The new order that was beginning to emerge with the establishment of the Carolingian Empire summarised the tendencies of the different traditions and various ethnic and social groups acting within it, and went on developing there by virtue of the predominant groups’ designs to fix their mutual relations and their ideas.
If the haphazard distribution of the Germanic invaders had already decisively differentiated this ambit from eastern Europe and northern Africa, new circumstances contributed to sharpen this differentiation. From the seventh century on, Muslims had been gaining a foothold in the Iberian Peninsula and, after a short campaign, had seized the entire Visigothic kingdom, save for a few mountain strongholds in the north from where small groups of Asturians began to launch their counterattacks. Those who crossed the Pyrenees held out for more than ten years in southern France but were halted by Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 and eventually driven back beyond the Ebro by the Carolingians between the eighth and ninth centuries.
The Muslims had begun to dominate Mediterranean maritime traffic by then and gradually succeeded in occupying the island of Sicily, where the last Byzantine city, Taormina, fell into their hands in 902. Shortly before this, other groups established a stronghold on the promontory of Freinet on the Provençal coast, from where they embarked on plundering expeditions, while other groups seized the island of Sardinia. They also became strong in the south of Italy and, over varying lengths of time, occupied several cities from which they launched their expeditions, sometimes for the purpose of pillaging, sometimes to try to establish their dominance. Bari was an important base of operations; and even when it was lost, the Muslims retained powerful bastions on both the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic coasts, from which they ruthlessly plundered countrysides and cities. The most terrible, according to Liutprand of Cremona,[1] were the Muslims of Africa. But no less violent were those in Spain who tried to annihilate the small groups of highlanders that resisted. At the end of the tenth century, Almanzor plundered enemy lands mercilessly. ‘In that tempest,’ says the monk of the Historia Silense, ‘all divine worship in Spain perished; the glory of all Christians fell; the treasures of the churches were plundered, hoarded and melted down; when at last divine mercy took pity on so much ruin, He deigned to remove that calamity from Christians’ necks. And so, in the thirteenth year of his reign and after many a hideous slaughter of Christians, Almanzor, caught by the demon that had possessed him in life, was plunged into the depths of hell in the great city of Medinaceli.’[2] A feeling of horror invaded people’s consciences, terrified, according to Lucas de Tuy, to see how ‘for our sins, the Lord consented to be so cruel to Christian folk.’[3]
Meanwhile, other aggressors entered western Europe. In the latter years of the eighth century, Norse pirates appeared on the coasts of England, and their raids would not let up for a long time. Year after year, throughout the ninth century, their ships approached the shores to loot churches and castles and seize crops. In 851, they entered along the Thames with 350 ships, set London alight and seized control of Canterbury; fifteen years later, they began to establish themselves on the island and, little by little, almost all of it fell into their hands. Meanwhile, other groups of Normen had reached the coast of France. Countrysides and cities – Paris amongst them – were repeatedly pillaged; in 885, a mighty fleet sailed up the Seine with a large number of warriors and threatened Joscelin, Bishop of Paris. ‘Libations of your blood,’ as the monk Abbo poetically put it, who had seen them making for Lutetia,[4] ‘were bestrewn by those barbarians astride seven hundred sailing vessels and other small craft, so numerous they could not be counted. The depths of the Seine were so full that its waves disappeared beneath the ships for a space of more than two leagues.’ The city was besieged, and the emperor bought the peace. The procedure was employed many times over. The Normen threatened, plundered and demanded ransoms or tributes, and their threat put rich and poor alike into perpetual disquiet. Finally, by the time some bands of Normen had settled in England, others persuaded Charles the Simple, in 911, to hand over to them the peninsula to the south of the Seine. But there was no peace. Flodoard’s year-by-year chronicle records the threat of or attack by Norse bands in various parts for much of the tenth century, on the French and British coasts, and those of Spain and the Mediterranean, where, nonetheless, they barely managed to breach the barrier of Muslim ships.
‘The year 926 began,’ says Flodoard, ‘and, with Count Herbert and various coast-dwelling Franks, King Rudolph attacked the Normen hemmed in in woods on the territory of Arras. Soon after, the Normen made a sortie during the night and struck the king’s camp. Count Herbert came to the king’s assistance fearing he would be captured by them; they set fire to some huts and there was fighting around the camp. The Normen were, nonetheless, driven back from camp and retreated. The king was wounded in the fray, and Count Herbert was killed. It is said that 1,100 Normen perished in the fight. Rudolph then returned to Laon, and the Normen pillaged the wooded countryside as far as Porcien. The Hungarians,’ he goes on, ‘also passed the Rhine and waged their cruelty by plunder and arson as far as Vouzi. When the moon was in its last quarter, on the first day of April, Easter Saturday, it underwent an eclipse and became pallid, losing some of its light and looking as if it were in its second quarter; when dawn broke, it turned the colour of blood. The body of Saint Remigius and the relics of some few other saints were carried from their monasteries to Reims out of the fear provoked by the Hungarians.’[5] The Hungarians had indeed begun to attack Germania, France and Italy. By the end of the ninth century, they had occupied the Danubian plains and, from there, had launched themselves in various directions, ravaging cities and countryside for half a century and instilling dread not only with their ferocity but also their strange appearance. ‘I shall not say men,’ wrote Otto of Freising, who knew them in the twelfth century, ‘but caricatures of men.’[6] Only when they were defeated by Otto the Great at the Lech in 955 did their looting expeditions cease, around the same time those of the Normen were coming to an end.
As the second half of the tenth century drew to a close, the long unrest of the western realms of Europe was showing signs of clearing. But the experience gained and, above all, the situations created by circumstances persisted and left a deep mark. The risks and urgent needs of defence helped consolidate a pattern of social relations that had long been organising themselves, and Muslim domination of the sea created a narrowly delimited economic situation. All these events would, in turn, help to fix the socio-economic order.
What is certain is that, by early in the eighth century, the economic transformation beginning at the time of the invasions had started to gain momentum. Already in decline, trade with the East became even rarer around that time due to Muslim maritime activity and, where it survived, meant a constant draining of wealth from western Europe eastwards. With this drainage, all forms of mercantile and manufacturing activity declined, already diminished by the turmoil of the invasions, the plundering expeditions and the general climate of insecurity.[7] To that was added the mounting loss of technical capacity, partly due to the new ruling classes’ inefficiency and partly to the steady disappearance of the division of labour. The result was a sharp drop in production yields and, above all, the decline of certain indispensable structures for the administration and movement of goods: roads began to become impassable, and bridges stopped being repaired, collapsing to the point of preventing communications, sometimes totally. This process gathered pace after the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire and coincided with the disappearance of economic stimuli due to the barriers to trade erected by the invaders. Around the same time, there was a growing process of depopulation such that living conditions between the eighth and tenth centuries became complex and unstable.
All these circumstances contributed to the abandonment of urban forms of life and the steady development of rural life. Except in some parts of Europe, especially Castile, reconquered by the Christians with such difficulty, elsewhere the great estates tended to expand, and land was concentrated in the hands of a few. In the feudal period – between the ninth and eleventh centuries, that is[8] – this tendency intensified, and the seigneuries – almost closed economic agricultural units, also operating as almost autonomous political units as their seigneurs succeeded in obtaining immunities – became firmly established. As long as the socio-economic organisation that emerged at the time suffered no aggression or competition from other forms of life or production, its development was consistent and set in formulas that, based on custom, acquired full force. But the impact on international trade of military, political and economic expansion towards the periphery in the eleventh century stirred new possibilities that affected tendencies in the prevailing socio-economic organisation. A new era thus opened up – the feudal-bourgeois period, between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries – in which the threatened system of privilege began to seek the formulas it deemed effective to stabilise itself.
I. THE FIXING OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC RELATIONS
Within the ambit thus defined, both the newly constituted kingdoms and the very idea of ‘state’ entered a crisis, particularly after the struggles between the sons of Louis the Pious. Concluding his account of those quarrels, Nithard said: ‘In the time of the great Charles, of fond remembrance, who died almost thirty years ago, the people trod the straight path, the path of the Lord, with one accord, and peace and harmony reigned everywhere. But at the present time, on the contrary, as each treads the path that pleases him, disagreements and quarrels break out far and wide.’[9] No norm concerning the foundations capable of ensuring the legitimacy of power was left standing, and the monarchy was challenged in the struggle between defenders of the hereditary principle and defenders of the elective principle. This latter theory triumphed early on in the Frankish and Germanic kingdoms and served, in practice, to justify the de facto powers won by a brave adventurer in this region or that, like Fernán González in Castile, whom it was then endeavoured to clothe in legitimising attributes.[10] But the theory entailed an inevitable reduction of monarchical authority, rendering the kings modest, as Guibert of Nogent remarks of the kings of France.[11]
In practical terms, the monarchy came under the protection of the landed military aristocracy, because only through them could it obtain ‘riches and an army, which are the defences of a kingdom.’[12] The epic took up the memory of the feeling of superiority acquired by the aristocracy, and the figure of Count William, as he appears in Le Couronnement de Louis,[13] symbolised the certainty that only with the aid of the great seigneurs could the king wield his power. But the Church took no less advantage of the monarchy’s weakness, both to share in its power and to obtain cessions of land. The dispute between the Empire and the Papacy that erupted in the eleventh century marked the culmination of a struggle between the two forces, manifested in the rise of the ecclesiastical aristocracy to the detriment of royal power.
The rise and steady emancipation of the landed aristocracy – both secular and ecclesiastical – helped to weaken what remained of the idea of nation or kingdom, itself a residue of the old Roman provincial organisation and the unity of the conquerors’ Germanic lineages. The dissolution of the Carolingian Empire, the reconquest of Spain and the vagaries of the Danish invasion of England blurred all sorts of boundaries. Political units were units of power and reached as far as the power did. Seigneurs could thus switch loyalties without the principle of fidelity to a nation or kingdom coming into play: Richer’s account of the rise of the Capetians and the tension between Carolingians and Saxons shows the progressive currency of a new kind of loyalty, namely person-to-person loyalty.
This circumstance contributed to an accentuation of the unstable relationship between the kings and the aristocracies, who were growing in power. Not only was respect for the monarchy waning, not only was it substituted de facto in the sphere of seigneurial authority, but it was openly attacked, weakening the bonds that entailed a commitment to it and acting with absolute independence. One battle followed another in all parts during the feudal period, and sometimes the great not only rose up against the kings, but in some places, like eleventh-century Italy in Wipo’s account,[14] ‘all the vavasours and simple soldiery conspired against their lords and masters, and all the small against the great.’
Indeed, power during the feudal period fell into the hands of the landed military aristocracy, which subjected the monarchy to its designs. The epic flattered the ears of the seigneurs by emphasising their haughtiness and their contempt for kings and traditional rules: Girart de Roussillon, Bernardo del Carpio or Count William despise and defy those wielding royal authority in name only, when the strength and power are in fact in their hands. The poet of the Nibelungenlied will have Volker say: ‘It is to experience too much fear always to eschew everything forbidden: I cannot call this a true hero’s courage. And Hagen approved his brother’s-in-arms words.’[15] It was no doubt gratifying for the barons to create a new system of relations as they freely wished, and the experience elicited haughtiness amongst their number. Only royal power could constrain them, as Bishop Adalberon pointed out: ‘As for the other nobles, no power restricts their freedom should they commit no crime behoving punishment by the kings’ sceptre.’[16] But the monarchy needed the landed military aristocracy too much, and it was not within its power at the time to try to make its theoretical powers effective.
