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The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics , by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow
3. The Medieval State:
Direct Rule
Changes in warfare, together with centralizing administration and the invention of a new language of politics, marked the transformation of feudalism into rule by the centralized, medieval states. 1 By the end of the late Middle Ages, roughly from 1100 through the 1500s, a number of important elements of territorial states would be in place: large standing armies, hierarchies of government functionaries loyal to territorially based rulers, and new ideas about human beings and their bodies as objects, about which secular knowledge was possible. In this chapter we will see how these developments made human beings, the state’s subjects, available to be used as objects by the state apparatus in the name of order and as expressions of the power of the state.
Military Revolution
With the advent of the feudal “state,” the large standing infantry-based army of imperial Rome was replaced with a multitude of small private armies composed primarily of retinues of mounted aristocratic warriors. From 1000 to about 1400, a band of heavily armored knights mounted on specially bred and trained warhorses became the principal military formation of the medieval age and the massed cavalry charge its chief tactic. Heavy cavalry was made possible by the arrival of large horses from Persia by way of Byzantium in the fifth century, the invention of the horseshoe, and the introduction of the stirrup into Europe from Asia. A feudal army, known as a host, was a temporary coalescence of many private retinues called into military service by the prince or king. Knights were obliged to render this service in exchange for their fiefs. The non-noble groups of the feudal “state”—clergy, bourgeoisie, and serfs—had no military obligations and were, for the most part, excluded from military service. Knights were responsible for procuring their own military equipment, which included a chain mail coat, helmet, sword, shield, lance, and mace. Because of the expense of this equipment, especially the chain mail coat, the number of men-at-arms in medieval armies was low. Knights were assisted by one or two squires, who were apprentice knights responsible for the packhorses and the maintenance of equipment. 2
During this period, thousands of castles and fortified manor houses, first built of earth and wood and later of stone, were constructed throughout Europe. Castles and fortified manor houses were physical sites of the fragmented and delegated politico-military authority of the feudal age. In medieval warfare the advantage was with the defense. Sieges of castles and towns, usually long, drawn-out affairs lasting many months, frequently ended in failure. 3
Between 1300 and 1600, three technological innovations were introduced onto the European battlefield; these revolutionized medieval warfare and shifted the advantage to the offense. 4 The first was the longbow, the traditional weapon of the Welsh, which was capable of shooting 10 arrows per minute at targets 300 yards away with great accuracy and penetrating power. The second was the pike, which, in the hands of well-drilled foot soldiers, could dislodge armored knights from their horses. During the century and a half after 1300 a number of battles—such as the Battle of Agincourt in France in 1415, where English longbowmen and pikemen were able to defeat a larger army of heavily armored French cavalry—demonstrated the effectiveness of these two weapons. To defend against longbows and pikes, armorers replaced the chain mail coat with plate armor, which was worn by horses as well. Thus, heavy cavalry became even heavier, capable only of the direct charge. Infantry, or foot soldiers, when formed into phalanxes (i.e., closed into deep ranks and files), could easily break such charges and dislodge knights from their horses. On the ground, knights weighted down by their armor could be easily overwhelmed by infantrymen. As a consequence, armies increasingly became composed of infantry units armed with longbows and pikes. 5
The third technological innovation that revolutionized medieval warfare was the introduction of gunpowder from China during the fourteenth century. The dominance of the heavily armored knight and the high, stone castle ended with the development of two weapons that used gunpowder: the arquebus and the cannon. The arquebus was a primitive, handheld firearm that fired a lead ball capable of penetrating the thickest plate armor. Gradually, longbows and pikes were replaced by arquebuses and, eventually, by muskets and, finally, rifles.
The second weapon that used gunpowder was the cannon. At first, cannons were small, poorly made, inaccurate, and unable to do more damage to medieval fortifications than the traditional, mechanical siege engines, catapults, which fired stones by means of counterweighted levers. Gradually, metallurgical techniques were developed that permitted the manufacture of larger, more powerful, and more accurate cannons. Stone shot was replaced by round cannon balls of lead and iron. Improvements in the composition and manufacture of gunpowder increased the penetrating power, range, and accuracy of cannons.
The development of effective artillery had a dramatic impact on the balance between offense and defense in medieval warfare. The offense gained the advantage because more powerful cannons were able to puncture the stone walls of medieval castles with ease. Castles that had held out for many months against traditional siege engines were reduced to piles of rubble within a matter of hours when cannons were fired at them. Consequently, the high stone-walled castle was gradually abandoned and replaced by a low-profile fortification, first designed by Italian engineers and called the trace italienne, whose low, angled earthen bastions could absorb the shock of concentrated artillery fire.
