2     1288: The Battles That Gave Birth to Modernity

The condition of man … is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

—Thomas Hobbes

Between the time that Kare the goat wandered off in the direction of that bog near Falun and the era during which Bishop Peter concluded his deal to buy back his share of the mine that was Kare’s legacy, Europe churned. During those five or so centuries, the Continent remade itself over and over again in what many saw as an effort to restore the stability of the Roman era that itself had ended half a millennium before the beginning of mining at the Great Copper Mountain. But the eyes of the great actors of that era were not on the past. Nor can it fairly be said that they were fixed on some future horizon. No, like the leaders of every period in history, the men and women who drove Europe’s fitful progress through what we think of today as the Middle Ages and early Renaissance produced history by happenstance. What they were doing is what the people of every era do: they were single-mindedly and often ruthlessly pursuing their narrow self-interests.

They draped their greed and their ambition in some glorious ideas, and once they had accumulated enough wealth, they ensured that the bards and chroniclers and artists and tapestry weavers of the day told their stories as if they had nobler objectives. Some framed their goals in political terms. Others chose to characterize their work as service to the deity or to virtue itself. Some—those who rose particularly high and were particularly deft or particularly craven or both—claimed both sorts of elevated justifications for their brutality, thievery, and worse.

But if you look beneath the superficial characterizations that conventional histories tend to proffer, what you find in the Europe of this period is a society in search of order and organizing principle. To say that the defining power struggle of the time was a battle between church and state is a gross oversimplification, because political and economic and military power was so diffuse, distributed among many levels of nobility and clergy—although given the behaviors of both groups as they grappled with each other for power and spoils, we can only view characterizations of most of the prominent players as “noble” or “men of God” as among history’s bitter ironies. Nonetheless, for our purposes, it is important to understand the church-versus-state and related dynamics because they offer a revealing prelude and striking parallels to the public-private power struggles that followed.

As we shall see, in the Scandinavia of this era, the same sort of struggles that rattled and bled the Continent were also dividing and reordering the relationships between Sweden’s ruling families and the representatives of the church. At the same time, as the first bits of ground were scraped from the surface at the mines of Dalecarlia, more than just copper ore was unleashed. So too was another force that would define world history: private power, business, or what would gradually become known (thanks to innovations not just in mining or the legal structure of businesses but also in the technology of agriculture, transportation, and other nascent enterprises) as a “third estate,” one powered by labor and capital to take its place alongside the ones powered by the sword and the cross.

As a consequence of this development, even as most of the attention of the era was focused on seeking an equilibrium in the endlessly destabilizing local and regional contests among those who would advance their own interests in the name of church or of state, the roots of the public-private struggle that was to succeed that one centuries later were creeping ever downward, expanding, growing more robust, mimicking the tunneling at Falun. It was during this era that many of the ideas, institutions, and conflicts that define our own time were shaped. It was in the battles of this period that modernity was born and great trends with then unimaginable consequences were set in motion.

Of Popes and Emperors Prostrate in the Snow

Given the primacy achieved by Roman emperors, the battle to claim their throne was among the most momentous of history. In many ways, the fall of Rome resulted in over a millennium’s worth of attempts to restore and thereby harness its former glory.

As often happens in history, the seeds of the rifts and turbulence of one era were planted in the prior period. Even as Rome was in decline and emperors seldom spent much time in the “eternal city,” one of the last of the great emperors, Constantine, converted to Christianity and through the Council of Nicea granted the church his imperial sanction. Although popes had existed for more than three hundred years as reputed successors to the apostle Peter, it took a nod from an emperor whose predecessors had once outlawed Christianity to nudge the church to the status that would allow it to outlive the empire and, ultimately, in many ways succeed it.

Indeed, among the early popes of the era that followed the fall of Rome, one of the most notable was Gregory the Great, who hailed from a family that had once been prominent among Rome’s senators. But he and his successors were weakened by the fact that their political patrons had moved eastward out of Rome. By the time that Kare the goat began sniffing around that bog, say in the year 800 or so, the popes had a problem. Despite their divine authority, they faced regular earthly challenges from princes who claimed papal land or revenues to which they felt entitled. And it’s worth noting that throughout all the battles that follow between church and state, it is the right to land and revenue that drives the actions of the main actors. We talk about the political organization of Europe, but what we mean is the economic divvying up of the Continent by those with enough power to make any sort of claim on any source of wealth at all. In fact, many actions with seemingly “higher” motives have very compelling economic explanations. For example, the prohibition against clerical marriage—promulgated a couple of decades before the Council of Nicea at the Synod of Elvira—had the advantage of ensuring that the wealth accumulated by the clergy would always be passed on to the church. That way there would be no conflict of interest on the part of priests and bishops who might seek to pass on at least some of the fruits of their labors to their children.

The “Dark Ages” that followed the fall of Rome in A.D. 410 can be seen as a period of what might be called political entrepreneurism. Other than the Catholic Church, there were few enduring strong national or international institutions. Consequently, a feudal system emerged in which those who were strong enough claimed as much as they could defend, although even then there were often overlapping claims among competing families and between such families and the church. Despite the differences in their “callings,” both local feudal lords and their clerical competitors, usually bishops like Peter of Vasteras, were chosen and survived through political intrigue, the sword, bribery, and the taxation of common citizens. Wherever weakness was perceived, one of these figures would scramble to fill the void. In this respect, the period was much like the current global era in which there are few effective international institutions and large private enterprises seek to take advantage of institutional and legal voids.

During the eighth century, just as Sweden was ruled by a shifting mix of Viking chieftains, in continental Europe warrior kings sought to concentrate power. One of the most successful at this was the founder of what would become the Carolingian dynasty, Charles Martel. His nickname was “the Hammer,” which tells you roughly all you need to know about what it took to establish and maintain a kingdom during the Middle Ages. Charles made his name in part from doing what Europeans have in one way or another been focused on doing to this day: keeping out Islamic invaders. Charles repelled the Muslims at the Battle of Poitiers in order to preserve his holdings. It is worth noting, however, that those holdings, while they comprised a goodly chunk of modern France and Germany, were not exactly a kingdom. The official title was still held by a dynasty, the Merovingians, established in the middle of the fifth century by a ruler named Merovech and his son Childeric, who had considerable success defeating some of the tribes that had previously beaten up on the Romans, including the Visigoths and the Saxons.

