Grzymala-Busse, Religious roots of governance
Conclusion: "emulation of ecclesiastical models shaped the Medieval state"
The Source:
Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Sacred Foundations: the Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State, Princeton University Press 2023
Conclusion
The challenge and example of religious authority galvanized state formation in Europe. The medieval church sought to ensure its own autonomy and power, and in the process transformed the political terrain of Europe. Papal ambitions and ecclesiastical influence help to explain several puzzling developments, such as the persistent fragmentation of Europe, the precocious development of state institutions such as chanceries and fiscal offices, the rapid spread of law and universities, and the rise of concepts of representation and binding consent.
First, the territorial fragmentation of Europe was no accident, but a result of deliberate church policy designed to neutralize the threat of the Holy Roman Empire. … [The] fragmentation of territorial authority took off as the church gained power after 1100. Popes used a variety of tactics to destabilize and to fragment the rule of monarchs they found hostile. The success of these relied on the good will and cooperation of other rulers, which is why wars by proxy, crusades, or alliances were so much more effective than excommunications. The differentiation of religious and lay authority in the Investiture Conflict, and new ideas of monarchs as sovereigns free from external superiors, also reinforced the atomization.
This fragmentation persisted long into the modern era, into the nineteenth century, contrary to accounts arguing that early modern war consolidated states. The splintering of political authority endured because local notables gained power at the expense of the emperor. The constant forays of the emperors outside of Germany, and the distraction of papal conflict, allowed these princes, dukes, and bishops to claim authority. They could stymie imperial efforts to centralize power and obtain even more concessions from the emperors. In Italy, self-governing cities became competing republics. As a result, the fragmentation of authority in Germany and Italy was durable and lasted long after its catalyst, the Catholic Church, had lost its wealth and organizational reach.
As intense as this rivalry was in the Middle Ages, its goal was to delineate spheres of influence rather than eliminate any players. The conflict was about autonomy and jurisdiction, rather than mutual destruction. In many accounts, this constructive fragmentation of Europe was critical to subsequent economic and political development in Europe, characterized by efficiency-enhancing competition and the absence of an overweening, overly powerful emperor who could stifle growth. Kings and popes were counterweights to each other, in ways that rulers in other settings, whether the Islamic Caliphate or the Ottoman, Byzantine, and Chinese empires, never faced.
Second, the church also provided models for institutions of taxation, courts, and parliaments that developed long before early modern war or bargaining supposedly made them necessary. Rivalry and fragmentation were themselves not enough to create new institutions of governance. They provided the incentive, but not the means. Instead, innovations at the papal court were the source of both institutional templates and governing concepts. Medieval secular rulers borrowed and adapted ecclesiastical techniques of taxation and answering petitions (a key role of governments at the time), and the division of labor within the court offices. Bishops and clergy, stationed in royal courts in faraway lands, transmitted these church templates: everything from the art of formal letter writing to methods for tax collection to a system for answering petitions. This emulation of ecclesiastical models explains the similar division of labor, institutions, and operating procedures across the European royal courts.
The rivalry between secular rulers and the papacy interacted with this emulation. Where domestic authority was fragmented, as in the Holy Roman Empire, rulers were unable to use these models to consolidate authority and establish new institutions of central governance. At the other extreme, in England, where the papacy counted on rulers to stay out of the conflict and made all kinds of concessions to that end, kings were free to centralize power and develop new institutions as they saw fit, the system of common law being perhaps the most salient example.
Third, the church contributed to the primacy of law and to the culture of learning in Europe. The rediscovery of Roman law during the Investiture Conflict, and the systematization of canon law a few decades later, meant that law could be a potent weapon in the conflict between the papacy and secular monarchs. Popes and emperors sought out legal arguments and competed for the experts who would ferret them out. This reinforced the notion of the law as a dispute resolution mechanism, and the idea that rules, evidence, and precedent mattered more than ordeals, sworn promises, or status. We also see competition over jurisdiction and cases, since there were parallel court systems, one lay and one ecclesiastical.
The huge new demand for legal expertise led to the rise of new law schools and universities during the Investiture Conflict. Nearly all these new institutions taught both Roman and canon law on an equal basis. Two consequences followed: first, both of these corpuses permeated European civil law, along with local, customary, manorial, and urban law. Second, as popes and emperors vied to found, fund, and protect universities and their students, they catalyzed a surge of learned expertise that would make possible credible contracts, property rights, trade, and economic growth. The papacy and the emperors invested in this human capital partly to be more efficient competitors. In the process, they generated enormous positive externalities that neither anticipated: the primacy of law and an ethos of learning, the very foundations of the Enlightenment and the “culture of growth”.