As a result of the emergence of infantry, artillery, and the trace italienne, armies increased in size and complexity. Table 3.1 shows the tremendous increase in military manpower for various emergent, European territorial states from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.
| Table 3.1 Increase in Military Manpower, 1200–1800 | ||||||
| Date |
Spain | France | England | Prussia | Sweden | Holland |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1200s | 50,000 | 25,000 | ||||
| 1300s | 37,500 | 60,000 | 32,000 | |||
| 1400s | 60,000 | 40,000 | 25,000 | |||
| 1500s | 200,000 | 80,000 | 30,000 | 15,000 | 20,000 | |
| 1600s | 300,000 | 120,000 | 70,000 | 30,000 | 70,000 | 30,000 |
| 1700s | 98,000 | 400,000 | 200,000 | 162,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 |
| 1800s | 600,000 | 347,000 | 1,200,000 | |||
| Source: Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson, War and State Making (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1980), 66, and Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 69. | ||||||
As armies became bigger, they were divided into infantry, artillery, and light cavalry units. Training and discipline were introduced. Logistics (i.e., procurement, maintenance, and transportation of military matériel) systems developed. Privateers (i.e., armed private ships) were organized into navies and sailors were trained. To withstand the shock of rounds fired from ever more powerful artillery pieces, the trace italienne fort became larger and its earthen walls thicker. Highly trained and disciplined infantry units, which were organized independently of their members and commanded by a hierarchy of officers, including noncommissioned officers, became the backbone of these massive armies. Troops began to wear distinctive, standardized clothes, called uniforms, and were issued standardized arms. Individualistic displays of fighting prowess and heroism, which had been so important in medieval warfare, were discouraged. The warrior aristocratic caste and the feudal host were gradually replaced by a professional standing army. 6
Initially, the ranks of most early infantry-based armies were filled by mercenaries, that is, individuals who were paid to fight. Eventually, mercenaries began to be replaced by soldiers recruited exclusively from the monarch’s own population because mercenary armies were notoriously unreliable: they frequently rebelled for higher pay, deserted the battlefield, changed sides, and even threatened the monarch’s own throne. Troops recruited from one’s own subjects and officered by individuals from one’s own ruling class fought better and were more reliable, less dangerous, and cheaper. 7
The summary effect of these technological innovations, then, was to change fundamentally the social and political reality of warfare. In the words of one scholar, “standing armed forces began to conform to bureaucratic regularity.” 8 War itself became an object for the state, not just a series of battles fought by the king, but a complex of practices that required the regular disciplining of subjects and the organizing of logistics that could be used not only for defeating the enemy but also in the general production of social order. More and more, armies became objects, a uni fied (as in uni form) “body” of soldiers onto which the state could be inscribed, through the design and color of uniforms and of various accoutrements such as insignia of rank, belt buckles, and buttons. Armies no longer just fought battles; they increasingly came to represent the state they fought for—which tended to render mercenaries an anachronism—and to symbolize its power, thereby helping create its right to govern. Thus, the military revolution encouraged a new general view of the person and the body as an object to be molded and upon which could be inscribed signs of the state’s power and legitimacy. As we will see in the next chapter, this imaginary of the body as an object to be inscribed by the state fundamentally altered the relation of sovereign and subject.
