coalitions one might expect.
14. In this sense institutional selection differs from the purely environmental selection within, for example, biology or unrestrained market competition. Selection also occurs because actors consciously seek to establish and favor compatible types of organization. That is, states empowered only like types. Additionally, one might speculate that the existence of other territorial states strengthened the positions of sovereigns domestically. Political elites might benefit from decreasing the set of plausible institutional alternatives from which their citizens might wish to choose. Furthermore, the existence of other sovereign states might serve to enhance the domestic legitimacy of the political leader claiming sovereignty at home.
15. Note that I have only argued that the sovereign state proved to be superior to European city-states and city-leagues. I am not explaining why the European state proved superior to forms of organization outside Europe, such as Imperial China or Japan. Tilly would argue that it was due to the superior war-making capacity of the national state. My own explanation for the worldwide spread of the European mode of international organization would lie closer to that of Hall and Baechler. See Jean Baechler, John Hall, and Michael Mann, eds., Europe and the Rise of Capitalism (1988). That is, once a competitive state system emerged, rather than an imperial organization, the competitiveness between states led to further economic and technological development. Furthermore, I would hypothesize that imperial systems were also incompatible with sovereign, territorial states. On this, more work would be needed, but my estimate is that rule that legitimates itself as religiously sanctioned cannot accept other political authorities as equals. Yet as Kratochwil argues, territorial sovereignty implies exactly that states are equal. Kratochwil, “Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality,” p. 35. The preference for compatible institutions also explains the global extension of the principle of sovereign territoriality by the European states. That is, nonsovereign forms of organization were deliberately transformed.
16. See particularly the essays by Stephen Krasner, “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16 (January 1984), pp. 223-246; and “Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective,” in Caporaso, The Elusive State, pp. 69-96, for the application of Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium.
1. Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (1970), p. 27.
2. Gilpin, War and Change, p. 41.
3. This work is large in volume and varies in its epistemological position, degree of criticism, and substantive argument. See, for example, the essays in Caporaso, The Elusive State; Czempiel and Rosenau, Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges; John Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity,” in Robert Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (1986), pp. 131-157; Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (1987); Richard Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” in Keohane, Neorealism and Its Critics, pp. 255-300; Alexander Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International Organization 41 (Summer 1987), pp. 335-370.
4. As Zolberg states, “thus while recent decades have witnessed, on the one hand, an abundance of theories concerning international relations and, on the other, a proliferation of comparative analyses dealing with the regime or the state, very little effort has been directed towards the interface.” Zolberg, “Strategic Interactions and the Formation of Modern States,” pp. 688-689.
5. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (1979), pp. 88, 104; and his “Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics,” in Keohane, Neorealism and Its Critics, p. 323f.
6. For Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, see Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (1933); Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, Steven Lukes, ed. (1982).
7. International relations is thus driven by a transhistorical logic. “Through all of the changes of boundaries, of social, economic, and political form, of economic and military activity, the substance and style of international politics remain strikingly constant. We can look farther afield, for example, to the China of the warring states era or to the India of Kautilya, and see that where political entities of whatever sort compete freely, substantive and stylistic characteristics are similar.” Waltz, “Reflections on Theory of International Politics,” pp. 329-330. See also Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 66.
8. Waltz explicitly responds to Ruggie on this point. He says in regard to Ruggie’s emphasis on dynamic density that “the account, however, tells us nothing about the structure of international politics.” Furthermore, he adds, “Ruggie would lower the level of abstraction by adding . . . characteristics of units and of unit level processes.” Waltz, “Reflections on Theory of International Politics,” pp. 328, 330.
9. Game theorists, for example, have explored the conditions under which cooperation or conflict arise. The number of actors, the particular payoffs that actors expect, and the shadow of the future all influence the probability for conflict or cooperation. The character of the unit is largely irrelevant to the logic of the analysis. See, for example, Kenneth Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy (1986). But note how Conybeare’s article in that volume indicates how the type of unit might be relevant for such calculations. John Conybeare, “Trade Wars: A Comparative Study of Anglo-Hanse, Franco-Italian, and Hawley-Smoot Conflicts,” in Oye, Cooperation Under Anarchy, pp. 147-172.
10. Dynamic density is thus “the quantity, velocity and diversity of transactions.” Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation,” p. 142f.
11. For interesting discussions on the connection between political authority and spatial order, see, for example, Robert Dodgshon, The European Past (1987).
12. For good discussions of the differences between the feudal era and the contemporary state system, see, in addition to Ruggie’s “Continuity and Transformation,” Kratochwil, “Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality”; and Holzgrefe, “The Origins of Modern International Relations Theory.”
13. The attempts to create a state monopoly on the use of force arguably started as early as the mid-thirteenth century when Louis IX tried to limit the bearing of arms by the nobility. State monopoly over the means of violence, however, was not yet fully complete even in the nineteenth century. On the latter issue, see Janice Thomson, “Sovereignty in Historical Pespective: The Evolution of State Control over Extraterritorial Violence,” in Caporaso, The Elusive State, pp. 227-254; and Janice Thomson, “State Practices, International Norms, and the Decline of Mercenarism,” International Studies Quarterly 34 (March 1990), pp. 23-48.
14. The royal domain was seen as the personal property of the king. See Herbert Rowen, The Kings State (1980).
15. This conclusion is similar to Wendt’s argument that neorealism sees the system ontologically as separate units. Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem.”
16. Consider, for example, how one might apply the contemporary vocabulary of international relations theorizing to the feudal era. Should one describe the system as tripolar consisting of Christian Europe, the Muslim world, and Mongol Eurasia? Would it be bipolar in terms of the contest of empire and papacy? Or was it multipolar? I would argue that the term hyperpolar seems more apt, in that a multitude of actors could wield effective force. Even more problematic would be to define the international system. In short, what the modern state system has done is to make unambiguous what the system is and who the actors are.
17. Anthony Giddens describes structuration theory as having two main objectives. “First, to acknowledge the essential importance of a concept of action in the social sciences. . . . Second, to formulate such an account without relapsing into a subjectivist view, and without failing to grasp the structural components of the social institutions which outlive us.” Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981), pp. 15. For adaptations in political science, see John Ruggie, “International Structure and International Transformation: Space, Time, and Method,” in Czempiel and Rosenau, Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges, pp. 21-36; Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem”; David Dessler, “What’s at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?” International Organization 43 (Summer 1989), pp. 441-473.
18. James Caporaso, “Microeconomics and International Political Economy: The Neoclassical Approach to Institutions,” in Czempiel and Rosenau, Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges, p. 135.
19. Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” p. 259.
20. For an example of a rich historical argument that the English state is a cultural construct, see Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch (1991).
21. Biersteker suggests that poststructuralism added to the epistemological debate surrounding international relations theory, but it has added little in the way of substantive social theory. Thomas Biersteker, “Critical Reflections on Post-Positivism in International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 33 (September 1989), pp. 263-267. For a suggestion on how to reconcile various approaches through more detailed historical analysis of nonstate logics of order, see Richard Mansbach and Yale Ferguson, “Between Celebration and Despair,” International Studies Quarterly 35 (December 1991), pp. 363-386.
22. Dessler, “What’s at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?” p. 447.
23. In this sense, I view Wendt’s focus on symbolic interactionism as more problematic than his first critique of neorealism contained in “The Agent-Structure Problem.” His later work takes the symbolic interactionist view. “Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46 (Spring 1992), pp. 391-426.
24. In short, I see this work as a response to the earlier critique which required neorealism to specify how the system emerged, thus recognizing the historical specificity of the state system. That is how I read Ruggie and Wendt’s earlier critiques. Ruggie, “Continuity7 and Transformation”; Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem.” Redefining the nature of the system in an inductivist sense creates several problems. An inductive understanding based on a taxonomy of interactions becomes far less parsimonious. For example, Richard Rosecrance identifies nine systems in Action and Reaction in World Politics (1963). As Waltz notes, particularly in his critique of Rosecrance, an inductive “bottom up” generalization of actor behavior redefines the system in terms of agent behavior rather than in a priori structural dictates which constrain such behavior. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 50, 64.
25. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 89; and “Reflections on Theory of International Politics,” p. 339.
26. See Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (1984), for the argument that Fordist production systems are being pushed out by craftlike production systems.
27. Instead it is similar to Waltz’s notion of Darwinian imperatives for socialization. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 73-77.
28. Similarly, one could argue that the change from personalistic to more bureaucratic corporations was a structural change. See, for example, Alfred Chandler, Strategy and Structure (1962).
29. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, p. 255f.
30. An exception might be the entrance of new members to cartel-like arrangements.
31. This is well described by Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (1961).
32. See Thomson, “Sovereignty in Historical Perspective.” For a fine description of the ambiguities of acceptable practice, see Robert Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates (1986).
33. Kratochwil comments of sovereignty that “it denotes internal hierarchy as well as external equality.” By denying some types equal status, they were delegitimized as units in the system. Kratochwil, “Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality,” p. 35.
34. I will argue that city-leagues were incompatible with sovereign, territorial states because leagues, such as the Hansa, had no clear territorial boundaries. In their desire to extend their political control over their economic sphere of interaction, they would inevitably encroach on territorial units. Second, because of the absence of sovereign hierarchy, they lacked a clear focal point through which to coordinate their behavior. City-states were more compatible in that they did have specific territorial limits to their claims of authority. Hence, external sovereignty and juridical equivalence came easier to that logic of organization.
35. Robert H. Jackson, “Quasi-States, Dual Regimes, and Neoclassical Theory: International Jurisprudence and the Third World,” International Organization 41 (Autumn 1987), pp. 519-549. He argues that the African states clearly lack the traditional empirical trappings of statehood but that they are juridically empowered. Also see, Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, p. 272.
36. Kratochwil, “Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality,” p. 36.
37. For the difference between traditional universal empires and sovereign, territorial states, see particularly Roberto Unger, Plasticity into Power (1987); John Hall, Powers and Liberties (1985); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 1 (1974), p. 15; and Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, p. 79f. Rundolph notes that it was only because of the failure of the Holy Roman Empire that Europe diverged from the world norm. Susanne Rundolph, “Presidential Address: State Formation in Asia— Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study,” Journal of Asian Studies 46 (November 1987), p. 736.
38. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (1977). Bull recognizes the existence of sovereign states but sees them as placed in a societal order (p. 24). Keens-Soper, also a Grotian, notes that this society was uniquely European: “The implications of political fragmentation did not call in question the continued spiritual and legal unity of Christendom.” Maurice Keens-Soper, “The Practice of a States-System,” Studies in History and Politics, vol. 2 (1981-82), p. 17. The Ottomans could play no part in this system. In Keens-Soper’s interpretation, the Peace of Westphalia reinforced this notion of states self-consciously being part of an association of states united by a shared culture.
39. Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), pp. 60-61.
40. On the universalist claims of Rome, see Hinsley, “The Concept of Sovereignty and the Relations Between States,” p. 276. Similarly, the German emperor claimed to rule as dominus mundi, “lord of the world.” Hinsley, Sovereignty, p. 60; Gerald Straus, “Germany: Idea of Empire,” in Joseph Strayer, ed., Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 5 (1985), p. 495.
41. Ruggie rightly stresses the conceptual parallel between the exclusivity of property rights and sovereign territoriality. Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation,” p. 143.
42. To use the normal concept “international” relations, rather than translocal, indicates how the state transformed politics and how we perceive such interactions. See Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation,” p. 142.
43. Garett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (1988); Gordon Craig and Alexander George, Force and Statecraft (1983), p. 11.
44. Those who analyze the feudal-state transformation recognize that balancing and self-regarding behavior occur. The point is that neorealism implicitly assumes that it is evident who the actors are (states) and that it is clear when the condition of anarchy holds. That is, neorealism is premised on the separability of hierarchical and anarchical realms. It is that very separability that the emergence of the state system institutionalizes. I disagree here with Markus Fischer, “Feudal Europe, 800-1300: Communal Discourse and Conflictual Practices,” International Organization 46 (Spring 1992), pp. 427-466. Ruggie similarly critiques Fischer’s position as a misstatement of his position and the theoretical problem posed by the feudal-state transformation. John Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47 (Winter 1993), pp. 139-174, particularly note 57.
45. Stephen Jay Gould’s view of evolution is a useful metaphor for an alternative understanding of institutional evolution. Gould likens biological evolution to water running down a slope. The water divides itself in different branches, the directions of which cannot be predicted. It is, however, possible to explain after the fact why a particular branch dried up, why it proved to be a dead end. In short, at critical junctures a multiplicity of alternatives emerge. Only over time do many of these turn out to be evolutionary dead ends. Gould, The Pandas Thumb, p. 140.
46. As said, of these three, Weber’s views are the least unilinear.
47. I label this competitive efficiency, but one can read it as relative ability. I do not imply that there is a particular form of organization that is a priori optimally efficient. Efficiency is not to be understood absolutely but relatively; that is, a particular form of organization is more or less efficient vis-à-vis its rivals. It might be more efficient in reducing transaction costs, preventing freeriding, raising revenue, etc. Comparative efficiency thus stands for the comparative superiority of one form of organization over the other, in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
48. Chapter 2 discusses this in greater detail.
49. Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 1, p. 7.
50. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World Economy (1984), p. 33.
51. Charles Tilly reaches a similar conclusion in The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975), p. 601f. See also Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State (1983), for a critique of functionalist and Marxist accounts of state emergence.
52. Aristide Zolberg argues that the development of states preceded the world economy, “Origins of the Modern World Economy,” World Politics 33 (January 1981), pp. 253-281. See Baechler, Hall, and Mann, Europe and the Rise of Capitalism, for the argument that the development of states actually aided the development of capitalism. See also Hall, Powers and Liberties, and Gilpin, who argues that “the emergence of a world market economy was dependent on the pluralistic structure of the European (and, subsequently, the global) political system.” Gilpin, War and Change, p. 133. He rightly notes how earlier international markets were displaced by imperial economies.
53. Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem,” p. 348.
54. Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974), p. 198.
55. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), p. 18.
56. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, p. 138.
57. Badie and Birnbaum note that Durkheim “is less aware than Marx of the extreme diversity of modern processes of political centralization, and he is much more attached than Marx to a narrowly evolutionary view of state formation. He supposes that all states always develop according to the same laws.” Badie and Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State, p. 12. Ruggie’s earlier reliance on Durkheim’s work to account for change does not satisfactorily explain sovereignty from my point of view because it cannot account for the variety in institutional types. Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation,” p. 142.
58. Consequently, one problem with a Weberian approach is that it does not easily lend itself to parsimonious theorizing. This evinces itself, for example, in the work of Reinhard Bendix. Bendix carefully retraces political developments in a variety of countries to examine why they resulted in monarchical or democratic rule. Reinhard Bendix, Kings or People (1978). Rueschemeyer says of Bendix’s work: “Ad hoc explanations abound in Bendix’s narrative.” He believes that Bendix is skeptical of any systems theory. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, “Theoretical Generalization and Historical Particularity in the Comparative Sociology of Reinhard Bendix,” in Skocpol, Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, pp. 151, 159.
59. This would, for example, be Habermas’s interpretation of Weber. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1984).
60. I believe that such accounts are prevalent in explanations of contemporary European developments. We are often told that a larger European community is “inevitable” because of increased competition. That actors who lose in this process might prevent further integration is not considered.
61. See, for example, Richard Bean, “War and the Birth of the Nation State,” Journal of Economic History 33 (1973), pp. 203-221. See also David Friedman, “A Theory of the Size and Shape of Nations,” Journal of Political Economy 85 (1977), pp. 59-77; and Leonard Dudley, “Structural Change in Interdependent Bureaucracies: Was Rome’s Failure Economic or Military?” Explorations in Economic History 27 (April 1990), pp. 232-248.
62. For the usefulness of biological metaphors to explain social evolution see, for example, Krasner, “Approaches to the State.” Runciman goes one step further by suggesting that biological evolution does not serve as a mere metaphor but that it and social evolution are analogues. W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, vol. 2 (1989), pp. 45-47, 449. I discuss my position at greater length in Chapter 2.
63. Many of the points raised here resemble Caporaso’s discussion of weaknesses in rational choice theory. The close correspondence between flaws in rational choice theory and unilinear evolutionary views is not surprising. Both views run the risk of affirming the consequent. Caporaso argues that some of these weaknesses may be resolved through a clearer specification of alternatives, actual choices of individuals, and subsequent selective dynamics among these choices. All these points are very similar to my concerns regarding unilinear views, and my response in this book to those concerns is very similar to Caporaso’s proposed research program. Caporaso, “Microeconomics and International Political Economy,” pp. 135-160.
64. Eugene Rice, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559 (1970), p. 15.
65. As I already noted, this institutional phenomenon, a system of discrete but interacting units, is viewed as decisive in the rise of capitalism. See Baechler, Hall, and Mann, Europe and the Rise of Capitalism.
66. Caporaso uses the term low level equilibrium trap. Caporaso, “Microeconomics and International Political Economy,” p. 150. Similarly, Elster notes how selection need not proceed to any optimal position. He speaks of low maximum traps wherein a higher optimum could only be reached after a brief decline. Consequently, new innovations that move toward the higher optimal result, but are initially inferior, will not be selected. The end result is that the higher optimum does not develop. Jon Elster, Nuts and Bolts (1989), pp. 72-73.
67. Like Gilpin, I will thus argue that unit change needs to be explained by the preferences of actors. Gilpin, War and Change, p. 42.
68. For a discussion of the advantages of rational choice applications, see Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (1988), particularly the conclusion and appendix. My analysis takes a methodological individualist approach but seeks to redress some problems with a strict rational choice approach.
1. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 11.
2. The economic transformation in the Late Middle Ages played such a role.
3. Fernand Braudel, On History (1980), pp. 3, 4, 27. For discussions of Braudel’s work, see John Armstrong, “Braudel’s Mediterranean,” World Politics 29 (July 1977), pp. 626—636; Stuart Clark, “The Annales Historians,” in Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (1985), pp. 177-198.
4. It has, for example, influenced Sahlins’s work. He describes how individuals, whilst embedded in structures of signification, have some room to redefine the operational repertoire of that structure. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (1985), p. 125.