Charles’s victory, however, established the Carolingians as the most powerful clan in Europe. So when, in 751, Pope Zachary needed help holding on to his papal territories, which were being threatened by the Lombards of northern Italy, he faced a conundrum when the Byzantine emperor—theoretical heir to the throne and responsibilities of the Caesars—was unable to protect him. Zachary’s solution presented itself when Charles Martel’s son Pepin III approached the pope to seek his blessing on his intent to depose the last Merovingian king and assume royal authority.

In exchange for having the pope send an archbishop to anoint him king of the Franks, Pepin—known to history as “Pepin the Short,” a nickname that must make all sons of powerful men wince—would later provide the Papal States with military assistance in their tussle with the Lombards. In leading his men across the Alps to repel a Lombard invasion of Rome, Pepin not only returned Zachary’s favor on behalf of his successor, Stephen II, he also crisply illustrated the mutual dependency of the secular and clerical leaders of the era (a non-zero-sum relationship that again is evocative of the current rivalry-riven but collaboration-dependent relationship between companies and countries). He added to the good light in which the pope saw him by returning to the Holy See a goodly portion of the northern Italian lands he had conquered. This “Donation of Pepin” was seen as a foundation of a new alliance between the king of the Franks and the church based on “a bond of love and devotion and peace” but also clearly based on something else that translates better in the language of the church: quid pro quo.

Almost certainly, Pepin’s biggest donation to history was not the land he won in northern Italy, but rather his son, a man who would transcend his father (and every other ruler of his era) in every definition of stature. The son, known today as Charlemagne (Carolus Magnus, or Charles the Great), was not only an imposing figure of six foot three with fair hair and a flowing beard, but he extended the family’s kingdom to the plains of Hungary and thus united Europe to a greater degree than anyone had since the Romans. To this day he is seen as having presided over a kind of pre- or mini-Renaissance in the midst of the Middle Ages and as being the founder of both the French and German royal lines.

Charlemagne continued his father’s policy of assisting the pope, working initially to support Pope Hadrian I during a Lombard onslaught in 773. (It’s worth noting that the Lombards didn’t much like Charlemagne to begin with, as he had a couple of years earlier briefly married and then dumped the daughter of their king, Desiderius. To add injury to insult, Charlemagne beat the Lombards so decisively that he assumed their Iron Crown as king of Italy.) Pope Hadrian was succeeded by Leo III. Leo was supposedly born a commoner, a fact which didn’t sit well with Roman upper-crusters. His admirers ultimately prevailed with his canonization nine centuries after his death. But during his lifetime, the detractors—who accused him of everything from adultery to perjury and corruption—made his papacy a tumultuous one. While Charlemagne had sent his hopes that Leo would be a worthy pope upon his election, he was soon among those disappointed by reports that the pontiff was “hard and cruel.”

In 799, an angry Roman throng attacked the pope, reportedly attempting to gouge out his eyes and cut off his tongue, and imprisoned him in a monastery. Leo escaped after shinnying down the monastery’s walls on a rope and made his way to a meeting with Charlemagne at Paderborn, a city in northwest Westphalia in modern-day Germany. Charlemagne listened as Leo enumerated the injustices that the “accursed sons of the devil” had inflicted upon him. Charlemagne had also listened carefully to emissaries sent by Leo’s detractors, who made accusations against the pope. The latter group demanded that the pope step down or clear his name via oath. Neither option would exactly strengthen the institution of the papacy, so Charlemagne sought another solution.

The Frankish king sent Leo back to Rome accompanied by a contingent of his soldiers. When they arrived, the conspirators against Leo were placed on trial. They failed to prove that the pope had done as they alleged, and they were sentenced to prison in Francia. These moves, however, did not stabilize the situation in Rome, and ultimately Charlemagne felt he had no choice but to go there himself, which he did in late November of the year 800. He helped broker a decision in which the pope would offer a voluntary oath to clear his name and dispel any suspicions against his character; because the oath was voluntary, it didn’t weaken the pope’s legitimacy. Since this decision was enough for the most powerful man in Europe—Charlemagne—it was enough for everyone else in Rome, and the pope’s authority was restored.

In exchange, on Christmas Day A.D. 800, Leo placed an imperial crown on Charlemagne’s head in front of an assembly of Romans. The symbolism worked its magic, and the Roman crowds shouted “Hail to Charles the Augustus, crowned of God, the peace-bringing emperor of the Romans!” This cry says it all: Charlemagne was legitimized by God, and as Holy Roman Emperor he was the undeniable successor to the Caesars. This didn’t sit well with the empress Irene, sitting on what was allegedly the throne of the Caesars in Constantinople, but she did not have the power to challenge the heir to Charles the Hammer.

Of course, at the time, no one saw the implicit problems that this bold step raised. Leo had elevated his protector to a status that left Charlemagne feeling as though he were Europe’s highest authority in any practical sense. At the same time, Charlemagne had not only strengthened the papacy at a critical moment, but he had also reaffirmed the idea that only the pope could grant legitimate power to a secular leader. Thus, while the alliance proved beneficial in the short term, it raised manifold problems associated with the dual and competing nature of all thrones.

As Northwestern University professor Hendrik Spruyt has written:

Despite all the benefits that cooperation between church and king yielded, however, their alliance was ultimately based on divergent interests. At the heart of the king’s endeavor lay an attempt to obtain sole control over the resources within his domain and to expand the area of that domain. This clashed with the church’s claim of jurisdiction over all clerical affairs and of ultimate superiority over rulers on secular matters as well.