Emergence Of A State Apparatus
A king who was able to recruit, train, equip, and maintain a large standing army as well as build low-profile fortifications could prevail over others. Hence, the advent of standing armies, regular navies, and trace italienne fortifications transformed the indirect, fragmented, decentralized rule of feudalism into the direct, concentrated, centralized rule of the medieval state, an early form of the territorial state. In the words of one historian, “The modern state without the military revolution is unthinkable. The road from the arquebus to absolutism, or from the maritime mortar to mercantilism, was a direct one.” 9
Recall that feudal kings were not all-powerful rulers. They faced the three estates of the realm—nobility, clergy, and bourgeoisie—who had their own rights and privileges as corporate groups. Kings were primus inter pares (first among equals) with respect to the nobility and had special responsibilities to the realm: providing justice, minting coins, designating bishops and abbots, granting town charters, and defending the realm. During the feudal period, wars were largely private affairs, paid for by revenues collected from the king’s own demense as well as by tolls charged for the use of his roads and bridges, fees for fairs, fines levied by his courts, customs placed on imports, and money from vassals. 10
As armies and fortifications became larger and more expensive to maintain, kings increasingly found themselves in debt. Medieval kings were unable to tax or confiscate property except that of Jews because their power was circumscribed by the rights and privileges of the estates. In order to raise funds, kings borrowed money, debased the coinage of the realm, sold crown lands, and pawned the royal jewels. 11 Eventually, medieval monarchs began to levy taxes on the estates. At first, the concessions granted to the king to levy such taxes were valid only for the estate that had granted them and only for the purpose for which they had been requested. The idea of a general tax on all subjects came about slowly. Gradually, the financial institutions set up by kings to collect revenues from their private lands became public institutions that collected taxes conceded by the estates. 12
Medieval monarchs were helped in their centralizing efforts by the support they received for such efforts by the bourgeoisie and the lower nobility. The burden of direct taxation fell most heavily on the bourgeoisie because movable property (i.e., commodities bought and sold) could be more easily taxed than such fixed property as land. Nevertheless, the bourgeoisie did not much resist because it benefited from the territory-wide legal systems that were also being developed by medieval kings at the time. Towns began to renounce their privileges and autonomy and integrated themselves into these emerging territory-wide legal frameworks, which came to link capitalism and state power in a single political formation. 13
For its part, the lower nobility was also in favor of the centralizing efforts of medieval kings. Many lesser vassals were barely able to live as gentlemen because their lands were too small and unproductive. It was from their ranks that kings recruited tax collectors and judges. They were paid good salaries and given gifts of additional land. From the ranks of the lesser nobility, then, medieval monarchs began to build a corps of professional administrators; in this way monarchs could bypass the upper nobility. 14
Emergence Of Professional State Administration
Although certain practices of feudal governance remained within the medieval state, such as dispensing justice through personal rule, and dynastic politics based on family ties and feudal obligations, increasingly a new apparatus of power—a new set of institutions, offices, and techniques of exercising power—emerged; it was envisioned and created as separate and distinct from the persons of the rulers themselves.
As was mentioned in the previous chapter, all feudal lords, including kings, kept retinues of knights and household servants who helped them defend and run their castles and lands. The most important members of the king’s household staff were the chancellor, who was in charge of the chancel (the altar area of the lord’s chapel), and the steward, who was in charge of the great hall of the castle or manor house. The chancellor, in addition to saying Mass for the king, kept the king’s seal, wrote his business letters (in Latin) to other kings or the pope, and directed the work of the king’s scribes, clerks, and messengers. The steward, who was in charge of the household and the management of the king’s demense, required knowledge of accounting and document preparation. The steward was assisted by a number of bailiffs, who were put in charge of the sections of the king’s demense called bailiwicks. 15
The king’s properties were not contiguous, that is, they were scattered throughout the realm. Revenues from them were also shared with members of the nobility. Therefore, collecting what was due the king was difficult even when the exact amounts were known. The first permanent officials of the emergent state apparatus were the estate managers sent out by the king to collect revenue from crown lands and properties. In medieval England these estate managers were called reeves and in France prévôts (provosts). After the Norman conquest, England was divided into shires (counties), within each of which a reeve was appointed. These shire-reeves, or sheriffs, were responsible for collecting the king’s revenue. As fines from local courts were part of the king’s revenue, sheriffs and provosts were also responsible for ensuring the king’s justice. Sheriffs and provosts frequently held court for petty offenses. Thus, the collection of the king’s revenue and the provision of his justice were intertwined activities in the early medieval state. 16
Gradually, feudal kings began to consider the administration of justice as more than a source of money. It was a way of asserting monarchical power and authority. Therefore, they began to increase the jurisdictions of courts. Serious criminal cases, such as murder, were reserved for the king’s court; this allowed him to intervene in districts where he had no estates or local rights of justice. In civil cases special procedures were developed that allowed litigants to bypass the local court and present their cases directly to a royal court. This allowed the lower nobility to protect themselves against their immediate lords. Because it was the duty of feudal kings to see that justice prevailed throughout the realm, appeals were allowed from lower courts to royal courts as a way of remedying injustice. 17
Eventually, throughout medieval Europe the tasks of collecting revenue and providing justice were disentangled and two parallel sets of institutions and offices—legal and financial—began to evolve. While the same individual might be both judge and tax collector, when hearing a case he followed certain procedures and formalities that were different from those he followed when collecting revenue. As the law became more complicated, individuals who had been trained in the law, called judges and lawyers, began to appear and take charge of the provision of the king’s justice. At the same time individuals trained in accounting began to take over the collection of the king’s revenue. 18
As legal and financial institutions and offices evolved separately, their work had to be coordinated. This was accomplished by the king’s chancellor, who was always a high-ranking clergyman, either a bishop or a cardinal. The king’s scribes and clerks, under the direction of the chancellor, developed and preserved regular administrative routines. They drafted orders and instructions, using language that could not be misunderstood. The chancery, or the office of the chancellor, became the nerve center of the medieval monarchy. 19
A group of individuals thus appeared who spent their entire working lives as professional, full-time administrators. They were assisted by part-time agents who were willing to work for a portion of the year as estate managers, tax collectors, or judges. Although few existed at first, these individuals significantly increased in number during the thirteenth century. This growing band of administrators was recruited from the lesser nobility, who needed the money, and the bourgeoisie, who wanted the prestige and potential influence that came from being in the service of the king or prince.