5. On this issue, see, for example, James Rosenau, “Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges: Toward a Postinternational Politics for the 1990s,” in Czempiel and Rosenau, Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges, p. 15f.
6. The distinction is from Gilpin, War and Change, p. 40. Peter Katzenstein also uses this typology, albeit with a slight twist. He separates systems change from actor change, whereas the two are the same for Gilpin. Peter Katzenstein, “International Relations Theory and the Analysis of Change,” in Czempiel and Rosenau, Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges, p. 294.
7. There are considerable debates on the periodization of such hegemonic shifts, particularly in long-cycle theory. For a good overview and discussion of different views, see Joshua Goldstein, Long Cycles (1988).
8. Since biologists see it as a model, I sometimes use that term. However, I pragmatically use it as a metaphor which helps us think through social evolution.
9. I say “ironically” because the idea of evolution as progressive and increasingly complex, which has influenced social science and everyday imagery, comes from misreading Darwinian selection.
10. The relevance of Gould’s views of change for social science was particularly suggested by Krasner, “Approaches to the State.”
11. Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (1989), p. 32.
12. Gould’s theory can thus account for the problem of “missing links” which perplexed orthodox Darwinians. Such links simply never existed.
13. I do not deny that complexity can have advantages. Hominids with larger brain stems were more likely to survive than hominid types with smaller ones. Given a certain environment, complexity does have its rewards. But should the environment change in a dramatic manner, there is no reason to suppose that the most complex form will survive.
14. Gould, The Pandas Thumb, p. 79.
15. Krasner makes a compelling case for the relevance of this view for politics in “Approaches to the State”; and Krasner, “Sovereignty: An Institutional Perspective,” in Caporaso, The Elusive State, pp. 69-96. For a variety of discussions on the punctuated equilibrium model, see Albert Somit and Steven Peterson, eds., The Dynamics of Evolution (1992). For the argument that biological evolution is not merely a metaphor for social evolution, see Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, vol. 2, p. 45f.
16. On this issue, see particularly Krasner, “Sovereignty.”
17. One cannot identify a punctuation event a priori. However, one can suggest what types of changes might upset existing political coalitions or dramatically affect the probability that institutions will change. A punctuation is thus an event that alters domestic balances of power and lowers the costs of altering existing institutional arrangements. One can recognize the punctuation event on our level of historical analysis, unit change, by identifying which causal factor led to institutional innovation. I see no reason, however, why the logic of the punctuated equilibrium metaphor could not be extended to the levels of interaction change or hegemonic shifts.
18. This is, therefore, another example of how unilinear theories fail.
19. Otto Hintze, The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, Felix Gilbert, ed. (1975).
20. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966).
21. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (1979); Peter Gourevitch, “International Trade, Domestic Coalitions, and Liberty: Comparative Responses to the Crisis of 1873-1896,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (Autumn 1977), pp. 281-313; Peter Gourevitch “Breaking with Orthodoxy: The Politics of Economic Policy Responses to the Depression of the 1930s,” International Organization 38 (Winter 1984), pp. 95-129; and Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times (1986).
22. Part 2 of this book centers on that question.
23. A factor endowment model would not determine the outcome of social coalitions. First of all, the paucity of exact data makes the model difficult to apply to the medieval period. Even more troubling is the fact that whereas factor endowments might provide for a first guess of societal cleavages and incentives, they do not give a clear prediction of outcomes. For example, North and Thomas try to explain the decline of feudalism by the increase in the land/labor ratio. Because of the plague, shortage of labor led serfs to bargain their way out of their indentured conditions. Yet earlier in their work, North and Thomas attribute the decline of feudalism to a period of population growth. Douglass North and Robert Thomas, The Rise of the Western World (1973). See Alexander Field’s critique of their model on this point, “The Problem with Neoclassical Institutional Economics: A Critique with Special Reference to the North-Thomas Model of Pre-1500 Europe,” Explorations in Economic History 18 (April 1981), pp. 174-198. For use of the factor endowment model in a different context, see Ronald Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions (1989).
24. A belief system is a conceptual framework through which individuals aggregate and evaluate social events. I take these as generalized insights into understanding and legitimating the social order beyond perceptions, which I see as more narrow. I will argue, and I will clarify this further in Chapter 4, that different social groups often have different belief systems because of the elective affinity of interests and beliefs. For example, burghers had a different conception and different valuation of manual labor than the warrior aristocracy; the burghers valued Roman law for its established trial procedure and property rights, and they stressed merit rather than genealogy. For a similar understanding of belief systems in a different area of research, see Robert Legvold, “Soviet Learning in the 1980s,” in George Breslauer and Philip Tetlock, eds., Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy (1991), pp. 684-732.
25. Elster notes how evolution might get stuck in local maximum traps. Elster, Nuts and Bolts, p. 72. For a discussion of equilibrium traps and a suggestive critique of the new economics of organization, see Caporaso, “Microeconomics and International Political Economy.”
26. Robert Keohane, After Hegemony (1984), p. 81. For other brief and insightful critiques of this problem, see Brian Barry, Sociologists, Economists, and Democracy (1978), p. 169; Beth Yarborough and Robert Yarborough, “International Institutions and the New Economics of Organization,” International Organization 44 (Spring 1990), pp. 252-255; and Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics (1992), pp. 7-10.
27. Caporaso, “Microeconomics and International Political Economy,” p. 148. See also Gilpin’s remarks on the limitations of new economic history. Gilpin, War and Change, p. 74.
28. Wilsford argues a similar point. David Wilsford, “The Conjuncture of Ideas and Interests,” Comparative Political Studies 18 (October 1985), pp. 357-372.
29. For a discussion of Weber’s understanding of elective affinity see, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber (1946), pp. 62-63.
30. I have chosen France rather than England as the exemplar of state formation because the English case is actually atypical. England was unified early and by exceptional circumstances. “France, which had many provinces with widely differing institutions, was far more typical of the European political situation.” Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 49. For a different argument that France is a better case, see Robert Bates, “Lessons from Flistory, or the Perfidy of English Exceptionalism and the Significance of Historical France,” World Politics 40 (July 1988), pp. 499-516. Says Bates: “[T]he English case supports invalid inferences. Rather, it is the French case from which the lessons of history should be drawn” (p. 500). Likewise Corrigan and Sayer suggest that the English experience diverges from that of the continent. Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch.
31. I agree with Stephen Krasner’s argument that Westphalia was neither the beginning of the sovereign state nor the end of all the old remnants. By my own account the beginning of sovereign, territorial statehood can be found at the end of the thirteenth century, but is not completed even after Westphalia. However, the Peace of Westphalia does serve as a useful indicator of this transition because it was understood by seventeenth-century writers themselves as something of a watershed. For Krasner’s position, see Stephen Krasner, “Westphalia,” (1991). Samuel Pufendorf, writing in about 1682 on the rights of the princes vis-à-vis the emperor, did perceive Westphalia as a juncture: “[T]ill in the Westphalian Peace their Rights and Authority have been expresly and particularly confirm’d and establish’d.” In Herbert Rowen, ed., From Absolutism to Revolution, 1648-1848 (1963), p. 75.
32. Note that an account of evolutionary selection bolsters the methodological individualist argument by clarifying the set of choices available at a particular point in time. For related arguments, see Caporaso, “Microeconomics and International Political Economy”; Yarborough and Yarborough, “International Institutions and the New Economics of Organization”; and Keohane, After Hegemony. My work thus differs in two ways from standard rational choice accounts. First, I focus on the variety of institutional possibilities and then analyze why some were selected out over time. Second, I pay explicit attention to the importance of shared belief systems to clarify preferences and to link choices to outcomes.
33. Note that I do not contend that war is unimportant—far from it. Instead I argue that relative success in war itself needs to be explained. I explain success largely by institutional makeup.
34. This is somewhat similar to Axelrod’s discussion of how particular types of units, even when in a minority, can become the dominant set. Robert Axelrod, “The Emergence of Cooperation among Egoists,” American Political Science Review 75 (June 1981), pp. 306-318; Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (1984).
35. For a discussion of institutional mimicry, see Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review 48 (April 1983), pp. 147-160.
36. One of my misgivings with Tilly’s earlier explanations of state emergence was exactly that he did not account for the variety of forms in Europe; see The Formation of National States in Western Europe. Tilly’s earlier work also did not distinguish the generative from the selective process. Both these problems are redressed in his challenging recent work Coercion, Capital, and European States.
37. In earlier arguments (1975 and 1985) Tilly stated that “war made states.” This suggested a uniform response to a changing military environment. Tilly himself admits this.
38. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 30.
39. Ibid., p. 30.
40. Tilly defines a national state as “states governing multiple contiguous regions and their cities by means of centralized, differentiated, and autonomous structures.” He adds that “most states have been non-national: empires, city-states, or something else. The term national-state, regrettably, does not necessarily mean nation-state, a state whose people share a strong linguistic, religious, and symbolic identity.” Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, pp. 2-3.
41. Tilly is confusing on this issue. He concedes that if kings started to provide protection at Strayer’s earlier date, then his argument is wrong. Indeed, there is evidence that kings already tried to regulate violence in the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries. See, for example, Aline Vallee, “État et Securité Publique au XIVe Siècle. Une Nouvelle Lecture des Archives Royales Françaises,” Histoire, Economie et Societe, vol. 1 (1987), pp. 3-15. Nevertheless, I do not see how this fact alone would be a decisive refutation of Tilly. The importance of coercive power remains emphasized. More important is the question of how this power was obtained in the first place, since the Capetian Dynasty started with very weak kings. In other words, Tilly is gracious in acknowledging possible counterarguments, but he misses the kernel of the counterargument that is presented by Strayer. That is, if state making preceded the military revolution, the centralization that occurred must have been based on factors other than military protection.
42. North and Thomas, The Rise of the Western World; and Douglass North, Structure and Change in Economic History (1981). Tilly, however, also includes property rights as a central element, but he sees them as only tangentially related to either of the two paths. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 100.
43. Tilly implies that the tsar possessed more power than rival aristocrats. The tsar had only to gradually overcome the competition. But if that is the case, there is little to explain—it is a simple matter of a strong monarch expanding his rule at the expense of the weaker. A more powerful version of Tilly’s argument would be that the tsar had to strike a bargain with other actors, who were willing to ally with the tsar in exchange for particular benefits. An example of such a bargain would be the type of deal between the elector of Brandenburg-Prussia and the Junkers. Hans Rosenberg, “The Rise of the Junkers in Brandenburg-Prussia, 1410-1653,” American Historical Review 49, part 1 (October 1943), pp. 1-22; and 49, part 2 (January 1944), pp. 228-242.
44. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 36.
45. Empires concentrated coercive force but did not accumulate very much, whereas city-states and urban federations accumulated considerable force but in a highly fragmented fashion. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 21.
46. Ibid., p. 160.
47. Of course, size does matter at some point. But for those who wish to explain Venetian decline by France’s preponderant size, one does well to remember that the Dutch Republic, with roughly the same population as Venice (1.5 million) and only one tenth that of France, was on its way to becoming a near hegemonic power in that same period.
48. On this issue my views are similar to those of North and Weingast, who clarify how the institutional arrangements in England allowed it to raise more revenue than France. If we could classify seventeenth-century England as less coercive than absolutist France, particularly after the English Revolution, then the war-fighting ability of the English was enhanced, not diminished, by its greater reliance on bargaining with capital owners. Douglass North and Barry Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49 (December 1989), pp. 803-832.
49. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 2.
50. Perhaps this is the reason why Spain under the Habsburgs is classified as an empire (an inefficient form of organization) and later as a national state (an efficient form). Empires are coercive intensive, capital poor, and have weak towns. Still there is something troubling about classifying Imperial Spain, with its Latin American gold and silver resources, as capital poor.
1. Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age (1987), p. 11. First published 1900.
2. Walter Schlesinger, “Lord and Follower in Germanic Institutional History,” in Frederic Cheyette, ed., Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe (1975), p. 90.
3. Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond,” p. 149. See also Kratochwil, “Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality.”
4. I refer to Eugen Weber’s telling account of how even as late as the nineteenth century, France still contained many different language groups and much regional specificity. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (1976). Also see the discussion of Pizzorno, in which he distinguishes the state from kinship and religious organization. Alessandro Pizzorno, “Politics Unbound,” in Charles Maier, ed., Changing Boundaries of the Political (1987), pp. 27-62.
5. Dodgshon, The European Past.
6. Bernard Lewis, describing the Muslim logic of organization, captures the logic of such rule well. “The real difference was religion. Those who professed Islam were called Muslims and were part of God’s community, no matter in which country or under what sovereign they lived. Those who rejected Islam were infidels.” Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, p. 171.
7. As Kratochwil notes, sovereignty implied juridical equality among states. Kratochwil, “Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality,” p. 35.
8. Lucy Mair, Primitive Government (1962), p. 106. Authority is thus highly context dependent. It is exercised depending on the set of relationships in which that individual is embedded, for example, the specific of obligations one has to a feudal overlord or the conflicting obligations to the church. In short, one operates simultaneously in a variety of fields of authority. Which field happens to be relevant is case specific.
9. Charles Tilly notes five different possible forms of organization: feudalism, the church, the Holy Roman Empire, states, and federations of cities. Strayer suggests that the first three were no longer viable by 1300 and suggests that the issue was then already settled. Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe, p. 26. But note that little attention is given to city-leagues and city-states. However, they had yet to reach their peak by 1300.
10. For a fine overview of these different points of view see Frederic Cheyette, ed., Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe (1975); also see Joseph Strayer, Feudalism (1965), p. 11; and Harold Berman, Law and Revolution (1983), p. 299.
11. There are many definitions of feudalism. Some emphasize the notion of reciprocal service, others emphasize the decentralization of authority, still others focus on the localization of production. One could argue that this variety of conceptualization proves that feudalism is not a generalizable concept. From my perspective, however, feudalism forms a valuable ideal type which aids in structuring that empirical environment. For a broad understanding of feudalism, see Bloch, Feudal Society; Archibald Lewis, Knights and Samurai (1974); and Michael Saltman, “Feudal Relationships and the Law,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (July 1987), pp. 514-532.
12. Strayer, Feudalism, p. 13.
13. See Bloch and Duby for descriptions of the impact of these invasions on the European economy and political infrastructure. Bloch, Feudal Society, chapters 1-3; Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy (1974), chapter 5.
14. Max Weber views the private character of military force as a critical feature of feudalism. See Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, p. 47.
15. Thus one general precondition of feudalism in Europe and elsewhere seems to be chronic warfare. Owen Lattimore, “Feudalism in History,” Past and Present 12 (November 1957), p. 50.
16. See White’s emphasis on the development of the stirrup. Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology (1978), p. 78. See also White’s “The Technology of Medieval Knighthood,” in Stanley Chodorow, ed., The Other Side of Western Civilization (1973), p. 67. Others suggest that the success of particular technologies is directly related to efficiencies of scale. See, for example, Dudley, “Structural Change in Interdependent Bureaucracies.”
17. By some estimates it required an estate of approximately 400 acres to maintain one knight. Horst Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, c. 1050-1200 (1986), p. 177.
18. Carl Stephenson, Mediaeval Institutions (1954), pp. 218-219. He argues that because this relationship is “thoroughly warlike,” it is more Germanic rather than like the Roman patronage system, to which feudalism is sometimes traced. For the Germanic and Roman influences, also see Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (1978), p. 19f.
19. Both also value the practice of gift giving. This was not simply a matter of largesse and generosity; it also signaled appreciation and reward to those who served in battle. William Marshal, the right hand of several English kings, was thus highly praised by his contemporaries for his generosity and his disdain for material benefits.
20. Duby sees it as originating after 1000. Georges Duby, The Three Orders (1978).
21. Although the principle of vassalage was already in existence by the beginning of the seventh century, fragmentation of political authority only came into existence in the tenth. For a description of the contracts of these armed retainers, see Strayer, Feudalism, p. 82, document no. 4. Strayer argues that fragmentation was complete by the year 1000; see Strayer, Feudalism, p. 38.
22. One can easily see this as a classical principal-agent problem. As long as agents in the field were dependent on rewards from the center, they had little incentive to act independently. When remuneration became in-kind, in the form of land grants, and inheritable, incentives of course worked exactly in the opposite direction. Much of Carolingian royal administration and the later administration of the French Capetian kings were in a way all attempts to minimize these dangers. Indeed, the latter used roughly similar methods of administration to do so. For an excellent article that can be read in this vein, see James Fesler, “French Field Administration: The Beginnings,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1962), pp. 76-111.
23. Many of Charlemagne’s vassi dominici were related to him. By some accounts they were “a small body of selected families, half of them related to or allied by marriage with the Carolingian dynasty.” Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (1984), p. 14.
24. Consequently the later expansion of the economy following the latter part of the eleventh Century is critical because it allowed kings to counteract such principal-agent problems.
25. To Polanyi, feudalism’s important traits are a multiplicity of units, economy of kind, and the emergence of personal ties. Karl Polanyi, “Primitive Feudalism and the Feudalism of Decay,” in George Dalton, ed., Economic Development and Social Change (1971), p. 146.
26. Bloch, Feudal Society, chapters 11, 12.
27. But this did not have to be the case; at no time in feudal history was every vassal also necessarily a landowner. Strayer, Feudalism, p. 22.
28. This has implications for the type of institutions that develop in the later Middle Ages. I have suggested that feudalism evolved around the particularities of Frankish kingship and reciprocal Germanic allegiance. Consequently, outside the Frankish home territory and outside the Germanic influence, we need not expect feudalism to be developed as such. And indeed Poggi notes how the ideal type of feudalism is absent in Italy. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State. In the argument yet to come, I suggest that this will influence the makeup of the political institutions that developed after the feudal
29. Lattimore, “Feudalism in History,” p. 49.
30. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 83.
31. A declaration of multiple homage from the Glossarium of Du Cange. Cited in Strayer, Feudalism, p. 146, document no. 39.
