We have so far taken snapshots of politics among the Greeks and Romans, but we may now exhibit the process of politics coming into existence all over again, and in a new setting. During the Middle Ages, civic order emerged in western Europe out of brutality and violence, and for the first time religion played an independent role. To show this as the massive achievement it actually was is to collide with current prejudice, which commonly takes ‘feudal’ and ‘medieval’ to be terms of abuse. But ‘feudal’ merely signifies a specific form of order emerging out of violence, while ‘medieval’ is the term educated men of early modern times used to refer to the thousand-year stretch that separated them from the Classical period. There is much to be said for the view that the thousand years between the fall of the Roman empire and the emergence of the modern world is the most important strand of all in the weaving of our political texture.
Europe as we know it is the outcome of successive waves of migration by tribes pushed westwards by the pressure of others behind them. They were attracted by the evident prosperity and civilization of the Roman empire. Travelling in great hordes, the wandering peoples whom we know from the names the Romans gave them – Huns, Goths, Visigoths, Angles, Franks, and so on – pushed into the empire over many centuries, at first being absorbed by the Roman structure but later disrupting and destroying it. These barbarians set up kingdoms of their own in the countryside and in time were converted to Christianity. Each realm had a king and a set of magnates who were generally granted land in return for allegiance. Temporary grants of land soon became hereditary, but it took centuries for the old stability of the Roman era to return, partly because of internal quarrels and partly because of the pressure of new wanderers in search of land and security. The Anglo-Saxons, for example, conquered England only to find themselves attacked by the Danes, and then the Normans. These Normans themselves originated in a set of Viking raiders who in the ninth century had carved out a province in the kingdom of the Franks, and went on to create another empire in Sicily. In these troubled times, the only security came from protection by a class of professional warriors. And protection came at a price.
Civil order thus had to be reinvented, and here we shall consider three of the elements out of which the civilization of the high Middle Ages was constructed. The first was the vital love of freedom inherited from the barbarians themselves. In spite of the actual violence of these ages, the barbarian tribes had a powerful moral and legal sense of themselves as the inheritors of a tribal law on which their very identity was based. These were people whose pride consisted in subjection to those to whom they were bound by oath. Kings were the guardians of law. Violence and disorder resulted from the fact that a strong moral and legal sense of how to treat one’s own community was in no way paralleled by any sense of the significance of others. It took the religion of Christianity and the morality of courtly love to begin the diffusion of this particular lesson. Europeans found their very identity in submission to a law which they believed themselves to inherit from their ancestors. Law was, as it were, untouched by human will, and it was to be some centuries before the idea that one might legislate began to be entertained. This was an idea which came in time from a renewed familiarity with Roman law.
Politics in these early times was, then, the dealings between a king and his more important vassals. It focused around small, primitive, moving courts. But gradually these kings evolved from being the leaders of tribes to being the masters of realms, and the law of which they were custodians became a law of the land rather than a tribe. In England, the kings steadily extended the scope of ‘the king’s peace’ and made themselves available to the lowest in the land as a court of appeal against the exactions of their own direct vassals. And in all these local processes (the details of which varied across Europe) one fact stood out: civil order had to be constructed by agreement with a set of magnates whose control over their own tenants gave them an independent position of their own. This is the second element crucial in the re-emergence of politics. It has been plausibly suggested that the uniqueness of European feudalism resulted from the fact that Europe is a well-watered continent and that its agriculture, unlike that of China, India, and the Middle East, does not depend upon the construction of large dams and canals for irrigation and flood control. Such enterprises require great central power for the mobilization of labour, and characteristically issue in a despotic form of order. Where the weather better distributes what agriculture requires, local life is relatively independent of central power, and authority must consult with its subjects. Like all grand theories of social causation, this one needs to be treated with caution, but it is certainly part of the truth. That it cannot be the whole truth is clear, for nothing in human society is independent of the ideas people have about their situation, and no idea is generated purely by physical necessity.