The development of financial and judicial institutions staffed by a small but growing number of professional judges, tax collectors, law-trained clerks, and scribes meant that monarchs were able to control and administer wide territories without the help of the feudal aristocracy. Because the king’s administrators were dependent upon the king for their livelihoods, they were loyal to him. Thus, the vassal-lord relationship ceased to be the glue that held the feudal politico-military system together.
The development of territory-wide law courts and direct systems of revenue collection, as well as the growth of the general right to tax, led to the commercialization of economic life and the decline of the nobility as an effective political force. The nobility began to lose ground to the bourgeoisie and the king. It should be recognized that this was a gradual trend; it did not happen all at once. Medieval kings continued to support the nobility, although increasingly on the king’s terms. The nobility was more and more subordinated to the king; those who were not recruited into the administrative apparatus were converted into the officer corps of the new infantry-based armies.
Thus, medieval kings gathered to themselves the instruments of rule that had been hitherto dispersed among the estates. They began to construct an administrative apparatus for the formulation and execution of centralized, territory-wide rule. This structure became more and more public, official, distinctive, and visible. Society came increasingly to be envisioned as peopled by a multitude of private individuals, not corporate groups. 20 Larger, territorial political units emerged, and politico-military power and authority became concentrated in the hands of the king and his court. Public officials eventually replaced individuals who held political power as a private possession. In this way, the centralized medieval monarchy, the precursor of the modern territorial state, came into being. 21
Emergence Of The Modern Sovereign
As power and authority became more centralized and more abstract, in the sense of being lodged in the institutions and offices of monarchical power rather than in the person of the king, they were increasingly depersonalized. This involved, first, the development of impersonal systems of law and taxation and, second, the emergence of a new language of politics and rule.
With respect to the first, the emergence of the king’s legal and financial institutions encouraged the evolution of uniform, impersonal systems of law. Two legal systems developed in medieval Europe. One was English common law (i.e., law common to all), which was an amalgamation of local customary law created by the king’s judges, who were sent out to hear cases in local courts. The decisions they made in a multitude of local cases gradually became the law of the realm. Common law was based on cases, and as each case was different, judges were able to make constant changes in it until the nineteenth century, when the principle of stare decisis (i.e., to stand by the decision), or precedent, emerged and was consistently applied. Thus, English common law was judge-made law that became uniform across the realm when individual judges followed precedent.
The legal systems that emerged on the continent were heavily influenced by the “rediscovery” of Roman law. As was discussed in Chapter 1, the Romans developed a homogeneous body of codified law, which provided a framework that regulated political, economic, and social life throughout the empire. Medieval courts on the continent, influenced by canon law, looked to the Roman legal system as a model. Quite early, medieval monarchs on the continent began to write legal codes—which were published in the vernacular, not Latin—that regulated the management of the realm’s forests, rivers, shipping, trade, fairs, and the like. Such codes fostered the development of official state languages such as French, Russian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Thus, whether the judge-made law of England or the Roman-inspired code law of continental monarchies, uniform systems of public law came into existence that eventually replaced the various rights and privileges (literally, private law) claimed by each estate. Law came to be applied territorially, meaning that the same rules were applicable to all groups and in all regions within the realm. The law became an instrument for governing entire populations dispersed throughout the realm. At this point, the king’s power to make law transcended his ability to do so based on discrete rights and privileges adhering to his person. 22
The second element of the emerging depersonalized mode of governance was the development of a new language of political power and authority revolving around the idea of state sovereignty. In feudal “states,” the king was sovereign only in the sense of being “first among equals,” and therefore his authority was limited by clearly recognized rights and privileges accruing to the estates. As centralization increased, medieval kings claimed a different kind of authority as the “head of state.” Authority, that is, the legitimate right to exercise power, came to be lodged in the state itself, and in the person of the king only insofar as the king represented the imagined unity of the state. More important, as sovereign head of state, the king claimed to be not simply first among equals but a separate, overarching sovereign —that is, one whose power was free from control by all others. In doing so, the king exploited a legal fiction that had emerged, especially in England, according to which the king’s body had a dual nature: it was simultaneously the physical body of the king and the symbolic, collective body that mediated between his realm and God. 23