The link with the state having faded, it was barely replaced by the personal tie with the king. The chain of personal loyalties based on the promise of armed service and rewarded with the granting of lands would begin to be forged. But while this new system of relationships was gathering momentum, the harsh demands of everyday circumstances strengthened blood ties. Those who could protect themselves with the help of their own had the opportunity, if they were numerous and fierce enough, to overcome the assaults of their enemies, their peers and even the king himself, and so preserve and increase their lands and, with them, their status. Certainly, in the crisis of disintegration that characterised the feudal period, lineages were cemented and came to be fundamental political units. The epic helped cement them. The song of Raoul de Cambrai perpetuated the tradition of the feud between the descendants of Raoul and Herbert of Vermandois; the song of Gui de Nanteuil, the tradition of the conflict between the lineages of Gui, its protagonist, and Ganelon; the song of the Lara Princes, the tradition of the family war.
This solidarity of lineages is nothing but negative testimony to the absence of a solid social bond. The feudal period saw the old ones disappear and witnessed the development of new ones forged by the swordstrokes of the group of the most powerful. In this task, violence, force and greed predominated over any right, barely constrained by the limited force of Christian moral principles.
But even these were ineffective in the face of the spontaneous tendencies and specific needs of the de facto situation. Living conditions reached such a pitch of instability that insecurity seemed to be the norm. It was considered astonishing to be able to transport riches along the roads without their falling into the hands of bandits,[17] amongst whom were discovered powerful barons who exploited their authority and strength to seize goods and people unlawfully. Their victims were sometimes men of their own class, whom they would ambush defenceless and fleece at a crossroads, but more often than not, it was the weak who found themselves at the mercy of the designs of the strong.[18] ‘Ingenious avarice,’ said William of Poitiers, ‘has invented in some nations of Gaul an execrable custom, barbarous and contrary to any Christian justice. Ambushes are laid for the rich and powerful, who are taken prisoner and hounded with affronts and torments. After bringing them almost to death’s door with various calamities, they are brought out of the dungeon and usually sold to some great seigneur.’[19]
What created such a state of insecurity, then, was the primacy of force, the non-existence of a legal order; but this was used to satisfy greed, because – like the king and the powerful lords of England, according to the account of the monk of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[20] – the great ‘loved gold and silver greatly, and too much’. The example spread. In imitation of the great, they let themselves be carried away by their passions and helped to keep men of lowlier and even the most wretched condition in a state of insecurity, as Raoul Glaber noted in astonishment.[21] They were even joined by Churchmen, who finally accepted the lay aristocracy’s customs, thereby removing the possible application of moral restraints. The Church thus reached a state, described by Guibert de Nogent, similar in its corruption to that of the surrounding atmosphere, but above all in its designs to achieve wealth and power by any means whatsoever.[22] It was in essence a clear crisis phenomenon whereby all rights were invalidated and all were forced to defend their status and property in person. The situation seemed so firmly set and so deep-seated that Adalberon made King Robert say that a bishop’s wishes for peace, respect for the law, justice and honesty in both religious and civil life would only be fulfilled if ‘God ever allows the Loire to attempt to bathe the fields of Calabria, the foaming Tiber to cover the Spanish countryside, roses to bloom on Mount Etna and lilies in a pond: should such things come to pass,’ he added, ‘then, bishop, hope that the vows you have taken be fulfilled.’[23] A general state of despondency gripped the spirits that clung to the hope of attaining living conditions more akin to those the world had once enjoyed.
These situations were compounded by repeated waves of shortages, hunger, famine and epidemics. While such events were normal to some degree, their impact on a political, civil and moral order characterised by insecurity, arbitrariness and violence seemed even greater and licensed vigilant consciences to assume that a certain ineluctable doom pursued the human species. Thus the idea took hold – with different nuances, of course – that, on the thousandth anniversary of Christ’s incarnation and heralded by countless misfortunes, the end of the world would come about. Raoul Glaber points to accounts of divine punishment and strings together events to bring out the veracity of Saint John the Theologian’s prophecy.[24] A holy fear moved many to surrender to the most severe religious discipline in monasteries that sprang up in large numbers to welcome those whose pious wish it was to set themselves apart from a world seemingly doomed to evil.[25]
In some parts, famine and shortage had far-reaching consequences; one old Germanic tradition blamed the kings for these disasters and recommended putting them to death to obtain the benevolence of the gods.[26] But in a world amalgamated by migrations into unevenly populated areas with abundant no man’s lands and the legal order in utter crisis, the search for effective solutions soon sought other paths. Shortages, often linked to the technical inability to increase production, was usually seen as a necessary consequence of the lack of land, that is, of the inadequate ratio of arable land to population, given certain production rates. If the land was redistributed in response to population growth, the chances of shortages grew; and the clamour was manifested in a single formula: the shortage of land. In the far north, Snorri Sturluson explained in The Yngling Saga[27] how the Swedes realised that times of shortage and scarcity were due to the fact that ‘there was a greater number of people in the lands than it could support’; and in the far south, the poet of The Song of Fernán González described a similar situation in analogous terms:
Our grandfathers were greatly afflicted,
the Moors had them corralled most tightly here,
few men in little land were gathered,
by hunger and war harshly were they travailed.[28]
The consequence of this situation was that many were forced to emigrate and embark on the adventure of acquiring new lands. Emigration was a Saxon custom, as Geoffrey of Monmouth had Hengist say in ancient times,[29] and Snorri Sturluson repeatedly attributed it to the men of the Baltic. But in France it developed for the same reasons and to identical purposes.[30] The Chronicle of the Counts of Anjou[31] notes that the first count, Tertullus, left his homeland in the time of Charles the Bald to fight alongside the king, ‘leaving behind the constraints of paternal possession, wishing and hoping to rise by his diligent deeds’. Such was the sense of the exploits undertaken by the barons exalted by the poems of William’s cycle, to one of whom the Pope said: ‘Bachelers estes, de terre avez mestier’;[32] and it was the sense of the exploits performed by Ruy Díaz de Vivar, addressing Minaya, who expressed it as follows:[33]
By spear and by sword must we survive,
or else in this narrow land we could not live,
and as I can, we must needs away from here.
The idea that the struggle for land – a desperate struggle for existence and also for the defence and preservation of social standing – was the fundamental cause of the concerns and conflicts that cast their shadow over all parts was well understood – among many others, no doubt – by Robert the Monk, the contemporary chronicler of the first crusade.[34] His chronicle attributed to Pope Urban II – whom he had heard in person at the Council of Clermont – this revealing reflection addressed to the seigneurs who heard him: ‘Let yourselves not be detained by any concern with regard to your properties or family affairs; this land you inhabit, enclosed by the waters of the sea and the heights of the mountains, keeps your numerous population in its straits; it is a land that abounds not in wealth and barely supplies food to those who till it: whence it is that you grimly tear and devour each other, make war amongst yourselves and many perish by wounding one another mutually. Extinguish all hatreds amongst yourselves; let quarrels be quelled, wars be pacified and the acrimony of your disagreements be stilled. Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre, wrest that country from the hands of those abominable peoples and subject it to your might. God has given Israel ownership of that land which Scripture says “flows with milk and honey”. Jerusalem is its centre, and, more fertile than any other, its territory offers, as it were, the delights of another paradise.’
The land conquered in this way constituted a new seigneurie, a new political, economic and social unit whose organisation and functioning stemmed from the primary fact of conquest and the law of war. This law would occasionally come into conflict with traditional precepts rooted in Roman law, but as long as custom did not confirm the law of the conqueror, they would cleave to the authority conferred on them by circumstance and make conquest a starting point for any discussion of titles. This accentuated the climate of insecurity and arbitrariness. The speech William of Jumièges attributes to Rollo speaks volumes: ‘We come to drive out the inhabitants of this land, for we wish to make it our homeland and subject it to our rule.’ And he added, ‘We shall submit to no one; everything we can conquer with our arms we shall bring under our jurisdiction.’[35] This attitude is recalled by the poet of the Song of the Nibelungs when he has Siegfried say to King Gunther: ‘I want to wrest from you by combat all that you may own; your kingdom and your mighty cities, all that is to be mine.’[36]
Ownership would later come to have other foundations, but, in the situation of the feudal period, these were extremely solid and binding. The conqueror acquired the aura of hero, in large part thanks to troubadours and minstrels, and his exploits soon became legendary. This was in part due to the prestige of victory, but above all because they had brought their protagonists a privileged social position which was soon unchallengeable. Honour and wealth began to become inseparable.[37]
In the meantime, the Church succeeded in expanding its lands after the expropriations of the early Carolingians. The cessions built up and the deed of ownership was strengthened through the respect inspired by the Church. There were dispossessions, but always in lesser number than in the lands of the laity, and the intensity of the abuse seemed far greater, with the result that the stabilisation of Church possessions was earlier and more secure than that of the other seigneurs.
As long as it was possible for the landless to acquire land by the force of their own might – generally in border regions, where there was abundant no man’s land – the opportunities for social advancement also remained open. As late as the twelfth century, a monk of Saint-Denis could say that ‘a string of different events has confounded all these distinctions; fortune has raised up what was below and brought low what was above.’[38]
Those who had become owners had placed themselves above, and only gradually would a strict hierarchy be organised amongst them. The differentiation between owners and non-owners was, however, established instantly, and those who stood among the former found new opportunities to navigate their new situation. This was the feeling that overcame Ruy Díaz de Vivar when, after his victory in Valencia, he said:
Praise be to God, who is Lord of the world.
Once I was wretched, now I am rich,
for I have land and gold and honour,
and my sons-in-law are princes of Carrión.[39]
The support of kings could also provide opportunities for social advancement,[40] which was quickly legitimised, notwithstanding any resistance it might initially encounter. Noblemen were wont to raise their voices in protest when a man of lowly status gained favour with the king because, as members of the owner class, they tended to perfect their privileges. Contrary to the opinion of those who thought like the aforementioned monk of Saint-Denis, owners and their advocates tended to accentuate social differences ultimately stemming from land ownership. And already at the start of the eleventh century, the classic thesis about the tripartite division of men was being repeated, bewailing a lack of respect for the law: ‘The family of the Lord,’ said Adalberon, Bishop of Laon, ‘which appears as one, is in reality divided into three classes. Some pray, others fight and the last toil. These three classes form but a single indivisible whole; what makes them strong is that, if one of them works for the other two, the latter in their turn do the same for the former: in this way, they each assist the others. This union, though composed of three elements, is then one and single in itself. Thus the world is ruled by the law of God, and thereby the world enjoys a sweet peace. But today the laws lack force, tranquillity is fled from all parts, the customs of men are corrupted and all order is upended.’[41]
Such a doctrine, upheld by some groups, could not be fully adhered to during the feudal period; but as time went on, the owner class tended to separate itself and organise itself not only as a de facto aristocracy but as a de iure nobility, above the non-owners. The strengthening of personal ties based on the service of arms and the exclusivity of land ownership under conditions of privilege would ensure them an increasingly consolidated position.
The personal bond established between a man and his fellow had arisen from the bare necessities of defence. Faced with constant danger, the holders of power and land – starting with the king himself – sought to secure the help of fellow soldiers of proven loyalty. The prize was to be land, but loyalty was not based on the hope of reward alone; though rewards were essential for a knight to ensure his economic and social position, personal relations were based above all on the mutual need for military assistance. The weaker party needed the support of the strong, and the strong could in turn only become strong if they had the effective might of one who knew how to wield arms. This intercrossing of mutual needs and interests spontaneously gave rise to relations of vassalage, the validity of which was crucial for those who based their security and social status on it.
