Watts, Power, government, political life in old Europe
State of the art overview of political power in the later middle ages..
The Source:
John Watts, ‘Power, government, and political life’, in The Later Middle Ages, edited by Isabella Lazzarini in The Short Oxford History of Europe series, OUP 2021
On 23 November 1407, Louis, duke of Orléans, uncle of the king of France and effective ruler of his kingdom, was set upon in the streets of Paris and murdered, his head cut in two by a halberd, so that his brains spilled on the pavement. The murderers, it emerged a few days later, had been hired by the duke’s nephew, John ‘the Fearless’, duke of Burgundy, who went on to justify his crime in an open letter to the court and the crowned heads of Europe as a form of tyrannicide, committed ‘for the safety of the king’s person’ [Charles VI] and ‘the general good of the realm’. Burgundy was soon pardoned, and then—just as soon—his pardon was rescinded, as Orléans’ heirs and allies regained control of the French court. There followed a lengthy civil war …
… This war was, in the first place, a division of factions within France … whose government raised huge sums in taxation, dispensed favours and pardons, and managed an extensive network of officers; these factions reached deeply into every province and every city, merging into the local squabbles of knightly landowners, urban oligarchs, and workers.
But it was also a public and political conflict, involving the assertion and defence of policies, principles, and values—positions on the duties of the subject and the ruler; on the importance of defending the kingdom; on the proper level of taxation; on the appropriate liberties of towns and nobles. To bid for the support of lords, citizens, and commons, both sides used the available technologies of preaching and demonstration, letter-writing, and the circulation of pamphlets.
At the same time, this was a conflict which spread out across Europe. Orléans had been allied to the recently deposed Holy Roman Emperor, Wenceslas IV; in the long-running papal schism, he supported the Avignon pope against his Roman counterpart; and he sponsored French royal interests in Italy—in Genoa, Milan, and Naples. Burgundy, on the other hand, was linked to the new emperor, Rupert of the Palatinate; he supported the moves to establish a general council of the church that could remove the contending popes; he was not interested in Italian adventures, but was instead building an assemblage of territories across the Low Countries, extending the dominance of his family to the north and east.
These two princes thus represented extensive connections that reached deeply into France and well beyond, but that was not the limit of the impact of their conflict ... it merged into the later stages of the Hundred Years War [between France and England, 1337–1453], as well as the struggles of popes and councils …
… This highly specific act of violence and its multiple ramifications capture some of the central features of later medieval political life. It was often bloody and personal, but the resort to bloodshed was politically purposeful, and the focus on individuals reflected the parts they played in larger frameworks of power. Those frameworks were both ‘private’ and ‘public’— they were followings of men and women, linked together in relationships of marriage, service, or friendship for mutual advantage; but they also involved the performance of official roles, the negotiation of public business, the management of institutions. The frameworks of power were national, international and ‘transnational’.
Europe was divided into self-conscious political spaces, each with a measure of sovereignty and identity, but these spaces also overlapped and any significant power-holder was likely to be able to operate across them, as well as within them.
And, within virtually any political setting, authority was contestable, so politics were lively, convulsive, prone to sudden swings of fortune: they involved a complicated mixture of relationships among elites and much wider movements, voiced and promoted by representative assemblies and popular revolts. … There were numerous wars …
… These features of contemporary political life have made the later Middle Ages a peculiarly challenging period to study. For a long time dismissed as ‘a mass of undignified petty conflicts’, repellently complicated and impossible to disentangle without oversimplifying, the politics of the later Middle Ages have recently come to be seen in a more positive light. As we shall see, this is partly because we have reached new understandings of the relationship between political discord and the growth of government …
… In this short essay, my aim is to survey the main patterns of later medieval politics, and to consider whether or not—and in what ways—there is a trajectory to be traced across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But first, it will be helpful to look at the historiography.
Political history—past and present
… historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … had seen the later Middle Ages as a period of declining political morality. In their eyes, the achievements of medieval civilization were destroyed over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by a mixture of social crisis, caused by famine, plague and war, and cultural change, in which commercialization, individualism, and a rising penchant for violence seemed to be the main drivers.
But [there were] positive developments in the later Middle Ages … [for other] historians, the period was one of political advancement, in which governments reached more deeply and effectively into society, and the intersection of the ‘private’ power of aristocrats and oligarchs with the ‘public’ power of governmental institutions was not inherently disorderly, but potentially integrative.
Later generations [of historians] built on these foundations … [they saw] the ‘genesis of the modern state’, especially between about 1280 and 1360, when new institutions of military service, taxation, and representation were developed across Europe. More recently, there has been a turn away from ‘the state’, to acknowledge the full range of political activity—not only the formal operations of institutions, but the less formal workings of influence, debate, networking, and the like.
This has led some historians to prefer the term ‘polity’ to ‘state’, incidentally acknowledging the political and governmental qualities of bodies other than kingdoms (principalities, leagues, cities, churches, rural communes, and so on) and linking together the story of constitutional development with the practice of politics.