The object of governing and government changed during this period. In the classical Greek city-states and the Roman Republic, the object of governance was “the city,” which was understood as the highest and most noble form of human association. The institutions and techniques of governing the city aimed at realizing a just and harmonious human community that embodied the best, most virtuous qualities of human beings. In feudal “states,” the object of governance was the soul. To the extent that the king (and his vassals) governed, beyond protecting his private holdings, he understood himself to be acting for the moral and spiritual well-being of those he ruled, his subjects. In the late medieval period, from about the thirteenth century, there began to emerge a new idea about what governing meant that contested these earlier conceptions of political rule. The object of governing was neither to realize human virtue nor to serve religious redemption. Although politics and rule were not in this period completely severed from these ends—they continued to be discussed using the language of virtue and salvation—both came to be described as good in their own right. As the aim of the art of painting was to produce a perfectly formed picture, so the art of governing increasingly aimed at producing a perfectly formed government. 24
In this new language, the king became more and more the symbolic representation of the apparatus that managed public affairs, his symbolic body gaining precedence over his physical body. The state became identified less with the authoritative decisions of private persons who governed, and more as an ongoing apparatus of processes, offices, and institutions under the direction and supervision of the king. Its logic became less one of personal loyalty to rulers and overlords and more one of representation; that is, political power became hierarchical and mediated by a language and culture that represented to the people their own collective being. Once the state was understood in this way, and a language formed that made such an idea intelligible, the state could take itself as its own object of rule. That is, the art of governance could become the act of managing the governing apparatus so as to ensure its own power and security, and to secure the health and well-being of the state.
It is important to recognize that the development of the modern language of sovereignty was gradual, and, hence, we will look at its development further in the next chapter. The authority and the growing power claimed by centralizing monarchs were contested throughout this period, in some cases successfully, by the Catholic Church and the nobility. Moreover, kings did not yet clearly see themselves as representatives of the sovereign power of the state. Most kings, well into the early modern period, that is, into the seventeenth century, continued to frame their claims to authority and power in terms of their being the representatives of a universal Christendom in Europe. This allowed them to claim rightful authority in areas outside their territorial area and to extend their authority to inherited but noncontiguous areas.
Nonetheless, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on, a new mode of governing based on the sovereignty of the state rather than personal rule developed. The principle of state sovereignty first and foremost unified political rule within a specific territory. The stage was being set for the imagining of political space in a fundamentally novel way, as a unified, contiguous territory. The king came to look on his subjects, the population of the territory he ruled, as an object, bounded by the limits of the physical space he ruled, as parts of the whole to be ordered and administered.
Secularism And The Emergence Of Modernity
The formation of centralized politico-military power together with the idea of sovereignty affected the traditional Christian way of understanding the relationship between human actions and God; this, in turn, provoked a crisis in Christian beliefs. As the politico-military power of the medieval state grew and strengthened, the natural and human worlds began to appear more contingent; that is, more of what happened to human beings appeared to be the result of mere chance or the result of their own actions rather than being directly determined by God. The power of the emerging, centralized medieval state to order human affairs made the world increasingly subject to human will; this presented a challenge to the Christian idea that all human actions and laws fit neatly together as part of God’s plan over which humans themselves have no control.
In the early fourteenth century, this crisis in Christian belief found expression in a philosophical movement called nominalism, which began to sever the link between reason and faith. Nominalists, like William of Ockham (c. 1280–1349), defended the new power of the medieval monarchy by arguing that considering the world as a preexistent order prior to human action and determination was inconsistent with the Christian idea that God was omnipotent, an all-powerful being who created the world according to his own will. The way the world is at any particular moment is finite and contingent. One contemporary political theorist describes the importance of nominalism this way: “Nominalism saves God’s omnipotence by pushing him higher into the heavens, disconnecting him from the reason, experience, texts and signs that make up the mundane world. It thereby sets the table for later secularization.” 25
This theological and spiritual crisis would continue to affect the rise of the state for several hundred years, and we will have occasion to return to it later. Here we introduce three developments of the late medieval period that would be important to the development of the secularized, territorial state: (1) the idea of a civil society; (2) the revival of Roman republicanism, including the idea of “reason of state”; (3) and the idea that knowledge can and should improve human life.