The bond of vassalage constituted the organisational principle of the class holding political and economic power. Furthermore, small freemen were also forced to throw their lot in with the great, alienating much of their freedom, despite realising that this alienation would be unlikely to check the growing power of those concentrating all the authority, prestige and influence in their hands. For these freemen, however, though vassalage meant giving up some of the freedom of individual action, it operated within an increasingly universal system of mutual demands that assured those establishing the feudal contract certain individual guarantees.
The hierarchical relationship amongst members of the privileged classes was progressively established by circumstance. It was sturdy within each area because circumstances themselves helped to strengthen it. And so strong did it become that, during the feudal period, loyalty among grandees superseded the loyalty they each theoretically owed the king.[42]
From this point on, relations between the aristocracy and the monarchy would acquire highly distinctive forms. The aristocracy grew in arrogance, and, while not explicitly stating its desire to shake royal authority, it succeeded in practice by broadening the political and legal boundaries of immunity and thereby helping to shape feudal monarchy, a type of power conditioned by the collective will and interests of the aristocracy.
Moreover, in the process of the traditional state’s disintegration brought on by the upheavals accompanying the crisis in the Carolingian Empire across western Europe, the conflicts between grandees and the crown sometimes took on harrowing dimensions, due partly to defence requirements, partly also to the desire or need to increase possessions and partly to the growing weakness and impotence of royal power, which piqued the aristocracy’s ambitions. This saw the birth of the attitude of ‘rebel barons’, dramatically and insistently reflected in chronicles and passionately exalted in the seigneurial epic.[43]
Ownership of land was closely bound up with the exercise of arms. It was fought for and gained if the fight was won. Anyone seeking loyal and effective service had to offer those falling in beside them possessions that seemed worthy of them. ‘He distributed benefices,’ says William the Conqueror’s biographer, ‘in order that they should bear hardships and dangers with greater fortitude.’[44] And as long as there was no man’s land or a state of insecurity prevailed, land seemed to be available to anyone who wished to seize it or receive it by offering their arms to whomever could grant it as a benefice.
Land obtained in this way retained the sign under which it had been acquired. It was a reward for courage, and this criterion, introduced by the experience of conquest and fanned by the vagaries of conveyance, was superimposed on traditional criteria. But the idea that land should be enfeoffed – contractually incorporated into the order spontaneously created in a given territorial sphere – also gained currency. Given the difficulty of defending land, it was necessary to relinquish ownership and exercise usufruct in exchange for integration in a politico-military order suiting the scale of the dangers. Such was the fate of allodial lands. If many lands were freed from seigneurial jurisdiction after the turmoil accompanying the crisis in the Carolingian Empire, in the tenth century, allods began to fall into a state of dependency. It was the same movement that drove free peasants to transfer their land to a seigneur in return for protection and assistance. And by the twelfth century, allodial land had all but disappeared, and all lands acknowledged a seigneur.
Lands handed over in exchange for service of arms – given the name of ‘benefices’ or ‘fiefs’ – acquired a special countenance, because the kind of relationship such a grant entailed became enshrined as proper and exclusive to the aristocratic class. While the precarium defined an allocation of land in usufruct on condition of payment in work or kind, the fief represented a similar economic situation but with radically different socio-political implications. The fief developed little by little into a jurisdictional sphere in which the holder, by virtue of immunity, acquired growing political, administrative and judicial authority due in part to the pressure of circumstances and in part to the natural ambition of the grandees. Primarily for the first reason, the fief also tended to become a closed, self-sufficient economic unit, so the grandees set about acquiring as fiefs some of the villas or seigneuries that had extensive resources and ancient organisation. For similar reasons, they aspired to obtaining honores, that is, lands allocated to certain dignitaries: for all their revocability, such lands enhanced their beneficiaries’ status in the local order. Yet, once conquest had been consolidated, what they coveted most was recognition of the right to pass on fiefs by inheritance and so initiate a process towards patrimoniality.
The tendency to perpetuate ownership provoked a clash between two conceptions: the traditional conception of conquest, whereby it was sufficient entitlement to ownership, and the conception that began to spread with a view to preserving and passing on what had been conquered. The former had been the conception that had forgotten and justified the expansion; it was reflected in the heroic legend, expounded matter-of-factly as an expression of the ultima ratio underpinning the current social situation; but it set it against other legal criteria that were beginning to make their way as situations stabilised. Siegfried’s challenge was met by Gunther with amazement: ‘Why would I, yielding to violence, deserve to lose what my father has long owned with great honour’; to which Siegfried retorted unperturbed: ‘I shall not waver from my purpose: unless you are unable to defend your kingdom with your valour, I shall appropriate it; if, on the contrary, you prove the stronger, you shall be the owner of the wealth you are heir to.’[45]
This readiness to gamble hereditary possessions and wealth in combat corresponds to the idealised image of the hero yet recalls the foundations that were, for a time, deemed valid for ownership. Conversely, the aristocracy’s tendency to secure its inheritance appeared very early on. This was admitted after a fashion by Charles the Bald in 877[46] and was repeatedly asserted through the application of a criterion founded on both moral principles and Roman law that substantially contradicted the principles that originated and strengthened the regime of vassals and benefices. But the tendency towards patrimoniality was linked to the steady rise of the aristocracy and its growing power. It was not hard for its members to exalt the injustice of dispossession of their heirs, and the poet of the Couronnement de Louis felt able to include the recommendation not to snatch his fief from an orphaned son among Charlemagne’s recommendations to his own.[47] The tendency to fix the socio-economic relations created by conquest, founded in the urgent needs for defence and security during the first stage and later stabilised by the fixing of the status of the aristocratic class holding political and economic power thus began to be externalised.
Below this aristocracy, there remained a population grouped into two strictly differentiated sectors: the free and the unfree. Both lacked any political significance, since power tended to be monopolised by a small group. They were, nevertheless, of great economic importance, because, as part of a predominantly rural economy, they were the fundamental instrument of production. This circumstance sealed their state of dependency.
Legally, the status of free and unfree was perfectly well-defined. The unfree – generally descendants of former slaves or serfs – were only spared dependency through manumission. Even then, they passed into a condition of extreme inferiority but were plunged into a multitude whose economic and social grouping was highly nuanced. One thing alone was common to all its members: the situation of economic dependency and the instrumentalisation of their labour, which the aristocracy, who owned large tracts of land, took advantage to persist and consolidate their rank. This circumstance forced the aristocracy to try to fix not only its own status but that of the lower classes.
From the eleventh century on, the circumstances altered society’s pace of development and wrought significant changes in its overall make-up. There were many contributory factors.
Not long before this, around the mid or late tenth century, the attacks by the peoples hounding the borders had dried up or, at least, lost much of their aggression. The Normen had established themselves permanently on the peninsula that took its name ‘Normandy’ from them and had created a state there that came very quickly to have curious features of organisation and government due to the firm authority maintained by its dukes. In a world in the process of political disaggregation, the Normen introduced a principle of centralisation into the duchy, which they then transferred to the kingdoms of England and the Two Sicilies. The Muslims, on the other hand, witnessed the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba, replaced by weak kingdoms which would fall one by one into Aragonese and Castilian hands, while the Hungarians were blocked after their defeat by Otto the Great. The Crusades would soon begin, a project stemming from the promising new opportunities opened up by free navigation of the Mediterranean. Money began to circulate in fairs and cities, bringing with it new aspirations and prospects for rich and poor alike. The traditional order sought a new balance through certain transformations – some spontaneous, others deliberate –all born of the immediate changes under way.
This change nevertheless favoured the monarchy to some extent. Where it established itself after territorial conquest – as in the Norman or Hispanic monarchies – it succeeded in overcoming the limitations imposed elsewhere by the progressive disrepute and impotence that had characterised it in the ambit of the former Carolingian Empire. There, the aristocracy had gradually acquired the local political powers left vacant by the ineffectiveness of the crown. But where monarchy came to power through conquest, it succeeded in exercising it by maintaining its military mettle and basing that power on a principle of centralisation which elsewhere had vanished. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says of William the Conqueror: ‘He truly reigned over England,’[48] because it was his will – not the will of the grandees – that steered the country’s destinies. A similar thing happened with the Normen who organised the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the centralising principles and robust authority of which was later inherited by Frederick II; the Castilian and Aragonese monarchies also conducted themselves in like manner, their borders on a constant war footing. Even in France, the monarchy’s tendency as of the twelfth century was increasingly to assert its authority, as royal chroniclers and biographers from Suger to Joinville sought to highlight.
Royal authority would grow thanks to a certain discrimination in the aristocracy’s powers. Its members understood that their power was indiscriminately political, military and economic. But, for all that they allowed the nobles’ to grow rich, the monarchy sought to divest them little by little of political and military power even while retaining their wealth, which the kings’ greed would seek to seize where circumstances permitted. For nobles, the land was a source of wealth and power; for the monarchy, it was imperative power should decrease even as wealth grew. Land was seen as a reward for service and was allocated primarily to that effect. That was why Otto I – and his successors after him – wished to retain the prerogative to appoint bishops, whose sees had been granted vast possessions. Likewise, Alfonso IX of León laid down in the charter of 1188 that anyone receiving land from him in return for service was forbidden to pass them on to a religious community,[49] and the English Magna Carta legislated along the same lines.[50] As long as they served the political and military purposes of the kingdom, the land and its seigneurs did not controvert the designs of the crown, even when these seigneurs grew in wealth and maintained a degree of local power.
It slowly came to be accepted that nobility somehow entailed wealth, partly because it was their due from service and partly because the aristocracy and the Church agreed it was preferable for wealth to be in the hands of the powerful in order to achieve peace and stability. As Sancho IV of Castile would later very eloquently put it in a passage from the Punishments and Documents,[51] ‘It is worth remembering that nobility, wealth and power are not one and the same: that many are noble who are not rich, and many are rich who have no civil power.’ He then added: ‘But the rich without power and without nobility pick fights and quarrels over the smallest trifle, as they heed not how much but how little. And therefore, if a man is wealthy but has no civil power or nobility, this makes him mean rather than blessed… Hence nobility and civil power sit very well with riches, for those who are rich, powerful and noble know far better how to use riches by directing them to virtues rather than rich and reckless adventurers.’ Nobles gradually succeeded in having their legitimate right to wealth recognised.
However, where the exercise of wealth-based power was concerned, the aristocracy during the feudal-bourgeois period had to withstand the growing offensive of the monarchy, which eventually prevailed over them. On the other hand, the monarchy formally granted seigneurs a local power that should and could be exercised within the bounds of the fief in the form of immunities or private justice. But, at the same time, the monarchy sought recognition of sovereignty and subjection to the outlook and interests of the crown. The old conception of feudal monarchy had to be gradually amended to this end, and the crown set about doing just that. It continued to require counsel and aid but sought them from other social groups on whom it could more confidently rely. In the political arena, the duel was without quarter. This was the case in the struggle between Capets and Plantagenets; in the countless conflicts faced by the descendants of William the Conqueror in both England and Normandy and by the descendants of the Plantagenets into the thirteenth century; in the conflicts occurring in Castile after Alfonso VI’s death and notably in the thirteenth century; and in those that prevented a stable order being established in the Holy Roman Empire.