Others have focused on ‘empowering interactions’, emphasizing the ways in which political communities were built from below as well as from above, or on ‘logics of political conflict’, accepting … ‘contentious politics’ as normal, rather than pathological. Against this background, there has been a renewed interest in popular political activity and in its political (as distinct from economic) causes and consequences.
Equally … in part a legacy of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ … later medieval historians have paid increasing attention to the sphere of political communication—the exploitation of spreading technologies, such as preaching, written vernaculars, and rising literacy, to address and shape an emerging public opinion, or public sphere.
Taking all these developments together, it is clear that today’s historians regard the political life of the Middle Ages from a much less jaundiced perspective than their predecessors … The period has shed its reputation as an era of decline, crisis, and chaos, and is now seen as a time of growing governmental and political exuberance—one in which authorities were obliged to negotiate with those they wished to subject, and one in which representation was a key facet of political assertion (i.e. representation in the dual sense of standing for others and seeking to create a public impression, through ritual, propaganda, debate, and so on).
The sphere of the political, and the ways of understanding that sphere, have significantly increased, and the kinds of confrontations that were characteristic of the period—popular revolts, wars and civil wars, coups and magnate rebellions—are recognized not as mindless violence, but as rational products of political and governmental dynamics. Equally, the scope of the Europe under discussion has broadened. As recently as the 1970s, it was common for the ‘European history’ of this period—at least in Britain—to confine itself to the west and centre of the continent … Now we are able to access a much richer literature …
So … a rich, broad, comparatively minded picture of the later medieval political world is beginning to emerge, and we shall aim to trace its contours in the next few pages. One of the central questions someone encountering this period for the first time will want to know is, ‘what is the storyline?’ Is there one, in fact, or have the scholars of this period simply replaced ‘muddle’ with the more pretentious term ‘complexity’? Like any students of politics, we shall also want to explore the causes of conflict and the causes of consensus, or at least of cooperation.
But there are two obvious starting points for our enquiry: one is to understand the background to our period—the legacy of the high Middle Ages, and specifically of the thirteenth century … the other is to examine the major political forms of the period, and their distribution across Europe. Let us take these in turn.
The inheritance from the thirteenth century
The central Middle Ages were the scene of what might be called a ‘legal-bureaucratic revolution’, in which many characteristic forms of state power were devised and implemented. There were perhaps four overlapping elements to this revolution.
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The first was in the sphere of law and jurisdiction. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a common body of Roman and Canon (church) law was recovered and codified by scholars working in cathedral schools, the papal curia, and the first universities. It came to form part of the training of clerks in church and state, and so to influence the identity and activity of governments, who began to legislate for themselves and their subjects and dependants, on the model of Roman emperors.
Custom—agreed principles relying on memory and face-to-face negotiation—came to be reshaped as law: fixed, written, authoritative, and publicly known (so the conventions governing the relations between lords of land and their followers came to be recast as a kind of ‘feudal law’ by the end of the twelfth century).
Courts came to be arranged in hierarchies, with top-level rulers—popes, emperors, kings—asserting control over the highest crimes and claiming for themselves the right to examine and overturn the judgements of lower courts; ‘jurisdiction’ became a common word to describe authority, as the holder of high justice and the person with the power to legislate (usually in some form of assembly, or at least on the basis of petition or complaint) was readily recognized as sovereign.
Roman and canon law also bestowed a series of axioms and principles which could be used to define and redefine the rights of rulers and subjects—a process which involved a series of innovations. The idea that a given king or lord was imperator in regno suo (emperor in his realm), for instance, made him the sole source of rule, entitled in a state of necessitas, or emergency, to military and financial aid from his subjects. So it was that Romano-canonical ideas underpinned the development of new forms of military service and public taxation in the course of the thirteenth century.
These ideas did not only benefit rulers—the notions of the digna vox (what was appropriate for a ruler) and the lex regia (the law that made rulers) confined them to what was in the common interest of their subjects; the canonical tag quod omnes tangit bound the ruler to the consent of his subjects, or at least their representatives, in matters of law and tax—but it is not hard to see how they created the raw materials of modern states, both in the central notion of a common authority, and in many of the lineaments of state power: jurisdiction, legislation, taxation, representation, ‘national’ service.
The Latin church, and most of the kingdoms, principalities, and cities of Europe, had developed this kind of authority, and the governmental machinery to assert it, by the end of the thirteenth century.
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A second element lay in the sphere of political ideas, where the key notions of Roman and canon law were afforced by concepts drawn from the classical tradition—particularly the works of Aristotle, translated into Latin in the mid-thirteenth century, but also those of Cicero, and those of Augustine, and other Christian interpreters of Greek and Roman culture. A cluster of jurists, theologians, and litterateurs—men such as Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Marsilius of Padua, Ramon Lull, and Dante Alighieri—wrote glosses, handbooks, novels, and poems which fleshed out the idea of the political community and explained how it should operate.
The content of these writings varied in all sorts of ways. Some texts presented authority in ‘republican’ terms, as collective and law-bound, others as monarchical; some presented the ruler as a kind of priest, others as a kind of knight; they differed in the relationship they prescribed between the ruler’s grace or will and the dictates of law, or between hierarchy and collectivity; they might depict the natural setting for politics as a kingdom, or an empire, or a city, or a church.