Civil Society
As early as the writings of the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274), the idea of a body of law that governed human social and moral life independently of direct religious supervision developed. Aquinas revived Aristotelian ideas concerning the ability of human reason to discover for itself the moral laws that governed human beings. To do this without denying God and defying the Church, he defined natural law as developing from the “participation in the eternal law by rational creatures.” 26 In Aquinas’s view, however, mankind still required direction from God. To express this need, he set natural law within a hierarchy of law. At the pinnacle of this hierarchy was the eternal law by which God regulated the universe. Divine law —the law as expressed in the Bible—governed mankind’s higher spiritual life. Natural law reflected humankind’s nature as a rational being possessed of both a natural inclination to do good and the innate reason to discover moral laws. Below natural law was positive or human law, the body of law made by the state. For Aquinas, human institutions and actions, such as politics, were to be directed according to principles of natural law and were distinct from the canon law of the Church, which expressed divine law. Aquinas used the idea of natural law derived by reason to justify the growing autonomy of medieval kingship from the church, and even went so far as to argue that the king was bound by natural law to do what was good for his subjects. 27
The implications of the idea that politics is bound by a realm of universal rational rules that sought the good of the “society” as a whole would develop over the next several centuries. It led to the concept of the “social” as a distinct realm of human actions and institutions. Natural law would become especially important in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when it would be used to describe a system of social relations that were based in human nature itself, and only indirectly linked, if at all, to God’s law.
Of particular importance to the construction of the idea of a society was the way in which women were related to natural law. This would lead to the subordination of women in the modern state by enabling them to be assigned to a private sphere cordoned off from the public world. Although natural law referred to both men and women, it did not do so in the same way or to the same degree. In both Aristotle’s thought and in Christianity, the two sources of Aquinas’s theory of natural law, women were secondary to men in a natural hierarchy. Aristotle believed that women were biologically inferior to men. Their natural function in the hierarchy of nature was to reproduce and care for children. Their natural place was the household and home. As was discussed in Chapter 2, Christianity considered women to be the “helpmates” of men, created by God to assist him in the Garden of Eden. Thus, Aquinas’s theory freed the natural world from direct religious control, but continued to place women in a subordinate position within a presumed “natural” gender hierarchy. 28 The result was that the modern state and society became domains of male activities. Although individual women might occasionally participate in them, this was not the norm, and such women were most often viewed with suspicion and open disdain. The modern idea of society was constructed according to a presumed “natural” gender hierarchy and a sharp division of public and private spheres, the latter proper to women and the former proper to men.
Perhaps the most important consequence of natural law’s conception of an independent social realm was that it freed commercial and economic activity from medieval constraints. The medieval church taught that commerce was an immoral activity because it encouraged people’s passions and desires and put material life above spiritual life. However, Aquinas’s writings provided a justification for commercial activity and the accumulation of wealth and private property based on the idea of natural law. Aquinas argued that although God had given the world to human beings as a whole for the purpose of sustaining and reproducing life (the traditional Christian belief), this inheritance would be best taken care of, and peace would be more likely, if individuals owned property for themselves. Aquinas reasoned from his observations of his fellow human beings that they took better care of property they personally owned. Here is how Aquinas put it:
Community of goods is said to be part of the natural law not because the natural law decrees that all things are to be possessed in common and nothing held privately, but because the distribution of property is not a matter of natural law but of human agreement which pertains to the positive law, as we have said. Therefore private property is not against natural law but it has been added to natural law by the inventiveness of human reason. 29
By justifying commerce and private ownership in this way, Aquinas marginalized women within economic activity, because it was men who legally owned property and therefore were the privileged caretakers of it.
Aquinas did not go so far as to describe an independent society, that is, the self-regulating, individual action that would later underlie the free market economy. Nor is the theory of natural law in Aquinas’s meaning a part of the concept of civil society that emerges in the eighteenth century. However, Aquinas’s idea helped generate a linguistic space, which made the idea of civil society possible by leading people to think of their social world as a creation of individual reason and their social interactions as governed by moral law, which they could know and justify to themselves. 30
The Revival of Republicanism
Another effect of the general trend toward centralized politico-military power in later medieval monarchies was the increasing construction of the political realm as independent of religious authority. This trend was bound up with the development of state sovereignty, which imbued the political realm with a spirit of self-confidence. Just as the idea of natural law allowed a freeing of the commercial spirit, the revival of Roman republican ideas of a distinct political realm operating according to its own principles freed the political will from the constraints of a divinely ordered world.