Shaken by the economic conditions created by the development of a monetary economy and threatened by the rising bourgeoisie, the aristocracy sought to resist by yielding ground over political power. It refused as best it could to return to the crown the powers feudal monarchy had relinquished, but most of all, it defended its freedom of action in parts where it exercised jurisdiction. There it rose up, passively or actively, against royal authority and Otto of Freisinga’s phrase defining the political situation in the Empire in the early thirteenth century could apply to many regions: ‘There was hardly a prince that did not rebel against his seigneur.’[52] Each asserted his independence and sought not only more economic profit from his lands, without concern for justice or humanity, but the most absolute exercise of power. If a seigneur was cruel, this tendency naturally took on the ferocity seen, for example, in the behaviour of Thomas of Marle.[53] But even without being cruel, the difference in power, prestige and strength between a seigneur and his subjects was such that both the exercise of power and the economic exploitation of the fief weighed heavily on the unprivileged and sparked the emergence of a social task which the monarchy took on itself, namely to defend the downtrodden and even to restore serfs’ freedoms.[54]
However, where possessions were concerned, the monarchy proved tolerant of – or perhaps helpless to prevent – the steady slide of ownership towards patrimoniality. Even though certain restrictions on the political and military value of land and the service related to it were asserted, custom in the first feudal-bourgeois period increasingly favoured the fief’s incorporation amongst the feudatory’s wealth. Conrad II enshrined the hereditary nature of fiefs in 1037. The allod had all but disappeared by the twelfth century, but it was around this time that the right to hold fiefs and sell them freely began to be allowed. Furthermore, the vestiges of violence underlying the whole ownership regime were beginning to fade. The Leonese charter of 1188 and the English Magna Carta of 1215 both lay down previsions to bolster the succession regime.
Thus, even as – or perhaps because – its power began to wane, the nobility took on a new, more clearly defined character as an economically privileged social class with an ever more precise status, not only in relation to the non-owning classes, but to the crown, with which it was contesting political power.
This status did not always have the same characteristics or attain legitimacy via the same paths. The social prestige of those who came to power and land by might of arms was passed on to their descendants and naturally created a principle of succession by rank. One way to flatter the powerful was to call them ‘posterity born of invincible parents’:[55] implicit in such flattery was the acknowledgment of their acquired position. Maintaining that position over several generations ended up fixing it, and the long tradition of justifying nobility by birth, denied on occasion by those who saw the new phenomena of social change and passionately defended by those who wished to resist it, worked, then, in its favour. ‘In nobility of blood,’ wrote Ramon Llull, ‘the heart is ennobled against all vileness.’[56]
It was none other than the classical intellectual tradition that, in addition to the justification of origin, provided the aristocracy with another kind of justification based on its effective role in society. They were, without a doubt, a leisured class, but those seeking to justify it emphasised the tendency to acclaim the noble leisure of those who fought, attributing to it – like Adalberon before them – a pivotal role in preserving the forms fixed for co-existence. In the early fourteenth century, Llull defined the knight’s leisure as a service that originally could only have been the provision of arms but came increasingly to be conceived as the exercise of public functions to preserve the established order. ‘That is why,’ wrote Llull in the Book of the Order of Chivalry, ‘God has willed that many knight officers are needed to rule all the people of this world […] for the knight, by the dignity of his office, is more worthy than any other man to rule over the people […] The office of a knight is to maintain and defend his earthly seigneur, for neither king, nor prince, nor high baron could uphold justice among his vassals without assistance. Therefore, if the people or any man opposes the commands of the king or prince, knights must aid their seigneur, who by himself is a man like any other. Therefore, the miscreant knight, who aids the people more than his seigneur, or who wishes to make himself master and take his seigneur’s estates, does not fulfil the office whereby he is dubbed a knight.’[57]
A nobility that felt themselves destined to share in government could not help but develop a sense of superiority. Their eagerness to maintain their position and privileges, now sharpened by the economic and social changes they observed around them, was justified by the Church’s delegation of its function as guardian of the established order and repository of the intellectual tradition in which it could find precedents and arguments. But the Church went even further. Particularly from the eleventh century on and for a variety of reasons, it extended the nobility’s specific functions to other loftier goals. It saw them as destined to defend the faith against both the daily threats of arbitrary power and the ferocious attacks of the infidels advancing on the borders of the Christian world. Instilling the nobility with the crusading spirit was the Church’s over-riding objective from the moment it managed to organise itself internally. An aggressive and fractious group averse to all discipline and accustomed to respecting the triumph of force, if it was to maintain its effectiveness in a society in the throes of change, it was necessary for the nobility to adjust its behaviour to precise and well-ordered ends in relation to the forms of co-existence. The opportunity to set about taming the nobility was provided by the fresh upsurge of Muslim attacks on the Greek Empire. It was realised then that those manly virtues which normally translated into cruel internal quarrels could be channelled into a vast enterprise, intended moreover to expand the power and wealth of the nobility and the authority of the Roman Papacy over the dissident Church of Constantinople. The Church subsequently adopted a clearly defined policy of vast social significance. It systematically contributed to establishing the principle that the mission of the ‘defender’ class of men-at-arms was not simple service of the community but the transcendental service of defending God and His Church. Knights had, until then, only waged unjust wars: the time had come for them to embark on the just war no less, warfare in the service of God; only in this way would ‘those who had for so long been nothing but thieves’ become ‘true knights,’ as Foulcher of Chartres reports Pope Urban II as saying.[58] Knights would be aided in their task by God Himself, who would stand at their head, and would achieve redemption from their sins if they died for Christ.[59]
By taking this path, the aristocracy found a justification throughout the feudal-bourgeois period for maintaining and consolidating its power as the ruling class. Granted by the old tradition and the new conception of the Church, this justification proved robust and was well received by those who took advantage of its privileges, and also perhaps by many who had no other choice but to conform to the de facto force of those who held the land and the authority. The idea that they constituted a nobility of law gradually took shape, precisely as vigorous new social groups began to form, growing and rising socially beyond the bounds of the organisation created by the landed aristocracy.
Perhaps it was the presence of these bourgeois groups, who came across as insolent due to the novelty of their pretensions, that most contributed to the aristocracy beginning to slowly withdraw into itself in order to assert its rank and to convert the privileges it owed to the exercise of violence into indisputable, almost sacred rights. In the process, the Church eventually managed to persuade people to acknowledge that those who devoted their lives to prayer deserved similar privileges to those who bore arms, especially when it succeeded in persuading the latter to partake of the idea that the use of force was legitimate only in the service of God and His Church. An image of society thus took shape around the principle that the two most noble offices were those of cleric and knight[60] – the two leisured classes – which relied on a vast network of producer groups who were accorded only secondary status.
‘It is still not enough for the great honour that pertains to the knight,’ wrote Ramon Llull, ‘choice, horse, arms, nor seigneurie, but he must needs a squire and courier to serve him and tend to his horses; and the people must dig and clear the weeds from the land so that it bears fruit on which the knight and his beasts may live; and he must ride a horse, be dealt with like a seigneur and live comfortably from those things on which his men spend toil and discomfort.’[61]
The certainty that the privilege enjoyed by the nobility was legitimate created a strong sense of class. That sentiment had long been loudly voiced before the monarchy, further supported by the evidence of the nobility’s superiority over the subjected groups on whom it imposed hard labour to its own benefit. The sentiment became more pronounced, however, over the course of the feudal-bourgeois period, mainly due to the emergence of certain symptoms of social change. One of the consequences of this was that the authority or privilege of the landed nobility began to be questioned or resisted. The spread of the idea that nobility is not inherited but consists solely of virtue[62] was but one sign of the growing pressure of the new bourgeois sensibility on traditional notions of social order. The nobility responded to this pressure by closing its ranks and defending its privileges and principles to the point of giving the impression that it regarded itself almost as a caste. Circumstances began to obstruct this agglutination,[63] but the nobility’s aggression and arrogance, as expressed in an intense contempt for other social groups and unbridled greed,[64] enabled it to deal effectively with the burgeoning social forces that were starting to threaten the foundations of its organisation and even its forms of life.
To strengthen this sense of class the nobility perfected the forms that protected its structure. The young knight’s entry into the community of those sharing the responsibilities of serving God began not only to be arrayed in a courtly ceremonial exalting the politico-social significance of the event, but also to be confused with a religious rite that helped to confirm the missionary character of chivalry. The institution of the knight’s investiture as a requirement for full incorporation into the class to which he belonged by birth stemmed from the purpose of strengthening the nobility’s inner structure and consolidating its social function with a charismatic element. Instituted and regulated by the Church, the service of God defined the nobility’s social function while asserting the supernatural origin of its mission. The institution of military orders acquired a similar meaning.[65]
Now consolidated, the nobility also asserted its rank by identifying with a certain form of life. Whoever was entitled to it by birthright had not only to enjoy the advantages of wealth but to use it to dignify his existence, giving his superiority an outward form visible to all. In the enjoyment of certain delicacies and beverages or furnishings and attire, but especially in the use of leisure, where the spirit could be elevated through poetry or music, or the most refined forms of conviviality, or perhaps in noble conversation on the highest themes of religion or politics, the knight demonstrated that he belonged to a lineage that sought in every way to prove it was not that of the common man nor accessible to anyone of obscure origin. A tight cluster of courtly traditions, beginning with those introduced by the tales of the Round Table, gradually built up the system of conventions that very quickly came to be regarded as obligatory in the courts that formed in once severe and solitary castles.
Little by little, a socio-economic system was formed that attained a high degree of internal coherence due to the conjunction of the de facto circumstances of the intellectually elaborate concepts used to explain and guide them. It was also a system of ideas entailing a conception of the world organised with the same rigidity and firmness as the social order. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it seemed able to impose itself as a whole in places where the conditions were hardly suited for it to take root: in England and southern Italy, where the Normen tried to establish a homogeneous system of institutions founded on benefices and vassalage and supported by a conception of feudal monarchy; and in the kingdoms of the East, where the crusaders took their social outlook with them. In these places, the formal principles of the Christian-feudal order were taken to extremes, an order whose validity was facilitated by the suppression of all traditional norms as a result of conquest. This order brought with it a conception of politics that was also gradually defined in relation to the exercise of power by the landed aristocracy, until it became fixed in an apparently unshakable system.
II. THE FIXING OF POLITICAL RELATIONS
The vicissitudes of the socio-economic process were accompanied by others in the field of power relations. Two conceptions of authority were vaguely floating in the air: one based on Roman tradition preserved, renewed and spread by the Church; another based on Germanic tradition imposed by dominating minorities. The predominance if one or the other was not – nor could it be – achieved save in relation to the original de facto situations occurring throughout the Romano-Germanic kingdoms period; indeed, strictly speaking, rather than either predominating, there was instead a struggle between the two and a gradual accommodation of their elements within a system adapted to circumstances.
Socio-economic and political circumstances over time became clearer and more defined. If one thing was certain, it was the need for a strong political power capable of immediate action, given the external pressures on society. First the Muslims, then the Hungarians and the Normen provided an imminent threat to the independent communities’ existence. The reaction after the discovery of the cultural opposition following contact with the aggressors was profound yet ineffective due to technical impotence in relation to the scale of the aggression. This involved surprise mass attacks unleashing a different kind of warfare from that usually waged in the local wars to which the military aristocracies had become accustomed; and it was, above all, a fight to the death, devoid of all convention, a kind of total war. In relation to its scope, the physical scale of the kingdom – the geographical area subject to a political power, that is – became fundamental. In the conditions of technical development under which the Romano-Germanic monarchy operated, the problem of transport and communications within an area it could neither cover through vigilance nor protect with timely action became decisive, even compromising its prestige and authority.
