by Garrett Robinson
This essay continues a line of inquiry and reflection begun here.
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, while riding with the lawyers Bulgarus and Martinus, asked them whether he was “lord of the world.” Bulgarus replied that he was not lord over private property; Martinus simply told him: “You are lord.” Martinus was rewarded with a horse, and Bulgarus with nothing. Variations of the story abound, but they all strike at a question recurring throughout the Middle Ages: how great was the power of the medieval prince? Answering this question will set the groundwork for examining how the monarchical power centralized and changed during the Renaissance and Reformation, and how those changes laid the groundwork for liberal politics.
A description of the limits of the power of a medieval monarch should consider historical fact as well as political theory of the time. Even if Martinus said that Barbarossa, as emperor, was lord over the entire world, the facts challenge this assertion. When Barbarossa’s son and successor, Henry VI, tried Richard the Lionheart for alleged crimes, Richard explained himself only after declaring that he was “born in a rank which recognizes no superior but God.” Though Richard was imprisoned for a while after, his statement makes clear that imperial pretensions to absolute jurisdiction overstated actual imperial authority. Those pretensions were permanently laid to rest at the field of Bouvines not long afterward. Richard’s own claim regarding his rank suffered greatly during the reigns of his brother and nephew.
These conflicts between emperor and king and king and barons illustrate the difficulty of describing a medieval polity using terms like “state” and “sovereign.” Any critique of the state-oriented politics that (arguably) sprang out of the Reformation should attend to the politics of the Middle Ages to see what preceded this political transformation. A sober analysis of medieval politics makes clear that, despite the modern, absolutist baggage the word “king” carries with it, medieval monarchs would rarely affect the goings-on of the lives of their subjects in a direct way. Instead, political life occurred primarily within the local communities of villages, towns, or guilds, or among members of a group sharing common ends such as clerics or nobles.
The monarch did, of course, play an important role in medieval political thought, but hardly in the same way that would come about in the course of the sixteenth century. A medieval monarch ruled mostly as a sort of court of appeal, by which the rights of various parties might be established. Those rights, though, were not rights granted by a sovereign authority, but rights recognized between various groups.[1] Statutes were occasional and proved an exception to the usual role of the monarch, albeit one that became more common toward the dawn of the modern era.
Medieval political activity occurred first on a local scale before reaching its way to a kingdom-wide scope. Politics was not the art of a king regulating a clearly defined kingdom into good order, but the efforts of communities or class groups ordering themselves to common goods and the general good of the kingdom. While the kingdom did play an important role as one of the political associations to which a medieval person belonged, the primary place of politics was in more local communities where shared ideas of justice provided the ends of political action.[2] Three of these communities will receive some attention here: the Church, cities, and the nobility.
Words here regarding the Church are only intended to speak to its legal jurisdiction and not to its status as an institution separate from “secular” life, as the latter distinction was unthinkable during the medieval period. The Gregorian reform sought to and eventually did largely free ecclesial politics from undue royal influence. Throughout the medieval period, the Church did exercise at the very least jurisdiction over its own clerics, but also claimed jurisdiction over particularly vulnerable people, such as widows and the poor. Further, while cooperation between the “two swords” was an ideal rarely reached in reality, the conflict between royal and ecclesiastical jurisdiction left space for other groups to assert their own jurisdiction apart from royal power. As Francis Oakley notes, it was “between the hammer and the anvil of conflicting authorities, ecclesiastical and temporal, that political freedoms were to be forged in the west and monarchical ambitions (both secular and spiritual) eventually to be chastened.”[3]
Cities grew up, in part, by taking advantage of this conflict of authorities in order to force feudal lords to recognize the rights of a commune to govern itself. A medieval city did not, as opposed to today, “consist of a simple collection of individuals; it was itself an individual, but a collective individual, a legal person.”[4] Perry Anderson compares medieval cities to their Roman counterparts, noting that, contrasted with their ancient predecessors, cities, “the paradigmatic medieval towns of Europe[,] which practiced trade and manufactures[,] were self-governing communes, enjoying corporate political and military autonomy from the nobility and the Church.”[5] Medieval towns and cities lay at odds with what one may think of as “normal” medieval politics, exempted from noble or ecclesial control (despite frequently containing a cathedral!). These cities often lay in areas distant enough from a king or emperor that they acted as if they had no king at all, and, should a king choose to confront them, as in the case of Frederick II’s wars against the cities of Northern Italy, they proved more than able to mount a successful resistance against him.