32. This was a deviation from the traditional feudal formula. After giving homage to several lords, one still owed the knights service, as was specified for the fief held from the lords. If two overlords went to war, the lesser lord owed both of them the number of knights specified. However, the lesser lord himself should follow into war the overlord to whom he owed primary allegiance. Hence, we might question Marshal’s motives in counseling John against invading France to retrieve Normandy (1205), an act that would have jeopardized Marshal’s holdings in Normandy should he have decided to fight Augustus. William Marshal refused to serve John because this would violate the homage he had done to Augustus. W. L. Warren, King John (1961), pp. 113-115.
33. For another example of multiple homage, see the granting of a fee by the Count of Troyes to Jocelyn d’ Avalon, who already had obligations to the duke of Burgundy, the Count of Auxerre, and Gerard d’ Arcy (1200). Brian Tierney, The Middle Ages: Sources of Medieval History, vol. 1 (1973), p. 108.
34. Augustus ended the practice of indebtedness to those bishops. His reign marks the beginning of the ligesse principle which set fealty to the king above all others. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 29.
35. Lattimore quoting Coulborn and Strayer, in Lattimore, “Feudalism in History,” p. 47.
36. Saltman, “Feudal Relationships and the Law,” p. 518.
37. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 20, notes the switch in the twelfth century with the Hohenstaufen from an identification based on ancestry to that of location. For an argument against the “tribalist” point of view, see Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 18.
38. Hallam notes that in the early Capetian reign the royal domain lacked clear boundaries—“and rights of justice, tolls and taxes appear on a map as a network, more concentrated in some areas than others, rather than as a unit of land.” Elizabeth Hallam, Capetian France, 987-1328 (1980), p. 82.
39. Bourdieu rightly observes that feudalism is not based on simply trust (fides) but on the confidence that one has in the inherent quality of the person. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), p. 193.
40. Duby, The Three Orders, p. 28 Consequently, the common oaths that villagers and townspeople took when forming communes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were an act of defiance.
41. Otto de Battaglia, “The Nobility in the European Middle Ages,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1962), p. 60.
42. “A tout instant, chartes et sources narratives attribuent aux nobiles un esprit et des attitudes de classe et même de caste” (In every case characters and narrative sources attribute a class and even a caste spirit to the nobles). Leopold Genicot, “La Noblesse au Moyen Age Dans L‘Ancienné ‘Francie’; Continuité, Rupture ou Évolution?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1962), p. 53.
43. Marc Bloch notes that throughout the early feudal period ties of kinship remained strong. As evidence he cites the ubiquitousness of the feoda, similar to the contemporary vendetta, wherein kin members carried out private justice to avenge members of their tribe or kin. Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 125.
44. de Battaglia, “The Nobility in the European Middle Ages,” p. 62. Poggi thus describes the system as a network of interpersonal ties. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, p. 25.
45. Genicot, “La Noblesse au Moyen Age Dans L‘Ancienne ‘Francie’,” p. 54. See also Berman, Law and Revolution, chapter 9.
46. One of the earliest documents of vassalage notes how such a person when killed justified a higher wergild than one who was not a vassal. Strayer, Feudalism, p. 82.
47. This was true even after feudal law became more systematized. Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 314.
48. The underdeveloped nature of timekeeping is indicated by the fact that the infliction of physical pain, such as a blow to the head, was apparently one of the mnemonic methods used. Bloch, Feudal Society, pp. 113, 114.
49. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 40.
50. Saltman, “Feudal Relationships and the Law,” p. 521. Likewise, Sahlins suggests that practical reason, conceptualizations which tailor to particular material interests, are only a part of the larger culture. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (1976).
51. Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 321.
52. As a consequence there are three different interpretations of the extension of royal authority in France at the beginning of the Capetian reign. Is royal power constricted solely to the royal domain? Does it extend to the lands of the vassals who have paid homage and provide service? Or does it even include the lands of those who in feudal theory, but not in practice, are the king’s inferiors? Usually the first criterion is used.
53. One of the clearest examples of such authority, even in the later Middle Ages, is Burgundy. It covered a widely disparate geographical basis of unconnected territories. It was based on the personal linkages of military aristocracy. Not surprisingly it is here that we find the last stand of feudalism, complete with the golden fleece and chivalric valor which served as means to enhance the aristocrats’ castelike status. See Mann, who notes the translocal nature of Burgundy. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (1986), pp. 438-440.
54. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 22.
55. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, p. 306.
56. The Roman Empire, like many other traditional empires, was a capstone government. Whereas elites were united horizontally, through common language and culture, the majority of society consisted of a plurality of groups, with their own identities and few links with others. These segmented groups were allowed to maintain their own religions and cultures, provided they did not interfere with Roman political rule. The empire stretched wide but not deep. The concept of a capstone government is discussed by Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983), chapter 2. For applications in historical sociology, see particularly Hall, Powers and Liberties.
57. Confucianism, by contrast, could readily become an immanent religion, overlaying and justifying the existing distribution of political power. It provided a set of rules, but more importantly it provided justification of civilian domination of the Han Empire. Bendix, Kings or People, p. 53f.
58. For an introductory exposition, see, for example, Norman Zacour, An Introduction to Medieval Institutions (1969), p. 156. The dioceses were grouped into the administrative unit of the province, which was headed by the metropolitan, the archbishop. For a slightly different classification, see Bendix, Kings or People, p. 27. Both acknowledge, though, the clear imperial legacy.
59. For the church’s control of knowledge, see Luce Giard, “La Procès d‘Emancipation de l‘Anglais à la Renaissance,” (1989); and Pizzorno, “Politics Unbound,” p. 35. Pizzorno notes the translocal nature of Latin and the church’s ability to keep written records, which allowed it to monopolize political discourse. Perhaps most important, the church claimed a monopoly on knowledge of ultimate ends.
60. The origins of the Frankish Empire are discussed in greater detail in the following section.
61. Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050-1300 (1964), p. 23.
62. Maurice Keen, The Pelican History of Medieval Europe (1968), p. 67.
63. Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 390f; and Keen, History of Medieval Europe, p. 68.
64. Richard Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (1970), p. 94f.
65. Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, p. 10.
66. Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (1986), chapter 3.
67. The following account draws from Vivian Green, “Taxation, Church,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 12, pp. 605-611. See also Alfred Haverkamp, Medieval Germany 1056-1273 (1988), p. 53.
68. The manuscript demonstrated how the first Christian king, Constantine, who moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople, had donated the lands between Rome and Ravenna to the Bishop of Rome. Southern, Western Society and the Church, p. 92; Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, p. 21.
69. Haverkamp, Medieval Germany, p. 53.
70. For a discussion of the tithe, see James Brundage, “Tithe,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 12, pp. 62-65; Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (1968), pp. 56, 213; and James Scott, “Resistance Without Protest and Without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic Zakat and the Christian Tithe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (July 1987), pp. 417-452. Approximately a quarter of the tithe went to the bishop, the second quarter to the parish clergy, the third to the maintenance of the church, and the last quarter was reserved for poor relief. Brundage, “Tithe,” p. 63.
71. One of the cornerstones of the Benedictine rule was that absolute obedience was due the abbot. This is believed to be one of the main influences on the later developments of the hierocratic church. See Southern, Western Society and the Church, p. 218.
72. Aside from the routinized sources of revenue, the pope, the regular clergy, and secular clergy could all derive benefits from gifts and deeds. Goody notes how virtually every medieval will in England contained some clause benefiting the church. The church also had an established set of fees for clerical services, such as payments for baptism, marriage, and burial. Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983), p. 105.
73. The Clunaic movement started with the abbey of Cluny, hence its name, and soon expanded to about one thousand monasteries. Its organization and integration served as a model for the movement to create a truly hierocratic church administered by the papacy. Particularly important was its explicit rejection of external authority, save that of the pope. Haverkamp, Medieval Germany, pp. 53-55; Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, p. 26; and Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 89.
74. “The clergy became the first translocal, transtribal, transfeudal, transnational class in Europe to achieve political and legal unity. It became so by demonstrating that it was able to stand up against, and defeat, the one preexisting universal authority, the emperor.” Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 108.
75. For the urban character of early Christianity, see Mann, The Sources of Social Power, p. 322 “Christianity was almost exclusively urban.” It is ironic that later theological doctrine of the eleventh and twelfth centuries criticized the activities of the townspeople.
76. Zacour, Medieval Institutions, p. 179.
77. A decree of the council at Orleans in the sixth century. Quoted in Southern, Western Society and the Church, p. 152.
78. Goody, Family and Marriage, p. 109, note 3.
79. The College of Cardinals was first institutionalized in 1059 by Nicholas II. Southern, Western Society and the Church, p. 155; Zacour, Medieval Institutions, p. 192.
80. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 43.
81. Ibid.
82. Southern, Western Society and the Church, p. 176. Pope Nicholas I (856-867) asserted papal authority not only over bishops and priests but also over the emperor. Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 93.
83. Such clerical vassals would also provide for armed men to serve the lord when necessary. Monasteries and bishops often had armed retainers in service. The clergy provided three quarters of Otto II’s army in his Italian campaign. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 36.
84. Josef Fleckenstein, Early Medieval Germany (1978), pp. 122-128.
85. Goody, Family and Marriage, p. 105, points out how the large clerical holdings of property started as early as the sixth century. By the end of the seventh century, the church owned one-third of the arable land in France.
86. The tithe, the tax of one-tenth of gross revenue, became a transferable commodity. That is, one could sell it or transfer it, even if one was not a member of the clergy. This is further evidence of the intermingling of sacerdotal and secular capacity of the clergy. See Duby, Rural Economy, p. 239, note 17.
87. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, p. 14.
88. The claim that the pope was superior in secular matters as well would emerge at a later date, particularly in the pope’s struggles with sovereign, territorial rulers.
89. Tierney, The Middle Ages, pp. 121-122, presents all twenty-seven theses. For discussions thereof, see Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 96f; and Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 113.
90. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, pp. 59-60; Tierney, The Middle Ages, p. 124.
91. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, p. 54.
92. For the argument that the Investiture Conflict was a revolution of world historical importance, see Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 87; Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 107; and Southern, Western Society and the Church, p. 34. Brown sees its importance in the separation of the sacred and the profane, which previously were intertwined. Peter Brown, “Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change,” Daedalus 104 (Spring 1975), p. 134.
93. The Greek church had broken away in the Schism of 1054 which revolved around the exact nature of the trinity. The deal did not materialize at the time and was only concluded shortly before the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, when both the universalist claims of empire and papacy had effectively come to naught. Southern, Western Society and the Church, pp. 74-78. Recall also in this context that the Crusade of 1204 had been diverted to Constantinople, which was taken by the Crusaders two centuries before the Muslims.
94. On this issue, see particularly Berman, Law and Revolution, chapter 5; Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, p. 116£; and Harold Hazeltine, “Roman and Canon Law in the Middle Ages,” in J. R. Tanner, ed., The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 5 (1957), pp. 697-764.
95. Southern, Western Society and the Church, p. 109. Only ten papal letters survive for each year of pope Silvester II’s reign (999-1003). The average number of letters per year was thirty-five until about 1130. After that it gradually increased. By the time of John XXII (1316-1324) there were an average of 3,646 letters per year.
96. Zacour, Medieval Institutions, p. 195.
97. Roberto Unger, Plasticity into Power (1987), p. 113. A similar point is made by Wallerstein in his discussion of how world economies were transformed into empires. Wallerstein, The Modern World System, vol. 1, pp. 15-16. Likewise Gilpin notes how expanding premodern markets were often turned into imperial economies. Gilpin, War and Change, p. 133. See also Kratochwil, “Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality,” pp. 35-36.
98. See the discussion of such rule in Susan Rudolph, “Presidential Address.”
99. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, p. 81.
100. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 20.
101. Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 89.
102. For discussions of the idea of empire, see Straus, “Germany: Idea of Empire”; Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 390; and Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, pp. 47, 62. The last, however, states that the emperor never asserted himself over the king of France. But note that there was an ideology arguing that kings were subject to the emperor, and Richard the Lionheart, when captured on his way back from the Crusades, was forced to recognize the emperor as his overlord. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, pp. 156, 184.
103. Rudolph notes how universal empires were the traditional pattern elsewhere. “Had the Holy Roman Empire become the dominant polity in the twelfth century, Europe would have approximated the world ’norm’ more closely.” Rudolph, “Presidential Address,” p. 736.
104. A full account of this is rendered in Chapter 6.
105. For overviews of this period, see Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization (1988), chapters 1, 2; Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, chapters 4, 5.
106. Pope Gregory Ill’s message to Charles Martel implored him for immediate aid. “You, oh son, will receive favor from the same prince of apostles here and in the future life in the presence of God, according as you render speedy aid to his church.” Tierney, The Middle Ages, p. 82.
107. See Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, pp. 22-23, for a variety of accounts. In Southern’s view, “the idea of a western empire as a means of extending papal authority was a mistake from beginning to end . . . because in creating an emperor the pope created not a deputy, but a rival or even a master.” Southern, Western Society and the Church, p. 99. However, one might equally argue that the emperor created the papacy. Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 91.
108. For overviews of this period, see Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, chapters 2, 3; Bendix, Kings or People, pp. 129-145.
109. The emperors, however, were sensible enough to recognize the limits of their factual power. Although they claimed juridical supremacy over kings, they seldom asserted these claims against either the French or English monarchs. Their aims rather were to control the church and Italy. Moreover, their universalist rhetoric became more strident as they faced an increasingly hierocratic church. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, pp. 68, 196.
110. France, by contrast, divided into roughly fifty-five distinct territorial units during the course of the tenth century. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 17.
111. Fleckenstein, Early Medieval Germany, p. 109, discusses the return of these stem duchies. See also John Freed, “Germany: Stem Duchies,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 5, pp. 505-511. Barraclough disagrees with the classification, but note that he too acknowledges that authority in the east was always personal, not territorial, and that the territorial control of the counts was weak. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 10.
112. Pizzorno thus labels the contest a struggle over absolute politics. The church claimed for itself the monopoly over knowledge, but even more important it claimed a monopoly over ultimate ends and loyalties. Pizzorno, “Politics Unbound.” For the impossibility of compromise between these two theocratic authorities, also see Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 113.
113. The allies of the pope in the Investiture Conflict were the Normans, the Lombard communes, and the German aristocrats. Henry IV allied with German towns in the south and east, but this tended to alienate the bishops who opposed greater urban liberties. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, pp. 119-128. Henry V allied with the nobility against his own father, only to be defeated in battle, a prelude to the conflict between Frederick II and his son, which was similarly a conflict about pursuing an urban or a feudal alliance. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 86.
114. See the discussion of some of the implications in Berman, Law and Revolution, p. 98.
115. Around 1200 there were roughly four secular barons for every ecclesiastical one in England. In Germany, by contrast, there were six ecclesiastical barons for every secular lord. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 173.
116. Ibid., pp. 67-68.
117. This document, the Golden Bull, put a formal end to the German attempt to reunite the old empire, although in fact that policy had failed more than a century earlier. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 316.
118. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 267. For his extravagant life style, see Keen, History of Medieval Europe, p. 165. For his messianic status see Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1970), p. 111.
119. John Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times (1980), p. 28.
120. Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages (1980), p. 76.
121. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, pp. 72, 147.
1. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, p. 94.
2. Hinsley, Sovereignty, p. 1.
3. See his discussion in Bloch, Feudal Society, pp. 59-71. He speaks of an economic revolution which transformed the face of Europe, p. 69.
4. The literature on this issue is vast but unanimous in its conclusion that a dramatic economic transformation occurred. Duby marks it as “a major turning point in European economic history.” Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, p. 269. See also Haverkamp, Medieval Germany, chapter 4; Carlo Cipolla, ed., The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages, vol. 1 (1972), pp. 11-24. See also Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, chapter 4. My account differs, however, from Anderson’s in that he insists that the towns continued to be part of the feudal system.
5. Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities ([1925], 1952), pp. 122, 132.
6. Indeed, much of his work focuses on the fortunes of great cities which managed to place themselves at the nexus of long-distance trade. Braudel, The Perspective of the World.
7. Jacques Le Goff argues that Pirenne is essentially correct. Towns formed the nodes of long-distance trade. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 78. Verhulst’s critical evaluation of Pirenne’s work basically ends up concluding that Pirenne was right for the period after 1000. Adriaan Verhulst, “The Origins of Towns in the Low Countries and the Pirenne Thesis,” Past and Present 122 (1989), pp. 3-35. A variety of debates surrounding Pirenne’s work are contained in Alfred Havighurst, The Pirenne Thesis (1976). See particularly the essay by Bryce Lyon. Note that most of the debates surround Pirenne’s evaluation of the Merovingian and Carolingian periods. But even on that issue, Lyon notes how Pirenne’s theory is convincing and credible. Havighurst (p. xi), concludes that Pirenne’s main continued contribution lies in his economic history of the medieval city. Hohenberg and Lees take an approach similar to Pirenne’s: “important cities sprang up on the basis of long-distance trade, and their economy from the beginning involved great specialization, distant markets, and large-scale financial complexity.” Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Lees, The Making of Urban Europe (1985), p. 38. See also H. van Werveke, “The Rise of the Towns,” in M. Postan, E. Rich, and E. Miller, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 3 (1963), pp. 3-41. Douglass North also stresses the importance of long-distance trade in Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (1990), p. 125.
8. Political geographers have substantiated this thesis by excavation and analysis of historical records. For a discussion of the urban structure, see Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, pp. 23–37; Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 73; and Pirenne, Medieval Cities, p. 142.
9. Fritz Rörig, The Medieval Town (1969), p. 35.
10. But even medieval Italy, the most urban region, added about two thousand settlements in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Many of these could hardly be called towns, but clearly there was population growth and an increase in the number of villages. Marvin Becker, Medieval Italy (1981), p. 15.
11. This is hardly a startling or novel claim. For example, the political influence of contemporary French agriculture on French trade policy far outweighs the share of agricultural production within the overall French economy. Yet French farmers have been able to forestall trade liberalization on a much wider set of issues beyond agriculture.
12. Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, p. 42. Likewise Poggi suggests that “the ascent of the towns marked the entrance of a new political force . . . such a force had to be taken into account in the shifting equilibrium between the territorial ruler and his feudatories, if only as a possible ally to be used by one against the other.” Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, p. 37. See also Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, pp. 40–41.
13. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, p. 42.