The challenges associated with this tension manifested themselves with special clarity almost three centuries after Charlemagne’s investiture, during the Reformation. During the intervening years, the dependence of the emperors on the popes who crowned them led them, not surprisingly, to become deeply involved in Roman and papal politics. In part this was explained by their economic interests in Italy, but it was mostly the inevitable consequence of seeking to protect their self-interest. The result was that the invisible hand of the emperors could be seen in rigging papal elections, deposing and replacing corrupt popes, and ensuring that bishops within their empire were satisfactory by simply appointing them directly.

The power to appoint bishops was especially important to the emperors because, while top positions in the nobility were hereditary, top clerical posts could be filled by emperors with loyal supporters or those to whom they owed a debt or from whom they might someday want a favor. The result was a system in which the line between interdependence and too much dependence, between secular and clerical centers of power, was very blurry. Later, and repeatedly, we will see just such a fuzzy and contentious relationship evolve between centers of public and private power.

A crisis arose with the inevitable conflict between a pope who believed in a strong and unchallengeable papacy and an emperor who saw a similar role for himself. The pope in question was Gregory VII. He “conceived of Christendom as an undivided state, of a state as a polity dominated by a sovereign; of a sovereign as a ruler who must be either absolute or useless. And who, he asked, but their heir to the Prince of the Apostles could presume to claim a power so tremendous?” He believed only the church was competent to give authoritative interpretations of Christianity’s sacred writings—the observance of which was the only way any man could be saved—and to trust the church’s privileges to impure lay rulers was nothing short of condemning mankind to hell. While past popes, including Gelasius, had noted that the world was ruled by two different powers—the sacerdotal and the secular—they left it ambiguous whether those powers were equal or one was greater than the other. Gregory made it clear which of these he thought was superior.

Gregory did this through a papal bull he circulated in 1075 called Dictatus Papae. In it he asserted—despite all evidence to the contrary—that the papacy was completely independent of the emperor. He then went on to claim and assert powers that were relevant to the emperors, particularly the then current one, Henry IV. Among the powers Gregory claimed were that the pope alone could depose or reinstate bishops, that he might depose emperors, that the Roman church was incapable of error, and that the pope may “absolve subjects of unjust men from their fealty.” These assertions meant more than the simple rivalry that resulted from his claim that “the Roman Pontiff alone is rightly to be called universal.” Denying emperors the right to appoint bishops also meant that the control of all the church’s land and revenue went straight to the pope. The issue therefore went well beyond a question of prestige or legitimacy. It went to the bottom line.

In response to the bull, Henry IV asserted his authority by appointing a supporter to the post of archbishop of Milan, a key position with regard to his Italian holdings. He gave the archbishop the church and the land that went with it, signifying that the property was the emperor’s to administer as he saw fit and not the pope’s. The pope protested, and Henry responded with a letter that did not mince words:

Henry, King not by usurpation but by pious ordination of God, to Hildebrand [Gregory’s birthname], now not Pope, but false monk:… Our Lord, Jesus Christ, has called us to kingship, but has not called you to priesthood … I, Henry, King by the grace of God, together with all our bishops say to you, Descend! Descend, to be damned through the ages!

Gregory responded by excommunicating Henry, releasing all his subjects from allegiance to him, and forbidding anyone to serve him as king. The excommunication wasn’t just rhetoric: it was all that some of Henry’s insubordinate subjects needed in order to justify rebellion against an emperor that their infallible spiritual leader said they simply could not heed. Henry’s back was against the wall, and he blinked first. In the midst of the frigid winter of 1077, he crossed the Alps and rode to the castle of Canossa in northern Italy where Gregory was residing under the protection of Countess Matilda of Tuscany while en route to Germany, where a council of bishops and magnates had gathered to elect a successor to Henry IV if the emperor failed to have his excommunication lifted within a year.

At the castle walls, Henry dressed himself as a humble penitent and promised he would abide by papal rulings in the future. To underscore his change of heart, he walked barefoot through the snow and prostrated himself beneath the pope’s window. Initially, Gregory was unmoved. But as a priest, he could not refuse to forgive a penitent Christian. Besides, the image of the emperor lying in the snow was a powerful one, not to mention a notable personal victory. After three days the pope emerged from the castle to find Henry lying before him in the shape of the cross. They then celebrated mass together and Gregory lifted the excommunication.

That would have been the end of the story had Henry actually meant any of it. But it was all politics, the latest melodramatic episode in the story of the central rivalry of the age. Once threats of rebellion had been quashed, Henry resumed appointing bishops. Furthermore, the German nobility were alienated when the pope forgave the emperor—which was a problem for Gregory when he tried to excommunicate Henry again three years later. Without the support of the German princes, the move was a political dud. Seizing the moment, the emperor marched on Rome and oversaw the election of a new pope, who placed the imperial crown on his head. Gregory, in turn, was forced to flee, and he died a year later in the city of Salerno, his last words being, “I have loved justice and hated iniquity, that is why I die in exile.”

Even after Gregory’s death, the core conflict between the Holy Roman Emperor and the papacy boiled on. In the near term, it was resolved in 1122, when one of Gregory’s successors, Calixtus II, and Henry’s son, Henry V, reached a compromise called the Concordat of Worms. The document basically split the baby right down the middle in symbolic terms, creating a two-part investiture ritual in which a church official would first give a soon-to-be bishop the symbols of ecclesiastical office—a ring and a staff—and then a secular representative would touch the bishop with a scepter, signifying the land and other earthly possessions that went with the office. This compromise ultimately sowed the seeds for the future separation of church and state. Now that religious and secular authorities were separate, kings had to justify their sovereignty on secular terms alone. This justification would eventually evolve into the doctrine of territorial sovereignty, a crucial tenet of the nation-state system that would eventually drive the last nail in the coffin of the church’s pretensions to universal authority six centuries later. The territorial basis for sovereignty of course raises new complications in a global era in which some great entities, including multinational corporations, have neither territorial allegiances nor limitations. And the entire episode illustrates the linkages between our own times and seemingly distant points in history, reminding us that very often today’s headlines started to be written centuries earlier, that the first drafts of Twitter feeds about twenty-first-century crises and issues were sometimes written with a quill pen.