The new spirit of politics emerged most forcefully in the city-states of Renaissance Italy. From the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries powerful Italian city-states such as Florence, Venice, Pisa, Milan, and Siena struggled to establish their independence from both the Catholic Church, which claimed the right to control them directly, and the Holy Roman Emperor. Political theorists such as Marsiglio of Padua (c. 1275–1342) and Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), among others, established the idea that the pope had no jurisdiction at all over political matters. 31 They described the pope as “a mere administrator of sacraments who could have no power and make no laws in temporal fields.” 32 Although this claim was made for the specific purpose of establishing the supreme authority of the Holy Roman Emperor in Italy, the arguments about the autonomy of political matters would go on to have more general significance. The important legal thinker Bartolus de Saxoferrato (1314–1357) used the rediscovered Roman law to claim not only the autonomy of politics from religion, but the supremacy of particular secular rulers. 33
Roman practices of self-governance had never been fully eradicated from the northern Italian cities during the Middle Ages; the peoples in them developed a fierce spirit of independence, which by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries led to the establishment of self-governing republics against prevailing monarchies. Thus, the political realm—the realm of struggle for independence and the conflicting strategies and passions of the factions, which sought to rule these independent city-states—became a subject of interest in its own right. Literati (i.e., educated individuals) began to write pamphlets and books giving advice to rulers on how to maintain independence from outside forces as well as peace among different factions at home. 34
The most significant proponent of this new spirit in politics was Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), a Florentine bureaucrat and diplomat who served in the republican government of Florence until it was overthrown in 1494. Machiavelli reinterpreted the Roman republican ideas of citizenship and civic virtue as actions in the spirit of self-sacrifice for the good of the state. He most fully presented this concept in his commentary on Roman history, the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy (1519). Machiavelli’s political theory has been called “the first great experiment in a ‘pure’ political theory.” 35
Machiavelli described politics as an arena of human action governed not by religion and high moral purpose but by necessity and contingency (i.e., chance and unforeseen causes). He saw it through a new imagery drawn not from religion but from the Roman idea of virtus and from his long experience of the political realm itself. Politics, he declared, demanded that the ruler know the people and that the people know the ruler, and involved the power and manipulations inherent in such knowledge. Knowing politics from the lofty heights of the heavens was replaced with an earthly imagery:
For in the same way that landscape painters station themselves in the valleys in order to draw mountains or high ground, and ascend an eminence in order to get a good view of the plains, so it is necessary to be a prince to know thoroughly the nature of the people, and one of the populace to know the nature of princes. 36
Thus, for Machiavelli, the political spirit is within politics itself, within its struggles for power, honor, privilege, and security. For him, the laws that govern political action are those of strategy, prudence, and daring. To learn politics one does not study theology or morals but the “deeds of great men” and their successes and failures in past political struggles.
For Machiavelli, the spirit of the political realm was distinctly human, able to recognize and, when possible, master the contingencies of Fortune (i.e., chance). In this struggle great men could not afford either religion or its morals. They had to reduce the contingencies of Fortune through the prudent and instrumental use of violence for the “interest of the state,” in order to maintain its glory, longevity, and greatness. One commentator on Machiavelli has called his focus on necessity and contingency an “economy of violence.” 37
This emphasis on mastery, prudence and valor in war, and violence reinforced the masculine character of the emerging state and continued the trend of estranging women from politics and public life. Fortune, Machiavelli said in a famous passage in The Prince (1513), “is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force.” 38 Machiavelli’s revival of the Roman ideas of virtus and citizenship relied on the individual’s (i.e., male’s) own abilities to master the circumstances he finds in the world.
Machiavelli’s writing became associated over the next two centuries with a distinctly secular and “modern” attitude toward politics and government. By liberating the political will from its medieval religious and traditional restrictions, his writings allowed explorations of the way states could actually maintain and enhance their power. Reflections on the state in the Machiavellian mode could become reflections of the state itself, on how to efficiently order its affairs to maximize its power. This way of thinking about the political realm as embodying a distinctive, even ruthless spirit of political intrigue and action is called Machiavellism or, alternatively, “reason of state.” 39
Science for the Benefit of Mankind
A third aspect of late medieval life that led to the emergence of the modern territorial state was the development of a new attitude toward knowledge in general. Increasingly, knowledge and science came to be seen as having intrinsic value, which satisfied human curiosity about the basic makeup of the earth and the heavens, and as means that should be used to improve the material condition of humankind. The renewal of curiosity about the natural world and the practical applications of that knowledge challenged the traditional presumptions about the nature and purposes of knowledge.
As we discussed in the previous chapter, the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages held a monopoly on advanced knowledge. This allowed the Church to define the standards of truth and the proper uses of science. To the medieval Church, knowledge was important because it led people to know God and therefore directly affected how people could live a good, moral life. Knowledge was to lead to a spiritual awakening and purification of the soul. Thus, knowledge was closely linked to religion through its role in teaching people how to “know and love God.”
