Later Medieval Europe

1250-1520

Daniel Waley, Peter Denley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317890171
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From the divine right of kings to the political philosophies of writers such as Machiavelli, the medieval city-states to the unification of Spain, Daniel Waley and Peter Denley focus on the growing power of the state to illuminate changing political ideas in Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Spanning the entire continent and beyond, and using contemporary voices wherever possible, the authors include substantial sections on economics, religion, and art, and how developments in these areas fed into and were influenced by the transformation of political thinking. The new edition takes the narrative beyond the confines of western Europe with chapters on East Central Europe and the teutonic knights, and the Portuguese expansion across the Atlantic.

The third edition of this classic introduction to the period includes even greater use of contemporary voices, full reading lists, and new chapters on East Central Europe and Portuguese exploration. Suitable as an introductory text for undergraduate courses in Medieval Studies and Medieval European History.

Part I

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY: EXPANSION AND HEGEMONY

Chapter 1

GOVERNMENT IN THE LATER THIRTEENTH CENTURY

THE POLITICAL CONTOURS OF THIRTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE

One of the main themes of this book is the development of government during two centuries and a half, foreshadowing and culminating in the ‘modern’ nation-state of later periods. We may begin, therefore, by describing some of the ways in which political power was exercised at the start of our period.

The most centralised forms of government are evidenced in western and northern Europe. In France, where St Louis IX (1226–70) had added immeasurable prestige to the territorial and administrative gains of Philip (11) Augustus (1180–1223), the monarchy already displays the powerful basis of its later achievements.¹ Similar trends can be seen in Christian Spain and in England. In their relationship with the great men whose attitude would do most to determine their success as rulers, these kings were feudal overlords. The magnates, lay and ecclesiastical, owed the king fealty as vassals and in particular had the obligations of attending his court when summoned to give counsel and of rendering him military service—the amount of which was normally defined in some detail. In that he had been crowned a king and anointed as a sign of his semi-sacred calling—everything possible was done to exploit the mystical aspects of kingship on his behalf—the monarch was more than first among equals, and in thirteenth-century France the doctrine was becoming accepted that in no circumstances could he be himself a vassal of an uncrowned lord.

The picture is less consistent elsewhere. The western emperors, heirs to Charlemagne, had uncertain claims to suzerainty over these kings, but in practice the lands of Germany and northern Italy had no ruler between the death in 1250 of Frederick II and the election in 1273 of Rudolf of Habsburg, a princeling from south-western Germany who enjoyed papal support but had no resources to compare with those of the kings. Germany was a feudal body without a head. In Italy, this long-standing situation had given rise to a multiplicity of independent or quasi-independent territories in which government took a variety of forms, from monarchy in the south (beyond the confines of the Empire) to city-state in the north.

Beyond the territories that formed the core of western Europe, there were even fewer signs of stability. The eastern emperor, restored to Constantinople from the time of Michael Palaeologus (1261), ruled over ‘the shade of that which once was great’; most of what had been Byzantine territory was now parcelled out among the Turks, Bulgars, Italian maritime republics and Frankish lords. Poland and Bohemia were Slav kingdoms in part populated by Germans and often unsettled by pressure from the rulers of Germany. Russia was overshadowed by Mongol domination and Hungary by the power of both Mongols and Germans. The Scandinavian kingdoms had not yet achieved even the relatively civilized techniques of government in western Europe and have left less written testimony to their activities.

MONARCHS AND SUBJECTS

It is with France and Spain that I shall be principally concerned, then, in describing the characteristic structure of the feudal kingdom, with its ‘empire within an empire’ or, more accurately, its series of ‘Chinese boxes’ intervening between the all-inclusive monarchy and the humble individual in his own locality (in ‘the last place on earth’, as I once heard a French peasant describe his village). ‘Every baron is sovereign in his own barony’, says Beaumanoir, the thirteenth-century French lawyer,² and indeed each was entitled to wage his own wars, so long as these were not incompatible with his fealty to the king. Linguistic differences accentuated this social and political localism. In France the great dividing line ran between the Provençal south, whose tongue (the langue d'oc') had received a smaller element of Teutonic influence from the barbarians, and the northerners whose ‘yes’ was ‘oui’ (the ‘langue d'oïl’) and who have shaped the French language of today. Brittany, of course, spoke an entirely different, Celtic, tongue. The great French fiefs were Aquitaine (whose duke was the king of England), the duchy of Burgundy, and the counties of Flanders, Brittany and Champagne. At St Louis' death (1270) the other powerful counties were in the hands of the king or his immediate family; his brother Charles held Anjou and Provence and a nephew Artois.