But these texts tended to agree on the naturalness of an association between ruler and people: the former ought to protect the latter; the latter ought to feel a common obligation, and a common identity, under the former. In other words, these works of theory—again widely circulated among clerks and influential in governing circles—advanced the concept of the state or political community, even if they differed on how it should be configured.
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A third element in this ‘legal-bureaucratic revolution’ was the instrumentalizing of writing as a technique of government. We now realize that this was not new in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but it is clear that it grew dramatically in that period.
Rulers began to keep systematic records of their judicial, legislative, and fiscal rights and activities on a large scale from around the second half of the twelfth century. This was an important part of the hardening of custom into law, as record-keeping authorities tied those below and around them to particular duties.
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And a fourth element went alongside it: the development of notions, ideals, and structures of office in which agents of the powerful accepted that they had defined roles and functions to perform on behalf of those they represented—whether kings and popes, as in the case of judges delegate, or towns, as in the case of urban leaders and councillors, aldermen, échevins, jurats, or podestà. Instead of extracting intermittent submissions from the more or less autonomous lords within and around their domains, rulers tried to pin them down by defining their status and hemming them in with loyal officers.
It is clear that, together, these ideas and practices created templates for the rule of large collectivities, whether these were concentrated in cities or spread out across kingdoms (or, in the case of the Latin church, across much of Europe itself).
During the thirteenth century, individual rulers were able to realize a remarkably complete and well-defined jurisdiction over large terrains—we think of the ecclesiastical empire of Pope Innocent III, for example, able to impose a universal crusading tax and to legislate for the whole of Christendom in the Lateran Council of 1215; or we think [of France] subordinated to the rule of Paris [when] most of the great vassals and much of the church were placed under the jurisdiction of the king’s court of Parlement, and—by the 1290s—taxes were levied across this great space; or we think of the governments of Venice or Florence, ruling populations of more than 150,000 people each, defining the terms of participation in the rule of the city, gaining control of surrounding territory and creating frameworks of taxation and service, whether military or naval.
It is these examples, and others like them, that once underlay the reputation of the thirteenth century as ‘greatest’, and as witnessing ‘the medieval origins of the modern state’, as the American constitutional historian J. R. Strayer put it.
Set alongside these achievements, the wars and broils of the later Middle Ages seemed degenerate by comparison. And yet twelfth- and thirteenth-century regimes were equally marked by conflict, and the periods of ‘success’, in which large-scale governments seemed to have traction, need to be set alongside the periods of disarray, in which would-be authorities were challenged, subverted, or … destroyed.
Indeed, the thirteenth century ended in a series of confrontations that look very ‘late medieval’ in form [numerous examples] … In all, it is clear that the constitutional developments of the thirteenth century could have disintegrative results. But why?
Some of the answers are insignificant, because they could apply to any political regime—exogenous disasters, interpersonal and dynastic rivalries, the personal idiosyncrasies and shortcomings of key politicians. But three answers are more important, both because they pertain to our period in particular and because they are pitched at a more structural level.
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The first is that the attempts of authorities to define relationships inevitably provoked conflict: matters which had been negotiable came to be fixed, and there was certain to be disagreement on the terms of fixing. Lords, churches, and towns threatened with new forms of subordination reacted sharply; kings and others who were forced to concede too much returned to the charge when circumstances changed. The growth of government that was part and parcel of the ‘legal-bureaucratic revolution’ was thus inherently conflictual, and conflicts were not necessarily won by top-level authorities.
Two further answers are connected to this.
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One is that the same process that created new aspirations and devices for rulers created aspirations and devices for those they were trying to make subjects—charters of rights and liberties, leagues of sworn allies, representative assemblies, plaints, petitions, and manifestos— these could all be exploited by opponents of the ruler, and so they were, time and again, with a tendency to limit or even to neutralize assertions from above. Apparently ‘constitutional’ challenges—such as the movements of barons that extracted Magna Carta from King John of England, or the Golden Bull from Andrew II of Hungary, or the charters of liberties from King Louis X of France—could have the temper of rebellions or feed through into civil wars or foreign invasions, such as those that beset England in the later 1210s, or the troubles in Flanders and northern France in the 1320s, 1330s, and after. Kings and peoples could be brought into harmony, certainly, but that harmony could be overturned, and we should take care before concluding that the former pattern is the natural one.
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A third and final important point is that thirteenth-century constitutional developments were not limited to empires and kingdoms: the same facilities deployed by popes and kings were exploited by princes and lords, towns and churches— government grew everywhere, at the same time, generating copious conflict as different authorities attempted to annexe and manage the same resources. Since, as we have seen, government provokes resistance as well as compliance—and since it creates the means of resistance too—it is not surprising that the thirteenth century ended in a world so full of conflict. The forms of political life that we associate with the later Middle Ages were up and running well before 1300; they were forged in the developments of the central Middle Ages.
Political geography
Before we consider the political dynamics of the two centuries after 1300, it would be helpful to gain a sense of the distribution of power across the continent. We have seen that by 1300, there existed a basic template of polity, found practically everywhere. It featured five main elements.