14. Indeed, we know from medieval and postmedieval history that the areas where trade advanced the most, prior to the industrial revolution, were also the most urbanized. In the Late Middle Ages this was particularly true for Italy and the lowlands. Another way of thinking about this problem is by differentiating between central-place towns and network towns. The first only performed a regional function. The latter were tied in to distant cities by means of commerce. See for this distinction Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, pp. 4-6.
15. Jacques Bernard, “Trade and Finance in the Middle Ages, 900–1500,” in Cipolla, The Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol. 1, p. 302.
16. There were basically two main trading areas, the Mediterranean basin and the North Sea-Baltic trade. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, p. 97f; Bernard, “Trade and Finance,” p. 276. See also G. V Scammel, The World Encompassed: The First European Maritime Empires c. 800-1650 (1981). France fell outside these main maritime routes.
17. Bernard, “Trade and Finance,” p. 299. There were some maritime ports that did attract trade, such as Bordeaux and La Rochelle. Not incidentally their political development and preferences differed from the rest of France. Fox speaks of two Frances, the maritime and the continental. Edward Fox, History in Geographic Perspective (1971). But for a critique of that view, see Braudel, The Perspective of the World, p. 243f.
18. Bernard, “Trade and Finance,” pp. 308-310; Braudel gives a low estimate of 5 percent for the maritime bulk trade of the Hansa in The Perspective of the World, p. 103. Scammel notes it might have been higher. “In the Baltic, c. 1400 the average net profit was 15-25 percent.” The World Encompassed, p. 77. I discuss the nature of trade in greater detail in the individual case studies. Miskimin reaffirms the differentiation between north and south: “in the northern trading region, the typical products were heavy, bulky goods of low value per unit. Certainly the greatest volume of trade occurred in these items.” Harry Miskimin, The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, 1300-1460 (1975), p. 125.
19. The Champagne fairs did manage to attract some trade, but they were relatively short-lived and depended on the urbanized areas of the lowlands and Italy. See Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 78; C. Verlinden, “Markets and Fairs,” in Postan, Rich, and Miller, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 3, pp. 119–153. Raymond de Roover suggests the fairs were finished by 1300, “The Organization of Trade,” in Postan, Rich, and Miller, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 3, p. 43.
20. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 48.
21. For the variety of sources documenting this range of profit margin, see chapter 7 on Italy which discusses Italian trade in greater detail. At this point I am simply arguing that trade in the south included, besides the basic bulk goods required to feed the populace of the cities, many expensive items of low volume but very high added value such as silk and spices. The term spices included many products, but particularly profitable were the “minute spices,” wares sold in “small quantities at high prices.” See the discussion in Miskimin, The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, pp. 123-129, and the list of spices in Robert Lopez and Irving Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (1967), p. 108f. De Roover likewise describes Italian trade as high-value, low-volume trade. The galley was not suited for bulk trade. De Roover, “The Organization of Trade,” p. 100.
22. The term is Roberto Unger’s. He contrasts it to autarkic empire and the state. Unger, Plasticity into Power, pp. 115-123. He argues that the state was less exploitive than the overlord-merchant and autarkic imperial forms of organization.
23. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 161.
24. One might speculate whether this created high barriers to entry for potential newcomers. Thus the highly advanced Venetian galley, with approximately two hundred to three hundred men aboard, proved to be an ideal mix of merchant and warship. Lane speaks in this regard of a protection rent which accrued to the Venetians. See Frederic Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973). McNeill likewise discusses the exceptional ability of the Venetians to marry trade and military exploits. William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (1982). The Hanseatic cog ship, by contrast, was relatively cheap to operate with small crews. See the discussion of these ships in Archibald Lewis and Timothy Runyan, European Naval and Maritime History, 300-1500 (1985), chapters 4 and 6. They also reinforce the argument that trade in the north was largely bulk trade. “Though we have already noted that by the late tenth century some bulk cargoes already had begun to be transported by sea in northern Europe, such trade increased immensely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries” (pp. 134-135).
25. Indeed, the rivalry between Genoa and Venice for control over the Black Sea provides an example. In 1204 Venice managed to divert the Crusaders to Constantinople and take that city, thus creating a Venetian monopoly to the Black Sea and the caravan connections to Asia. About sixty years later the ousted Byzantine emperor retook the city with Genoese help and thereupon received the monopoly for Black Sea trade. Documents demonstrate that internal monopolies were forbidden, whereas external monopolies were encouraged. See Lopez and Raymond, Medieval Trade, pp. 126-130. De Roover notes that the Italian cities were rivals, whereas the cities of the Baltic and North Sea banded together. De Roover, “The Organization of Trade,” p. 105.
26. One cannot a priori predict what the outcome of particular recombinations will be. The nature of social evolution is indeterminate. One can, however, explain the observed outcomes of such recombinations once they have occurred. For a methodological exposition of this view, see Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory. Runciman takes a more indeterminate view than I do. Since I trace the relative powers of social actors and their preferences, we can make reasoned inferences as to which type of institutions might develop.
27. Although social and political actors pursue their own specific goals, the eventual outcome need not be one intended by any actor. That is, the outcome of social realignments might, in the long run, result in unintended consequences. For example, the alliance between towns and French kings initially operated without established representation and oversight over royal revenue. Ad hoc negotiations benefited both town and king. In the long run however, the unintended consequence—at least for the towns—was an absolute monarchy. The king turned against the towns once his position was secure. The argument that king and towns were later sometimes at odds is thus not a rebuttal of my position. See, for example, the later opposition to royal absolutism in David Parker, “The Social Foundation of French Absolutism 1610-1630,” Past and Present 53 (November 1971), pp. 67-89.
28. Because of the dual impact of external change and relative position of social actors, and the absence of hard data for this period, a factor endowment explanation such as Rogowski’s is difficult to apply here, although I agree with his general approach. For example, prior to the plague, the population grew, but so did available land through the development of new agricultural areas. Was there then a high land/labor ratio or not? If there was, both France and Germany should have shown a high ratio. But the similarity does not explain the variation of political outcomes. For that reason I argue that the relative strength of social and political groups is more relevant for this set of cases than the distribution of productive factors. See Ronald Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions (1989).
29. I do not deny that trade itself can be explained by other causal factors, such as weather, population shifts, and declining incursions from raiders. The latter variables in turn can be explained by yet other causal factors—ad infinitum. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to treat trade as an independent variable because it created a broad environmental shift which affected all actors in Europe, and over which no one actor had ultimate control. Admittedly, at a later stage the political changes set in motion by the economic transformation started to feed back on the level of trade. As I will argue, the emergence of a competitive state system was beneficial to the growth of trade.
30. Michael Walzer, “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,” Political Science Quarterly 82 (June 1967), p. 194. Walzer further suggests that political discourse is embedded in a larger unified vocabulary wherein it resonates with other realms of experience. For example, the idea of a “Body Politic” resonates with scientific and biological images. I argue that the transformation of the Late Middle Ages introduced a new unified vocabulary with new symbols and mental frames of reality. As Walzer points out, “in any complex civilization there exists what might be called symbols-in-reserve, or symbols alternative to the dominant ones, to which men freed for one or another reason from the dominant one can turn” (p. 197). I submit that the burghers were the ones who searched for and used alternative symbols, and they allied with political elites able to accommodate such new ideas.
31. “That is, the rule of the state not only extends throughout its territory, which gives it body, in which it is ’reified’ (verdinglicht); it is also objectified (versachlicht).” Schlesinger, “Lord and Follower in Germanic Institutional History,” in Cheyette, Lordship and Community, p. 88.
32. John of Salisbury already noted the distinction by the twelfth century. “He is, and acts as, a personal publica. And in that capacity he is expected to consider all issues with regard to the well-being of the res publica, and not with regard to his privata voluntas.” Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (1957), p. 95. For the view that the royal domain was seen as private possession by the early kings, see Rowen, The King’s State.
33. Holzgrefe, “The Origins of Modern International Relations Theory”; Kratochwil, “Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality”; Ruggie, “Continuity and Transformation.”
34. For example, both the Chinese Empire and Japanese shogunate did not recognize the equivalent status of others.
35. These developments did not, of course, occur instantaneously. Here I can only suggest the enabling conditions that permitted for a later and fuller development of a theory of sovereignty. Nevertheless, as I will demonstrate in Chapter 5, the basis for the concept of sovereign authority had been laid by the end of the thirteenth century.
36. Indeed, the two areas that saw the first reemergence of ideas of sovereignty, Italy and Germany, ended up being the most fragmented.
37. See Max Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber. Their introduction gives a good description of the process of selection of ideas, which corresponds with my view on the matter. “But in time, ideas are discredited in the face of history, unless they point in the direction of conduct that various interests promote” (p. 63).
38. For a discussion of the ability of political entrepreneurs to manipulate cultural symbols, see David Laitin, Hegemony and Culture (1986).
39. Weber himself explicitly acknowledged this mutual dependence of ideas and interests; see Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, p. 280: “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ’world images’ that have been created by ’ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.”
40. This does not claim to be a determinative account of why new ideas emerged in the late medieval era. The purpose is rather to explore which sets of ideas emerged and why certain social groups and political entrepreneurs had an affinity with some of these.
41. Bloch was the first to pioneer the concept of the medieval mentality as a structure determining individual actions. Many historians since then, such as Duby, Le Goff, and Braudel, similarly suggest that there was a comprehensive set of ideas which informed medieval human behavior. They sometimes call it culture, civilization, collective mentality, or shared consciousness (conscience collective). They seek to describe the way individuals perceived and made sense of their environment. It is different from the instrumental adoption of ideology for political expediency. I use the term belief system, since my focus is less on an overencompassing concept of culture and more on the systematized way people aggregate and explain political phenomena. This set of aggregations and explanations is moreover infused with personal and normative values. A belief system is thus a relatively enduring and related set of insights into reality. My understanding of what a belief system is shares a strong affinity with Robert Legvold’s, although he uses it in a completely different realm. Legvold, “Soviet Learning in the 1980s.”
42. Political geographers in particular have explored the correspondence of social order to the spatial extension of material activity in society. See, for example, Dodgshon, The European Past.
43. Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture (1980), p. xiii, note 9.
44. There was a general feeling of pessimism, decay. Civilization had moved from east to west to its final stage. Mundus senescit, “the world is growing old.” For others the prophecy of Daniel indicated that the end was near because of the decline of the Roman Empire. Scripture foretold that there would be but four empires—the Roman being the last. Others saw in famine, pestilence, and war signs of the horrors indicative of imminent final judgment.
45. Bloch notes how documents were seldom dated. Chroniclers often did not know the date. Bloch, Feudal Society, pp. 71-75.
46. The day was marked in blocks of our contemporary hours. The common measurement consisted of Matins (midnight); Lauds (3 A.M.); Prime (6 A.M.); Terce (9 A.M.); Sext (noon); Nones (3 P.M.); Vesper (6 P.M.); and Compline (9 P.M.). Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 177.
47. Markers of differentiation could be manipulated depending on the instrumental purposes of those invoking scripture and clerical authority to argue their cause. Duby, The Three Orders, p. 63.
48. Ibid., p. 109.
49. Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture, p. 58. De Roover notes that “merchants in any case, had no assigned place in the pattern of feudal society, and their activities, under the influence of Church doctrine, were regarded with distrust as something tainted with the stigma of usury or wickedness.” De Roover, “The Organization of Trade,” p. 46.
50. Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture, pp. 60, 120.
51. Pizzorno discusses the particular nature of ecclesiastical knowledge. It was first of all a knowledge of ultimate ends. Furthermore, the use of Latin transcended the local-boundedness of vernaculars. Since it was knowledge of the general rather than the particular, it was considered superior to temporal knowledge. It bound society together “beyond the momentary and beyond the local.” Pizzorno, “Politics Unbound,” p. 36.
52. See the discussion in Hazeltine, “Roman and Canon Law in the Middle Ages.” The personal nature of law made for great variation. A ninth-century bishop noted that “it often happened that five men were present or sitting together, and not one of them had the same law as another.” Quoted in Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, p. 17.
53. Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 116. “Teutonic custom, formulated later into feudal law, saw nothing inconsistent in the belief that the same piece of land could be owned by two or more persons. . . . Such divided ownership was quite foreign to the more severely logical Roman law.” Morrall, Political Thought in Medieval Times, p. 15.
54. Brown argues that trial by ordeal functioned as ritualistic method of acquiring consensus. By the display of the ordeal, norms were made present to all. Brown, “Society and the Supernatural.” For documents detailing the procedure of ordeals and a critical Arab view of Crusader justice, see Brian Tierney, The Middle Ages, pp. 60-61, 141-142.
55. Edouard Perroy, “Social Mobility Among the French Noblesse in the Later Middle Ages,” Past and Present 21 (April 1962), p. 29.
56. de Battaglia, “The Nobility in the European Middle Ages,” p. 60. See also the discussion of aristocratic society in Bendix, Kings or People, pp. 228-232.
57. Jean Dunbabin, France in the Making, 843-1180 (1985), p. 247.
58. Karl Leyser, “The German Aristocracy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century,” Past and Present 41 (December 1968), p. 27. Leyser also notes how the Saxons claimed to have descended from Alexander the Great’s army (p. 29).
59. Goody provides for a fascinating account of how the church favored a two-pronged strategy. First it stressed the importance of the elementaiy family rather than the wider kin group, and it advocated for primogeniture within that family. Second, it advocated written law rather than custom (bookland over folkland) because a written record provided better security against the claims of the descendant’s kin. Goody, Family and Marriage, pp. 111, 118, 123. My thanks to John Hall for stressing this point with me. See also Hall, Powers and Liberties, pp. 130-132.
60. Some authors thus speak of the discovery of the individual. Although the church had condemned individualism as exaggerated pride, by breaking up traditional kinship ties it helped bring that very individualism about. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 279; Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 30. Pizzorno suggests that subsequent territorial definition of individual identity facilitated market exchange. Pizzorno, “Politics Unbound,” p. 48.
61. For a discussion of the Peace of God, see Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 412. For an example of the enforcement of the Peace of God by the duke of Normandy (in 1135), see Strayer, Feudalism, pp. 120-121, reading 25.
62. Strayer, Feudalism, p. 45. In Germany the feudal system was formally constituted through the Heerschild. In this rigid hierarchy there were five layers of lords and inferiors. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 171.
63. In the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, the potential conflict between the two legal systems never arose because the basileus, the Byzantine emperor, came to have sacerdotal status. See Bendix, Kings or People, pp. 94-95; Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 268. Southern, however, believes that the omnipotence of the Greek emperor has been exaggerated. Thus he explains the failure of the political package deal that the pope proposed: a unified Christian church with the pope as the sacerdotal authority, and the Byzantine emperor rather than the German to unite all Christendom in temporal matters. The pope misunderstood the political nature of the Greek church, and hence the deal failed. Southern, Western Society and the Church, pp. 74-78.
64. See Hazeltine, “Roman and Canon Law.” How secular rulers specifically used Roman law will be discussed in the following chapters.
65. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, p. 87f.
66. In Weber’s analysis of the protestant ethic, predestination creates anxiety in the believer. Because redemption is foreordained, all activity appears meaningless. It is up to the Calvinist to discover meaning in the world and meaning in the activity in which one is engaged. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1958). The denial of legitimacy to monetary pursuits set similar forces in motion during the late medieval period. Duby mentions the rise of a capitalist mentality in twelfth-century Italy, well before Weber’s discussion of the affinity between Protestantism and capitalism. Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, p. 261. Likewise Pirenne notes the existence of a capitalistic spirit well before the Renaissance. Pirenne, Medieval Cities, p. 118.
67. Hirschman argues that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theorists saw a difference between the moderation of passions when engaged in commerce, as opposed to the absolute commitments of religion. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (1977). The point is different than my own, but it suggests likewise the different beliefs entailed in either practice.
68. For the argument that the shift to territorial rule depended on an epistemic shift in perception, as evinced in the single point perspective in art, see John Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond.” Likewise Le Goff sees this as an important indicator of changing views. Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture, p. 37.
69. Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture, p. 30
70. It is true that the church gradually developed a perspective that justified mercantile activity, and other previously illicit trades, by focusing on the intentions of actors. If actors had the intent to further the common good, then the activity was acceptable. This new view, however, demonstrated that there was a departure from the old medieval mentality. Indeed Le Goff suggests that the development of intentionality as a criterion was an important deviation from previous adherence to medieval symbolism, a point that I cannot further explore in this context.
71. The vassal kneels before his lord and places his hands between those of his lord. The position he takes is the same as that of prayer in the modern church. The vassal swears before God and guarantees his liegeship with his life before God. For the ritual of vassalage, see Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 146.
72. Becker, Medieval Italy, p. 25. Coleman suggests that other factors such as political centralization and Roman Law also might have had a lot to do with this shift to abstract ties. Janet Coleman, “The Civic Culture of Contracts and Credit: A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (October 1986), pp. 778-784.
73. For that argument, see Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, pp. 48-57.
74. Becker, Medieval Italy, p. 15.
75. Bloch, Feudal Society, p. 118. For the urban preference for written law, also see Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 253.
76. Edward Miller, “Government Economic Policies and Public Finance 1000-1500,” in Cipolla, Fontana Economic History, p. 358.
77. Consequently, burghers would have had an affinity to rulers who changed legal procedures. For example, Hallam notes how Louis IX forbade trial by combat in a set of ordinances (1257–1261). She adds that “this measure was greatly disliked by the nobility.” Hallam, Capetian France, p. 244.
78. This develppment of Roman law coincides with the development of canonical law and the reemergence of scholasticism, as well as the beginnings of scientific procedure. Canon law particularly drew from the Decretum of Gratian (1140), which sought to interpret and update canonical law by substantive issues. This development of canonical law thereby provided the means to counteract encroachments on ecclesiastical property and reassert the supremacy of papal administration. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, p. 116f. In short, the strongest development of different bodies of law occurred when the conflict between church and secular authorities sharpened.
79. See also Pirenne’s view on the distinctness of the noble and ecclesiastical points of view. Pirenne, Medieval Cities, p. 123.
1. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2 (1978), p. 351. The first precondition for the modern concept of the state is to see politics as a distinct branch of moral philosophy Skinner basically retraces the possibility of a true “political” philosophy as opposed to its subservience to theological points of view.