Each of these lordships was a state in itself, with its own machinery of central and local government, exercising legislative and judicial powers, taxing and coining money, exacting military service and counsel. Even excluding Aquitaine, which was altogether exceptional through its connection with the English Crown, these fiefs rivalled and in some cases surpassed the king's own administration in the degree to which they had developed an intricate structure of government. Both Champagne and Flanders had local baillis at least as early as the Crown—in the late twelfth century—and indeed the Flemish counts, who had a precocious chancery in the eleventh century, tapped the wealth of their industrial cities through a highly organised office for receipts by the middle of the thirteenth. For the majority of French nobles, their lord was one of these great magnates. Before St Louis set out on crusade he had called his barons to Paris to swear that they would ‘keep faith and loyalty to his children if anything happened to him on his journey’. Joinville, the king's future biographer, refused to take this oath, ‘since I was not then his vassal’.³ He was a vassal of the count of Champagne only and his refusal was entirely justified. Nearly 200 years later the royal official at Vaucouleurs in the county of Bar—between Champagne, which had now come to the Crown, and Lorraine—was Robert de Baudricourt. When a shepherdess came to him with a strange tale of supernatural visions, it was to the duke of Lorraine that she was sent. Only later did Baudricourt reluctantly despatch the persistent Joan of Arc to Charles VII at Chinon.

But it would be misleading to give an impression of France as a neat pattern of clearly demarcated territorial lordships. The situation was much more intricate than this. The count of Champagne, for example, held lands of the emperor, the duke of Burgundy, the archbishops of Reims and Sens and of several bishops, as well as of the king of France. The title of count was not an indication of tenancy-in-chief (i.e. of the king) and many counts were numbered among the count of Champagne's own vassals. The powerful subjects of later medieval England were still less regional in the basis of their strength. Edward Ill's sons, the Black Prince and John of Gaunt, were little less than kings, and the latter (who was, indeed, titular king of Castile) on occasions raised about half the nation's armed forces from his own men. The Black Prince was prince of Wales and Aquitaine, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester; Gaunt was duke of Lancaster, but geographical titles gave little indication of their power and Gaunt's ‘palatinate’ was more independent and stronger.

The Spanish monarchies present a different picture in some respects, for they were themselves composite structures. Alfonso X was king of ‘Castile, Toledo, Leon, Galicia, Seville, Cordova, Murcia, Jaen and Algarve’ and the Aragonese ruled not merely Aragon but also Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearics and the county of Barcelona. These titles to some extent corresponded to divisions in the work of government: the component parts of the Aragonese kingdom had their own royal households and councils, their own stewards and chancellors, courts and parliaments. The absence here of a small class of great lay feudatories did not imply that the king exercised greater power, indeed it could not, for all kings faced the same situation and lacked the financial means to secure direct obedience over wide areas. Hence all were compelled to divide the work of government with local powers such as feudal magnates or municipalities. The degree of independence achieved by urban institutions serves as a sort of barometer of the king's strength, for where he is most powerful— in southern Italy and in England—the town receives a strictly limited right to order its own internal affairs, and where he is weakest—in the imperial territory of northern Italy—republics arise paying, at the most, occasional lip-service to their overlord.