In countries across Europe, however, the tug-of-war would be played out at different speeds and with different points of contention dominating. In part this was due to the different speeds of development of national and theological institutions. For example, in Sweden, it was only in the twelfth century that Christianity began putting down real roots. King Sverker the Elder was a major proponent of the church and, in 1152, instituted a tax on Rome’s behalf that had been known previously only in England as “Peter’s Pence.” A dozen years later, a Cistercian monk, probably of English origin, was consecrated with the permission of King Karl Sverkersson at the cathedral of Sens in northern France to become archbishop of Uppsala, a community no doubt chosen in part because it was one of the last remaining strongholds of paganism in Sweden. This would be the first archbishop to reside in Sweden, and his appointment was seen by the king as a way of helping to provide more order and stability within the kingdom, a fact underscored when Karl’s successor, Erik Knuttson, became the first Swedish king anointed with holy oil and crowned by the pope.

Not surprisingly, the church sought to consolidate economic power in Sweden in fairly short order. By the year 1200, it had received its first major charter from the new king, Sverker the Younger. The charter, negotiated by representatives of Rome, granted the church freedom from taxation on all church lands and released the clergy from the jurisdiction of temporal criminal courts. Importantly, through the charter, “a privileged clerical class came into being and churchmen now had a firm foundation on which to build.” Their independence grew through the Convention of Skanninge in 1248, at which it was determined that all clergy owed obedience to the pope and the pope alone. A great illustration of that class and its political clout was the soon-to-be Bishop Peter of Vasteras, who, in exercising his clerical prerogatives, would become an example of the wealth that clergy quickly accumulated as well as the opportunistic appreciation of the clergy for the just-emerging third set of actors on the scene: businesspeople, the miners of Falun.

Even as the power of the pope had diminished vis-à-vis the Holy Roman Emperor and certain key tenets of papal authority had been challenged successfully, the church found other ways to assert its authority and was even embraced by local rulers. Tension occurred when those rulers were challenged by the church, whose approval was critical to their survival. One such set of challenges was brought against the legal authority of kings; another was clearly brewing on the front of taxation. The conflicts around these issues produced resolutions that were central in defining what made a state a state—key to our understanding of the challenges coming today to states from a completely different set of actors, but ones who also have interests and powers that rival those of political leaders and the states they represent.

Of Lawyers, Death, and Taxes

Gilbert Becket was the son of a knight but chose the trade of a mercer (a textile merchant) to support his family. He lived at the beginning of the twelfth century in Cheapside, London, with his wife, Matilda. There, hoping for the best for their son, Thomas, and his sisters, they regularly sought to expose their children to the world of their wealthier friends, of hunts and, in young Thomas’s case, a serious education in languages, religion, and the law. Thomas took well to the training and traveled to the great intellectual capitals of Europe, from Paris to Bologna, preparing himself for what life might bring. He did brilliantly, and as a young man, back in England, he won a position working with the archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop was the most important representative of Rome in the country, and Thomas won his trust and with it important appointments within the church. Recognizing that Thomas’s gifts were worthy of even greater challenges, Theobald, the archbishop, suggested to England’s king, Henry II, that when he had an opening for a new chancellor, he should consider Thomas for the job. Henry did, and the two formed not only a formidable partnership but a fast friendship.

King Henry II was one of those rare monarchs who make contributions that resonate through the centuries. The actions he took and the values he promoted not only transformed England almost a thousand years ago but also affect our daily lives in countless ways. Henry was canny in legal matters, smart enough to form a potent alliance through marriage to the equally formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine. He was also an effective administrator who took special interest in the king’s and the state’s role as determiner and enforcer of justice within society.

Early in his reign, Henry sought to both strengthen himself and enhance the effectiveness of the British legal system by promoting profound reforms. At the core of these reforms was the idea of common law: laws applicable to all citizens throughout England. He sent royal justices on regular trips to every locality throughout the kingdom and required twelve representatives of the nobility to meet with them and hand over accused criminals for trial. In addition, Henry’s royal courts undertook to adjudicate property cases. Thanks to Henry’s innovation, litigants could file a property claim with the royal court if refused a trial locally. Despite the costs of such a system, the benefits to the kingdom were clear. The common law system was more transparent, more centralized, and a great source of revenue as a consequence of the penalty fees imposed on criminals, which were transferred directly to the royal treasury. The problem was that those penalties used to be collected by the nobility or the church, each of which administered its own system of justice, or some facsimile thereof.

Those who had been the beneficiaries of these customary legal systems, now superseded by Henry’s courts, were angered. They had lost both money and the prerogatives of power. Furthermore, clerics who had enjoyed the gentler justice of church courts were also resistant to change. The church courts had actually grown during the reign prior to Henry’s, that of King Stephen, and as such they had encroached on what had once been an important element of previous kings’ powers. But Henry was not only interested in reclaiming powers lost during the reign of his feckless predecessor. He also wanted to expand his own authority in ways that would make his government the undisputed primary seat of power within his kingdom. This impulse brought him into direct conflict with Becket, a man who had once been so much like a brother to him that Henry sent his namesake son to live with Becket and his family. Indeed, it’s possible that some of the acrimony that would poison this once warm relationship came from the fact that the younger Henry reputedly felt he was the beneficiary of more fatherly love in a day with Thomas Becket than he enjoyed from his father in a lifetime.

Quite apart from such personal tension, there were practical rivalries in play that echoed others from across Europe. The king saw the church encroaching on his power and his sources of revenue. His loyal friend Becket had at one time been part of his solution to this problem. Henry appointed him archbishop of Canterbury, seeking to bring the church further under his direct control. But Becket, who had lived the high life as chancellor, underwent a fairly profound change as he undertook his new clerical duties. He had what has been characterized as an ascetic transformation. But regardless of the reasons for or the nature of the change, the consequence was that Henry’s handpicked man for the job soon became less pliable and even an active opponent of Henry’s proposed reforms.