Finally, conceptual innovations of the church made possible the distinctly European versions of representative assemblies. Councils and assemblies are widespread, found across different cultures and historical periods, whether the Vikings in the ninth century or the Huron in the seventeenth. But what gave life to European parliaments, and what made them different, were the notions of consent and representation. These concepts, in turn, have their direct roots in the church, as do early notions of corporate governance, the summoning of parliaments, and majority decision rules. This was the church’s contribution: to transform medieval parliaments into representative bodies that could make decisions on behalf of the commonwealth . … Here, some church thinkers went even further and advocated for conciliarism, the notion that the collective decisions of the assembly should trump the executive, whether pope or king. These ideas went nowhere within the church, and in fact, inadvertently hindered a speedy response to the Reformation—but secular theorists would pick up and adopt these.
Many of the distinct features of European state development—the multitude of sovereign statelets, rule of law, autonomous universities, and national representative assemblies—thus have sacred foundations: the powerful medieval church. Its assertion of autonomy and authority led to conflict with many European kings, emperors, and princes. At the same time, its administrative advances, conceptual innovations, and the network of bishops and clergy all across Europe offered new patterns and resources for building state institutions. These were still embryonic administrations, but key aspects of the rule of law, taxation, and parliaments had been established long before early modern conflict and bargaining would give them center stage.
Subsequent state formation in the early modern and modern periods was based on these earlier advances. As a result, the purported causes of state formation (wars necessitating taxes, which then necessitate bargaining) may in fact be the consequences. For example, early modern warfare relied on the medieval fragmentation of territory for both its protagonists and its lengthy course. This fragmentation not only created the space for new communes, ambitious princes, and regional politicians—but these actors then ensured that the fragmentation would be sustained and defended. In face of these vested interests, early modern war did not neatly reduce the number of European states or consolidate them—that would have to wait until the nineteenth century. By the same token, both parliaments and universities, critical to accounts of elite bargaining and the economic takeoff in the early modern era, were both medieval innovations, nurtured by both religious and secular actors. The vast stores of human capital and legal expertise diffused across Europe, making contracts and impersonal exchange both possible and viable. The very autonomy of church and state, seen as critical both to the Reformation and to subsequent political development in Europe, has its roots in the eleventh century. Rather than early modern war necessitating taxation and bargaining, then, the development of state capacities in the Middle Ages made it possible for stronger states to tax and to bargain—and then to wage war more effectively and efficiently.
Many ecclesiastical concepts and institutions of governance took on a life of their own. Secular rulers adopted these precedents for their own ends, in a case of “institutional conversion” that subverted the church. They justified, fueled, and legitimated secular governance, and in the process, rendered the church increasingly obsolete. Pronouncements such as “rex in suo regno imperator” were meant to hinder imperial ambition, but were then used to question papal authority as well. Human capital flourished with the investments of popes and kings, only to escape the walls of courts and universities, and the control of the church. The church lent models for legal arguments, documentation, petitions, and taxation: secular rulers used these to assert their autonomy from the church and consolidate their power.
European state development was so distinct because the church itself was unusual: unlike other religious denominations, it became a centralized hierarchy, with a powerful papacy at its apex. The church was the most powerful and influential actor in medieval Europe, one that commanded wealth, human capital, and spiritual authority like no other. Elsewhere, the state developed without the challenge of a monumental religious rival. The autonomy of the church was critical. Not only did independence serve as the incentive to fragment Europe and conceptualize sovereignty, but it also made it possible for the church to then shape the European state.
To see why this autonomy was so important, we only need to look to Byzantium, after the schism of 1054 split the one church into western and eastern churches. The story of the church in the West is the one we have just visited: reformist popes gained ecclesiastical independence from the overweening secular authority of the Holy Roman emperors and local landlords, competed with rulers for authority, and shaped state formation. In contrast, in Byzantium, a church with the same roots was powerless to shape the state. The Byzantine empire was in a more advantageous starting position: it was a centralized tax state with a budgetary capacity unmatched in Europe until 1204 and the capture of Constantinople. Byzantium had a fixed court and capital since 330, long before the western empire did. Yet during the schism, the church did not become independent: instead, the Byzantine emperor assumed nearly complete authority over the church. As a result, Byzantine emperors called church councils, shaped theological pronouncements, and taxed the clergy, exercising political authority over the church. In effect, the situation was reversed: the emperor shaped how the church would develop. Without the example of the autonomous church, there were no new templates to adopt. Instead, eastern emperors preserved Roman administrative offices, such as the praetorian prefect. Offices, hierarchies, and ceremonies multiplied. Specialization, when it occurred, did not follow western trajectories: medieval Byzantine justice and finance offices were fused at all levels, for example, as were military affairs and justice, with military commanders acting as judges.