Since the Carolingian period, in circumstances that had been unpropitious to central control, western Europe's most characteristic institution had been the zone of private jurisdiction, the ‘liberty’ or ‘immunity’. The king's efforts had to be directed to seeing that ‘self-government at the king's command’ was performed satisfactorily and on terms which were clearly defined and as much as possible in accordance with his own interests. His vassals owed him aid in war and peace and he would also attempt to reserve the right to hear judicial appeals. He would normally reserve the right to intervene if his vassal failed to render justice, and might even reserve for his court all major criminal suits. A grant made by Alfonso IX of Castile to the Order of St James (1229) will serve as an illustration.⁴ The Order received from the king gave jurisdictional rights in certain places in return for normal feudal services. ‘Moreover I [the king] am to exercise justice in these villae should either you or the representative [vkarius] deputed by you for this purpose be negligent in doing justice.’ Should this circumstance arise, however, the Order was nevertheless to receive the property of the criminal. The king also reserved to himself the power to hear appeals from the Order's court.⁵

Arrangements of this nature prevailed all over Europe (and others bearing some resemblance to them over a good deal of Asia). The Spanish kingdoms were not exceptional in the ubiquity of ecclesiastical lords. In imperial territory north of the Alps (that is, an area centred on modern Germany) the pious donations of lay magnates had combined with the policy of emperors intent on securing a literate and celibate governing class to place a very high proportion of the land in the hands of the Church, a situation which had been fateful for German history in the eleventh century, when the emperors fought the new claims of the papacy to control the whole Church, and was to be so again in Luther's time.⁶ In the Slav lands, Germany east of the Elbe and Scandinavia, bishops and monasteries occupied a dominant position in society as the heirs of recently triumphant missionaries. Some churchmen, too, benefited by the general rule that in the ‘marches’ or border territories the local potentates were entrusted with special powers to strengthen their hand in the military emergencies of frontier existence. Thus the bishop of Durham, the king of England's bulwark against the Scots, ruled a palatinate which was unvisited by the king's sheriffs and normally paid the king no taxes.

The energetic ruler kept himself constantly informed concerning his rights and struggled to increase them or at least preserve them intact. In particular he sought to extend his judicial activity, for this gave him greater control in his kingdom and also, by bringing in money, made possible further gains. Often a vital contest was waged over appellate jurisdiction.⁷ The popes of the later thirteenth century fought a long struggle to prevent the communes of the Papal State from hearing appeal suits, but their attempt to secure a monopoly of these cases were not successful. At the same time (1278) Philip III of France legislated to forbid the setting up of appeal benches by any of his vassals not then in possession of such courts.

The bureaucratic apparatus of the western monarchies will be described later. The king was, in orthodox but somewhat archaic theory, expected to ‘live of his own’, content with what he received as a lord exploiting his own feudal revenues or domain. To an enormous extent he was dependent on the productiveness of this domain. With some exaggeration, the success of the thirteenth-century French kings may be ascribed to their acquisition of Normandy in 1204, and the failure of the emperors to their inability to acquire the confiscated duchy of Saxony some years earlier. But in the last analysis the king was dependent on the loyalty of his vassals, a virtue doubtless fostered by the knowledge that they in turn needed their own vassals to be loyal.

To these vassals the king was a feudal overlord, but he could be seen in other ways: to legists he was the source of law, to theologians the means through which God worked his purposes on earth. Before going further into the realities of thirteenth-century government it may be well to look at some of the theories expressed concerning rule and rulers and, first of all, to see what kings themselves and popes thought about kingship.

KINGSHIP AND LAW

St Louis, handing on to his son Philip III the lessons of a righteous and successful career, explained that a king must love God and strive after justice. He must avoid favouring the rich and powerful and must show complete impartiality in cases in which the Crown's own rights are involved: ‘If you should discover that you are in wrongful possession of anything, even if possession of it was acquired by your ancestors, surrender it forthwith.’⁸

A few years before this, St Louis' brother, Charles of Anjou, had been the recipient of similar advice from Clement IV on acquiring the throne of Sicily ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps; Figure; Table
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliographical Note
• Maps
• Part I The thirteenth century: Expansion and Hegemony
• Part II The Fourteenth Century: Crises and Restructuring
• Part III The Fifteenth Century: New Dynamics
• Part IV Western Europe's Peripheries
• Part V New Perspectives
• Index