In fact, Becket resisted when Henry sought to codify reforms that would bring the church more under his control. In 1164 Henry saw to it that a set of sixteen specific reforms were passed to limit the sway of the papacy, the church, and the church’s courts in England. Of special importance in the reforms were provisions underscoring the authority of royal courts to try “criminous clerks”—church officials who had broken the law and who were likely to escape serious consequences if the only law they faced was the one administered by their employer. Unsurprisingly, Becket refused to accept these reforms, known as the Constitutions of Clarendon, and the resulting power struggle with Henry led Becket to flee into exile in France. There he did what any self-respecting theocrat would have done: he turned to the pope for assistance, calling for Henry’s excommunication and punishment. For six years, the recriminations flew back and forth. The pope declared Henry’s reforms null and void. But Henry feared worse was in store, and in an effort to avoid excommunication, he lured Becket back to England in the hope that some kind of an understanding would be reached.

But Becket was unyielding despite the king’s demands. Indeed, he made matters worse by excommunicating an archbishop and two prominent bishops who had played along with Henry, presiding at the coronation of Henry’s son despite the fact that this right was technically that of the archbishop of Canterbury alone. Weeks later, fuming, Henry, infirm and in his sickbed, asked loud enough for men of action in his court to hear, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low born clerk?” Four knights took the king’s complaint to mean something more, and they made their way to Canterbury, arriving on December 29. They asked Becket to come with them to be called to account for his actions. He refused. What followed is described in an eyewitness account:

… The wicked knight leapt suddenly upon [Becket], cutting off the top of the crown which the unction of sacred chrism had dedicated to God. Next he received a second blow on the head, but still he stood firm and immoveable. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living sacrifice, and saying in a low voice, “For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.” But the third knight inflicted a terrible wound as he lay prostrate. By this stroke, the crown of his head was separated from the head in such a way that the blood white with the brain, and the brain no less red from the blood, dyed the floor of the cathedral. The same clerk who had entered with the knights placed his foot on the neck of the holy priest and precious martyr, and horrible to relate, scattered the brains and blood about the pavements, crying to the others, “Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more.”

Becket may have been brutally killed, but he continued to play a role in the struggle between the church and the English royal court. Within three years he was canonized and venerated as a martyr. In fact, he became so powerful a symbol to the faithful (the path from London to Canterbury became such a popular pilgrimage that it was immortalized in literature such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) that even Henry, just four years after the death of his former friend, traveled to Becket’s grave site to do penance. Becket would forever symbolize the threat that powerful bishops pose to kings. That is why, four hundred years later, when Henry VIII sought to finally finish the business the second Henry had started, one of his most important acts while destroying monasteries across the kingdom was to obliterate the tomb and all remnants and relics of Thomas Becket.

The friendship and falling-out of Henry and the man now known as Saint Thomas Becket was such a compelling human drama that even twentieth-century playwrights and poets such as T. S. Eliot and Jean Anouilh created major works about it. But behind that drama is an even greater story that impacts people everywhere, the story of a rivalry between institutions, between two visions of how society should operate and who should set the rules. It is a struggle that seemed to take place with similar fury and often with similar results over each and every one of the prerogatives and privileges that secular and clerical elites jealously aspired to or guarded. In the case of Charlemagne and the popes of his era, it was a question of determining legitimacy, of establishing from which source authority flowed. In the case of Henry and Thomas Becket, it was over which courts had ultimate authority, over whose justice would be meted out. And in the case of King Philip IV of France, known as Philip the Fair, and Pope Boniface VIII, it was over who controlled the lifeblood of any state or church: the ability to set and raise taxes.

In this last instance, through conflict came progress in clarifying just what determined a state and how it related to the other powerful actors that might be rivals. This was one of the most important—if bloody, frustrating, and convoluted—tasks and outcomes of the Middle Ages. And while the final issues involved were not resolved until centuries later, the critical questions were framed and advanced. As is the way with most forms of giving birth, the advent of the modern state not only took what seemed to be an excruciatingly long time but was also a bloody mess. Virtually all issues were resolved with violence or the threat of it. Any hint of weakness was an invitation to further mayhem. And given that throughout the Middle Ages the church was undergoing what must be described as one of the most protracted crises of confidence and leadership in history, it was a particularly battered target. Long after the scuffles with the Lombards, the Papal States continued to face threats, increasingly from the heirs to their former protectors from the north. Frederick Barbarossa, Henry VI, and Frederick II all made efforts on behalf of the empire to unite Sicily, the Papal States, and the northern Italian city-states under their rule. While they were unsuccessful, and periodically and predictably excommunicated by the popes they threatened, their disregard for the popes as anything other than rival princes—workaday warlords with a little extra religious mojo—is revealing.

These kings from Northern Europe were not the only heirs to Charlemagne who showed such contempt. In fact, it was their French cousin, King Philip the Fair, who dealt the papacy one of the most devastating blows—and one with especially important consequences in terms of the gradual accumulation of centralized power on behalf of the secular state. As kings and princes across Europe saw the church being challenged, they grew bolder and increasingly sought to levy taxes on the clergy, many of whom controlled significant lands and wealth. Although this was not unheard of—one way popes could get men at arms to wage crusades was by allowing them to tax local churches for “the defense of the faith”—the spread of tax levies on the clergy and church property that were not associated with papal objectives had grown so widely by the mid-thirteenth century that it produced a backlash and a confrontation.