This is not to claim that the church somehow determined the course of European state development. Church models were not always emulated (despite repeated exposure), as clearly demonstrated by the growth of common law in England, the refusal of most monarchies to adopt elections as a way of choosing their kings, and the rejection of chastity at all levels of society. Theological prohibitions against usury were widely ignored in practice, in both ecclesiastical and lay courts. Some precedents were unsavory and reeked of corruption, such as the sale of offices, nepotism, or the sale of indulgences. The institutional church was a strategic actor, developing clear goals and tactics in light of others’ actions—but it could also badly miscalculate. Popes as politicians were all too fallible, as shown by Boniface VIII’s overreach with Philip IV, the competing antipopes of the Great Schism, and the delayed response to the Reformation for fear of a conciliarist resurgence. The papacy also faced weaknesses inherent to its religious organization: controversies over succession, internal divisions and schisms, and finances that never quite covered its ambitions.
So what does this European trajectory tell us about state formation more broadly? For one thing, war may be one path of state formation, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient, not even in Europe. It is not necessary, because institutions attributed to war, such as taxes and parliaments, arose long before the demands of the military revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If anything, these costly conflicts undermined state capacity, by leading monarchs to sell offices, honors, and economic privileges such as tax collection or monopolies. War meant venality, not state building, even in early modern Europe. War is also not sufficient: despite hundreds of years of warfare, the Holy Roman Empire did not consolidate into a national state, nor was it able to centralize its institutions. Stability and relative peace, rather than the chaos of war, made nascent state institutions possible. States made war—and war could unmake states.
The broader point here is that we need to be more careful in our analyses of state formation. First, we need to problematize European state development before exporting its truisms to other areas. Not only is European state development not a precedent for other states—its own history is far more complicated and attributable to different forces than we thought. State institutions did not arise simply because war necessitated them or elites agreed on them: rather, clergy diffused institutional templates that were then adopted, adapted, and legitimated.
Second, no single cause is responsible for state formation. Multiple processes and dynamics coexist in the same broad episodes of state building. It is not simply that state building differed across geographical and historical contexts—it is that we see multiple, distinct mechanisms within the same context, in this case post-Carolingian Europe. The European state did not simply arise out of armed conflict or domestic negotiations: the fragmentation of territorial authority and the emulation of ecclesiastical models also shaped the state in foundational ways. Moreover, these mechanisms interact: fragmentation meant that some rulers could not emulate and build central state institutions, as successive Holy Roman emperors found out. Emulation also involved adaptation and reinterpretation, bricolage and reassembly, not simply a straightforward transferal of resources or templates.
Third, culture and ideology also build states. Such influence has been held responsible for the backwardness of the Middle East after 1000, and for the scientific and economic advances in England but not in China after 1650. Cultural forces mattered just as much in medieval Europe. The church played such an outsized role in European state development partly because of its wealth and political ambitions, but also because it was a fundamentally religious organization, one that could offer salvation and legitimation, eternal life and temporal glory. Kings may have claimed to have been appointed by God, but none would dare to promise the forgiveness of sins or the hope of heaven. When the papacy developed its comparatively sophisticated bureaucracy, taxation, and justice regime, these templates were taken up by rulers not just because they were efficient, but because they were authoritative, stamped with the imprimatur of the Holy See.
The literature on institutional adoption has emphasized that local, endogenous solutions are often more efficient and effective than those imposed by high-modernist governments. Yet the case of medieval emulation of the church suggests that institutional models from central, high, and far-off authorities can be successfully replanted if they are both familiar and legitimate, transmitted by brokers such as bishops, with dual authority in both spheres. The church could thus foster institutions critical to subsequent economic development, constitutionalism, and representative government, including the rule of law, the separation of church and state, universities, and parliaments. Europe took a long and fitful road to get there, but its peculiar trajectory would not have been possible without rivalry with the church and the secular adoption of institutional solutions with their roots in ecclesiastical practice and administration.
The final irony of European state development is that democratic and secular institutions can have their roots in an authoritarian and religious organization. Not surprisingly, many modern analyses have focused on how the Catholic Church stymied economic growth and how the Reformation freed Europe to pursue knowledge, reason, free markets, and property rights. Yet in the picture that emerges from this book, the medieval church, in all its secular ambition and spiritual monopoly, also brought about the separation of church and state, learning, universities, and human capital, the primacy and rule of law, and the concepts of representation, consent, and sovereignty. The most secular of state institutions can have the most sacred of foundations.
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