The circumstances thus not only promoted a clash between the authoritarian concept and the concept of limited political power but another between the criterion of effectiveness and the criterion of legitimacy. The intercrossing of these two oppositions determined the peculiar nature of the process that led to the fixing of political relations.
If the concept of limited political power was unmistakeably Germanic and was supported by the situation of pre-eminence attained by the landed military aristocracy, the authoritarian concept had more complex roots, whereby it absorbed the forces sustaining it in spite of the determining social factors. On the one hand, it drew on the Roman tradition of high prestige, consubstantiated with juridico-political structures that had not disappeared, and on the other hand, the Hebraic-Christian tradition, adorned with sacred features and supported by the dual authority of the revealed texts and the Church. Having taken shape, this concept was operative in the face of unprecedented situations and was confronted with the concrete forms of the exercise of power. This resulted in a varied interaction between practice and theory of power.
This interaction took the form of an adaptation of certain institutions to the new de facto conditions, under the sign of the durability – sometimes theoretical, sometimes effective – of the evangelical principle of the intangibility of authority. But this adaptation underwent countless difficulties and alternatives imposed by the conditions of reality, and there, not only did traditions count but also certain undeniable demands, prompting another no less serious conflict between the principle of the legitimacy of power, towards which leant the institutional order, and the principle of effectiveness, imposed by circumstances.
Institutional traditions undoubtedly tended to strengthen the principle of legitimacy. Only someone entitled to it could exercise power. But this vague formula divided along two possible courses depending on whether the tendency prevailed to make monarchy elective, as the aristocracy preferred, or hereditary, as the kings aspired. The latter course was due in part to kings’ desire to strengthen their power, in part to the force of certain interpretations that assimilated political power to the principles of Roman private law and in part because for many it was the only means to institutionalise power and furnish it with continuity and legitimacy. Meanwhile, royal power was subject to other tensions. Though widely acknowledged as legitimate, royal power could act in such a way as to compromise the security or existence of the community, and in that case its legitimate title was not enough to justify it. Founded on incontrovertible reasons of survival, the criterion of effectiveness gathered force and weakened the principle of legitimacy, or rather created a new kind of legitimacy outside the realm of legality and tradition.
Over the course of the eighth century, all these tensions became more acute. The new states could not keep strictly to conventional political traditions but had already achieved a degree of social stability that encouraged them to adjust the way their institutions were organised. In the kingdom of Asturias, Alfonso II attempted to restore the Visigothic monarchy, and the kingdom of Wessex reached an organisation over the ninth and tenth centuries that, with variations, consecrated the perpetuation of strong Germanic traditions. In both cases, however, special circumstances favoured this tendency to consolidate the monarchy as a strong power swift to act, while other circumstances hindered it in the kingdom of the Franks.
If external dangers demanded a strong power capable of swift action, the monarchy was only able to employ it in kingdoms like Asturias or Wessex, which because of their reduced area and daily threat, allowed a direct and constant exercise of authority in a state of permanent mobilisation. Conversely, where the degree and number of threats made it necessary to delegate the exercise of power, monarchical authority plunged into crisis, and the strong, swift-acting de facto power exercised by the seigneurs in their respective jurisdictions or areas of influence diminished the aura of legitimacy surrounding royal power and relegated it to a purely symbolic dignity.
This was the case with the Frankish realm. The steady decline of the Merovingian monarchy exposed all the inconsistencies of a political system whose institutional and doctrinal lifeblood was not only contradictory in itself but as a whole in relation to social reality, yet it was only with the appearance of the Muslim threat that these contradictions became intolerable. Before any attempt at institutional change was made, there was a shift of real power in two directions: first, from the monarchy to those on the periphery of the kingdom who were forced to confront the danger; second, from the monarchy to the mayors of the palace, who took on the task of leading the defence in order to make up for the inefficacy of the legitimate kings, who had succumbed to the dangers and temptations of the patrimoniality of power.
The Heristals resolved one of the system’s contradictions by attempting to legitimise its efficacy by unusually transferring the problem to ecclesiastical authority, which they considered the custodian of a charismatic power. According to the formula attributed to Pope Zachary in the Annals, he declared that ‘it was better he should truly be king who already possessed the authority of such.’[66] He thereby acknowledged that efficacy was ultimately more important than legitimacy, but only if it was possible to immediately furnish illegitimate power with a different kind of legitimacy: charismatic legitimacy. The political crisis that brought the Heristals to power therefore confronted all the problems. Applying a rite from the Hebrew tradition that in Romano-Germanic realms had only been used by the Visigoths, ‘Pépin was called King of the Franks, anointed for this high dignity with sacred unction by the holy hand of Boniface, archbishop and martyr blessed in memory, and elevated to the throne in the city of Soissons as is the custom of the Franks.’[67]
A new problem remained for the future: whether or not there would be legitimacy without charismatic intervention, and, from then on, the struggle between ecclesiastical power and civil power played out around it. However, in the meantime, the Heristals’ rise to power meant that another no less important problem was solved: the competition between royal power and seigneurial power, since the new dynasty would base its policy on recognition of the rise of seigneurial power and of the institutionalisation of its regional authority, a strong authority capable of swift action within a limited area, over which a broader, looser power was superimposed. From this tendency and a parallel one to strengthen power through an alliance between traditional order and charismatic force, the imperial conception that renewed the terms of political relations was born.
While monarchy was cementing its hold with few concessions over certain small kingdoms, the secular edifice of the new Frankish royalty, whose weaknesses had been exposed by the Merovingians, collapsed. Nevertheless, a now partially stabilised social order required new political formulas not only to satisfy and channel the pressures of the aristocracy towards power but to organise the community’s defence against dangers from outside. Showing solidarity and unity of interests, the lay aristocracy and the ecclesiastical aristocracy converged when it came to delineating feudal monarchy. A new institutional regime characterised by a much-needed fluidity, it displayed a degree of internal weakness, which had been remedied by the charismatic intervention of the Church.
The Heristals’ acceptance of the principle of royal unction was the culmination of a long process of interpenetration between the secular and religious spheres. The old, solid foundations of natural law, upon which rested the Roman notion of respublica, had been corroded by a growing supernaturalism, according to which the origins of power – and, by extension, those of society and the state – depended on the inscrutable divine will. This idea appeared in different guises in both Old and New Testaments. One related the story of an independent people, the other the story of a persecuted subordinate community within a vigorous state. But they shared a common background – reflecting the same Eastern conception of authority – and the principles this background implied became deeply ingrained in men’s minds. The Hebrew kings’ idea of power, their priestly mission, their missionary conception of civil authority, the idea of all authority’s sacred legitimacy contained in the New Testament, it had all been insistently repeated by the Church to the kings and barons of the Romano-Germanic kingdoms and had become a set of concepts not open to discussion.
If efficacious authority – and, at the same time, loyal representative of the landed military aristocracy – had the opportunity to acquire legitimacy through the joint action of election and sacred unction, political power then could be considered solidly underpinned and sufficiently representative. In exercising its authority, this power needed to recognise its inability to act forcefully and swiftly but had, instead, to recognise regional power. ‘The emperor cannot act personally but through the intermediary of his faithful,’[68] said Charlemagne in his instructions to the missi to obtain the oath of 802, and the idea would resurface in subsequent documents of Louis the Pious; implicit in this recognition was the new conception of central authority, which could only survive if it slackened and was exercised as indirect, mediate authority. Once the moment of Charlemagne’s gravitas – who exceeded his own expectations – had passed, feudal monarchy would accept this proposition, which was merely an acknowledgment of the effective hegemonic situation reached by landed military aristocracy in the Frankish realm, due in part to the monarchy’s technical inability to exercise power directly.
It was Charlemagne who brought structure to this new conception of royal power among the Franks. However, various circumstances moved him to expand his authority, and he was crowned emperor in Rome late in the year 800. From then on, the type of authority held by the emperor – who may have aspired to restoring the ancient conception of the state and with it that of impersonal power[69] – became increasingly clear, and there was an explicit tendency to confuse the ends of the state with those of the Church.
The first signs of this process had already appeared in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms, especially that of the Visigoths, but it gathered pace after the appearance of Muslims in the West because of their religious militancy. If the opposition between Muslims and Christians was couched in religious terms, the conflict was felt as a conflict of cultures. The struggle against the Muslims was not only in defence of the faith but a lifestyle with strong roots. It was, however, inevitable in this acute crisis that the Church should take the lead in this defence, representing as it pre-eminently did the tendency to reorder the situation around the dogmatic system of Christianity. If individual existence only made sense in light of its supernatural ends, it was inevitable that collective existence, whose fundamental contents were under threat, could only be conceived as also being directed towards the same ends. Hence, the tendency to blur the boundaries between the objectives of the state and the general objectives of the Church conceived as an instrument of salvation geared to supernatural ends became more and more pronounced.
If the landed military aristocracies’ immediate power was originally conceived as being justified by the de facto situation, imperial power was mediated in the practical order and its justification came to lie in the need to defend the cultural unity of the Western world, with its Roman, Hebrew-Christian and Germanic roots. In a world in which circumstances were forcing the fragmentation of authority, the task to assert and defend cultural unity, the visible sign of which was the conception of life and the world, seemed an urgent one. The Empire undertook this mission, but only at the expense of abandoning the Roman notion of the state and adopting in its stead a broader one embracing other purposes.
This notion was essentially ecumenical and transcendental, and Charlemagne asserted it in unequivocal terms that demonstrated his political thinking’s dependence on the fundamentals of Augustinian thought. ‘Believe that there is but one Church, which is the society of all pious men over all the Earth, and that only those who persevere in the faith and communion of that Church until the end shall be saved,’ said the abovementioned Capitulary.[70] The principle of the unity of humanity was thus laid down in political documents. This unity could be conceived pre-eminently either as Church or Empire but tended increasingly to be seen as the fusion of the two institutional forms in one reality in which the temporal was saturated with the supernatural. This idea would very soon be taken up by Agobard:
‘One faith has been taught by God, one hope spread by the Holy Spirit in believers’ hearts, one charity, one desire, one prayer. All men, distinct in nation, sex, condition, nobles or slaves, must needs say together to the one God, father of all: “Our Father… Oh heavenly brotherhood, oh everlasting harmony, oh indissoluble unity, work in one author! Through you the heavens are joyful, the earth rejoices, the sea moves, the fields are glad, and all the nations applaud what is in them. And rightly so, for all brothers, the serf, the seigneur, the poor and the rich, the ignorant and the wise, the humble craftsman and the sublime seigneur, call upon one God, the Father. Let no man anymore despise his neighbour, nor despise nor exalt himself, for we are all of one body in Christ, nay rather, one Christ according to the Apostle. Enough of Gentiles and Jews, of circumcised and pagans, barbarians and Scythians, slaves and freemen. If God has suffered to bring together in His blood those of us who are far away that the wall of separation might be torn down, that all enmity might disappear in Him, that all might be reconciled in the Body of God, I ask you, does not this wondrous variety of laws that reigns not only in every region and city but in every dwelling and almost at the same table stand in the way of that divine work of unity? May Almighty God grant that under one most pious king all men be governed by one law; it shall be most beneficial for the harmony of the City of God and for equity among the peoples.’[71]
Inspired by Saint Augustine,[72] Charlemagne conceived his empire as a realisation of the City of God. ‘The peace of men is union in order,’ the Bishop of Hippo had said,[73] and both ideas – peace and order – guided the transcendental conception of the Empire. Lying at its core was the certainty that the reigning order – born of not so remote conquest – could be regarded as definitive and had attained such a degree of stability that it called for institutionalisation on supernatural foundations. And it was also encouraged by the confidence that the ultimate purpose of political power transcended the limits of sensible reality. Peace was the fundamental design of power, but it entailed the fixing of the system of social relations created throughout a prolonged and tumultuous process. Once achieved, collective existence was to be geared not towards earthly goals but towards the triumph of faith, towards salvation, in other words, towards a religious goal.