First of all, there was a ruler, possessing some kind of domain which belonged to him and his family, as well as various ancient rights, some ritualized authority, and normally some elements of romano canonical imperium— claims or rights to legislate and do justice, to tax, to coordinate the defence of the realm, to direct relations with other countries, and to summon assemblies.
Second, there was a nobility, with some measure of control over land and men, and often over other local assets—royal offices, churches, towns, provinces.
Third, there was usually some form of representative assembly, organized by class (‘estates’) or locality, meeting rarely or frequently, sometimes a single gathering for the whole polity, sometimes multiple gatherings for constituent regions.
Fourth, there were churches, partly coordinated under bishops, archbishops, and the pope, and partly— in the case of monasteries and other religious orders—under a mixture of papal headship, royal, noble and urban patronage, and practical independence.
And fifth, there were towns, typically with some autonomy, and the larger ones subdivided into rulers and bodies representing the oligarchs and the mass of the citizens (so that towns, themselves, were like small polities).
This five-part model varied greatly in reality.
Sometimes, the ruler was remote and his powers and estates vestigial—effectively colonized by others, such as nobles or towns; in other cases, he was rich and powerful, ruling on the basis of extensive domains controlled by loyal officers, and also (and increasingly) on the basis of public authority—jurisdiction, taxation, rights to military service, and so on—an authority which was maintained by a mixture of top-down force and bottom-up acceptance of its utility to subjects.
Taxation existed more or less everywhere by 1300, but its scale and its format varied, and so did the extent to which it was controlled by the centre, rather than absorbed by lords, or towns, military contractors, or networks of tax collectors.
Representation might be centralized and formal—in parliamentary assemblies—or it might be maintained by groups of subjects themselves, in the form of leagues, like the hermandades of thirteenth-century Spain or the Bünde and Landfrieden of Germany; or it might take the form of adventitious assemblages of subjects claiming to represent the collectivity, as in the Burgundian example I began with, or when the towns and lords of Aragon established a Unión de Aragón in 1283, or the rebellious peasants of 1381 claimed to be ‘the loyal commons of England’.
Towns could be large, more or less independent, and able to dominate the territories around them—sometimes, like Venice, Barcelona, or Genoa, they headed huge networks of trading posts and colonies—or they might be generally under the thumb of effective lordship, as the rich cities of Paris and London typically deferred to the kings of France and England respectively, and realized commercial and political opportunities under their aegis.
Nobles might be poor and numerous and divided into clans—as in the Basque country, or in Scotland, Ireland, and parts of France and Poland—or they might be stratified, into a class of magnates, benefiting from inheritance rules that preserved large estates, and the lesser nobles, who may or may not be linked to them by ties of service or protection.
In all, then, the basic forms of polity might be realized in different ways, but it should be clear from this discussion that there were also other patterns and formats—leagues, assemblies, different types of jurisdiction, tax, inheritance, or association—that were recognized and widely copied or adapted across Europe. It is helpful to think in this way, because it reminds us that national histories favour only one subset of available political forms, and not necessarily the ones that were most dominant or permanent: we think of England, France, Hungary, Castile, rather than the components of these realms: components which could easily be in conflict, or come to be recomposed in different ways.
So the map of Europe was still fluid in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and much of it—Italy, the Low Countries, the east and the south-east—would change very significantly over the period.
The international empire of the Roman church underwent four major changes of format—the ‘Avignon papacy’ of 1309–78; the Schism of 1378–1417; the era of councils, 1409–49; and the time of ‘Renaissance papacy’ and ‘national churches’ which followed.
France was twice dismembered and twice recomposed; the king of England lost, and partly regained, his controlling position in the British Isles; the Iberian kingdoms struggled against each other, but Aragon and Castile were finally united; the centre of gravity in the empire shifted several times before the gradual emergence of a lasting Habsburg hegemony, based in Austria and the Low Countries.
We shall discuss these developments, and others like them, in the sections that follow, but it may be more helpful to take a different tack here and identify broad continuities.
Latin Europe can be roughly divided into three zones, each characterized by particular forms of polity.
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The first zone is sometimes called the ‘Carolingian core’, reflecting the empire of Charlemagne, which covered most of the area between the Pyrenees and the Rivers Elbe and Danube, including much of northern Italy.
In the later Middle Ages, the centre and east of this area were covered by the Holy Roman Empire, though the power of the emperor was in practice restricted to parts of Germany, while most of the huge imperial space was governed by cities, princes, and lords, often in leagues and alliances (especially in the German lands).
This core of Europe was rich and populous, the scene of an ‘urban belt’ or ‘urban axis’ of large cities, running down from Bruges and Ghent in Flanders (with outliers in London and Paris), through the Rhineland and into the Mediterranean littoral and northern Italy, where Barcelona, Genoa, Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice were dominant, and back up through Vienna and Prague to Kraków and the Baltic network of trading cities, managed since the thirteenth century by the German Hansa or Hanseatic League.