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The pope who sought to draw a line in the sand was one who was not unaccustomed to confrontations. His name was Pope Boniface VIII. History knows him primarily for two reasons. One is that as a consequence of his bare-knuckles style of handling papal and Italian politics he made an enemy of, among many others, Dante Alighieri. Much as it is said today that politicians shouldn’t make enemies of people who buy ink by the barrel (a reference to newspaper publishers), it is probably equally good advice not to make enemies of people who write enduring works of literature that are likely to shape your reputation for time immemorial. Boniface was seen as a schemer who won and kept the papacy through intrigue and brutality, and although Dante’s Divine Comedy was published while the pope was still alive, the author nonetheless placed Boniface in the ring of Hell reserved for priests who sold clerical positions and favors, a sin known as simony. That Boniface was also unpopular with many for his brutal handling of local feuds—such as one with a prominent Italian family that led the pope to lay waste to an entire Italian city, producing a death toll in the thousands—made Dante’s audacity all the more palatable to his broader audience.

The pope’s political weaknesses had the added effect of undercutting his primary area of real accomplishment. He, like England’s Henry IV, had the mind of a lawyer and was a prolific producer of opinions regarding canon law. In addition, he promulgated several important opinions via papal bulls that had the intent, if not the effect, of strengthening the church’s authority. One of these bulls addressed the issue of taxation. In his Clericis Laicos he asserted that kings could only tax the clergy with the permission of the pope, and he automatically excommunicated any who disobeyed.

Needless to say, this did not sit well with Europe’s ruling class. In France, Philip responded decisively by banning the export of any monies out of the country, effectively denying Rome any revenue it might have been hoping for from France. He also tossed one of the pope’s emissaries into prison. When Boniface reacted as might be expected, excommunicating Philip, the French king reacted as he might also be expected to do, given the utter devaluation of the threat of excommunication when it is seen as a tool of economic bullying rather than one of great sacred import: Philip burned the bull of excommunication. Boniface in turn responded with another papal declaration, one that framed the issue at stake in the clearest possible way. The document was called Unam Sanctum, and its thrust was that it was “altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.” It asserted without ambiguity the argument that the pope was the highest authority on earth and that the price for disagreeing was eternal hellfire (thus adding a choice element of irony to The Divine Comedy).

To translate his assertion into action, Boniface summoned the leaders of the church in France to meet with him in Rome in order to shape a potent response to Philip. It was here that Boniface began to sense his gambit was not going to work. Thanks to both a rising tide of French nationalism—which would prove over time to be a potent solvent, very effective at breaking down the influence of Rome—and careful calculation as to which leader was likely to have more influence over their earthly futures, the prelates of France decided to stay home and side with their king.

Cannily, Philip sought to amplify this national feeling through even broader national political outreach. In 1302, he convened the First Estates Assembly, at which he addressed an audience that included not only nobles and clergy but also prominent townspeople. This was a watershed because it introduced the “third estate”—the rising class of merchants, freehold farmers, and tradesmen—into the political equation (in another part of Europe, Stora Kopparberg’s miners would also come to constitute this third estate). King Philip recognized that to stand up to the eternal power of Rome, he had to marshal all available sources of temporal authority.

Once he had won his political victory at home, resulting in the outright rejection of both Clericis Laicos and Unam Sanctum and establishing the king’s primacy on the issue of taxation, Philip sought to punctuate it in a more practical sense. He sent an emissary, his chief minister, Guillaume de Nogaret, to Rome to conspire with the Colonna family, the one that Boniface had targeted and against whom he had directed armies of mercenaries with bloody results. Together they stormed the pope’s summer residence in Anagni. There they confronted the sixty-eight-year-old pope and subjected him to all manner of abuse, including a slap across the face with a steel glove. They showed some restraint, contemplating but then rejecting the idea of executing him. Providence interceded then, and Boniface was given the opportunity to discover whether Dante had it right after all when he died less than a month after the intrusion at the palace.

The Great Transformation: The Third Force Enters the Fray

More than the old pope died when Boniface expired in October 1303. So too had an important prerogative of the church and many old ideas about the true political structure of Europe. Kings and nations were in their ascendancy, and central to their power was the alliance they would forge with the merchant class. The rise of this class had, of course, been underway for several centuries. It literally began with events like the initiation of mining in central Sweden and the evolution of an association of independent miners who, through their labors, developed resources that made both them and their kingdom strong. In this sense, the organization of that mine as revealed in the share document signed by Bishop Peter in 1288 represents as important a watershed as many of the higher-profile battles that were taking place throughout Europe at that moment in history, including the one between Philip and Boniface that would take place only eight years later with the publication of Clericis Laicos.

Of course, not every corner of Europe moved at the same speed. Events would happen in parallel, sometimes decades or even a few centuries apart. But the cumulative effect over the period between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries was transformational. In fact, in the longer-term context of history—in political and in economic terms—it may well be that schoolchildren would be better off studying this social transformation rather than the more narrowly defined and religiously focused Reformation. The locus of the change was not the castles or palaces of Europe but the towns of its countryside. In England, for example, at the turn of the millennium, trading centers emerged as villages began trading in goods such as pottery. Waterways, the God-given thoroughfares of the era, helped define which areas would prosper in Europe. The Crusades helped fuel the growth of these trading routes as knights who were willing to venture to the Holy Land were granted land or booty. As they passed toward the Middle East and they and their goods passed back, trading relationships with the region grew, and city-states such as Genoa and Venice prospered. And as traders moved the goods of the Mediterranean up into Italy via its rivers and ancient Roman roads and other byways, they developed and refined ways to strengthen their businesses.

Key to the growth of business—as evidenced by the share structure of Stora—was managing risk. While the owners of the companies still bore complete liability for their enterprises, they sought to create a mechanism by which that liability could be spread among several owners, and then those owners could spread their risk among several enterprises. In Italy, the structural approach was called the compagnia (plural compagnie). These were primarily family ventures, but they also embraced outside investments. They allowed, through their legal structure, for investors’ shares to be precisely described (as in the Stora agreement) in terms of both their value and other provisions. There were also multiple classes of liabilities through which these enterprises could be underwritten, ranging from retained earnings to supplementary partner contributions to loans from outsiders that would be repaid within a set period. These compagnie, many of which were banks, were innovative, establishing everything from techniques for managing complex overseas operations to networks that could handle rapid wealth transfers. Some banking ventures lent money to kings in exchange for preferential treatment. The Bardi family made loans to courts in France and Naples in exchange for unrestricted trading privileges. The Peruzzi family lent money to the king of Naples to enable him to buy the port of Chiarenza, where the bank was then allowed to set up a branch operation. Venetian bankers helped the pope finance his ongoing battles with the German emperors.