2. Following the definition of Chapter 4, feudalism means political fragmentation, the exercise of public power through private actors, and the securing of military power by private contract. See Strayer, Feudalism, p. 13. I highlight this definition again because it clarifies whether the French political system after the Capetians can still be called feudal, as Hilton suggests. See R. H. Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society (1992). I argue that it cannot.
3. The number of duchies and counties in France around the year 1000 is from Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 17. I have no figures on the number of castles in France, but by way of illustration, Heer suggests that there were about 10,000 castles in Germany. Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World (1961), p. 32. Whatever the equivalent number for France might have been, the disintegration of political authority was certainly high with military security basically revolving around a multiplicity of castle-holders.
4. Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 4. The king was thus described as king of the Normans, Bretons, Aquitanians, Goths, and others, symbolizing the lack of a name for or identification with a particular territorial entity. See also Robert Fawtier, The Capetian Kings of France (1960), p. 60.
5. Joseph Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair (1980), p. 388.
6. James Fesler, “French Field Administration: The Beginnings,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5 (1962), p. 77. He also notes that by the end of the thirteenth century, the royal domain had expanded fortyfold.
7. Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 27.
8. Sidney Painter, The Rise of Feudal Monarchies (1951), p. 10.
9. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 57. I would argue that Strayer overstates his point by generalizing the argument to Europe. Alternatives, such as the Hanseatic League and the Italian city-states, were viable and were yet to reach their zeniths. Strayer apparently discounts such forms. See Charles Tilly’s comments on his discussion with Strayer, in Tilly, The Formation of National States in Europe, pp. 26-27. Strayer is right, however, in arguing that by then royalist centralization had largely succeeded.
10. Since 1066 the crown of England had been in hands of the duke of Normandy. Henry also ruled Anjou, Gascogny, and Acquitaine. Indeed, Henry II’s holdings in 1152 consisted of virtually half of contemporary France.
11. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, pp. 388, 393.
12. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe. She explicitly disputes the idea that the king was merely primus inter pares, first among equals (p. 259). Paradoxically she notes on the very next page that Flanders and Normandy were also referred to as kingdoms. Yet nominally the Count of Flanders and the duke of Normandy were vassals of the French king. Indeed, the book refers to many other communities of identification than the kingdom.
13. Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 108. He, too, seems to contradict himself. He notes on pp. 65-67 the prevalence of private wars against the king. On page 42 he suggests that Philip I (1060-1108) was little more than the lord of the Île-de-France. He adds on p. 199 that the kingdom need not have emerged.
14. Dunbabin, France in the Making, pp. 198, 205, 213; Hallam, Capetian France, pp, 37, 42, 52.
15. See his “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” in Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In. As I already pointed out in Chapter 2, Tilly’s earlier work did not pay attention to institutional variation. His later work, Coercion, Capital, and European States, does.
16. Bean, “War and the Birth of the Nation State”; Tilly, “War Making and State Making,” p. 170; and Levi, Of Rule and Revenue.
17. Dunbabin, France in the Making, notes how in the eleventh century castles were increasingly constructed from stone rather than wood (p. 287). Rice, in The Foundations of Early Modern Europe (pp. 13-15), demonstrates how the fifteenth century saw a rise in the use of artillery and infantry warfare. Geoffrey Parker focuses on the absolute increase in the size of armies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See his “Warfare” in Peter Burke, ed., New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 13 (1979). Lawrence Stone suggests that sixteenth-century armies were much larger than medieval armies. See his comment in K. B. McFarlane et al., “War and Society 1300-1600,” Past and Present 22 (July 1962), p. 13.
18. I have already discussed the merits of Tilly’s nonlinear view of evolution in Chapter 2. Here I discuss the general theory that warfare is the determinative factor in the evolution of different types of units, and I use the French case as an empirical referent.
19. Dudley argues that the fiscal efficiency of small units is higher than that of large units because of lower transaction costs and fewer principal-agent problems. Since cavalry was more expensive, small units were more efficient in providing the resources for this type of warfare. Leonard Dudley, “Structural Change in Interdependent Bureaucracies.”
20. From the fourteenth century onward, infantry gradually started to book successes against the mounted knight. See Le Goff’s account of Courtrai (1302) in Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, pp. 282-284. See also Keegan’s highly descriptive account of Agincourt in John Keegan, The Face of Battle (1976).
21. Walls were now constructed in the Trace Italienne, with cornered angles admitting less impact of artillery. Elaborate earthworks were built to protect the wall from direct gunfire. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power, pp. 90-93. See also Simon Pepper and Nicholas Adams, Firearms and Fortifications (1986).
22. For evidence in the rise of expenditure, see Bean, “War and the Birth of the Nation State”; Edward Ames and Richard Rapp, “The Birth and Death of Taxes: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History 37 (1977), pp. 161-178; Parker, “Warfare”; Samuel Finer, “State and Nation Building in Europe: The Role of the Military,” in Tilly, The Formation of National States in Western Europe; and Mann, The Sources of Social Power, chapter 13. I am not suggesting that all of these authors take a macrostructural view. What I argue against are interpretations of the historical evidence in a macrostructural manner that emphasize only efficiencies of scale.
23. Dudley, “Structural Change in Interdependent Bureaucracies.” Even North, whose model basically explains the efficiency of particular organization in terms of the definition of property rights, sometimes resorts to efficiency-of-scale arguments. North, Structure and Change in Economic History, p. 64. See also Ruggie’s discussion of North and Thomas in “Territoriality and Beyond,” p. 156.
24. For a good discussion of the influence of economic, political, and ideological factors on the adaptation of technology across civilizations, see Hall, Powers and Liberties. He notes how Muslim, Brahman, and Chinese Imperial societies impeded technological evolution. For a discussion of how adaptation to technological change depends on major changes in the political and social organization, see Unger, Plasticity into Power.
25. In other words, the independent variable, the character of war, cannot explain variation on the dependent variable, the type of unit.
26. Douglass North and Barry Weingast make a somewhat similar argument in emphasizing property rights and credible commitments in their article. “Constitutions and Commitment.” See also North and Thomas, The Rise of the Western World; and North, Structure and Change in Economic History.
27. Tilly’s account in Coercion, Capital, and European States is of this type.
28. See my discussion in Chapters 1 and 2. Also see Thelen and Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” p. 8: “Rational choice institutionalists in effect ’bracket’ the issue of preference formation theoretically . . . and generally they do so by deducing preferences of the actors from the structure of the situation itself.”
29. An example is the opposition by the Mamluk light cavalry to the introduction of artillery. It was not due to a technical problem. The first evidence of the use of artillery by the Mamluks dates from 1366, shortly after it was introduced in Europe. White, Medieval Religion and Technology, p. 285. Carlo Cipolla notes that “as long as the social structure of the kingdom remained essentially feudal, the backbone of the army was necessarily represented by the knights and there was no possibility of giving a major role to other corps. Artillery was left to the black slaves who were the most despised human element in the kingdom.” Guns, Sails, and Empire (1965), p. 92. See also Unger, Plasticity into Power, pp. 79, 163. Eugene Rice suggests that the adoption of this new technology depended on political actors, aspiring princes, who were willing to adopt it. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, p. 15.
30. To some extent we can see this in the attempt to outlaw the adoption of the crossbow. Both nobles and ecclesiastics feared that this shift of technology would favor commoners.
31. Dunbabin suggests that stone castles favored centralization, whereas Petit-Dutaillis argues that stone castles enabled local defense and fragmentation. Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 287; Charles Petit-Dutaillis, The Feudal Monarchy in France and England (1936), p. 17.
32. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, pp. 388-393.
33. I agree therefore with Strayer’s statement that the formation of states cannot be explained by their ability to wage war. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 92. Ringrose notes that Bean’s data do not bear out his conclusions on England. David Ringrose, “Comment on Papers by Reed, de Vries, and Bean,” Journal of Economic History 33 (1973), pp. 222-227. Indeed, Bean himself locates the main changes between 1400 and 1600. Strayer is right in arguing that by 1300 the basis of the French state already existed.
34. Estimating the size of medieval armies is a hazardous enterprise. Chroniclers often exaggerated the numbers, and later historians simply duplicated the fallacies. Thus the armies of Philip Augustus and of the German emperor, with his Flemish and English vassals, who fought each other at Bouvines (1215), were each reported to be between 40,000 and 100,000 strong. Delbriick suggests that it is far more likely that they were between 5,000 and 8,000. Hans Delbrück, Medieval Warfare (1982), p. 417. First published 1923.
35. Hallam, Capetian France, pp. 306-307.
36. Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, p. 106.
37. To uphold that argument, one would either have to say that the French king was actually quite strong from the outset or that his ideological position made him the preferred provider of protection. As I have already suggested, I reject both views.
38. As Michael Mann suggests, Flemish towns, the French state, and Italian communes alike strove to raise money for war. The Sources of Social Power, p. 428. Moreover, lords other than the king had their own means of raising revenue and their own administrations. The pipe rolls of the duke of Normandy and the Grote Brief (literally “long letter”) of the Count of Flanders reveal fiscal machineries that were every bit as advanced and similar in function as the French king’s. See Bryce Lyon and Adriaan Verhulst, Medieval Finance (1967).
39. Strayer sometimes suggests that he has no explanation of why this occurred. “It is difficult to decide what factors changed the behavior of possessing classes.” Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 91. At other points, however (pp. 93, 106), he does allude to the social mobility of the lower classes. His later work, The Reign of Philip the Fair, contains much information on how Philip’s administration drew support from the lower nobility and commoners.
40. As Hilton suggests, the Flemish towns had more in common with northern Italy. Hilton, English and French Towns, p. 1. We may add that their political objectives, to maintain independence from central authority, also looked similar.
41. An exception were the periodic fairs, such as those in Champagne. However, these fairs basically depended on itinerant traders, that is, merchants accompanying their goods. Once this type of trade declined, the fairs declined as well. C. Verlinden, “Markets and Fairs.” Even when long-distance trade developed in the sixteenth century in such cities as Lyons, Marseille, and La Rochelle, its impact was relatively small. Robin Briggs, Early Modern France, 1560-1715 (1977), p. 55. In English and French Towns, p. 101, Hilton also notes the relatively underdeveloped mercantile element in French towns.
42. Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 207. Although I would argue that a city-league, such as the ones the German towns developed, would be a possibility, Fawtier is right that the Italian option of individual city-states was not viable in France.
43. The efforts of the king to standardize weights and measures and centralize coinage are discussed in Chapter 8. There I compare the success of sovereign, hierarchical institutions to that of nonsovereign organizations.
44. James Given has similarly suggested that medieval state building needs to clarify which social groups benefited and which suffered. State and Society in Medieval Europe, p. 258.
45. Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, p. 252. Immanuel Wallerstein argues that the importance of the towns depended not on their magnitude but on their bargaining position. The Modern World System, vol. 1, p. 20, note 14. Hallam suggests that the towns were more important than the countryside. Capetian France, p. 139.
46. Pirenne submits that money, rather than in-kind transfers, allowed the change from royal suzerainty, feudal overlordship, to sovereignty. Medieval Cities, pp. 213, 226. Likewise Hallam emphasizes the importance of these new sources of revenue. Capetian France, p. 112.
47. In the words of P S. Lewis, “a rich king with a taste for power can buy troops to browbeat the unbribable and can bribe the unbeatable.” Essays in Later Medieval French History (1985), p. 7.
48. Of course I do not deny that there is a coercive element to paying tax as well. Individuals and towns prefer to shirk without the political power of towns to support them were no doubt exploited against their will. The point I am making is that coercion alone is relatively inefficient. As Scott demonstrates in his discussion of the tithe, individuals can easily subvert taxation processes, that are considered unfair or too high. James Scott, “Resistance Without Protest.” Similarly, Margaret Levi argues that taxation implies at least quasi-compliance. Of Rule and Revenue, p. 52f.
49. Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (1986), p. 198. David Parker notes that the taille had become the most important revenue source, by far outstripping aides and domainal revenue, which were previously important sources of money. The Making of French Absolutism (1983), pp. 10-15.
50. Initially the king relied on many methods of revenue raising. From those who owed military service he could receive payments in substitution for military service, the scutage. The king could ask aides to pay for special occasions such as the wedding of a son or daughter. He could also impose taxes on movable goods, such as the gabelle, the salt tax. Some money was raised by charging exports. Then there were a host of special sources of revenue raising such as confiscating property of Jews and Templars. Defaulting on loans and manipulation of currency were other common means of generating revenue. Webber and Wildavsky, A History of Taxation, p. 181f. See also John Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus (1986), p. 44f.
51. See the discussions of Given, State and Society, p. 23; and Hallam, Capetian France, p. 12.
52. Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, p. 228. He further notes that it was considered the most burdensome by reason of its arbitrary character. See also Duby, Rural Economy, pp. 225–228, 247. Likewise John Baldwin sees it as an “arbitrary payment.” The Government of Philip Augustus, pp. 45, 49. Myers shares this assessment. Henry Myers, Medieval Kingship (1982), p. 312.
53. Stephenson, Mediaeval Institutions, p. 41.
54. Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, p. 200. In my account, the end of feudalism therefore comes before the black death. This solves one of the problems noted by Field, who argues that the decline of feudalism in the North-Thomas model precedes the factor endowment explanation that they use to explain the decline of serfdom after the plague. For the discussion of that problem, see Field, “The Problem with Neoclassical Institutional Economics.”
55. Stephenson, Mediaeval Institutions, p. 117.
56. For example, Scott has argued that peasants resisted the church tithe. It was technically meant to guarantee the availability of local religious service, but in fact five-sixths went to the higher ranks of the clergy. Strategies to evade such taxation were numerous. Scott, “Resistance Without Protest,” p. 443f. For descriptions of the tithe, see Duby, Rural Economy, pp. 56, 213, 239.
57. Hence the well-known adage of the medieval town, Stadtluft macht frei nach Jahr und Tag “City air makes free after a year and a day.” For a variety of examples of this practice across western Europe, see John Mundy and Peter Riesenberg, The Medieval Town (1958), documents 23-26, pp. 137-142.
58. For the provisions in the Charter of Lorris, see Tierney, The Middle Ages, p. 161. See therein also the liberties granted to English and Italian towns, p. 162f. For similar discussions and examples of demands in these charters, see Duby, Early Growth of the European Economy, p. 207; Hilton, English and French Towns, pp. 36, 38, and particularly 128; Hallam, Capetian France, p. 140; Painter, Medieval Society, pp. 72-73; and Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 269.
59. Duby suggests this happened toward the latter part of the twelfth century. Early Growth of the European Economy, p. 228. See also Miskimin, The Economy of Early Renaissance Europe, p. 7.
60. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 106. On occasion communes would purchase this from the prévôts, the royal tax officials; see William Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade ( 1979), p. 161. See also Duby, Rural Economy, pp. 243-248.
61. Given, State and Society, p. 196.
62. Myers, Medieval Kingship, p. 198. This is probably the reason why John Henneman distinguishes an intermediate stage between seigneurial taille and royal taille as the phase of the municipal taille. “Taille, Tallage,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 12, p. 576.
63. This decentralized and ad hoc bargaining was a tedious process. It involved haggling and reneging. The taxfarmers, the prévôts, were relatively uncontrolled, despite efforts by their supervising baillis, and hence apt to reroute considerable revenue to their own pockets. Still, compliance was relatively high during the late Capetian era according to Strayer. The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 208.
64. For a good discussion of the contrasting strategies of French and English Crown, see Given, State and Society.
65. See Jan Rogozinski, “The Counsellors of the Seneschal of Beaucaire and Nimes, 1250-1350,” Speculum 44 (July 1969), pp. 421-439; Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, pp. 43-44.
66. This continued well into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries despite the emergence of French absolutism. The negotiations did not follow any formalized rules (se placent dans un dialogue quin’admet aucune règle posée d’avance, “took place in a dialogue that did not acknowledge any previously established rule”). Bernard Chevalier, “L’État et les Bonnes Villes en France au Temps de leur Accord Parfait,” in Bulst and Genet, La Ville, La Rourgeoisie et La Genèse de L‘Etat Moderne (1988), p. 74. Fryde notes how in one instance Rouen obtained one-third of its tax back. “The Financial Policies of the Royal Governments and Popular Resistance to Them in France and England c. 1270-1420,” in E. B. Fryde, Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance (1983), p. 854.
67. P. S. Lewis, “The Failure of the French Medieval Estates,” Past and Present 23 (1962), p. 14. In Capetian France, p. 303. Hallam likewise notes the relative unimportance of assemblies.
68. There is some debate on this issue. According to some accounts, the alliance started to fall apart during the fourteenth century when higher taxes were imposed on the towns, and it certainly was not very strong by the seventeenth century. However, it would be wrong to argue, based on an understanding of the seventeenth century, that there never was an understanding between towns and monarchy, as David Parker seems to suggest in “The Social Foundation of French Absolutism.” Chevalier argues, by contrast, that the alliance of towns and kings, begun in the Late Middle Ages, lasted at least until 1550. What upset the balance were the wars of religion. Chevalier, “LÉtat et les Bonnes Villes.”
69. Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 77.
70. Eleanor Lodge, “The Communal Movement, Especially in France,” in Tanner, The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 5 (1957), p. 629.
71. As the townsmen of Marseille put it, they would prefer ideally to hold from God and no one else. Mundy and Riesenberg, The Medieval Town, p. 49.
72. Lodge, “The Communal Movement,” p. 638; Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 356; and Tierney, The Middle Ages, p. 158. Hallam also notes a general dislike of ecclesiastical lordship. Capetian France, p. 141.
73. Painter, The Rise of Feudal Monarchies, pp. 15-16; Duby, Rural Economy, pp. 76-77; and Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, p. 42.
74. Many historians support this description of towns as antifeudal. See Heer, The Medieval World, p. 75; Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, pp. 206-207; Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, pp. 244-245. Given the discussion of the content of urban charters and their demands for liberties, I cannot interpret the towns’ objectives any other way. Nevertheless, Hilton, taking a neo-Marxist position, wants to embed towns within the feudal order. He does so by focusing on feudalism as a social formation and argues that it did not alter despite the emergence of towns. Hilton, English and French Towns. I discuss this position in more detail in my conclusion to this chapter.
75. Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 28.
76. Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 274. On pg. 275 she adds: “No lords appreciated the possibilities inherent in the movement so clearly as Louis VI and Louis VII.” Given argues that the king offered Toulouse a better deal than the Count of Toulouse. State and Society, p. 58. That town, however, wanting more, went back and forth in its loyalties between king and count. Petit-Dutaillis suggests that the king granted more liberties to the towns than rival lords granted to them and that hence burghers outside the domain would demand royal justice. The Feudal Monarchy, pp. 153, 197, 309.
77. Hallam, Capetian France, pp. 136, 186; Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 207.
78. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, pp. 61-64.
79. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, p. 59f. See also Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 58.
80. Hallam, Capetian France, pp. 141, 142.
81. Lyon and Verhulst, Medieval Finance, p. 94.
82. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, pp. 152-175. Additional extraordinary revenue might come from the church in times of Crusades.
83. See Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 394. Fryde notes that particularly the debasements of the fourteenth century mobilized determined opposition. At those times kings would have to return to hard currency. “The Financial Policies,” p. 835.
84. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, pp. xii, 79, 394; Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 194.
85. Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages (1984), p. 79.
86. It was particularly difficult to levy knight service from areas outside the royal domain. For example, the knight service that Philip Augustus could extract in 1215 when confronted with the forces of the German emperor, English king, Count of Flanders, and their allies at Bouvines was relatively small. His army of 1,300 knights was “a surprisingly small number summoned from Philip’s entire feudal resources at the most critical moment of his reign.” Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, p. 286.
87. Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, p. 83.
88. There were two types of pounds—the livre tournois (l.t.) outside the Ile-de-France area and the livre parisis (l.p.) within the Parisian area. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. xvii; and Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, p. xv. There were twelve deniers (pence) to a sous (shilling), and twenty sous to a livre. The livre tournois was worth about 20 percent less than the livre parisis. Given provides an example of the king’s strategy in the south. State and Society, p. 169.
89. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 349.
90. James Collins, The Fiscal Limits of Absolutism (1988), p. 27. See also Fryde, “The Financial Policies,” pp. 837, 858.
91. See P S. Lewis, “The Failure of the French Medieval Estates,” p. 12.
92. See the argument of Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (1986).
93. The general assessment is that there was an alliance between the church and king. Painter, The Rise of Feudal Monarchies, p. 13; Dunbabin, France in the Making, pp. 121-122, 167. But even though there were seventy-seven bishoprics, the general weakness of the early Capetians meant they only controlled perhaps as few as fourteen. Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 73; Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, p. 48; Hallam, Capetian France, p. 86.
94. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, p. 173.
95. Louis IX thus obtained about 900,000 l.t. for his first crusade. Jordan, Louis IX, p. 82. Significantly, the towns contributed a large amount, about 274,000 Lt., as well (p. 98).
96. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, p. 178; Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 43.
97. Myers, Medieval Kingship, p. 316. The king’s lawyers had already in 1289 used legal codes against an archbishop to argue for the supremacy of royal jurisdiction. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 243. According to Hallam, “lay jurisdiction was constantly encroaching on ecclesiastical jurisdiction.” Hallam, Capetian France, p. 310.
98. For an account of this campaign, see Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 319.
99. See Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, p. 282.
100. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, p. 182. It is interesting to speculate why the French king succeeded where the German emperor failed. One reason is that the king’s position vis-à-vis ecclesiastical lords was stronger than the German emperor’s at the time of the Investiture Struggle (1075 and on). The German emperor had used a greater number of ecclesiastical than secular lords. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 173. Moreover, the king only moved against the pope after he had built a solid domestic alliance with the towns from which the lords received side payments.
101. The next seven popes were subsequently Frenchmen. Of the 134 cardinals appointed by these popes, 112, maybe 113, were French. Half of papal revenue in 1328 came from ecclesiastical intake in the French kingdom. Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (1979), pp. 38-55; Heer, The Medieval World, p. 338.
102. Petit-Dutaillis, The Feudal Monarchy, p. 206.
103. Ibid., p. 235.
104. In essence the king was confronted with a classical principal-agent problem. Given the inability to supervise agents on a frequent basis, how could he make sure that agents were pursuing policies that met his objectives?
105. This distinction of four stages of administration is from Fesler, “French Field Administration.”
106. As general agents they performed military, administrative, fiscal, and judiciary functions. Their offices quickly became hereditary, and the pagi established themselves as counts. This corresponded with the Merovingian practice of land grants to those who rendered military service to the chieftain. Stephenson, Mediaeval Institutions, p. 211.
107. Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 6f.
108. These appeared for the first time around 1050. Hallam, Capetian France, p. 83.
109. A moment’s reflection suggests the logic of this type of administration. The king had no established core of personnel to raise such revenue, nor could he hire them in view of his lack of money. Economic conditions, being what they were, did not allow for easy means of revenue increases through tolls or indirect taxes. In other words, the transaction and enforcement costs of levying taxes were high. What the king did possess was a modest royal domain. Since he had no means at his disposal to raise revenue, adjudicate disputes, and make his presence felt, he offered others a part of the proceeds of the revenue they could raise. Thus he acquired personnel at little cost to himself. For a description of this system, see Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 175; Lyon and Verhulst, Medieval Finance, p. 92.
110. I use the terms bailli and bailiff interchangeably. Fawtier dates their emergence at around 1180. The Capetian Kings, p. 177. See also Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, p. 126.
111. This third aspect, the prefectoral model of administration, reveals the efficiency of royal policy. Since the king lacked the means to control his agents on a day-to-day basis and to continually instruct his agents, he, as the principal, wished to duplicate the policy of the principal in the agent. The model for this form of administration was in many ways the Catholic church in which the bishop duplicated the pope. Furthermore, since the center of control was undifferentiated—it still formed an amorphous Curia Regis—the agents in the field could not be specialized either.
112. Hallam, Capetian France, p. 239. There is considerable research on the origins of the men who served the king. Strayer argues that the careers of about a one thousand men who served Philip the Fair can be traced in some detail. He suggests that the use of nonnobles was stronger in the south than the north. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 37. The input and participation of the bourgeois are well documented. See Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 184. Jordan adds: “The majority of baillis . . . came from knightly and bourgeois backgrounds.” Jordan, Louis IX, p. 48. Hallam speaks of “nouveaux riches officials” in Capetian France, pp. 159, 160, 296; Strayer, Feudalism, p. 65 and documents 45 and 46 on pp. 159-162.
113. Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 284; Mundy and Riesenberg, The Medieval Town, pp. 90, 91.
114. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 51; Given, State and Society, p. 173; Jordan, Louis IX, p. 160.
115. Some bailiffs would serve thirty or forty years and as many as five successive kings. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 416.
116. For comparison, a skilled worker might earn one to one and a half sous (shilling) a day. If he worked 300 days, he would earn about 300 shilling, or 15 livres (pounds). See Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 56. He argues that even lower officials did reasonably well. Walter Prevenier has suggested to me that this estimate of the number of working days is too high and that 200 to 240 was more common because of the large number of holy days. If so, this reinforces my point that the agents of the king were well remunerated.
117. Petit-Dutaillis argues that the pay was not very high, but one must keep in mind that he focuses primarily on the period leading up to the end of Augustus’s reign with less emphasis on the later half of the thirteenth century. Petit-Dutaillis, The Feudal Monarchy, p. 296. Fawtier notes that salaries were low(!) but then argues they were between 292 and 739 livres. The Capetian Kings, p. 182. Baldwin and Fesler suggest that the pay was indeed high. See Fesler, “French Field Administration,” p.94; Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, p. 109.
118. Jan Bogozinski, “The Counsellors.” Jordan likewise notes that the prévôts established strong local ties. Louis IX, pp. 161-162.
119. See particularly Fesler, “French Field Administration,” for this discussion.
120. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 89.
121. Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 185.
122. Hallam, Capetian France, p. 160.
123. Börig, The Medieval Town, p. 60.
124. Duby stresses the importance of this. The Early Growth of the European Economy, p. 253.
125. See, for example, Buggie, “Territoriality and Beyond.” Many others have raised similar points of view. Useful starting points for a variety of discussions are Nicholas Onuf, “Sovereignty: Outline of a Conceptual History,” Alternatives 16 (1991), pp. 425-466; Bobert Walker and Saul Mendlovitz, Contending Sovereignties: Rethinking Political Community (1990).
126. To reiterate, I take a Weberian position on this issue. I take ideas as exogenous. Their routinization, however, depends on both material conditions and their empowerment by social actors and political entrepreneurs.
127. Hinsley, Sovereignty, pp. 41, 159.
128. “Quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem” (What pleases the prince, has the power of law). P Gerbenzon and N. E. Algra, Voortgangh des Rechtes, (1975), p. 106. About a century earlier, Henry IV had first entertained the idea of using Boman law to support his position against the pope. He did not, however, use it as a systematic means to enhance imperial control as did Frederick Barbarossa. Particularly the Diet of Boncaglia (1156) is important in this regard. See Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, pp. 72, 147, 148.
129. “Rex Franciae in regno suo princeps est, nam in temporalibus superiorem non recognoscit” (The King of France is prince in his own Kingdom, for in temporal affairs he recognizes no superior). Gerbenzon and Algra, Voortgangh des Rechtes, p. 106. See also Keen, History of Medieval Europe, p. 204.
130. Stanley Benn and Bichard Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State (1959), p. 255.
131. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, pp. 131, 132.
132. Fuhrmann argues that this alliance between the French king and papacy formed in the twelfth century. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 103. Pope Innocent III recognized in 1202 that the king of France had no superior in temporal affairs, but the king like the emperor was subject to the universal church. Hinsley, Sovereignty, p. 80; Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 86.
133. Hallam, Capetian France, pp. 262-269, 308-309. To the notion of sovereignty that the legists put forward, Marsilius of Padua added in his Defensor Pacis (1324-1326) that the state was a creation of reason. Heer, The Medieval World, p. 344.
134. Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 95.
135. Mundy and Riesenberg, The Medieval Town, p. 87.
136. Marvin Becker discusses the importance of the growth of trust and confidence in abstract exchange in order for a market economy to take hold. Medieval Italy.
137. See the discussion by V. G. Kiernan, “Private Property in History,” in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P Thompson, eds., Family and Inheritance (1976), pp. 374, 376, and note the importance of Roman law on p. 378.
138. The royal court thus advanced a theory of delegated powers, in which the highest authority lay with the royal court. Strayer, Feudalism, pp. 47, 131.
139. See Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, pp. 229, 318f; Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 230.
140. Mundy and Riesenberg, The Medieval Town, p. 61.
141. For an example of the towns’ resistance to privileged juridical procedures for knights, see Dunbabin, France in the Making, pp. 270, 280.
142. Hallam, Capetian France, p. 244.
143. Petit-Dutaillis, The Feudal Monarchy, pp. 288, 310.
144. Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 39.
145. For the standardization and codification of customs, see Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 277; Hallam, Capetian France, pp. 265-266.
146. In short, the king’s actions changed the political order in favor of the merchants. “One thing is certain, the political action of the sovereign that dismantled the ecclesiastical organization, the redistribution of land, the secularization of the administration that began in the preceding century, changed the balance, broke the routine, accelerated the rise of the merchants and the servants of the Crown, partially renewed a superior class, and contributed to the decline of the ideal life associated with the old warrior aristocracy” (my translation). Giard describes in particular how the advance of vernacular language coincided with the empowerment of new actors. Previously, Latin had been the language of knowledge, power, and belief. Luce Giard, “La Procès d’Émancipation de l‘Anglais à la Renaissance,” pp. 2, 13. An example of the nonfeudal character of the crown was that legal training became more important for service. For example, Nogaret, one of Philip the Fair’s closest advisors, had been a faculty member of law at the University of Montpellier, which was well known for its study of Roman law. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 52. For the influence of Montpellier, also see Hallam, Capetian France, p. 57; Heer, The Medieval World, p. 343.
147. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. xii.
148. From a new institutionalist perspective, one might add that a shared ideology made it easier to overcome freerider problems and lower the costs of forming alliances.
149. Strayer, The Reign of Philip the Fair, p. 314.
150. Dunbabin, France in the Making, p. 49.
151. A nice enumeration of reasons for this alliance is also given by Myers, Medieval Kingship, pp. 197-199.
152. Gradually kings became more involved in trade because of its economic benefits. Rather than letting the merchants rely on self-help to settle grievances, the king himself would seek redress from his royal counterpart and thus create more certitude in the merchants’ business practices. See Frederic Cheyette, “The Sovereign and the Pirates, 1332” Speculum 45 (January 1970), pp. 40-68.
153. Hallam, Capetian France, p. 154. “The medieval universities were predominantly urban institutions.” Edith Ennen, The Medieval Town (1979), p. 203.
154. Indeed, the expansion of that system became one of France’s continual fiscal woes in the centuries to come. That story is well known. See, among others, Collins, The Fiscal Limits of Absolutism; Parker, The Making of French Absolutism; Briggs, Early Modern France; Hilton Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (1987).
155. Thus in the Hundred Years War the king could claim with considerable plausibility that only he, not any other lords, should be the one to sign treaties with the English. Aline Valléé, “État et Sécurité Publique au XlVe Siècle.”
156. See Hilton, English and French Towns, pp. 11, 25.; A. B. Hibbert, “The Origins of the Medieval Town Patriciate,” Past and Present 3 (February 1953), p. 17; Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 18.
157. Hilton thus denies an alliance between king and towns (p. 15) and argues that the divisions within the towns reflect the agricultural division of lord and tenant (pp. 16-17). He places towns within the feudal system (pp. 78, 88, 132, 150). Yet he also notes the towns’ desires for freedom from lordly exactions (pp. 36-38), the rivalry on jurisdiction (p. 53), that English towns were ruled by merchants capitalists, and that the French bourgeois became royal officials (p. 104). Hilton, English and French Towns. Similarly, Anderson notes that the “Absolutist State increasingly centralized political power” (p. 40) but argues that “the nobility could deposit power with the monarchy, and permit the enrichment of the bourgeoisie: the masses were still at its mercy” (p. 41). From my point of view, if the previously independent lords surrendered political power to the king, this should be understood as a decline of feudalism. To argue otherwise is inconsistent with Anderson’s own definition of feudalism as “parcellized sovereignty” on p. 18 of his book. For a similar critique of Anderson, see Mary Fulbrook and Theda Skocpol, “Destined Pathways: The Historical Sociology of Perry Anderson,” in Skocpol, Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, p. 186.
158. Hallam, Capetian France, pp. 290, 305; Given, State and Society, p. 16; Jordan, Louis IX, p. 15; Fawtier, The Capetian Kings, p. 210.
159. Although the Hundred Years War threatened the centralized power, it nevertheless did not see the rise of independent lordships. At best we may call this bastard feudalism. See Jean-Philippe Genet, “Conclusion,” in Bulst and Genet, La Ville, La Bourgeoisie et La Genèse de L‘Etat Moderne, p. 347. Strayer disagrees with that term, because although some groups tried to capture parts of central government, they did not establish quasi-independent fiefs. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 62.
160. Wim Blockmans, “Princes Conquérants et Bourgeois Calculateurs,” in Bulst and Genet, “La Ville, La Bourgeoisie et La Genèse de L’État Moderne,” pp. 178-180; Chevalier, “L’État et les Bonnes Villes,” pp. 72-83; Parker, The Making of French Absolutism, pp. 103-105.
1. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 24.
2. After Otto I (936-973), the king who was crowned emperor in 962 in Rome, virtually every German king was also emperor. In most cases, we can use the two terms interchangeably without suggesting that usage of one or the other has specific political meaning. However, the German king was basically approved by, and later elected by, the German nobility. The imperial title was granted by the pope. The two elective procedures therefore did not have to, and later did not, converge on the same candidate. Where such an issue arises, this will be made clear in the text.
3. The phrase Roman Empire was introduced by the German kings who sought to gain control over the kingdoms of Burgundy, Italy, and Germany. It was introduced in the later part of the tenth century when the German kings sought to make Rome the capital of the empire. Frederick I (1152—1190) added the adjective Holy to denote the special status of the empire.
4. The confusing set of political organizations plagued Germany for many centuries. Harris aptly describes the anachronism of the empire in the seventeenth century. “It consisted of well over 300 separate States; there were over 200 ruling princes, some ruling more than one State; there were 51 Free Towns, and in addition nearly 1,500 Free Knights, a special mediaeval curiosity, each ruling a tiny State with an average of 300 subjects.” R. W. Harris, Absolutism and Enlightenment, 1660-1789 (1966), p. 187.
5. See Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation (1959), p. 37.
6. Du Boulay like Barraclough, affirms the Pirenne thesis (see Chapter 4 of this book) and stresses the importance of long-distance trade. F R. Du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages (1983), p. 116; Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 4; Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 20. Holborn notes the importance of migration and expansion in the formation of new towns. Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, p. 10.
7. I discuss these profit margins in greater detail in the section on the Hansa in this chapter.
8. Consequently, when imperial authority regained a measure of effectiveness under the Hapsburgs, the Hanseatic towns sought imperial protection. Leo Lensen and Willy Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze (1990), p. 37.
9. In practice, election usually meant affirmation. Only after the Investiture Conflict did this become a serious impediment to monarchy, because election was then tied to the criterion of suitability.
10. Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 23.
11. Rhiman Rotz, “German Towns,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 5, p. 459.
12. Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 85; Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 24.
13. Since the differences between townsfolk on the one hand, and feudal lords and church on the other, were basically similar to cleavages in France, I have not discussed them in detail. The point is that because the German case lacked a political actor who was willing to capitalize on these differences, these cleavages did not evolve into the basis for a political coalition.
14. For a discussion of this sequence of events, see Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, pp. 86-90.
15. Ibid., p. 147.
16. See the description in David Abulafia, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor (1988), p. 73. According to some German historians, such as A. Hauck, that date already marks the end of German imperial pretensions. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 161.
17. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 166.
18. Consequently their rivalry was also fought out in Italy where the two parties were called the Ghibelline (after Waiblingen, a Hohenstaufen castle) and the Guelph (Welf).
19. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 154.