The size of the cities, the importance of trade, the traditions of Roman rule across much of this area help to explain why the centre of Europe was dominated by city-states or (mostly small) city-based principalities, the largest of which were: first, the crown of Aragon, comprising the more or less autonomous principalities of Catalonia, Valencia, Majorca, and Aragon proper; and, second, the Valois duchy of Burgundy, which grew between the 1380s and the 1470s to cover much of north-eastern France and the Low Countries. The area also featured two other big players. One was the papacy, based mainly at Rome, and controlling a cluster of territories in central Italy and southern France, while exercising regional influence in southern Italy and a more general authority, derived from its headship of the church, across all of Latin Europe (i.e. the north, west, and south of the continent, and as far east as Poland and Hungary). The other was the crown of France, ruler of a large kingdom in the second zone, but conscious of imperial traditions and deeply invested (often as papal ally) in the affairs of Italy and the Rhône region, the Low Countries and Spain.
Around this core was a less populous area of mostly larger polities, typically monarchies, which might (rather crudely) be divided into two zones—one western, and one northern and eastern.
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The western, or second, zone was dominated by the kingdoms of England, France, and Castile, each an expansionist power, typically ruling a large space (England itself was small and underpopulated, but its king exercised a fluctuating power over the British Isles and western France). The rulers of these kingdoms saw themselves in imperial terms, and meant to exercise jurisdiction over the people and territories beneath them; while all three dealt with powerful princes, and—in Castile particularly—large and powerful cities, they were consistently able to project authority at a local level, so the politics of their realms always involved some kind of dialogue between centre and locality. These realms were themselves quite highly developed, with historic identities and growing structures of jurisdiction and representation; frequently, there were tensions between the expansionist aims of the ruling dynasties and the more localized interests of smaller powers which came together to assert a kind of domestic opinion. Similar kingdoms existed at times in Sicily, Naples, and Hungary, but the political coordination of southern Italy was disrupted by warfare for much of the period between the 1280s and the 1440s. The kingdom of Hungary, on the other hand, centralized first by its Árpád rulers, and then by the Angevins after 1301, was rather like France or Castile in featuring an assertive monarchy operating in tension with powerful magnates, through royal officers, supervision of property, and direct dialogue with local communities.
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The kingdoms of northern and eastern Europe make a third zone, characterized by low population, strong provincial solidarities, and relatively weak monarchies with limited capacity to penetrate the regions. To be sure, some of these monarchies were stronger than others—the rulers of Poland and Denmark could often be very effective, and so, from time to time, could the kings of Bohemia—but in all of these places, and in Scotland, Sweden, and Norway, there were powerful bulwarks against royal power: ‘land-courts’ protecting aristocratic liberties and strong provincial assemblies; regnal councils or regional officers ruling in place of the monarch; castle lordships and allods (independent property) which the ruler could not easily access or confiscate. While institutions like these could also be part of the repertoire of western kingdoms too, they typically had less permanence and efficacy in that region.
So it is that we might characterize these northern and eastern kingdoms as ‘cellular’—assemblages of provinces under loose royal headship. It is not insignificant that most of them were lumped into unions for much of the fifteenth century, nor that Poland came to be seen as a ‘noble republic’, a format more or less shared for a time by Sweden, Bohemia, Hungary, and Scotland.
Beyond these three zones lay the steppe empires of Lithuania and Moscow, both of them expanding to cover very large spaces during our period, and—further south—the sphere of the Byzantine empire, discussed in Chapter7, which was gradually overrun (or reconstituted) by the Ottoman Turks from the 1320s onwards. Most of these vast territories were ruled in different ways from the areas on which this chapter focuses, though the trading cities of northern Russia and the eastern Mediterranean, such as Novgorod, Tver, Thessalonica, and the Levant, the polities of the Aegean, and the Balkan kingdoms of Serbia and Wallachia would certainly merit comparison with their western counterparts.
Patterns of conflict
We have seen that the political and governmental developments of the central Middle Ages both encouraged and enabled rulers to coordinate power and resources across large or populous spaces, and that these spaces possessed some historical, institutional, and cultural solidity.
In other words, a series of polities—empires, kingdoms, principalities, leagues, city-states, and so on—existed across Europe even at the beginning of our period.
At the same time, it is clear that these polities were highly contestable, both internally and externally, and that few of their features—even their boundaries—were fixed. Like the thirteenth century, the later Middle Ages were absolutely full of political conflict, and the aim of this section is to characterize, explore, and explain its patterns.
The fourteenth century is famous for international wars—perhaps, above all, the so-called Hundred Years War between England and France (1337–1453)—while the fifteenth century is better known for civil wars, coups, and plots. There is a rough and ready truth in these perceptions: the major conflicts of the period before about 1450 were more likely to involve the transformation of political geography and institutional organ- ization than their equivalents in the last 50 years of our period. If we turn back to the decades around 1300, for instance, we can immediately identify a series of long-running and far-reaching confrontations.
Between the 1290s and about the 1310s, the papacy was in conflict with the leading western rulers over the power to tax the church and to make major appointments; in 1302 it made a last-ditch attempt to assert its universal jurisdiction, with the claim in Unam sanctam that ‘every human creature [must] be subject to the Roman pontiff ’. [B. Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 (Toronto, 1988), p. 189.]