The theory does, however, help to explain the political structure which emerged in Europe in the second half of the medieval millennium. By the eleventh century we find a mosaic of principalities ruled by dukes and counts, some independent trading cities, and the beginnings of realms out of which we can, with hindsight, see the nation-states of Europe emerging. To the historian, all things are contingent, and the national order of European states solidified gradually out of whole successions of unpredictable events. The Treaty of Verdun in 843, which divided the realm of Charlemagne into three parts, is often taken to be the watershed which gave us France, Germany, and that third kingdom, never fully unified, which stretches from the Netherlands in the north to Savoy and Lombardy in the south. As another example of contingency, we might take the Provençal state which might have emerged in southern France had not the crusade against the Albigensian heretics in the early thirteenth century devastated that area and subjected it to the French monarchy. Kings intrigued, nobles fought wars, and it was the intermixture of policy and accident that determined which among the variety of languages and cultures in Europe came to be identified with nations. Some fashions, however, spread spontaneously all through Europe. The fashion for courtly romance, for example, seems to have emerged first in Provence and the surrounding regions, but had immense consequences, in conjunction with Christian theology, in generating a place for women in Western civilization quite different from that found in other cultures.
Everywhere we find kings seeking to extend their dominion over both neighbouring territories and their own vassals. And in this respect the story of freedom is one of institutions and laws which balanced the demands of the dominant powers in these small societies. The king of England as the fountainhead of justice had an officer of his own, called a sheriff, in each of the counties, and his judges travelled the country dispensing justice in response to an ever more flexible set of claims and petitions called writs. But the nobles in turn had the right to force an errant king to recognize a betrayal of his trust and to force him to make reparation. The most famous occasion of this sort was when King John was forced to affirm the Magna Carta at Runnymede in the Thames valley in 1215, and Magna Carta became enshrined in English legend as the source of English liberties. In fact this was not a unique medieval occasion, but one of the standard crises of medieval politics. And it illustrates a central feature of European development: rights and liberties were first elaborated by, and commonly in the interests of, the nobility and the richer inhabitants of the towns, and then only very slowly filtered down, over the generations, to lower levels of society. The voter of today, in other words, inherits the rights first sustained by the barons of old. Whatever the defects of this historical experience, it did have the consequence that the culture needed to sustain freedom had been thoroughly tested in custom and institution before the movement for democracy extended these rights to all. Democracy has thus emerged in European states out of an organic development which sustains it at a profound level.
The essence of medieval politics lay in the fact that the king could not rule – even to the extent of carrying out the very limited functions of rule as it was understood at that time – without the co-operation of partners. He had to consult the nobles, the magnates of the Church, and, in time, representatives from the towns who could make commitments of money. It was this situation which generated the quite new institution of parliaments. Parliaments have a complicated history, very different in each of the European realms. France, for example, had both parlements which were essentially legal institutions, and the Estates General (états généraux), which were consultative. Kings needed parliaments to agree taxation and sometimes to give weight to royal policy in international dealings. Subjects valued them as they offered an opportunity to influence the law and to secure remedies against the abuse of power. The history of the English parliament is perhaps the most complicated of all; it is also the most significant, in that parliamentary institutions fell into disuse in most of Europe in the early modern period, and were only revived as devices of liberal democracy in the nineteenth century on the model of what had so successfully survived in England. But what makes parliaments an almost pure example of political creativity is that they responded to the exigencies of the moment. Unplanned, they turned out to be the essential instruments of democracy, but it was quite late in the day that they provoked reflection on such abstract aspects of their operation as representation.
The third element of medieval politics is the most important of all. It concerns religion, which is the beliefs and feelings a civilization has about the point of being alive. The Greeks and Romans had enjoyed a civic religion, in which it made no sense to distinguish between membership of church and state: the same set of institutions covered both of the functions we in the West now so clearly distinguish. In classical times, the significance of a human life consisted in exhibiting rationality and serving the republic. With the rise of Christianity to a position of dominance in the Roman empire by the fourth century, we have a quite new religious situation. One had been born an Athenian or a Roman. Religion was part of the package. But one could only become a Christian by deliberately acquiring a set of beliefs. In addition, Christianity was a religion of the book, something which set a premium on education and literacy. Partly because of this it soon became so complicated a structure of beliefs, sentiments, injunctions, and rituals that it required a vast amount of intellectual reflection, including philosophizing, in order to make it a coherent whole. Beliefs are vulnerable things, requiring custodians of their purity or orthodoxy, for the human capacity to misunderstand, or perhaps understand all too well, is very considerable. The elaboration of Christian belief out of the relatively slight materials to be found in the New Testament was the work of church councils over several centuries, and in an important sense this work has never ceased. It began with the letters of St Paul in the first generation, and was continued throughout the early centuries of Christianity. By the death of St Augustine in AD 430, the basic structure (and an immense amount of intricate superstructure out of which heresies might be made) had been elaborated. This dangerously disruptive possibility of unorthodox belief is, of course, the source of much of the intolerance to be found in the history of Christianity, an intolerance of which the Inquisition has become an emblem. But it is also the source of much of the intellectual vitality of a Christian civilization.