In terms of its doctrinal content, Charlemagne’s empire represented a triumph of the Christian interpretation of society and political power. The idea of the identity of the temporal and the supernatural – of reality and unreality – underpinned the emperor’s immense authority. But it masked two flaws that would soon become visible: one was the impossibility of ensuring the compatibility of the spiritual ecumenical order and immediate earthly authority; another was the debatable matter of which power – the temporal or the spiritual – the highest hierarchy of the ecumene would assume. The two flaws very soon became confused. If Charlemagne could entertain the hope that the immediate authority of the seigneurs and the mediate authority of the emperor were compatible within an charismatically grounded order, events would quickly show that the social process sought other more appropriate institutional ways of ensuring the predominance of the landed military aristocracies. And as this process accelerated, and the imperial order plunged into crisis, the dispute between the temporal and spiritual powers for the exercise of the highest authority immediately presented itself.
Problems of extreme gravity thus very soon arose after Charlemagne’s demise. Two opposing tendencies clashed during the reign of Louis the Pious: one inspired the privilege granted to the Papacy in 817 whereby the emperor renounced any intervention in the election and consecration of the Pope; the other was imposed with the Roman constitution of 824 forcing the Pope to swear allegiance to the Emperor.[74] The dispute was accompanied by a vigorous defence of imperial unity, enshrined in the ordinatioimperii of 817[75] establishing the indivisibility of the Empire and the subordination of the kingdoms. But the gulf between doctrine and reality was widening. By the last days Charlemagne, the aristocracy’s power had already increased considerably, and this process gathered momentum under his successors, whose powerlessness was ever more glaringly obvious when contrasted with the immediate efficacy of the seigneurs. Immediate political power came to be increasingly concentrated in the hands of those wielding personal authority within a limited area that could be policed directly, while both Pope and Emperor contested their pre-eminence within an abstract world in which the earthly and spiritual of ends authority were becoming increasingly confused.
The kings of Wessex or Asturias, whose narrow domains allowed them to exercise personal authority, ultimately exercised power as seigneurs. As owners of the land and sole repositories of military power, the seigneurs held all the resources necessary to ensure their predominance as a class and to justify their privileges by effective defence of their subordinates, whom they protected from the threat of invaders by gathering them around their fortifications and closely policing the borders. Their authority grew, gradually freeing itself of imperial and even pontifical power, since it soon seemed lawful for seigneurs to select the bishops and invest them with secular investiture through the crosier and the ring. In the meantime, Empire and Papacy lost direct contact with the realm over which they were vying for authority, while, in their disputes, meticulously specifying the features they attributed to a reality they could only control from afar. This was a world that could be understood only by acknowledging the supernatural fabric in which it was interwoven.
The ecumene – the abstract world over which the Papacy and the Empire sought to exercise their authority – was thus saturated with transcendence. As the Empire’s efficacy waned from the reign of Louis the Pious on this trait became more pronounced, and it seemed more legitimate for the Papacy to exercise ecumenical supremacy. Amidst the civil wars that consummated its impotence, the Empire saw the Papacy’s claims rise up against it, taking the supernatural conception of reality to its logical conclusion. ‘You must needs not be unaware that the government of souls, which belongs to the pontiff, is superior to imperial government, which is temporal,’ wrote Gregory IV.[76] Little by little an extreme thesis began to be expressed openly: the unity of the ecumene, peace and order, as custodian of which the Empire has shown its inefficacy, is the responsibility of the pontiff. Around that time, Jonas of Orléans wrote in De institutione regia that ‘All the faithful must needs know that the universal Church is the body of Christ, that its head is Christ and that in this Church there are two main personages: the one representing the priesthood and the one representing royalty.’ And he concluded by repeating the concept established by Pope Gelasius: ‘The former is more important, for it must account to God for the kings themselves.’[77] With the blurring of the line between the temporal and the spiritual and the conception of humanity as the Church – as the Empire itself acknowledged – supreme power was to be vested in the representative of the priesthood. ‘The king,’ added Jonas of Orléans, ‘has for his chief function the defence of the churches and servants of God. His duty is to watch carefully over the protection of priests and the exercise of their ministry, and to protect the Church of God with arms.’ The ‘ministerial function’ of civil power was thus categorically defined amidst the discord ignited among Charlemagne’s heirs, revisiting the thought expressed by Isidore of Seville in the book of Sentences.[78] If seigneurial power could be exercised efficaciously in direct relation to reality, without any attempt to subject it to supernatural ends, imperial power, having accepted its place in the ecumenical and spiritual sphere and with its ability to act in decline, accepted the fate and function assigned to it by the Papacy. Charlemagne’s formula had been reversed.
In the course of the ninth century, especially after the dissolution of the Empire in 843 which confirmed the crisis in the ordinatioimperii, the pontifical thesis only became more pronounced. Nicholas I formulated it with renewed vigour and precision when, addressing Charles the Bald, then at odds with the emperor Louis II, he said: ‘It is therefore necessary that – according to the example of our Holy Mother Church that has begotten you before by the Gospel and has born forth Christ in you through faith – I beget you again by the ministry of my apostleship, so that Christ himself be formed in your hearts through peace and make of you a perfect man.’[79] And while the pope confirmed his inflexibly doctrinaire stance in practice, the theory continued to gather rigidity, as expressed in the treaty De ordinePalatii by Archbishop Hincmar of Reims.[80] Not only does the Papacy impose upon the civil power the objectives that power has to serve but, according to Hincmar, the bishops have the mission formerly entrusted to the apostles and are, therefore, also responsible for the tutelage of kings, whom they must enlighten regarding the divine word and remain vigilant against the dangers that surround them. The pseudo-Isidorian Decretals were already in circulation by then, and Hincmar could speak of laws ‘promulgated by God’ governing the organisation and conduct of the priestly order. In this way, the ecclesiastical aristocracy secured its position and independence, acquiring a charismatic basis for both its spiritual authority and social status. Yet, at the same time, the secular aristocracy also benefited from this condition, for the social order was consolidating and acquiring an immutable basis in the gradually prevailing supernatural conception of reality.
The rise of the Papacy was interrupted in the late ninth century. With the decline of the Carolingian Empire, the institution lost its capacity to withstand the local powers asserting their dominance in Italy, and the unbreakable unity linking the two institutions, which could only survive if they joined their charismatic and institutional and military forces, was proven. Empire and Papacy represented an idea, an aspiration steeped in nostalgia. Nourished by religious faith and the ecumenical character the Church attached to its spiritual authority, this idea grew in strength with the tradition of political unity evoked by the memory of the Roman Empire. But in the real world order, the local powers only bowed to the validity of this idea when it did not stand in the way of their immediate interests and when it imposed itself by force of divine fear or human fear. With the break-up of the Carolingian Empire, kingdoms and seigneuries regained full autonomy and, in Italy, did not hesitate to subjugate papal power. From the pontificates of John VIII to John XII, the Papacy was at the mercy of the Roman aristocracy and was subjugated to the vicissitudes recorded – somewhat exaggeratedly – by Liutprand of Cremona in his chronicle.[81] With the imperial title vacant and the idea of unity in utter crisis, Otto I, the king of Germania, resolved to restore the Empire.
The Holy Roman Empire renewed Charlemagne’s formula whereby, in the close unity between the temporal and the spiritual, the emperor had primacy. Otto I brought the Roman constitution of 824 into force and freely exercised the right to impose lay investiture upon bishops to whom he granted strategically situated land. But the mystical conception of the Empire quickly permeated him, perhaps fuelled by the religious awakening of the time. It was Otto III who took this conception to its logical conclusion.
Perhaps influenced by his Byzantine education, Otto III inclined not only to asserting his secular authority but to the thesis of the sacred status of emperor. For a time, during the pontificates of Gregory and particularly of Sylvester II, the learned Gerbert of Aurillac, the Empire claimed to have realised the mystical fusion of the sacred and the profane, the temporal and the spiritual. In contrast to those who had advocated the ‘ministerial function’ of temporal power, Otto III attributed to the emperor a mystical force of his own. This he sought to manifest in the titles bestowed on him by his chancellery and the ceremonial he introduced, and by virtue of this force he believed it permissible to share the priestly authority of the pontiff.
Steadfast in the defence of his temporal powers, he rejected as false the so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’,[82] putting all his momentum instead into demonstrating not only the sacredness but the universality of the Empire. He considered his authority inseparable from the Pope’s, since Church and Empire were but one single unit in his eyes. ‘Oh, you two luminaries, across the expanse of the lands,’ said Bishop Leo of Vercelli in one poem, ‘light the Churches and put darkness to flight. May the one prosper by the sword, and the other make His Word ring out!’[83] These terms were similar to the ones Charlemagne had used in his letter to Leo III,[84] but the two luminaries now held a deeper meaning for the Germanic emperor, because the mystical fusion of sacred and profane had reached its highest point: regnum and sacerdotium were to Otto III and Sylvester II but two inseparable sides of the same coin.
As the tenth century drew to a close, then, the Empire attained its most original physiognomy. An earthly power, it needed to rise to the highest plane of authority in order to co-exist with the power of the landed military aristocracy, which regarded the Empire as a remote power compatible with its immediate authority and from which it drew a charismatic and legal justification for its own power. The lax power of the emperors and the strict power of the seigneurs defined the political conception of the newly emerging feudality, reluctant to recognise a vigilant, centralising authority such the monarchy had sought in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms.
For all the Christian and Roman elements it aspired to clothe itself with, the Empire could not hide the peculiarly Germanic nature of its radical conception. As a political system it was, in fact, the highest expression of feudal monarchy, within the framework of which seigneurial power was hierarchically ordered and maintained a certain unity within the broader freedom. This was certainly not the political ideal of the Church, which kept alive the authoritarian tradition of the Roman Empire, and these opposed traditions may have fuelled the conflict that arose between the two powers not long after reaching the highest degree of identification in the latter years of the tenth century.
The experience of the conjunction of ‘the two luminaries’ brought about by Otto III and Sylvester II had also undoubtedly helped to define by contrast the limits between the sacred and the profane. These were two spheres that were in fact distinct, even though an intellectual conception might be predisposed to overlook the differences. And while treatise writers did not spell this out, it was implicit in the differing viewpoints of emperors and pontiffs, and would one day become apparent. Supreme religious aspiration, the mystical fusion of reality and unreality, was nothing but an intellectual operation, thwarted by the experience of facts at every turn.
As a feudal monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire had since the days of Otto I established a regime that suited its peculiar situation and affected the interests of the Church. The Investiture Controversy, after which the Church regained its autonomy, pitted Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII against each other: it was then that each power’s extreme viewpoints began to be defined in a tense, prolonged debate that was to last for more than two centuries.