Up to the 1330s, the papacy was still trying to control affairs in the German lands of the empire, and was engaged in wars throughout northern Italy to advance its own power and that of its Angevin and Valois allies: it was possible that the whole peninsula would fall under Franco-papal rule, and that a French prince would become Holy Roman Emperor.
At the same time, the English king, who had already conquered Wales, was trying to reduce Scotland and Ireland to obedience, while the king of France attempted to annexe Flanders and Gascony. Out of these confrontations came the Hundred Years War, the first phase of which ended in 1360 with the transfer of a third of the French kingdom to Edward III of England in the Treaty of Brétigny. Meanwhile, in the same 1280–1330 period, the kings of Aragon attempted to gain control of Sicily and Naples, the kings of Bohemia attempted to conquer Austria, Hungary, Silesia, Sandomierz, and Małopolska, while Władisław Lokietek and his successor, Casimir III, reunited the warring duchies of Poland and re-established the Polish kingdom.
Some of these ventures succeeded, others failed, but their potential to override customary boundaries should not be missed. Many of them also gave rise to significant internal changes—a turn towards what has been called ‘princely polyarchy’ in France, for instance, as the crown suspended its hard-nosed pursuit of jurisdiction in favour of endowing its cadets with huge domains in the interests of defence (or expansion).
In war-ravaged Sicily and Naples, meanwhile, there was the near-abandonment of centralized governance; and the papacy of the ‘Avignon’ era (1309–78) shifted towards accommodation with lay rulers, following the conflicts of Boniface VIII’s reign, and intensified its management of ecclesiastical resources.
Almost everywhere there was experimentation with new taxes and new modes of representation, as rulers rose and fell and populations were mobilized for attack or defence.
From about the middle of the fourteenth century, however, international conflicts gradually became more localized. The papacy stopped trying to control northern Italy and the German lands; the English were driven out of France, Scotland and most of Ireland; Holy Roman Emperors stopped invading Italy; the borders of kingdoms began to stabilize.
It would certainly not do to overstate this trend—many of these conflicts were renewed between 1350 and 1450, and new ones broke out … [numerous examples] … So there was plenty of change after 1350 or even 1450; but, dramatic as these episodes were, they did more to confirm existing trends in the development of European polities than to alter them. This was even more the case with the civil wars that struck almost every kingdom in the course of the fifteenth century. Although they were often bitter and lengthy—perhaps especially in the heretical kingdom of Bohemia from the 1410s to the 1450s, or in France between the 1400s and 1470s—civil wars affirmed the identities of the polities in which they occurred, and tended over the longer term to strengthen and consolidate them.
It is important to remember that these major conflicts on which the history books focus were just the tip of an iceberg of confrontation that marked every part of the continent and every political level; but there was, even so, a trend towards the stabilization of the political order, both within individual polities and (to some extent) between them.
We need to consider why this was, but first of all it may be helpful to discuss the types of conflict experienced in Europe during the period.
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In the literature, there is an emphasis on natural competition for resources—and this is fine, as far as it goes, though we need to remember that, while it may be normal for individuals to compete for resources, the dynamics of group conflict are not the same, and there are always pressures for compliance with authority and adherence to principle.
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There is also a tendency among historians to emphasize succession disputes among the causes of conflict, but these can occur at any time and in any society, and they are typically associated with— even dependent upon—other kinds of conflict.
By and large, the political conflicts of the later Middle Ages can be divided into two groups: conflicts of jurisdiction and conflicts of political community.
The key difference between them is that the first kind of conflict was between parties that refused to accept each other’s authority or right, whereas the second kind of conflict occurred when one party accepted a general subjection to the authority of the other, but challenged the way in which that authority was exercised.
Clearly there was some overlap—the actions of an authority might seem all the more obnoxious to its subjects if they involved challenges to existing rights and customs—but the distinction is helpful because it captures something about the way in which political life was developing.
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Jurisdictional conflicts were very common in the first half of our period, because every kind of power, ecclesiastical and secular, royal, provincial, and municipal, was developing its legal and administrative apparatus. Sometimes these were literally conflicts over the power to do justice—as, for example, when the French king asserted the jurisdiction of his court against the judicial claims of the duke of Gascony (i.e. the king of England) and the count of Flanders: these were the major causes of the Hundred Years War, alongside the similar assertions of the English king in Scotland, his acceptance of a vicariate (lieutenancy) from the Holy Roman Emperor over the Low Countries, and his advancement of a legal claim to the French throne itself in 1340 (which would rescue him from the justice of the Valois ruler).
More widely, jurisdictional conflicts arose over other kinds of governmental assertion—over the right to tax, for instance, or to raise troops, or to control disputed territory. … [examples given] …
These jurisdictional conflicts involved high-level players, but they were common at lower levels too, as lords and towns disputed rights to judge peasants and tax passing trade, or as oligarchs and citizens contested the organization of offices in towns. Quite often, different levels of conflict intersected, as the struggles of the towns of southern Germany to protect themselves from local nobles in the 1380s and 1390s became interwoven with the tussles between Emperor Wenceslas IV and the Electors, or as the struggles of lords and towns in early fourteenth-century Castile exploited, and were exploited by, the contenders in a disputed succession to the throne. It is not surprising, then, that the tendency of jurisdictional disputes was to ramify, pulling in potential allies from neighbouring conflicts, spreading uncertainty and violence ever wider.