In Northern Europe, new technologies also played an important role in shaping the rise of this merchant class. More sophisticated mining approaches—from cracking the earth to refining the ore to digging deeper—helped in places such as Falun. Along northern rivers and streams, water mills sprang up and revolutionized the European economy. Cloth and paper production—the current focus of Stora as a world leader in packaging—were utterly transformed by the ability to perform repetitive tasks using the mechanics of a mill rather than backbreaking human labor. This was a direct threat to a feudal system built on the advantages accrued by lords who held sway over armies of serfs. In fact, there have been few more destabilizing developments in history than the transfer of power from those whose edge was in marshaling massive human resources to those who could use the combination of capital and technology to achieve similar outcomes.

In one instance, reported by the chronicler Joceline of Brakelond, the rise of a member of the “third estate” triggered a squabble between an Abbot Samson and a local dean named Herbert. Herbert had built a windmill to grind his corn, thus threatening Samson’s business. The abbot was not amused. “When the abbot heard of this,” according to the chronicler, “his anger was so kindled that he would scarcely eat or utter a single word. On the morrow, after hearing mass, he commanded the sacrists, that without delay he should send his carpenters thither and overturn it altogether and carefully put by the wooden materials in safe keeping.” Herbert argued the wind was a public good, adding that “he only wants to grind his own corn there and no one else’s, lest it be imagined he did this to the damage of the neighboring mills.” Samson would not relent. “His anger not yet appeased,” he responded, “I give you as many thanks as if you had cut off both my feet. By the mouth of God I will not eat bread until that building be plucked down. You are an old man and you should have known that it is not lawful even for the King or his justicar to alter or appoint a single thing within the [area] without the permission of the abbot and convent and why have you presumed to do such a thing?”

He then got to the heart of the problem: “Nor is this without prejudice to my mills, as you assert, because the burgesses will run to you and grind their corn at their pleasure, nor can I by law turn them away, because they are free men … Begone, begone. Before you have come to your house you shall hear what has befallen your mill.” Herbert was cowed and tore down his own windmill. But ultimately the business done among the freemen that Abbot Samson so feared undid the world he was trying to preserve. Mill owners were, of course, often feudal lords, and they usually forced their serfs to work in their mills. This gave the owners a double bang for their buck—one that was often further leveraged by their monopoly status within their local economies. Mill owners’ abuse of the advantages gained by those who controlled technology produced some resentment, as is expressed in The Canterbury Tales in Chaucer’s condemnation of an abusive miller. And, given the patchwork political and social structure of Europe at the time, some of the mills were also owned by rich clergy—who themselves were not above abuse, or at least also sought profit. But in the end, the result was a flowering of free enterprise in a Europe that grew from 42 million people in A.D. 1000 to 70 million in A.D. 1300. Indeed, it was the spread of new technologies for growing and distributing food that helped support this flourishing.

At the same time, the rising classes of merchants produced economic change and important political shifts. They moved away from traditional strongholds of feudalism into new towns, or “newburghs”—hence the name by which many members of this class were known: burghers. These towns became trading centers and sources of new revenue that didn’t fit into the old system. But while feudal lords were threatened by it, kings saw it as an opportunity, since the new towns deliberately lay outside the realms of lesser lords but still within the purview of the monarchs. What’s more, businesspeople invariably seek a comparatively transparent, predictable environment. Kings can provide this through centralized authority, which includes a single system of taxes, tariffs, and laws. The burghers got predictability and a single individual with whom to negotiate, and the kings got dependable income streams from a community that was more likely to support them rather than local or foreign potential rivals. The idea of national sovereignty advanced with increasing success from Charlemagne onward to Philip the Fair and beyond, dovetailing with the interests of merchants and traders. A bond was forged between royal heads of state and the business class that remained powerful, albeit fraught with tension, for almost a millennium—until today, in fact. As we shall see, it is the growing disconnect between the interests of business and national leaders in the global era that is likely to be an increasing source of tension in our times and could create the same kind of systemic changes that were produced during the volatile era in which both nation-states and an independent business community were born.

This affinity between the emerging third estate and national leaders is part of what propelled Philip the Fair to his political triumph. And, as similar power struggles were replayed across Europe, the power of the emerging class was decisive. In fact, in the biggest battle of the era, a family contest for the right to control the Duchy of Limburg—an area known for the past century or so primarily for the smells associated with its two most famous exports, Limburger cheese and eau de cologne—the tide of the Battle of Worringen turned on the ability of the victor, Duke John of Brabant, to harness the support at arms of the merchants, traders, peasants, and other free citizens of the surrounding communities. That battle, four thousand to a side, with one side led by Siegfried of Westerburg, the archbishop of Cologne, and the other by Duke John, took place on June 5, 1288, less than two weeks before Bishop Peter bought his shares in Stora Kopparberg.

1288 and Beyond: Change from the Perspective of a Swedish Mining Community

After the battle was concluded, Cologne and its surrounding territories had won a degree of independence that would only enhance their ability to trade, winning it the understandable and revealing appellation “the German Rome.” That status would play an important role in its ultimate membership with other major German cities in the Hanseatic League, a group of trading centers that would ultimately be the primary commercial lifeline connecting the miners of Stora Kopparberg to the markets of the European continent. Eleven days after Duke John triumphed at Worringen, Bishop Peter signed the agreement to reclaim his shares in Stora from his nephew in exchange for selected church lands. While the document in and of itself is primarily significant as the oldest artifact of a corporation still in operation today, it also resonates with many of the great themes and historical issues of its era: the role of kings and of clergy, the rise of enterprise and businesspeople, and the emergence of the state.