Taking opinions held for several centuries to an extreme, the Papacy concluded by asserting the theocratic thesis founded on a natural interpretation of the world. The defence was vehement yet was undoubtedly the defence of a doctrinal position whose chances of becoming a guiding principle in concrete political relations seemed increasingly remote. The supernatural interpretation of the world could not cloud the judgment of those who noticed that the spheres of the sacred and the profane – after briefly seeking their coincidence under the influence of a mystical conception – regained their autonomy and accentuated their limits. Gregory VII expressed this in a significant passage in his second letter to Hermann of Metz, in 1081: ‘from the beginning of the world, in this innumerable multitude of kings who have succeeded one another on the different thrones of the earth, there has been but a very small number of saints, whereas in a single series of pontiffs – for example, in the series of Roman pontiffs since the time of Saint Peter the Apostle – more than a hundred have distinguished themselves by an eminent holiness. This, as has been said, arises from the fact that the kings and princes of this earth, fascinated by vainglory, prioritize their earthly interests over spiritual ones, whereas the pious pontiffs who care not for vainglory do not sacrifice the cause of God to things of the flesh. The former are ruthless when personally offended but lack energy to punish those who have offended God. The latter, on the contrary, easily forget faults committed against themselves but only reluctantly forgive insults to God. Absorbed by earthly matters, the former have little regard for spiritual matters; the latter, constantly directing their thoughts heavenwards, have nothing but disdain for what is earthly.’[85] If such was the historical experience, the possibility of establishing the City of God on earth could only be a remote aspiration divorced from the principles that ought to have governed the Church’s relations with earthly powers: emperors, kings and, above all, feudal seigneurs who wielded the most absolute personal authority in their jurisdictions.
But, confronted with the emperor, who claimed for himself not only an earthly power – as did kings and seigneurs – but a universal power, the Papacy in reality, under the guise of a theocracy, asserted the right to exercise ecumenical spiritual power, as it was the Church – and only the Church – that the secular power called on for charismatic justification. Clearly instituted to favour de facto situations, the secular power – emperors, kings and seigneurs – sought supernatural legitimation and thereby contributed to the Papacy being regarded as the source of all legitimate power: such was the consequence of the dramatic and turbulent process whereby the aristocracy had finally consolidated its military and economic power.
But this was not the only root with which the Papacy fed its conviction of being the sole source of legitimate power. If political reality had forced it into take on that role, there were sufficient elements in its tradition and in the doctrine that served as its foundation to justify the absolute attitude it adopted from the eleventh century on. The Scriptures, Augustinian thought taken to perhaps unimagined consequences by the bishop of Hippo[86] and the growing influence of the Platonic (and neo-Platonic) notion of reality, all contributed to the triumph of an image of the world in which the sensible vanished into the infinite, eternal fabric of the intelligible. The sensible was translated into terms of the earthly city, the valley of tears, the temporal order, a realm devoid of any meaning in itself and only justified by the possibility of transcending it. Individual and collective existence therefore seemed to acquire a single purpose: salvation; and this transition could only come about through Christ the mediator, whose mission on earth was twofold according to the dual nature of man. Only if the Empire and the Papacy worked with one accord and reconstructed Christ’s original mission would salvation be possible. But in that consubstantiation of powers, the spiritual had to retain its predominance. This is how Peter Damian expressed it in a passage from the Disceptatiosynodalis: ‘May the heads of the world live in the bonds of perfect charity and prevent all discord among the lower members. As there is but one mediator between God and men, these two institutions – the kingdom and the priesthood – must be fused by a divine mystery; and the two persons that embody them shall be joined by such bonds that, through their mutual charity, the king shall be found in the Roman pontiff and the Roman pontiff in the king, the privilege of the pope being spared, which none has the right to usurp.’[87]
This supremacy of the Papacy was related to its responsibility for man’s salvation rather than his earthly ends. Very shortly before this, Cardinal Humbert had developed the idea in precise terms: ‘That is why,’ he said in his treatise against simoniacs, ‘whoever would usefully and correctly compare priestly dignity and royal dignity must own that the priesthood in the Church is alike to the soul and the kingdom to the body, for they both love one another, have need of one another and necessarily lend one another mutual assistance. But just as the soul rules over and commands the body, so priestly dignity is above royal dignity as the heaven is above the earth.’[88] This followed naturally from the principle of identity between society and Church. If all the faithful are subject to the Pope as responsible for their salvation, all the more so are kings and those who exercise all civil power. ‘Are they not among the sheep that the Son of God has entrusted to the blessed Peter’ asked Gregory VII. ‘Who, then, I ask, would dare claim to be cut off from the authority of Saint Peter, and not to have been included in the universal power that He has given him to bind and unbind, save the wretch who, unwilling to bear the yoke of the Lord, submits to the Devil’s and renounces being part of Christ’s flock? By acting thus, proudly rejecting the power accorded Peter by God, he can only acquire a paltry freedom, for the more he disowns that power, the heavier the day of judgment will weigh upon him for his eternal condemnation.’ And, in another passage, he added: ‘Would it be possible for a dignity invented by the men of the age, even men ignorant of God, not to be subject to the dignity the providence of Almighty God has mercifully accorded the world for His honour? If the Son of that Almighty God is unquestionably God and man, He is also the Sovereign Priest, the chief of all priests, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father, ceaselessly interceding on our behalf. He has scorned the earthly kingship that the sons of the age pride themselves upon and has spontaneously chosen the priesthood and the cross. Who is not aware that the first kings and the first dukes were men ignorant of God who, moved by blind ambition and intolerable pride, encouraged by the Devil, prince of this world, have sought through pride to dominate their equals, namely other men, by means of rapine, lying, murder and almost every crime?’[89]
The priesthood’s superiority over the kingdom was, then, implicit in the very origin of both institutions, one sacred, the other profane. Thus, the origin of civil power was established, which, according to scriptural tradition,[90] came from God. But the controversy affirmed not only the profane origin of power but its de facto origin and independence from any moral attitude. Legitimate power was considered to be that granted by the Church, which took on the role of intermediary. ‘Those who, spontaneously or after mature reflection,’ wrote Gregory VII, ‘are called by the Church to royalty or empire should respond to the call with humility, not to acquire an ephemeral glory but to seek the salvation of a great many.’[91] Thus the principle was fixed that civil power was not granted directly by God; that is, success in the struggle for power did not signify the legitimate right to exercise it, but rather it came from God through his Church, a doctrine, moreover, that was accepted especially when His charismatic intervention was sought to legitimise it. Hugh of Saint-Victor fixed the theological formula in his treatise on the sacraments, stating that ‘spiritual power must establish temporal power in order for it to exist and judge it if it conducts itself badly.’[92]
The doctrine thus formulated was the ‘two swords’ doctrine. John of Salisbury stated that ‘the prince receives his sword from the hands of the Church,’[93] and Bernard of Clairvaux expressed the same principle: ‘The spiritual sword and the material sword both belong to the Church; but the latter must be drawn for the Church and the former by the Church; one is in the priest’s hands, the other in the soldier’s, though at the priest’s behest and the emperor’s command.’[94] Steadfast in the old Isidorian thesis, the Papacy reduced the role of civil power to a mere instrument. Ecclesiastical power, by virtue of its sacred nature, had purposes of its own that coincided with those of man and the world; however, due to its profane nature, civil power had no purposes of its own but had to confine itself to serving the transcendental purposes fixed by the Church and related to keeping the peace and defending the faith. This was why Innocent III could say ‘just as the moon, which is lower in size, quality, position and power, receives its light from the sun, so royal power obtains the splendour of its dignity from pontifical authority.’[95]
Closer to the struggles for power, glory and wealth, the Holy Roman Empire could not, however, confine itself to claiming only de facto power but needed to assert its universality and direct dependence on an absolute source of power. If it clashed with the Papacy, however, it was originally because the problem of ecclesiastical jurisdiction would interfere with the emperor’s German policy. From this arose the ‘Investiture Controversy’, in which the problem of power between the two authorities, both in the kingdom of Germania and in the Roman area after the Church’s emancipation, morphed into a question of doctrine. The empire could certainly not do without a grounding that would at once ensure its supernatural origin and its independence from the Church. And this necessity obliged it to fight the Papacy on its own turf at a glaring disadvantage, leading it towards the radical contradictions manifested in Frederick II’s conception of empire.
The Empire was scrupulously careful to admit the identity between society and Church. Empire and Papacy were members of the Church, and Henry IV claimed that, until the conflict with Gregory VII flared up, they had lived ‘a calm and quiet life’. He accordingly reproached the Pope for having ‘completely upset this magnificent harmony of the distribution of Christ’s members whom the Doctor of the Nations never ceases to exalt and commend’.[96] They were like the two luminaries that Divine Providence had created, wrote Frederick II: ‘each for its own office and without the one clashing with the other; thus She also willed a double power over the earth so that men had a double rein in two opposing directions, and so it has been done in imitation of the heavenly order.’[97]
The two powers had but one common end: to ensure the salvation of mankind and the achievement of universal peace as was vehemently upheld by Otto III in his conduct and doctrine, aimed at bringing about the renovatioImperii Romanorum. The emperor was ‘the author of the peace,’ said the jurist Peter Crassus,[98] and Frederick Barbarossa complained that Pope Adrian IV’s policy was not aimed at ‘encouraging the unity of Church and Empire, uniting them in the bonds of peace.’[99] But this solidarity of purpose did not obscure the specific missions of each of Christ’s two members, and the Empire refined the distinction in order to demarcate its own jurisdiction without altering the fundamental conception. It was certainly the Empire’s mission to serve the purposes of Providence, but not within the limits set by the Vicar of Christ as the ministerial conception of civil power willed, but in accordance with the specific mission that Providence had assigned to secular power.
This raised the problem of the origin of imperial power. Against the thesis that only the Church could legitimate power, Emperor Henry IV upheld the thesis that he possessed ‘the avenging sword upon entrusted to us by God’,[100] and later added that he should ‘be judged by God alone.’[101] In 1157, Frederick Barbarossa wrote that ‘The Divine Power, from which derives all power in heaven and on earth, has been entrusted to us, his anointed, the kingdom and Empire to govern it,’ later adding that ‘Whoever claims we have received the imperial crown as a benefice from the pope contradicts divine orders and the doctrine of Saint Peter and is guilty of a lie.’[102]
Against the thesis of the translatio, the Empire under Frederick II came to set a strictly historical, realistic doctrine, asserting that, since ‘the Germans had taken up the defence of the Empire, it was right that the power to elect emperors once held by the Senate and the Roman people should pass to them.’[103] And contrary to the thesis of the elective, contractual origin of the emperors’ power, developed notably by Manegold of Lautenbach,[104] imperial jurists, at every favourable turn, supported legitimacy by inheritance, especially in the sense imposed on their reasoning by Peter Crassus, who transferred the principles of private law to the problem of royal succession.[105] These lateral resources entrenched the central thesis of the Empire’s independence from pontifical power without, however, denying the charismatic principle required to underpin the imperial order. When Alfonso VII of Castile was proclaimed emperor in 1135, he received the new power of a council, whose members all ‘received from God,’ as the chronicler says, ‘the inspiration to bestow on King Alfonso the title of Emperor.’[106]
If the ecumenical jurisdiction and sacred nature of imperial power rendered it an instrument of Providence to keep the peace and the reign of justice, the circumstance of being a power directly ordained by God rendered it capable of exercising tutelage over the Church itself. It was founded on the idea that the renovatio, as realised by Charlemagne or Otto I, had resulted from the effective exercise of political and military power in defence of the Church under threat from its enemies. With the emancipation of the Church in the eleventh century, the Papacy rejected this claim, but the Empire made its claims effective by appointing and deposing pontiffs, just as Otto III and Henry III had done. Strong in this doctrine, Henry IV promoted the deposition of Gregory VII, and Frederick I the campaign against Adrian IV. Barbarossa had been explicit about his conduct in the aforementioned letter addressed to the kingdom in October 1157: ‘Divine Providence has ordained that the peace of the churches is to be upheld by the imperial army,’[107] and, in another addressed to Cardinal Rolando two years later, he asserted: ‘To this most pious end, we must not only protect all the churches of the Empire but also zealously provide for the most Holy Church of Rome, whose care and defence are believed to have been especially entrusted to us by Divine Providence.’[108]
Competition between the two potestates was thus based in the same plane, far-removed indeed from the plane of immediate efficiency in the face of social reality. But the force of events gradually led to the awareness of the inherent diversity of jurisdictions. There was no denying the growing strength of the bonds stabilising political relations, and it seemed prudent within the Church itself to recognise their legitimacy. At the end of the eleventh century, Ivo of Chartres put forward a thesis that avoided the extremes to which the controversy had led, clearly distinguishing the sacred from the profane. ‘Nor does Pope Urban,’ wrote the Archbishop of Lyon in 1097, ‘if we have understood correctly, forbid the kings anything other than bodily investiture; he does not exclude them from election, since they are at the head of the people; nor does he bar them from granting [the elected] ownership; it is true that the eighth Synod forbids them to attend the election, but it says nothing about ownership. What does it matter whether this is done by hand or sign or word or staff, if kings intend to bestow nothing spiritual, but only to obtain the votes of electors or to grant to those elected the ecclesiastical domains and other external goods that the churches have from royal munificence?’[109] This thesis was eventually imposed in the Concordat of Worms in 1122, and while the controversy continued to rage, the limits of the political order and the peculiar nature of the relations it implied became more and more sharply defined.