20. Haverkamp, Medieval Germany, p. 244.
21. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 236. Barraclough argues (p. 234) that “the Statutum . . . was directed first and foremost against the rising towns.” Leuschner also evaluates it as an explicit strategy in favor of the secular and ecclesiastical princes and against the cities. Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 57. See also the text of the Statutum in Tierney, The Middle Ages, p. 248. Although Abulafia agrees that these agreements gave the princes extensive rights of intervention in towns, he is somewhat less critical than Barraclough and Holborn of the imperial strategy and suggests it conformed with an overall imperial position of nonintervention in de facto independent units. Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 231f.
22. Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, p. 23.
23. Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 55f; Abulafia, Frederick II, pp. 230-241; Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 237.
24. The royal domain was only three-fourths the size of the margravate of Brandenburg. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 246.
25. Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 80-81.
26. Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 155-161; Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, pp. 316-321.
27. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 320.
28. This was not the full-fledged sovereignty of the French state. The external relations of these lords were still in the hands of the emperor. At the Peace of Westphalia (1648) these principalities would also gain external standing, despite the fact that the empire continued to exist until 1806. Gradually, from the decline of the Hohenstaufen until Westphalia, the princes would increasingly start to behave like their regular sovereign counterparts.
29. Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, p. 28.
30. Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, p. 23–24. Rotz makes a similar assessment: “Unlike the English or French monarchs or the Dukes of Burgundy in the Low Countries, the German King never used towns as a foundation for his authority.” Rotz, “German Towns,” p. 459.
31. Fleckenstein, Early Medieval Germany, p. 189.
32. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 148. This estimate basically conforms with the estimates of Louis VII’s revenue that we saw in Chapter 5.
33. Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 14. The estimate is probably too high, but no doubt there were considerable gains to be had from Sicily.
34. As I have already pointed out, the German king relied more on ecclesiastical lords than did the English or French kings. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 173. The reason for that might have been the strength of the stem duchies. That is, the king initially tried to use the clergy as a counterweight to the German high aristocracy. See Holborn for that argument. A History of Modern Germany, p. 19.
35. Keen, History of Medieval Europe, p. 165; Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 53; Straus, “Germany,” p. 495. For the eschatological status of the emperors, see also Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 77; and Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 135.
36. It continues to be a matter of debate whether the emperors only professed universalist ideas or also tried to follow through on them. Holborn thus suggests that the German emperors only claimed preeminence over kings, not actual dominion. A History of Modern Germany, p. 20. Abulafia, however, argues that the emperor did act on ideological claims of competence to judge kings. For example, the emperor forced Richard of England to do homage to him as his vassal and interfered with the Kingdom of Cyprus, claiming that it, as all kingdoms, fell under his jurisdiction. Abulafia, Frederick II, pp. 69, 232.
37. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, pp. 254-262; Rotz, “German Towns,” p. 459.
38. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 221.
39. Alexander Boswell, “The Teutonic Order,” in J. R. Tanner, ed., The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 7 (1958), pp. 248-269.
40. Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 25; de Battaglia, “The Nobility,” p. 66. It is virtually impossible to say where this movement first started. It is clear, however, that communes were aware of similar movements throughout Europe and that they consciously copied each other’s substantive demands.
41 Rotz, “German Towns,” p. 459.
42. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 80. See also Rörig for the general disagreeableness of clerical overlordship. The Medieval Town, p. 22.
43. The imperial towns, sixty to eighty in number, owed no allegiance to any lord and were placed directly under the emperor. Lübeck obtained the status of imperial city early on. Imperial cities (Reichsstädte), such as Lübeck and Nürnberg, were usually large and only owed the emperor a certain amount of tax. As far as policy was concerned, imperial towns were basically indistinguishable from free towns. Free towns, such as Mainz, Cologne, and Strasbourg, were nominally subject to bishops but had gained independence. Territorial towns (Landstädte), by contrast, were controlled by secular or ecclesiastical lordships. These were usually the least independent. Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 85; Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 178; Du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages, p. 126.
44. Hans-Joachim Behr, “Die Landgebietspolitik Nordwestdeutscher Hansestädte,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter 94 (1976), p. 18.
45. Gerald Straus, “Germany: 1254-1493,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 5, pp. 485-491; Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 63f.
46. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, pp. 342-352.
47. Edward Miller, “Government Economic Policies and Public Finance 1000-1500,” in Cipolla, The Fontana Economic History, vol. 1, p. 347.
48. Steven Rowan, “Germany: Principalities,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 5, p. 503.
49. Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 98.
50. Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 32. He relates the early formation of town councils to the business groups which had helped found the towns. Fuhrmann talks of consortia of merchants. Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 151.
51. Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 35.
52. For a discussion of the functions of guilds and the Hanse, see Ennen, The Medieval Town, pp. 98-99; Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, pp. 31-32.
53. Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (1970), p. 24. This is still the seminal historical work on the Hansa.
54. The Saxon, Westphalian, and Wendish leagues were all formed during the twelfth century, partially for reasons of military security. Bruce Gelsinger, “Hanseatic League,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 6, p. 93.
55. See the efforts to perform such economic functions described in Rowan, “Germany: Principalities,” p. 503; Straus, “Germany: 1254-1493,” p. 490. For the Hansa’s attempt to regulate measures and weights, see Otto Held, “Hansische Einheitsbestrebungen im Mass- und Gewichtswesen bis zum Jahre 1500,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter 45 (1918), pp. 127-167; Rotz, “German Towns,” p. 464.
56. Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 165.
57. In 1254 the Rhenisch League formed to take over a semblance of central government after Frederick II’s policies had failed. There were also: the Westphalian League (1246), the lower Saxon League (1246), the Wendish League (1280), the Hansa League (1294 or 1356), the League of Thüringen (1304), the ten cities of the Elzas (1354), the Swabian League (1376), the new Rhenisch League (1381), and the Saxon League (1382). Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 28; Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 179; Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 47.
58. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 238. See also Du Boulay for the argument that city-leagues were often antifeudal. They attempted to ameliorate the effects of political fragmentation. Germany in the Later Middle Ages, p. 125.
59. Matthias Puhle, “Der Sächsische Städtebund und die Hanse im späten Mittelalter,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter 104 (1986), pp. 21-34.
60. The Hansa also had provisions to maintain the ruling patriciate against the patriciate’s internal opponents. Indeed, patrician rule was a prerequisite for membership. When Brunswick’s government was overthrown in 1374, the town was excluded from the Hansa for five years. Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 177. Such provisions were not superfluous given the large number of urban uprisings. The German historian Maschke estimates that there might have been as many as 210 throughout Germany between 1300 and 1550. Cited in Du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages, p. 146.
61. Rotz, “German Towns,” p. 464f.
62. See Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 179. Consequently the emperor allied with the princes against the Swabian-Rhenisch League in 1388. Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 141.
63. The adage “Unity at Home. Peace Abroad” is inscribed above the Holstein gate of Lübeck. See Johannes Schildhauer, The Hansa (1988), p. 86. In a way it symbolizes both the objectives and the problems of the Hansa. Because the league was a confederation of towns, collective action problems were one of the main concerns for Hanseatic internal unity. At the same time, the Hansa sought to protect its members from deprivations abroad and to provide a larger degree of certainty in their long-distance commerce.
64. The etymology of the word is difficult to trace. Early on it denoted a group or fellowship for which the medieval Latin hansa or old German hanse are both used. It might also derive from hos which is an armed contingent. A. Weiner, “The Hansa,” in Tanner, The Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 7, p. 216. See also Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, “Hanse und Gilde. Genossenschaftliche Organisationsformen im Bereich der Hanse und ihre Bezeichnungen,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter 100 (1982), p. 22; Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 129; Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 12. When I discuss the Hansa, I mean the Hanseatic League. With hansa, I refer generically to any group of merchants.
65. Scammel notes how the Hansa in the fifteenth century had profit margins of about 15 to 25 percent. Italian profit margins ranged between 20 and 150 percent. Portuguese trade with the East Indies, by contrast, could yield extraordinary profits of up to 2000 percent. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 77. See also Chapter 7 of this book for a discussion of the nature of Italian trade. Braudel suggests lower profit margins for the Hansa, i.e., between 5 and 15 percent. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, p. 103. The difference between Italian and northern commerce also shows up in ship design. The Hansa ships were “designed for carrying bulk cargoes of only moderate value.” J. H. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea ( 1981), p. 19. For a similar assessment, see Lewis and Runyan, European Naval and Maritime History, pp. 130-136. The cog and later the hulk were bulk carriers. For an enumeration of the most important products, see Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 214f.
66. I have relied heavily in this section on the extensive discussion by Walter Stark, “Untersuchungen zum Profit beim Hansischen Handelskapital in der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Abhandlungen zur Handels und Sozialgeschichte (1985).
67. In general, German business knowledge and training lagged behind that of the Italians. There was little double-entry accounting. Training was largely by experience and socialization. Only by the seventeenth century did such education improve. Pierre Jeannin, “Das Handbuch in der Berufsausbildung des Hansischen Kaufmanns,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter 103 (1985), pp. 101-120; Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 76; Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 165.
68. Stark suggests that Töhner might have had an extraordinary profit of 48.7 percent. Stark, or perhaps Töhner himself, does not specify whether this is calculated from twelve or eleven marks to the great pound. Stark, “Untersuchungen zum Profit,” p. 136. If it is calculated by twelve instead of eleven, then the profits according to my calculation would be about 27 percent. Once again this demonstrates the information costs involved in commerce of this period. It also explains why the Hansa made considerable effort to come to an agreement with the Count of Flanders not to change the coinage. Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 15. This became a general demand. The Treaty of Stralsund, which was drafted after the Hansa’s victory over Denmark in 1370, included provisions on the stability of currency. Weiner, “The Hansa,” p. 222.
69. Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 35. This consequently meant that the consumer also faced considerable information costs.
70. Both words are used synonymously in early texts. Schmidt-Wiegand, “Hanse und Gilde,” pp. 20, 30, 35.
71. Dollinger, The German Hansa, pp. 164-165.
72. Ibid., pp. 40, 41, 56-58.
73. It thus restricted the Dutch and English from sailing in the Baltic. Lewis and Runyan, European Naval and Maritime History, p. 152.
74. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 44.
75. Consequently, German historiography used it in the 1930s to justify claims to a greater Germany. Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, chapter 15.
76. For a discussion of Lübeck’s founding and its subsequent efforts to found daughter cities, see Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 41.
77. For a fuller discussion of these orders, see Boswell, “The Teutonic Order,” p. 250f; Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 270; Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 130; E. Lönnroth, “The Baltic Countries,” in Postan, Rich, and Miller, eds., Economic Organization and Policies in the Middle Ages, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 364, 375f.
78. Gelsinger, “Hanseatic League,” p. 92; Du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages, p. 124.
79. Recall that French communes also sought to be placed as high as possible in the feudal hierarchy since this diminished the number of overlords to be served.
80. Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 40.
81. Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 39.
82. One might argue that it is not therefore possible to give a history of the German town. The variation of towns is well documented and not contested here. However, the very formation of city-leagues such as the Saxon League, the Swabian-Rhenisch League, and the Hanseatic League, as well as many other regional organizations, suggests that the towns recognized similar interests. This chapter clarifies these shared interests and explains why the towns resorted to the particular formation of leagues to serve their interests rather than another type of organization.
83. Lönnroth, “The Baltic Countries,” p. 391. See also Gelsinger, “Hanseatic League,” p. 92. The Teutonic Order itself was, true to the crosscutting jurisdictions of feudalism, subject to the emperor and the pope. In practice it proved to be virtually an independent body. Boswell, “The Teutonic Order,” p. 261.
84. The Kontor was a combination of diplomatic representative, judicial body, office, living quarters, and storage facility.
85. The Hansa thus acquired a form of extraterritoriality. The same holds true for the private property of Hanseatic merchants in some non-Hansa towns. These properties (fed) were administered by the bailiff of the local town, but Lübeck law exceeded all other law. In other words, Hanseatic merchants were tried by the law of one of the dominant Hansa towns rather than by local law. C. Verlinden, “Markets and Fairs,” pp. 148-149.
86. Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 91; Wernicke (p. 34) also notes that a simple majority decision could bind even those who were not present. Hence, the towns had an added incentive to be present. Horst Wernicke, “Die Städtehanse 1280-1418,” in Abhandlungen zur Handels und Sozialgeschichte Bd. 22 (1983), pp. 1—204. Lensen and Heitling confirm the simple majority vote. De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 31.
87. Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 334.
88. Ibid., p. 92.
89. Gelsinger, “Hanseatic League,” p. 90. Leuschner suggests a membership of seventy active members with about ninety peripheral members. Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 145. Scammel and Heer give roughly similar estimates. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 53; Heer, The Medieval World, p. 90. For estimates of around two hundred, see Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 17; Du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages, p. 133.
90. Leuschner mentions the Wendish, Saxon, Prussian, Rhenisch, Westphalian, and Brandenburg groups. Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 145. Wernicke mentions the Wendish towns, the Prussian, the Livonian, the Westphalian, the Dutch towns on the Southern Sea, and the Saxon group. “Die Städtehanse,” p. 31. See also Weiner, “The Hansa,” p. 220. Some of this variation depends on the period chosen by the historian. After 1500 many of the towns in Russia had fallen under territorial control.
91. Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 51. Ennen gives a similar ordering in The Medieval Town, p. 173.
92. Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, pp. 22-23.
93. Dollinger, The German Hansa, pp. 98, 99.
94. Wernicke, “Die Städtehanse,” p. 63. For example, the eighteen board members of Bruges were divided into three Drietel (“thirds”) of six. Each third represented the towns of its regional group.
95. Wernicke, “Die Städtehanse,” p. 56. Smaller Hansa settlements (Niederlas-sungen) were supervised by mother towns (Funktionalstädte). Antwerp, for example, was supervised by Dortmund.
96. This is a general phenomenon. Where merchants face a variety of local obstacles to trade and lack some reliable enforcement mechanism, they must rely on self-help mechanisms. To guarantee that agents in the field are not cheating and to have access to help overseas, individuals rely on group associations and social mechanisms to overcome short-run, self-interested behavior. The most common method is to conduct trade through members of the family. Consequently, ethnic communities with strong kinship affiliations are prevalent in long-distance trade in general. See, for example, Philip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (1984). De Roover notes the general principal-agent problem in commerce. From necessity, agents have a large amount of freedom. De Roover, “The Organization of Trade,” p. 87.
97. Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 41.
98. The logic of overcoming collective action problems by establishing some semblance of hierarchy and reducing the number of actors involved is, of course, also well known in today’s business practices. See, for example, the account of Charles Lipson on how the major banks subdivide responsibilities to control a larger number of subordinate banks in the restructuring of Latin American debt. Charles Lipson, “Bankers’ Dilemmas: Private Cooperation in Rescheduling Sovereign Debts,” in Kenneth Oye, ed., Cooperation Under Anarchy (1986), pp. 200-225.
99. Weiner, “The Hansa,” p. 229.
100. Rörig, The Medieval Town, chapter 2.
101. This is Wernicke’s main contention. He draws particular attention to the existence of enforcement rules by majority decisions in the Hansetag. Wernicke, “Die Städtehanse,” p. 12f. Georg Fink suggests that the Hansa was not really a confederation because it did not have a founding document and did not wage war using all its members. He argues that wars were only conducted by a given number of members within the Hansa. Fink, however, acknowledges that the Hansa performed the tasks noted by Dollinger and Wernicke. Georg Fink, “Die Rechtliche Stellung der Deutschen Hanse in der Zeit ihres Niedergangs,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter 61 (1936), pp. 122-137.
102. Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, pp. 31-32.
103. Wernicke, “Die Städtehanse,” p. 114.
104. Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 211.
105. Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 332; Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 37.
106. For brief discussions of the Hansa and some of these conflicts, see de Roover, “The Organization of Trade,” p. 185; Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 174; Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, p. 74.
107. For example, records show that Deventer was assessed and paid 1,000 pounds in 1368 and 1369 prior to the war with Denmark. In 1394 towns were assessed for a certain number of troops and armed contingents, again against Denmark. Lübeck was to contribute 6 cogs with 100 men each, including 20 archers. Stralsund was assessed 4 ships, Greifsfeld 2, and Stettin 2, and the Prussian towns were to contribute 10 ships with 100 men each. Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, pp. 140-143. See also the discussion of the Tohopesate, the league assessment of armed troops, in Wilhelm Bode, “Hansische Bundesbestrebungen in der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter 25 (1919), pp. 173-246 and 26 (1920/21), pp. 174-193. Wernicke notes that there were special decisions and agreements by the Hanse Tag to raise troops and revenue for war. Wernicke, “Die Städtehanse,” pp. 75, 114, 158.
108. For discussions of the nature and effects of such boycotts or blockades, see Lönnroth, “The Baltic Countries,” p. 393; Dollinger, The German Hansa, pp. 48, 72; and Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 164.
109. Even as late as the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the Hansa sought, and gained, limited representation as a league. This recognition as an international actor was highly contested. Soon thereafter the league was not recognized as such, and even the recognition at Westphalia was only on certain issues. It is interesting to note, and this is important in terms of status as an international actor, that the imperial cities were recognized without objection. Hans-Bernd Spies, “Lübeck, die Hanse und der Westfälische Frieden,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter 100 (1982), pp. 110-124.
110. Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 36; Dollinger, The German Hansa, p. 361; Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 32.
111. Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 168; Behr, “Die Landgebietspolitik,” p. 19.
112. For a discussion of the law merchant, see W. A. Bewes, The Romance of the Law Merchant (1923); Lensen and Heitling, De Geschiedenis van de Hanze, p. 13. For the spread of “families” of law codes, see Fuhrmann, Germany in the High Middle Ages, p. 80; Ennen, The Medieval Town, pp. 109-110; Heer, The Medieval World, p. 94. Weiner suggests that Lübeck law was adopted by nineteen towns by 1300. Urban submits that eventually one hundred cities governed themselves by Lübeck law. Weiner, “The Hansa,“p. 218; William Urban, “Lübeck,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 7, p. 680.
113. “Damit schufen die hansischen Städtemitglieder ein relativ geschlossenes Rechtssystem” (With that the Hansa city members created a relatively closed legal system). Wernicke, “Die Städtehanse,” p. 124.