Christianity was in these elaborations revealed to be a religion of moral challenge. Human beings were the workmanship of the creator of the universe. They had betrayed his trust by falling into sin but had been redeemed by the divine mission of Jesus. Human life was a time of trial and test, after which some people would have immortal life. Others, perhaps most, would suffer a different fate, and much thought was given to what it might be, the medieval elaboration of the torments of hell setting the tone of human life for centuries. What this religion meant was that each person was the custodian of his or her own soul and responsible for it to God. Death was no escape from this awful responsibility, for judgement continued beyond the grave. It affected great and humble alike. Greek and Roman religion and philosophy were, it will be remembered, highly élitist. Full humanity was only possible for the hero and the philosopher, while slaves, and to some extent women, were inferior specimens of an ideal. Christianity often reversed this judgement: it was the humble people who were closest to the spirit of love which God was thought to require. This particularly included women, who were enthusiastic about a faith preaching peace and love.
Some enthusiasts for ancient republics – Machiavelli and Nietzsche are examples of this line of thought – have taken this aspect of Christian belief as an enfeebling pietism hostile to the vitality and sense of honour found in the warrior. Whatever view we take of this, we must not conclude that the respublica Christiana of the Middle Ages was notably peaceful or obedient. The Church did indeed seek to encourage peace and humility among a tetchy and quarrelsome set of kings and aristocrats, but it also preached crusades, most of which aimed to take Jerusalem back from Islam by main force. However much the pulpit might echo to the reiteration of Romans 13, in which St Paul exhorts Christians to obey the powers that be, European life was notably turbulent and rebellious. The real significance Christianity had for political life lay in its transformation of human values.
Christianity affirmed the equal value in the sight of God of each human soul. And the value of each individual lay not in his or her participation in universal reason, but in a personality which responded to the challenge of sin. Philosophers found it difficult to give an account of this notion of personality, and tended to relapse back into the classical account of moral life as a contest between reason and the passions. But with the emergence of Protestantism at the Reformation in the sixteenth century, it was becoming clear to all, Protestant and Catholic alike, that modern human beings must be conceived of in terms of will, though not in any superficial sense which might identify will merely with getting one’s way. Christianity turned human attention away from political conquest and the material things of the world towards the cultivation of the inner life, and the emergence of the modern world is the slow construction of a society in which that concern with the inner life could fully parallel involvement with the world. The modern world is, of course, a dynamic process, and individualism in this sense has perhaps long passed its peak, but its debris is still to be found around us, in popular books about how to attain happiness by inner fulfilment and in the popularity of the idea of human rights, which would not be conceivable except as the outcome of the tortuous journey of Christian theology.
The Christian religion transformed the Roman empire and allowed new spiritual shoots to grow amid the decay of its civil and military power. The Roman empire in the west turned itself into the Roman Catholic Church, Roman provinces becoming dioceses, the Pope rising in power as the Emperor declined, the Roman foundational myth of Romulus coming to be focused on Jesus as the founder of the City of God, and the distinctions of Roman law being exploited to make sense of the relations between the Old Testament and the revelation of Jesus. The holy texts guided life. Jesus had said: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my Church’ and the successors of St Peter as bishops of Rome built up a power which came to bestride the continent and in time the world. An alliance between this sacred power and that of the monarchs was forged by turning the inauguration of kingship into the religious ceremony of coronation. The Church turned marriage into a sacred as well as a merely social bond. By the eleventh century, the Pope could fight the most powerful of secular rulers on equal terms and control high affairs of state. Europe was spiritually governed by an absolute monarch whose agents were charged with the regulation of large areas of life. The very architecture of Europe was dominated by the vast cathedrals of the towns, and by the churches found in every village from the Mediterranean to the shores of the Baltic. In time, papal power overreached itself, the secular rulers reasserted themselves, and after 1309 the papacy spent many years at Avignon in the pocket of the king of France before returning in the following century to Rome. But it had indelibly affected the structure of European politics, becoming, along with the nobility, another power which kings had to balance as they constructed their realms.