The nobility both ruled on a local level and as a group successfully thwarted the ambitions of many a king. As jurisdiction and property often went hand in hand throughout the Middle Ages, and as many nobles held land in two different kingdoms, medieval kingdoms looked unlike the idea of a modern state. Situations like Henry II and his sons being Duke of Normandy as well as King of England prevented the formation of firm boundaries necessary for a political entity resembling the modern state. Similar areas of blurred allegiance appeared in the south of France and Catalonia, as well as in Burgundy. And, even though monarchs during the High and Late Middle Ages did make strides to bring distant nobles more firmly under their control, it was not until the revolutions of the sixteenth century that the nobles could really be said to be fully subservient to the monarch. Even during later medieval periods during which monarchs were attempting to centralize authority, kings would recognize nobles in certain border areas as having particular military privileges necessary to defending particularly volatile areas, but which also necessarily undermined the authority of the monarch to act as the sole military authority. When considering these fuzzy boundaries and layers of allegiances, it becomes difficult to read sovereignty into medieval politics.
Clearly, then, attempts to apply the framework of the state or of sovereignty to the Middle Ages fall short of their mark. Susan Reynolds, while acknowledging the high authority of the king in medieval politics, notes that theoretical formulations of politics always fall short of factual circumstances: “The containment of conflict between layers and types of authority seems to be a problem in all governmental systems, even where elaborate theories of sovereignty purport to eliminate it.”[6] Brian Tierney goes a little farther, decrying attempts to read sovereignty into the papal politics of the thirteenth century as “anachronistic attempts to force medieval thought into the mould of modern concepts of sovereignty.”[7] Medieval, pre-liberal politics deserves attention as not only the unique thought of the people who lived out those political ideas, but as a model from which post-liberal politics might gain inspiration.[8]
A great deal has changed today, where the state decides the legitimacy of a “religious” institution and sets up cities through its own power (as opposed to being set up through the efforts of the inhabitants), and where organs of government are collected into a few key locations governing a jurisdiction with clearly defined boundaries. The next essay will describe the journey from medieval to modern politics, invention of the modern state, and what competitors the state had to suppress during the era of the Reformation and Renaissance.
[1] John Milbank has written provocatively of the modern fascination with “natural rights.” See especially John Milbank, “Against Human Rights: Liberty in the Western Tradition,” Oxford Journal of Law and Religion 1, no.1 (2012): 203-234.
[2] This complements many “post-liberal” criticisms of the state as inherently liberalizing.
“The state cannot order this realm without attacking its very nature because the state cannot make sense of real relationships, but only abstractions like rights, debts, contracts, and, indeed, races, ethnicities, languages. Real people are invisible to the state. These communities of real people, however, must themselves be situated within the pursuit of the common good of their region, of their country, of larger forms of political community, of humanity, and finally of all creation.”
https://www.postliberalthought.com/blog//a-defense-of-the-particular-and-the-universal
[3] Francis Oakley, Kingship, 145.
[4] Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities, 181.
[5] Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 150.
[6] Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900-1300 (2nd Ed.), 222.
[7] Brian Tierney, “The Continuity of Papal Political Theory in the Thirteenth Century” Medieval Studies 27 (1965): 229.
[8] “Inspiration” here being operative. This brief account hardly pretends that the briefly summarized version of the Middle Ages contained herein ought to be reconstructed; rather, as liberal institutions crumble, the hope might be that a politics based on actual relationships and shared understandings of justice may gain renewed attention.