While knowledge remained connected to the moral life throughout the medieval period, links between scientific knowledge and the moral life became more indirect. “Modern” science did not tell people what the moral life was, but it could be an important tool for accomplishing specific tasks and solving specific problems, such as how to build bigger ships to meet the demand for more goods, or how to count populations accurately so that taxes could be more efficiently collected. Rather than being limited to the Church and a hierarchy of knowledges that defined God’s will as supreme and the unity of the human world as part of God’s plan, knowledge became technologized; that is, it became an instrument to be used by those who wielded power in order to accomplish specific tasks or solve certain problems.
This new use of knowledge would have two important effects. One was to produce among human beings a sense of power and control over the natural and social world. The second was to produce a sense among human beings that knowledge of the natural and social worlds was of intrinsic value because it could lead to a better, more comfortable, and “civilized” way of life. By the early sixteenth century this new attitude would be reflected in the emergence of a new genre of literature, the utopia. These fictional narratives described a perfected social order that could be produced by applying scientific knowledge. Among the most popular of such works were Utopia (1516) by Thomas More (1478–1535) and The City of the Sun (1623) by Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639). The most influential in promoting the secular and political power of science was New Atlantis (1627) by Francis Bacon (1561–1626), which proposed a government based on a scientific technocracy.
Summary
This chapter has described both continuities and discontinuities between the elements of the medieval state, the precursor to the modern territorial state, and the feudal and Roman worlds out of which it grew. Central elements of the modern territorial state, such as large standing armies and professional administrations, emerged in the medieval period, roughly from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. By contrasting elements of the new language of politics that emerged in medieval monarchies, we have illuminated how the modern, territorial state was made possible by both its past and the contingent history in which it operated.
Endnotes
Note 1: Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, A.D. 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: Free Press, 1994). Back.
Note 2: Samuel E. Finer, “State- and Nation-Building in Europe: The Role of the Military,” in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 102–108. Back.
Note 3: For details see Hamesjoachim Wilhelm Koch, Medieval Warfare (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978). Back.
Note 4: On the military revolution see Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). Back.
Note 5: Phillippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 119–165. Back.
Note 6: Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 114–115. Back.
Note 7: Janice E. Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Back.
Note 8: William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 117. Back.
Note 9: Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 519. Back.
Note 10: Joseph A. Schumpeter, “The Crisis of the Tax State,” in Richard Swedburg, ed., The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 102–108; and Michael Mann, “State and Society, 1130–1815: An Analysis of English State Finances,” in Maurice Zeitlin, ed., Political Power and Social Theory: A Research Annual, vol. 1 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1980), 165–208. Back.
Note 11: Schumpeter, “The Crisis of the Tax State,” 106. Back.
Note 14: Joseph R. Strayer, Feudalism (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1965), 61–68. Back.
Note 15: Joseph and Frances Geis, Life in a Medieval Castle (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Back.
Note 16: Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 28. Back.
Note 20: Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 77–79. Back.
Note 21: Strayer, Feudalism, 67. Back.
Note 22: Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, 60–67. Back.
Note 23: Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). Back.
Note 24: Jean Bodin, in Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), is credited with being the first to investigate sovereignty theoretically in reference to the depersonalized state. The imagery in which the state is rendered a “body politic” is most vividly deployed in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), wherein he describes the sovereign as an “Artificiall Soul” (9) and “Mortal God” (120). Back.
Note 25: William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 20. Back.
Note 26: St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, trans. and ed. Paul E. Sigmund (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988) 46. Back.
Note 27: St. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship, in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics. Back.
Note 28: Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 74–78; Diana Coole, Women in Political Theory: From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism, 2d ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), 48–51. Back.
Note 29: Coole, Women in Political Theory, 72. Back.
Note 30: Adam B. Seligman, The Idea of Civil Society (New York: Free Press, 1992). Back.
Note 31: See J. H. Hinsley, Sovereignty, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 82–88; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 16–22. Back.
Note 32: Hinsley, Sovereignty, 83. Back.
Note 33: Skinner, Foundations, 8–12. Back.
Note 34: Skinner, Foundations, pt. 1. Back.
Note 35: Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 198. Back.
Note 36: Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, ed. Max Lerner (New York, Random House, 1950), 4. Back.
Note 37: Wolin, Politics and Vision, chap. 7. Back.
Note 38: Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses, 94. Back.
Note 39: Still the most important chronicle of this tradition is Frederich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962). For an interpretation of its importance in the development of political economy, see Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 33–35. Back.
The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics
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