The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt

Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Dirk Schoenaers, Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Dirk Schoenaers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134878949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt charts the history of medieval rebellion from Spain to Bohemia and from Italy to England, and includes chapters spanning the centuries between Imperial Rome and the Reformation. Drawing together an international group of leading scholars, chapters consider how uprisings worked, why they happened, whom they implicated, what they meant to contemporaries, and how we might understand them now.

This collection builds upon new approaches to political history and communication, and provides new insights into revolt as integral to medieval political life. Drawing upon research from the social sciences and literary theory, the essays use revolts and their sources to explore questions of meaning and communication, identity and mobilization, the use of violence and the construction of power. The authors emphasize historical actors' agency, but argue that access to these actors and their actions is mediated and often obscured by the texts that report them.

Supported by an introduction and conclusion which survey the previous historiography of medieval revolt and envisage future directions in the field, The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt will be an essential reference for students and scholars of medieval political history.

PART I

Conceptualising revolt

Then and now

1
WRITING REVOLT IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Myles Lavan

If the later Middle Ages are emerging ever more clearly as an age of revolt, the Roman empire of the first and second centuries CE has long seemed an age of order.¹ There were a few large-scale provincial rebellions, but they were mostly limited to peripheral areas and to the immediate aftermath of conquest. The thousands of cities in the empire offer only scattered evidence for urban revolts; slave revolts appear few and minor; peasant revolt is virtually invisible. It has even been suggested that banditry all but disappeared for much of the period.² For many scholars, the remarkable thing about revolt in the early Roman empire is its rarity. On one reading, this picture is explained by the Roman state’s success in securing the consent of the governed, its provision of mechanisms of dispute resolution that were relatively predictable, rational, and autonomous from local interests and thus worked to reduce the frequency with which aggrieved groups turned to violence, and perhaps also its ability to constrain predatory behaviour by local magnates through the ever present threat of Roman intervention in the case of unrest.³ On a more cynical interpretation, the Roman empire appears peaceful not because rational Roman government worked to limit the causes of conflict, but because the threat of retaliation by Rome deterred the disadvantaged from attempting to use violence to address their grievances. Stability was a product of an unusually neat alignment of interests between the imperial state and local elites, with Roman power underwriting highly unequal distributions of wealth, privilege, and political power in the provinces.⁴

But the image of the Pax Romana has not gone unquestioned. One approach has been to assemble the scattered evidence for revolt into a coherent picture. Thomas Pekáry, for example, set out to critique the prevailing view that the Roman empire was highly successful at keeping the peace by cataloguing every instance of ‘unrest and revolt’ that he could find. Producing a list of more than 100 examples, he concluded that minor disturbances of the peace were a feature of life in the empire even during peaceful periods.⁵ At the macro-level, it has become evident not just that large-scale revolts requiring a major military response were frequent during the first generations after incorporation into the empire, but also that there were regions where they continued sporadically through the second century – notably Britain and Mauretania, as well as the obvious case of Judea.⁶ At the micro-level, banditry can now be seen more clearly as a ubiquitous structural consequence of the uneven penetration of the Roman state.⁷

Equally important work has highlighted the unreliability of the literature produced by the Roman elite and civic epigraphy – our two most important sources – as evidence for revolt.⁸ There are several revealing examples of major episodes that we know of from some texts that are ignored or suppressed by other texts. A famous speech by the emperor Claudius delivered in the senate in 48 CE praised the ‘unswerving faith and obedience’ of the Gauls during the hundred years since their conquest by Julius Caesar, wilfully ignoring a major revolt as recently as 21 CE.⁹ Talmudic sources reveal endemic banditry in Judea that is largely invisible in Latin and Greek sources.¹⁰ Archaeology is also revealing evidence of military installations in some supposedly peaceful areas.¹¹ It thus seems likely that our sources significantly under-report both the incidence and scale of disturbance. Their myopia may be partly strategic, aiming to limit the circulation of knowledge about instability, but it is probably predominantly ideological. The Roman elite were so deeply invested in convincing their subjects and themselves of their success in creating peace that they were likely to ignore or trivialise discordant events.¹² The Roman world was surely less peaceful than it appears. But that does not necessarily mean that it was not, in comparative perspective, an age of order. Sympathetic as I am to projects of compilation, it remains unclear how many instances we would need to find in order to conclude that revolt or was not relatively rare, given that the object of study is a vast and diverse imperial state encompassing tens of millions of inhabitants distributed across 2,000–3,000 largely autonomous local communities.