They reflected a first stage of institutional growth, and were shaped by the strongly legalistic and juridical emphasis of thirteenth-century political thought. This means that the root cause of thirteenth- and fourteenth- century wars was the ‘legal-bureaucratic revolution’ of the ‘greatest of centuries’.
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Conflicts of political community, on the other hand, reflected the development of more complex polities, in which smaller powers—towns, lords, churches, citizens, peasants—might be willing to accept a common authority, but were determined to negotiate or adjust the terms of that acceptance; these conflicts became more common as the period went on. Fuelled by powers of justice, taxation, and/or troop-raising, top-level authorities could be hard to resist, but the smaller powers around and beneath them could league together to protect customary rights or agree—through charters, laws, treaties, and assemblies—tolerable terms of engagement.
Over time, the pressures of contingency—incompetent rulers, unaffordable wars, natural disasters—and the continuing elaboration of government (again, at every level) produced tensions and confrontations which the coordinating mechanisms of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century polities were unable to contain.
The commonest kinds of conflicts of political community were popular revolts, magnate rebellions, and civil wars. Typically, indeed, these overlapped or combined—dissenting magnates, even when they were claimants to the throne (or to headship of a city or a church), usually tapped into grievances expressed by estates assemblies or common people—and while historians typically regard this kind of action as cynical, it is better understood as representative: whatever the motives or ambitions of individuals, they were obliged to raise public support, and their actions reflected public grievances.
We can see examples of this kind of conflict in every political space. The fifteenth-century civil war in France, with which this chapter opened, reflected the inability of the regime of an enfeebled king to manage its leading subjects, or to contain tensions over taxation, foreign policy, and the distribution of power in towns and provinces.
… [other examples of civil wars] …
… Even the international church manifested this same kind of politics: the Schism of 1378 was partly caused by the crude reformism of Pope Urban VI, but his actions—and those of the conciliarists over the next seven decades—were driven by widespread (and conflicting) tensions among the clergy about the forms of papal government.
Conflicts of political community could eddy out of control, crossing borders and becoming embroiled with other conflicts— as the fourteenth-century phase of the Hundred Years War, for instance, was at once a French civil war, a war between England and France, and an additional source of fuel to conflagrations in the Low Countries, Spain, and the Empire. To some extent, the same tendency to cross borders is apparent in fifteenth-century civil wars—certainly the war of Burgundians and Armagnacs, discussed above; also the civil wars in Castile (1438–45, c.1464–76), which pulled in Navarre in the 1440s and Portugal in the 1470s; or the Wars of the Roses in England (c.1450–c.1500), which intersected with conflicts in France, Scotland, Ireland, and the Burgundian lands.
Even so, these wars were understood by contemporaries in highly nationalistic and constitutional terms: they arose in domestic protests and stimulated campaigns of domestic reform. As we shall see in the next section, their net effect was to confirm the development of more sophisticated and robust polities.
Consolidation
Governmental growth was not restricted to the thirteenth century, but persisted, and expanded, throughout our period. Early experiments with taxation, for example, could raise significant sums, but only occasionally: regular taxation only became possible in large polities like kingdoms in the middle decades of the fourteenth century, and by the end of that century, their revenues had outstripped those of the richest cities. In the fifteenth century, the revenues of high-tax polities like the kingdom of France grew still higher, and were able to support both an elaborate infrastructure of princely pensions and—from the 1440s—a standing army, two resources which strengthened the king’s hand in managing his massive realm.
Similarly, if the thirteenth century was the starting point for most national and provincial assemblies, it was in the fourteenth century that these really flourished, meeting regularly and (in most places) enabling the growth in taxation just discussed, and also a significant expansion in regulation, through laws, ordinances, and statutes.
Besides assemblies, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries also witnessed the growth of councils and secretariats, to manage an increased volume of business and facilitate the influence of leading interests at the centre of government.
At the same time, the courts and households of rulers, whether popes or kings, princes or urban leaders, became more substantial and permanent, providing a setting where ministers, magnates, and foreign visitors could mingle and offer informal advice to one another and the ruler.
Beyond all this, there were developments in the raising of armies—made much more effective and manageable by developments in taxation—and in networks of office, which tended to proliferate, potentially increasing the number of local agents with an interest in the projects of the political centre.
In older literature, these instances of ‘state growth’ are assumed to have had a positive effect, leading naturally from the experiments of the central Middle Ages to the mature nation-states of the sixteenth century and beyond. But this approach has now been discarded. For one thing, it makes it very hard to explain the copious conflict of the later Middle Ages without recourse to external explanations, most of which have been shown to be unconvincing.