114. Wernicke makes that point. “Die Städtehanse,” p. 12f.
115. For this description of Postans position, see Rotz, “German Towns,” p. 460.
116. Rörig, The Medieval Town, p. 27.
117. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, p. 80.
1. From the chronicles of Otto of Freising, The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa (1953). The bishop, the uncle of the emperor, narrated the first years of Frederick Barbarossas reign (1152—1156). After Otto of Freising’s death, the narrative was brought up to 1160 by Rahewin. Freising here laments the strength of the Italian towns and their unwillingness to submit to the emperor.
2. Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination (1979), p. 9.
3. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 46.
4. Rotz, “German Towns,” p. 464.
5. Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics (1969), p. 84.
6. For the Genoese estimate, see Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 161. The Venetians had about 20,000 men available for war by the early fifteenth century. In 1450 they could muster approximately 40,000 land and 20,000 naval forces. Denys Hay and John Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1380-1530 (1989), p. 89; William McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081-1797 (1974), p. 70.
7. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 86.
8. Scammel, The World Encompassed, pp. 86, 90, 101. For a similar description of Italian trade, see de Roover, “The Organization of Trade,” p. 100. De Roover also notes that the galleys used for such transport were not suited for bulk trade because of their high freight costs and inability to take large loads. Because of the low-volume, high-value nature of trade, the number of ships engaged in such commerce was relatively small. “In good years, Venice sent out several fleets: twelve galleys . . . to Syria and Alexandria, four to Constantinople, four or five to Flanders and England, and two or three to Barbary.” De Roover, p. 101.
9. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, p. 103.
10. Schumann suggests a profit margin of 20 to 100 percent. Reinhold Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years (1986), p. 107. Scammel notes a profit margin of about 40 percent but suggests that Genoese privateering, which was not that different from their regular trading practices, yielded profit margins of 50 to 100 percent. Scammel, The World Encompassed, pp. 101, 200. Waley believes profits of up to 150 percent were possible. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 47. For the average investor, who was not a direct partner in a venture, profits were also high. Braudel argues that these would be around 40 percent. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, p. 121. De Roover suggests that short trips would yield profits of about 25 percent and that longer trips, such as from Genoa to Constantinople would yield about 42.5 percent. De Roover, “The Organization of Trade,” p. 56. McNeill also finds profit margins of about 40 percent. Venice, p. 61. Kedar, analyzing the recession of the fourteenth century, suggests that profit margins were a good deal lower for that period. But even in the later part of the fourteenth century it was possible to make reasonable profits of between 33 and 36 percent per year, as the commoner Nicolo Picacio did. Benjamin Kedar, Merchants in Crisis (1976), pp. 64-65.
11. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 128. See also McNeill, Venice, for a discussion of their maritime technology.
12. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 159.
13. It was rather appropriately called the Synod of the Corpse. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 33.
14. According to some historians, this occurred along feudal lines, which system had been introduced by the Carolingians. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 31. Others, such as Tabacco, see this as less feudal, because the counts and dukes were basically freeholders rather than holders of fiefs, subject to the emperor. However, even Tabacco admits that the second in line held as vassals, similar to the feudal system. Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy (1989), p. 159.
15. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 76.
16. As I have previously discussed, Pirenne’s argument concerning the nature of long-distance commerce and the growth of towns has largely been substantiated, particularly regarding northwestern Europe. However, his claim that the Carolingian Empire rose because the Muslims had basically closed off Mediterranean commerce has been severely contested. For an overview of this debate, see Havighurst, The Pirenne Thesis.
17. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 18. However, by some accounts these communes first appeared around 1015. See Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 119.
18. Schumann sees the commune as an association directed against secular and ecclesiastical lords and royal control. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, pp. 81, 88. Martines has the same view in Power and Imagination, pp. 18-21. Tabacco emphasizes the anti-ecclesiastical nature of the commune and sees it as “an urban collectivity which was potentially able to provide itself with an autonomous political order, in the shadow of and in opposition to the power of the prelate.” Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 185. For a similar evaluation, see Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 149.
19. Martines, Power and Imagination, pp. 14, 175.
20. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, pp. 57, 58.
21. Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 219; Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 62; Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 111.
22. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 16.
23. Tabacco denies, in fact, that the election of the communal government, the rule by consuls, was styled after the Romans, despite the similarity in titles. But for opposing views, see Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 119; Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 67.
24. The Lombards had gradually been assimilated under Roman culture and adopted written law. This presence of written law was further aided by the proximity of Byzantine rule, which maintained a foothold in Italy until 1059, and the Papal State, both of which maintained written law. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, pp. 76, 77. Brown notes that the theory of classical republicanism was important because it provided a model of political order without the church. Alison Brown, “Florence, Renaissance and Early Modern State: Reappraisals,” Journal of Modern History 56 (June 1984), p. 299.
25. The focus on northern Italy, rather than on Italy as a whole, has several reasons. First, virtually all the large towns, except three, were located in the north. The independent city-states thus arose in the north. Second, the southern towns were dominated by foreign powers, first the Byzantines, then the Normans, Hohenstaufen, French, and Aragonese. They never developed the autonomy of the northern city-states. For the Norman policy toward towns, see Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 16. Ennen discusses the lesser development of southern Italy. Ennen, The Medieval Town, p. 147.
26. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 14.
27. Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 148.
28. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 24.
29. Diane Owen-Hughes, “Urban Growth and Family Structure in Medieval Italy,” Past and Present 66 (February 1975), p. 5; Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 11.
30. Hibbert contrasted the towns of northwestern Europe to those of Italy in order to criticize Henri Pirenne’s old (1925) thesis that new mercantile towns were dramatically different from the old towns dominated by the nobles. Hibbert, “The Origins of the Medieval Town Patriciate,” pp. 15-27. Arguably, however, Pirenne in fact limits his conclusions to northwestern Europe. Hence, both Pirenne and Hibbert reaffirm the distinct nature of the Italian towns.
31. See Rörig, The Medieval Town; Straus, “Germany: 1254–1493,” in Strayer, Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 5, p. 490f.
32. Genoa obliged its landed aristocracy to live in the city for a certain number of days per year. Likewise, Florence required the feudal aristocracy to live in town. Ennen, The Medieval Town, pp. 118, 143.
33. Heer, The Medieval World, p. 75.
34. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 53.
35. Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture, p. 69; Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, p. 165.
36. Although feudalism also contained Roman elements, the strong influence of Germanic custom was a critical element in the feudal character of German and French relations. Both Stephenson and Poggi see Roman authority as distinct from feudal principles of rule. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, pp. 19, 26; Stephenson, Mediaeval Institutions, p. 210.
37. Waley, for example, notes the persistence of a military ethos which denigrated the commoner. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 48.
38. McNeill views this combination as a critical element in explaining the success of the Italian maritime cities. McNeill, Venice, particularly chapter 2.
39. For the Genoese, piracy, trade, and war were all intertwined. See, for example, Scammel, The World Encompassed, pp. 157-159.
40. That the inhabitants of the towns were quite aware of these differences is well discussed by Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 46.
41. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 116.
42. For example, the Alberghi, the clans in Genoa, thus claimed that their genealogy was traceable to that of old Roman patricians. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 210. Such clans consisted of kin, clients, and neighbors who were willing to take the same last name and aid each other. Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 246.
43. John Mundy, “Medieval Urban Liberty,” manuscript (1993), p. 7.
44. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 30.
45. Owen-Hughes, “Urban Growth and Family Structure,” pp. 3, 20, 23.
46. This also served to demarcate nobles from commoners, since the latter did not have this extended family concept.
47. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 35.
48. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 175f.; Owen-Hughes, “Urban Growth and Family Structure,” p. 6; Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 36.
49. Confusingly, popolo might sometimes also refer to nobles. In that context, it was used as an honorary title, because these were “good” nobles who were on the side of the popolo (commoners). Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 167. For another enumeration of these different groups, see also Heer, The Medieval World, pp. 78-79.
50. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 77.
51. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, pp. 197-199.
52. These geographic divisions still exist today. They are, for example, symbolized by the palio horse race in Siena in which each of the contrade sends its champion. Dundes and Falassi note that these contrade almost formed city-states within the city, with their own government, flag, armed companies, and constitution. Alan Dundes and Alessandro Falassi, La Terra in Piaza (1975), p. 13.
53. “In many towns the inhabitants of the different rioni gathered in the main square to throw stones at each other, a violent sport in which there were many casualties; at Siena the bactallia in campo Fori between the three regions (terzi) is witnessed by documents as early as 1238. Stone throwing of this sort was an organized sport in a number of towns, as were various other forms of fighting and wrestling.” Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 199.
54. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 35.
55. Ibid., p. 48.
56. Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 240.
57. To appease the pope, who feared German control of northern and southern Italy, the emperor argued that the kingdom of Sicily (the regnum) was not part of the empire (the imperium). Thus the king of Sicily need not be in the hands of the German emperor. This was of course but a legalistic ploy since factual control remained in the hands of the Hohenstaufen.
58. By some estimates Sicilian revenues equaled half those of France. Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 249. The revenues from Palermo alone purportedly rivaled those of the entire English kingdom. Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 14. (Abulafia is unclear on whether that was an accurate estimate.)
59. The Guelphs named themselves after the Welfs, the Saxon opponents of the king in Italy. Ghibelline refers to the Hohenstaufen castle Waiblingen. At one point, Tuscany thus tended to favor the emperor, whereas the Lombard towns tended to favor the pope. Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, p. 150. For reasons why factions within the towns might favor the Hohenstaufen, see Abulafia, Frederick II, p. 72.
60. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 201.
61. He claimed that he was the legitimate overlord of Sicily since he had granted this area to the Normans for their ousting of the Muslims.
62. For a discussion of this episode, see Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 111; Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 247.
63. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 113f: Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 252f.
64. Nevertheless, as late as 1313 Henry VII would still claim universal domination. Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 269.
65. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 210. These terms continued to be used even after the decline of the Hohenstaufen and the decline of the French fortunes in Sicily.
66. Thus Castruccio Castracani converted the podesta in Lucca, a temporary position, into a permanent despotism by allying with Ghibelline forces in the city. Louis Green, “Lucca under Castruccio Castracani,” I Totti Studies 1 (1985), pp. 137-159.
67. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 206; Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 261.
68. Moreover, because of their fierce struggles, the church and empire succeeded in demythologizing their own claims to rule. Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 221.
69. See Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 215, for this argument. This conforms with my earlier general assessment of the tension between feudal organization and urban life.
70. For the abstractness of protocapitalist relations, see Becker, Medieval Italy. For a good discussion of Becker’s work, see Janet Coleman, “The Civic Culture of Contracts and Credit.” Coleman disagrees with Becker that public trust in the communal government was based on the availability of credit. Instead, she focuses on the political and social reasons why such an abstract set of social relations could develop. That is, for her, credit and abstract contract are a consequence of, rather than an anterior condition to, different political relations. Coleman’s position is closer to my own.
71. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 85.
72. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 176.
73. Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 4.
74. In accordance with the Germans’ Norman predecessors, German imperial policy favored feudal obligations rather than seeking an urban alliance. “This was, clearly and unequivocally, a resumption of the preceding Norman experiment.” Tabacco, The Struggle for Power, p. 245.
75. This might have been an additional reason why the German emperors tried to pursue a feudal strategy in Germany rather than seek an urban alliance.
76. For a discussion of this development, see Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 42; Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 120; Heer, The Medieval World, pp. 81-82. For an example of the functions and installation of the podesta, see the excerpt of John Viterbo’s book on government (1228) in Mundy and Riesenberg, The Medieval Town, p. 12If, document 14.
77. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 66. Because of the levels of violence, the size of the police force was always considerable. Bowsky suggests that Siena between 1280 and 1350 had a police to citizens ratio of between 1:73 and 1:145. The contemporary ratio for New York City is about 1:285. William Bowsky, “Keeping the Urban Peace,” in Stanley Chodorow, ed., The Other Side of Western Civilization, vol. 1 (1973), pp. 176-187.
78. One cannot attribute the ascent of the signoria to internal strife alone. In many instances communes turned to seigneurial government even when internal strife was minimal. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 71.
79. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 111. Waley notes how these lords allied with the emperor or the Angevins; The Italian City-Republics, p. 231.
80. This example relies on Green, “Lucca under Castruccio Castracani.”
81. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 101.
82. For a discussion of the Venetian government, see Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 122; Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 34; McNeill, Venice, p. 34. Martines suggests that this amounted to thirty to forty family clans. Martines, Power and Imagination, pp. 131, 154f.
83. Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, pp. 252, 259; Brown, “Florence,” p. 288f.
84. Becker argues that oligarchy was the typical form of government in Florence from 1282 to 1382. Marvin Becker, “Some Aspects of Oligarchical, Dictatorial and Popular Signorie in Florence 1282-1382,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (July 1960), pp. 421-439.
85. Hans Baron agrees with Becker but suggests that this development continued past 1382. He notes as evidence, for example, the famous castato, the property tax of 1427, which went against the interests of the oligarchs, who opposed direct taxes. Hans Baron, “The Social Background of Political Liberty in the Early Italian Renaissance,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (July 1960), p. 446. He also notes how social mobility and the strength of an industrial middle class, based on wool manufacturing, kept the oligarchy at bay (p. 448).
86. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 148.
87. See the discussion by Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 139.
88. Residency requirements for citizenship status could be as high as thirty years, as it was in Pisa. Waley, The Italian City-Republics, p. 106.
89. Peter Riesenberg, “Civism and Roman Law in Fourteenth-Century Italian Society,” in Herlihy et al., eds., Economy, Society and Government in Medieval Italy (1969), p. 241. This differed quite markedly from the Hansa towns which openly copied laws and business practices from fellow Hansa members. It viewed non-Hansa individuals as distinct and forbade its members intermarriage, thus creating more social cohesion between the Hansa towns.
90. Glenn Olson, “Italian Merchants and the Performance of Papal Banking Functions in the Early Thirteenth Century,” in Herlihy et al., Economy, Society and Government in Medieval Italy, pp. 43-63.
91. Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 148.
92. Schumann, Italy in the Last Fifteen Hundred Years, p. 116f.
93. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, pp. 119, 120. For more extensive listings of Venetian revenues, see Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic, p. 426; Michael Knapton, “City Wealth and State Wealth in Northeast Italy, 14th-17th Centuries,” in Bulst and Genet, La Ville, La Rourgeoisie et La Genèse de L‘Etat Moderne, p. 203; McNeill, Venice, p. 262, note 68. For revenues of other Italian towns in the 1470s, see Denys Hay, Europe in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (1989), p. 180. For a discussion of the types of taxes, see Waley, The Italian City-Republics, pp. 78-81; McNeill, Venice, p. 71; Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 101; and Gene Brucker, Renaissance Florence (1969), p. 58.
94. Parry, The Discovery of the Sea, p. 70. Taxes in Genoa in 1293 yielded by some estimates three and a half times those of France; see Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, p. 193.
95. For a brief discussion of the rivalry between Genoa and Venice, see Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony (1989), pp. 110, 121; Scammel, The World Encompassed, p. 96. For a chronicler’s account of the brutal Pisan war in 1284, see the description of the Franciscan Salimbene in Mundy and Riesenberg, The Medieval Town, p. 107, document 6.
96. Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 113.
97. Brown, “Florence,” pp. 298-299; Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 255.
98. McNeill, Venice, p. 123.
99. Martines, Power and Imagination, pp. 222, 228.
100. There were good reasons to try to keep with the old galley ships. First, the Mediterranean did not always provide sufficient wind. Furthermore, the Venetian Arsenal had perfected its design and was able to manufacture the ships along assembly-line techniques. Galleys were also difficult to combine with sailing ships. Hence, the Venetian navy would have had to be completely overhauled. Thus, although the Venetians experimented with alternative models, the galley remained the ship of preference. McNeill, Venice, p. 130.
101. Martines, Power and Imagination, p. 172. Although not as spectacular as the profits in long-distance commerce, profits on landed wealth could yield between 15 and 20 percent. Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 53.
102. This war was partially propelled by Florentine concerns over a secure grain supply. Florentine worry with their food supply was of long standing. In the thirteenth century, for example, they actually aided bishopric control over their contado provided the bishop remained subject to the town council and provided the city with grain. George Dameron, “Episcopal Lordship in the Diocese of Florence and the Origins of the Commune of San Casciano Val di Pesa, 1230-1247,” Journal of Medieval History 12 (June 1986), pp. 135-154.
103. Heer, The Medieval World, p. 77.
104. Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, p. 106; Hay and Law, Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, p. 275.
105. Paul Coles, “The Crisis of Renaissance Society: Genoa 1488-1507,” Past and Present 11 (April 1957), p. 21.
106. I borrow the term from Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, p. 21.
107. Peter Burke, “City-States,” in John Hall, ed., States in History (1986), pp. 142, 151. He goes on to provide a rather tautological definition of the city-state by essentially describing the character traits of the Italian city-state, but he provides no answer as to their differences with sovereign states.
108. That would also be empirically inaccurate. The Venetian republic was qua population no smaller than the Dutch Republic of the sixteenth century or Portugal. In territorial terms, it was also a good deal larger than the Dutch provinces, and yet Portugal and the Dutch Republic were to become world powers. In short, small is often used as a posterior assessment.
109. Giorgio Chittolini, “Cities, ‘City-States,’ and Regional States in North-Central Italy,” Theory and Society 18 (September 1989), p. 699.
110. Tilly makes the general point that strong centralized states emerged where towns were weakest. Charles Tilly, “Cities and States in Europe, 1000–1800,” Theory and Society 18 (September 1989), pp. 563–584. I discuss the implications of the status of subject cities in greater detail in Chapter 8.
111. The reasons why this might be the case are potentially very interesting. I, however, do not deal with this topic in this book. I am not explaining why kings exist, or what special position they have. I merely wish to analyze how they operate vis-à-vis other political actors.
112. Braudel, The Perspective of the World, p. 89.
113. Note that I am not merely suggesting that the towns dominated the rural areas politically. One might, for example, counter that Paris also dominated the provinces. The population of the French provinces, however, were still full French subjects. The position of subjects in Italian territories almost resembled semicolonial status.