The considerable uncertainty about the frequency of revolt is compounded by the paucity of information about most of the events that we do know of. In many cases, the sum total of the evidence available to us is 10 to 20 words in one or two texts – often much less. In these circumstances, there is probably little that the study of the early Roman empire can contribute to the social history of revolt in other periods – though the exchange can be very profitable for Roman historians; indeed most of the best work has leant heavily on the comparative method.¹³ But the Roman empire is a useful context in which to think through some of the methodological difficulties involved in moving from a textual record to a social history of revolt. Our ability to identify and understand past revolts is necessarily constrained by our sources’ operations of classification (what they consider a revolt) and selection (their threshold for taking notice of relevant events) and the conceptual apparatus they deploy to explain and describe episodes of revolt, which may not be particularly accurate and is unlikely to be disinterested. These are problems that beset any history of revolt, but they appear in particularly sharp relief in the case of the early Roman empire. Hence I focus on the Roman discourse on revolt and the ways in which it continues to shape our understanding of the social processes it describes.¹⁴

The most obvious problem is our dependence on sources written by the literate, propertied classes – especially the administrative elite and their social circle. The best analysis of this predicament known to me is Ranajit Guha’s study of peasant insurgency in colonial India, which ought to be the starting point for any history of revolt in an imperial context.¹⁵ Guha foregrounds the problem of reliance on elitist evidence, which ‘has a way of stamping the interests and outlook of the rebels’ enemies on every account of our peasant rebellions’.¹⁶ ‘The historical phenomenon of insurgency’, he writes, ‘meets the eye for the first time as an image framed in the prose, hence the outlook, of counter-insurgency.’¹⁷ The distortions of elitist discourse on peasant revolt – what Guha calls the ‘prose of counter-insurgency’ – include not just the obvious rhetorics of barbarism, criminality, and immorality, which deny legitimacy to the rebels, but also more subtle tropes, such as spontaneity or hysteria, which deny them agency and rationality. These distortions pervade not just the communications of colonial administrators but also the private writings of elites in the periphery and the metropole, even those writing at some emotional distance from events and with some sympathy for the rebels. They continue to shape modern historiography, however sympathetic it may be:

It is still very common for many [historians] to let their source material, almost invariably of an administrative nature, command their view of peasant revolt both in fact and judgement. The reliance on official evidence cannot be helped in most cases because of the absence or inadequacy of information of any other kind. But for a modern scholar to vitiate his work with the subjectivity of the guardian of law and order is to renounce the advantage he has over any contemporary witness of an event.¹⁸

He is scathing in his dismissal of historians who have denied peasant rebels the possibility of agency and rationality merely because they are denied them by elitist sources. Guha insists that the historian must acknowledge the peasant as ‘the maker of his own rebellion’. His solution to the problem of dependence on elitist evidence is to assume, plausibly enough for his period, that political discourse is necessarily dialogic: ‘counter-insurgency can hardly afford a discourse that is not fully and compulsively involved with the rebel and his activities’. Starting from the observation that the prose of counter-insurgency is pervaded by terms ‘designed primarily to indicate the immorality, illegality, undesirability, barbarity, etc of insurgent practice’, he argues that it is possible to recover the real history of peasant insurgency by inverting those tropes to recover the practices they delegitimised.¹⁹ For reasons I will return to, I doubt that Guha’s methodology of inversion will work for my period, but his insights into what an adequate history of revolt should look like and into the need to interrogate the tropes of elitist discourse on revolt have profoundly shaped this chapter.

This chapter offers a close analysis of the Roman discourse on revolt, exploring the key terms in the Latin vocabulary of revolt (seditio, rebellio, motus, tumultus, latrocinium) and the conceptual models that Latin texts use to explain and narrate revolt. I show inter alia that the categories employed by Roman writers tend to conflate many different types of conflict, that Roman writers draw on a relatively limited repertoire of quite simplistic narrative models to explain revolt, and that their choices of which revolts to mention and how to describe them were often governed by larger agendas – all of which complicates our attempts to write histories of revolt. I finish with some discussion of discursive history of revolt as a supplement, or even alternative to, social history of revolt. The chapter is largely philological, even literary, in its approach, because that is what the sources for the period require. We are disproportionately dependent on narrative histories – ambitious and sophisticated texts that need to be understood on their own terms before we can redeploy them for our purposes. This chapter emerges from a revolution in the study of Roman historical writing, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures, maps, and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: medieval revolt in context
• Part I Conceptualising revolt: then and now
• Part II Socio-political contexts: identity, motivation, and mobilisation
• Part III Communication: language, performance, and violence
• Conclusion
• Index