Much like the rest of Europe, Sweden had been grappling with the relative roles of the church and the state throughout the thirteenth century, as evidenced by the Convention of Skanninge in 1248. When King Valdemar Birgersson was crowned in 1266, the ceremony took place in Linkoping Cathedral in an effort to confer upon him the legitimacy that association with the church brought. Almost immediately this produced problems, since shortly after taking office, Valdemar committed adultery and had to go to Rome to seek forgiveness. The pope took the opportunity to force Valdemar to declare his fealty to him and to reaffirm Sweden’s responsibility to provide a steady stream of Peter’s Pence to the Vatican coffers. The fact that Valdemar went along with the pope angered his brothers, who, with aid from the Danish king, deposed him. After years of turmoil, Magnus Ladulas, one of the brothers, took power, this time holding the coronation in Uppsala Cathedral. Just to ensure that he would have the support of the clergy, he asserted that he reigned “by the Grace of God” and he extended tax immunities to the clergy.

To counterbalance the power of the church, in 1280 Magnus also issued the Alsno Decree, which gave a tax exemption that was previously reserved for the clergy—note the recurring issues and techniques for managing them—to any person who could provide himself with a horse and armor in defense of the kingdom. This primarily benefited the nobility, who thereafter were known as the fralse, meaning literally “the exempt.” Magnus further fine-tuned the balance he sought by working to limit the abuses that “the exempt” often inflicted on the 95 percent of the population who belonged to neither of the first two estates. It is through such efforts that he gained the moniker “Ladulas,” which literally means “barn-lock,” a nickname that came from his efforts to keep nobles from forcing peasants to feed and house them and their retinues when they were traveling. When Magnus signed the share document for Bishop Peter, it was clear he was a leader trying to balance all the forces within society in an effort to achieve some kind of stability.

But as in the rest of Europe, concessions to the church or the nobility seldom brought stability. Swedish kings rarely lived past the age of thirty, often done in by members of their own family or communities. In the first four centuries of the new millennium, fifteen different kings or heirs were murdered. Between 1130 and 1250 alone, the two main Swedish dynasties alternated periods of rule five times. The ongoing efforts of the next major dynasty, that of Valdemar and Magnus, the House of Folkung, did not typically fare much better. When Magnus’s older son, Birger, inherited the crown, his two brothers immediately began a series of efforts to overthrow him. So, with his wife, Margareta, Birger decided to invite his two siblings to a banquet at Nykoping Castle in December 1317. He fed them well and lubricated them with much wine. When they retired to their beds and collapsed asleep, he tied them up and threw them in the dungeon. When their supporters stormed the castle, Birger threw the key to the dungeon into the river and left town. By the time the dungeon doors were opened, the two brothers had starved to death.

The inability of the kings to manage their affairs with any sort of continuity undercut the one value offered by such royalty: stability. In response, local Swedish nobles assumed the balance of power in the kingdom and claimed the authority to elect kings. They also wrote into law the popular election of bishops—which didn’t make the church hierarchy very happy. But the search for stability through balance did not stop. In 1319, after Birger’s ouster, Magnus Eriksson took the throne. The election charter that was issued upon his ascension reconstituted the ruling class leadership into a council of nobles and clergy that possessed important formal rights and duties. This charter, argues Thomas Lindkvist, “can be regarded, at least symbolically, as the definitive end of the process through which Sweden became a state.” Magnus also took, as did other leaders of the era including Henry IV in England, to creating a system of common law, promoting native literature, abolishing bondage, and, in a twist that presages political developments centuries in the future, developing a royal oath that carefully stipulated the king’s duties to the people.

This was a watershed, and it placed Stora Kopparberg in the context of something like a functioning nation. The next centuries would not be easy. Within decades the plague would strike Europe, and Sweden would be hit hard. Economies were devastated and the balance of power shifted and shifted again. (The plague benefited the church in many instances, as the wealth of the deceased often passed to it.) Further uprisings and royal rivalries took their toll, and one result was a growing dependence of Swedish monarchs on their Danish and Norwegian counterparts. This led to Sweden’s involvement in the Kalmar Union, an alliance among the kingdoms placing them under the control of a single monarch that lasted until 1523. Finally, this phase of Sweden’s history ended with the reign of Gustav Vasa. Gustav saw that the ongoing Protestant Reformation afforded him the opportunity to create a strong national state that would be once and for all free of Rome’s influence. He also understood that to achieve that independence and true territorial sovereignty, he would have to depend on domestically generated loans and revenues.

By far the greatest current and potential producer of such revenues was the mine at Falun. That is why he led his periodic forays up to the Copper Mountain. Before he was elected king he led a group of nationalists there to secure money, supplies, and the support of the Dalesmen. Within two years of that raid, in 1523, he was elected king, and like many modern leaders, he discovered a crippling deficit linked to recent wars. He felt that if he was to create a strong state, all sectors of society would have to contribute to eliminating or reducing it. As the historian Franklin Scott explains in his Sweden: The Nation’s History:

The peasants balked at paying taxes for the war and wondered how they were better off. The men of Dalarna thought it was they who had put Gustav on the throne and so they wanted more voice in political affairs. The church people were distressed about the financial demands placed upon them and disturbed by the religious revolution that was spreading rapidly beyond Germany. Neither merchants nor farmers liked the rising price of salt nor the bad coinage.

The answer for Vasa was the answer that would drive the next chapter in European development, the inevitable next step following the buildup of the state by carving away the prerogatives of the church and the more recent advent of the Reformation. He would effectively nationalize the church and make it a tool of his kingdom. Alongside the burgeoning of the nation’s greatest enterprise—the mines that furnished the raw materials for his weapons, the nation’s farm tools and utensils, and the hard currency—this step would establish an integrated, stable, powerful Swedish state that could become the foundation for an empire. He would scheme and cajole and battle for control of both pillars of his new Swedish society, and as he achieved it, he would be collaborating in the remaking not only of Sweden but of Europe and of the entire international system.