Rather, it should be clear from everything discussed above that the growth of government itself was the major cause of political conflict. As every political unit developed legal, administrative, and constitutional resources, conflict between them was inevitable. Equally, the development of government raised political expectations and provided mechanisms which even groups with fewer resources to their name—such as peasants and workers—could exploit to press their concerns. It is true that the new resources of high-level authorities enabled them to assert themselves, and altered the stakes of any confrontation with lesser authorities, and this is why, in many parts of Europe, towns, churches, and lords accepted the rule of kings.
But it is also important to acknowledge that there were areas where rulers could not create this competitive edge, where the political landscape remained variegated, and smaller powers could league together to protect their freedoms. The German lands are the classic example of this kind of region, and a number of historians have shown how an ‘associative political culture’, based on alliances, local assemblies, and feuding, tended to prevent the formation of larger political blocs which could compel or negotiate obedience.
In northern Italy and the Low Countries, powerful cities could resist the relatively distant authority of popes, emperors, and neighbouring kings, but here a number of effective principalities did develop—the ‘territorial states’ of Milan, Venice, and Florence, for example, which conquered the smaller cities and countryside surrounding them in the first half of the fifteenth century, or the counties of Flanders, Hainault, and Holland, and the duchy of Brabant, moulded into a large and state-like principality by the Valois dukes of Burgundy in mid- century.
These principalities may be better understood as ‘bricolages’—loose assemblies of smaller units—than as mini-kingdoms; but, as we have seen, kingdoms themselves were often weakly coordinated, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Overall, then, the picture is quite equivocal, particularly before the fifteenth century. Even where kings could prevail, they could not necessarily prevail for long.
Wars to suppress opponents could go badly wrong, and more emollient devices—representative assemblies which addressed complaints, endowments of land or money to loyal subjects—could be turned against the ruler, hemming him in with charters or councils, challenging his handling of the fisc, or using his gifts to raise the regions in opposition.
No king could live forever, and every change of regime brought in new uncertainties and opportunities for challenge; and collective regimes, such as the governments of Italian city republics, were no better—changes of personnel were more normal, but they often involved factional strife and constitutional innovation. These were the pressures that pushed Florence, for example, into allowing the informal hegemony of the Albizzi and then the Medici, but such developments faced the city with all the problems of monarchy, as well as those of corporate rule.
And yet, behind the ebb and flow of individual political regimes, there is a discernible trajectory towards political consolidation at a regional or national level. We have already seen that outright clashes of jurisdiction became less common and conflicts of political community more common as the fourteenth century gave way to the fifteenth.
We have seen that more countries acquired stable boundaries, and that larger formations of more or less contiguous territory were able to develop in the fifteenth century, even in the apparently unpropitious setting of the imperial core (even in the German lands a number of quite sizeable and durable principalities grew up during the course of the period—Bavaria, Brandenburg, the Palatinate of the Rhine, the lands of the ‘house of Austria’ are examples—while the Empire itself acquired more stable and convincing leadership, from the well-endowed Habsburgs and the regular meetings of reform-minded Reichstage).
Single-town city states became a thing of the past, and even town leagues—notably the Hansa—tended to subside and be absorbed into surrounding polities.
The reasons for these developments are multiple.
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One, long noted, is the growing fiscal and military capacity of the larger centres— a capacity which is now understood to be more than a matter of tax and standing armies, and to include control of credit and the enlisting of major commercial interests.
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A second factor lies in the practice of politics: the repeated experience of confrontation and negotiation between rulers and communities created a kind of constitutional fabric in each polity, which— especially from the later fourteenth century onwards—came to be celebrated in national literatures, works of history, and (by the fifteenth century) constitutional treatises.
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Arguably, too, the mechanisms of incorporation deployed by states became more sophisticated and less liable to provoke explosions—better-targeted taxation, better means for influencing policy, modes of local government that struck more manageable compromises between central direction and local interest, forms of social regulation that enlisted hierarchies against less controllable solidarities.
The later fifteenth century has often been seen as an era of ‘new monarchy’ or rising ‘princes’, and there is something in this hackneyed image; but we need to remember that the more stable polities of the period were more collaborative than older accounts suggest, and that they were built by the multiple actions of political societies, not by rulers alone.
Europe in 1500
By 1500, most of the inhabitants of Europe lived in relatively fixed and stable polities, with fairly complex institutions of government, at least regional in scope, and often covering large areas. The seeds of this dispensation had been laid in the central Middle Ages, but the effervescent politics of our period had played a crucial part in the growth and development of these regimes.
The historians of the early modern period are now rather hostile to the older picture of a Europe of nation states in which the present narrative may appear to culminate.
They tend to emphasize the power of dynasties— Valois, Habsburg, Jagiellon—rather than the solidity of kingdoms and principalities; they identify ‘composite monarchies’ and ‘unions’ as the key players on the sixteenth-century stage.
… [examples given] …
But this more nuanced picture of early modern politics does not contradict the developments we have been exploring: the polities of our period were the components of the ‘composite states’ of the following century, and they were a great deal more coherent and developed than the political forms of the thirteenth century and before. The later Middle Ages, so long seen as an era of chaos, deserves to be understood rather differently—as a time of growing government and lively politics, a combination which thickened the constitutional texture in every European polity.
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