Strictly speaking, when the Church limited its area of influence to the order of the spiritual, its authority was strengthened and its mission purified. When the Empire, on the other hand, reduced its hegemony to the political level, it was weakened in relation to the landed military aristocracy, who wielded effective local power. Even as its situation stabilised, this aristocracy had also to consent to supporting a more extensive but always differentiated regional power, namely the monarchy, whose authority began to grow through continuous competition with the aristocracy.
Backed by the tradition preserved pre-eminently by the Church, the old monarchical institution struggled to survive the adverse circumstances and sought to maintain certain functions peculiar to it that no one else was willing to exercise. These were combined with functions that, on other levels, the powerful landed military aristocracy allowed the monarchy to perform. The monarchy tried to find new political formulas befitting the uncommon social situations and, in spite of the difficulties, succeeded in finding them with a keen sense of reality. Upon renewal, the aristocracy thus acquired the traits of a valid institution which, while unstable, managed to adjust to the developing society’s direction, unlike the Empire, which tried as an institution to disengage from the accelerated process of social change unfolding at the time.
The first formula was a response to the omnipotence of the new landed military aristocracy and adjusted to the system of relations created by it. Feudal monarchy as a political regime was closely aligned with the interests of the ruling class, and from this first formula, an indelible framework emerged: the Anglo-Saxon nobility sought to impose it in the reign of Edward the Confessor,[110] and it still echoed in the words attributed to Philip Augustus of France, whose notion of monarchy was, in practice, different.[111] But as the economic transformations unleashed in the eleventh century deepened, monarchy began to assume a specific function to justify its power and release it from its dependence on the aristocracy. This consisted in taking on the role of arbiter among the classes at a time when certain social groups outside the aristocracy were starting to gain importance and the Church had acquired enough autonomy for some of its component sectors to defend new social and moral ideas.
Over and above the mere juxtaposition of seigneuries, an economic and social network was beginning to spread, giving rise to new situations and modified previous traditional ones. The monarchy quickly agreed to intervene in regulating relations between the old and new social forces, bringing with it a new social and moral conception and simultaneously managing to define a specific mission, distinct from that of the seigneurs. Suger, advisor to Louis VI of France, defined the mission of a king by saying that ‘he was an illustrious and bold defender, provided for the needs of churches and, as had long been necessary, saw to the peace of farmers, workers and the poor.’[112] ‘It is the duty of kings,’ he said elsewhere, ‘to suppress, with a mighty hand and by the original right of their office, the audacity of tyrants who tear the state apart with endless wars, delight in plundering, steal from the poor and destroy churches.’[113] And among the monarch’s merits, he drew attention on one occasion to his anger at a seigneur robbing some merchants.[114] Perhaps for the same reasons, Rigord pointed out the bourgeoisie’s enthusiasm and support towards Philip Augustus for his vigorous repression of Jews.[115] The king was beginning to cease to be a warlord – the best or most powerful of the seigneurs – and was rising above his peers in the feudal order to shoulder other responsibilities which the changing society needed to delegate to someone.
This capacity was, however, still firmly tied to the idea of king. If the monarchy was gradually able to attain the status of arbiter which placed the aristocracy under its dependency, it was because the kings, while conferring these functions on themselves, acted as warlords on a higher scale than the seigneurs. The very founding of the monarchy frequently involved a decisively audacious act, as in the case of the kingdoms of Castile, Navarre or Portugal, but it attained the apogee of constructive audacity in the case of the Norman monarchs of England and Sicily, where, better than anywhere else and with the prestige of conquest, the Crown secured a supraseigneurial function authorised by a growing patrimonial conception of the kingdom.[116]
This status could not, however, easily obtain the consent of those who could, weapons in hand, defend their seigneuries and with them their class predominance. The monarchy took up the gauntlet thrown down by the aristocracy and defended its rights and the powers it deemed implicit in its authority to the hilt, but it also sought to rise above the quarrel by elevating its authority to the rank of a supernatural power. It was aided by a certain Germanic tradition that had viewed the king as a magical representative of the community,[117] but even more so by the scriptural tradition that closely linked the monarchy with the godhead and lent the monarch a sacred aura. The Church helped to spread the legend of the thaumaturgical powers of kings on the model of Melchizedek. ‘Divine virtue,’ said Helgaud about King Robert of France, ‘conferred on this holy man such grace for the healing of bodies that, by touching the patients’ wounds with his pious hand and marking them with the sign of the holy cross, he delivered them from pain and illness’,[118] and in one of his canticles, Alfonso the Wise said that ‘All Christian kings have the virtue of bestowing health merely by laying their hands on such pain.’[119] This nature of the royal person – and with it its supraseigneurial status – was institutionalised through the rite of consecration, whose formula was fixed by the Ordo Romanus,[120] and received doctrinal support through a rich theologico-political literature, whose extreme exponent was the libel by Anonymous of York.[121]
As monarchy grew stronger so a conception of the relations between people who compromised the foundations of the feudal order was invigorated. This rested upon direct person-to-person bonds, but as the monarchy felt strong, it sought to establish different kinds of relations between it and those over whom it wielded its power, relations that were, in fact, to be less immediate and, by the same token, more objective, such as those established by William the Conqueror and his subjects after the conquest, especially through the direct oath he demanded of all free owners in 1086.[122] Otherwise, though part of the feudal order, the king retained – and increased from the eleventh century –an exceptional status that set him above the aristocracy and allowed him to gradually claim the representation of the state.[123] The spread of the principles of Roman law from Irnerius on helped to strengthen this idea, and the relationship between the Norman dynasty, which carried out the first experiment in determined centralism, and the monastery of Bec, an important centre for legal studies and home to Lanfranc, who was elevated to the status of Archbishop of Canterbury by William the Conqueror, is significant. As early as the twelfth century, the doctrine of royal power gained strong consistency with the juridical concerns of Henry II of England and the judges and legists, in particular Peter of Blois and Ranulf de Glanvill. Also, in the Norman monarchy of Sicily combining different traditions, Roger II, William I and his minister Maio of Bari built up a sturdy legal structure to strengthen the power of the Crown,[124] which, in the following century, served as a basis for the Frederickian state. Again, around that time, Philip Augustus and Louis IX of France achieved a decidedly supraseigneurial authority, on a par with that of James the Conqueror in Aragon and Ferdinand the Saint in Castile.
In order to achieve these results, the monarchy, abandoning its position as the representative of a class, was strengthened in its role as protector of all social groups: this is the sense gradually acquired by the old idea that its mission is to defend the peace, justice and the law.[125] The monarchy gained from this policy because the newly emergent bourgeoisie provided it with a variety of resources that helped to strengthen its autonomy and authority and was thus able to organise the two fundamental instruments for independent action adjusted to the new social conditions: the exchequer and the army. ‘Riches and the army are the defences of a kingdom,’ were the words Richer put in Louis V’s mouth,[126] but such resources were only obtained by feudal monarchy within very narrow limits as long as it failed to negotiate its dependency on the landed military aristocracy. Only when new social groups exempt from privileges attained a certain level of development was it possible for the monarchy to obtain these resources without tying its hands, with the exception of the Norman conqueror of England. There and in other kingdoms by degrees, the exchequer began to be organise itself, as there seemed to be a need to serve kings ‘not only by preserving those excellencies that display the glory of royal majesty but also their earthly riches, which accrue to kings by virtue of their station,’ as the author of the Dialogue of the Exchequer put it.[127] With its wealth correctly and freely managed, the monarchy acquired freedom of movement, but it gained even greater freedom through the formation of armies increasingly independent of the will of the aristocracy, made up of mercenaries who started being recruited in the twelfth century,[128] particularly in England after a decision by Henry II. When the process was sufficiently advanced, the monarchy could count on effective means to secure its authority and the independence of its policy. Once again, the monarchy sought to adjust to the new possibilities offered by social reality.
By its behaviour, the monarchy showed that it viewed its power as closely tied to the circumstances of immediate reality. Its struggle with ecclesiastical power was not – as the Empire’s was – a dispute over the abstract supremacy of the ecumenical order but a strong, clear defence of concrete jurisdiction in the profane order, that is, the earthly world. The reply to Bishop Odo that Orderic Vitalis puts on the lips of King William, when the prelate attempted to assert his religious rights in order to avoid his political responsibilities, is significant. ‘Odo exclaimed, “I am a cleric and minister of the Lord; bishops cannot be condemned without the judgment of the Pope.” The king responded wisely: “I condemn neither the cleric nor the prelate, but the count who answers to me and whom I have made my lieutenant on my estates; I take him because I wish him to give account of the government I have entrusted to him.”’[129] And equally significant is Suger’s attitude, the Abbot of Saint Denis and advisor to the king, who was nevertheless urged to abandon the crusade in acknowledgment of the needs of government.[130] It was the position anticipated by Ivo of Chartres, one that would eventually triumph over the course of the English kings’ struggle against Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Becket through the distinction between the spheres of the sacred and the profane.
But as profanity strengthened, ecumenical sentiment weakened and localism deepened. The monarchy accepted the mission to represent a specific, delineated area of the world which was home to socially antagonistic groups constrained by various historical and practical reasons to live within a given geographical area. The sense of nationality began to develop, and the monarchy, initially conceived as the repository of its own patrimony, slowly morphed into the representation of the patrimony of the community, the patria itself.[131]
Naturally, the landed military aristocracy resisted the monarchy’s advance towards centralism all that it could. The stone castles it erected from the eleventh century onwards served to defend its privileges and jurisdiction, and it was assisted by the traditions of its former greatness, which it knew how to wield as a weapon over people’s consciences. The seigneurial epic emphasised the role of warriors in the time of the conquests, and the Church, when it was engaged in the fight against civil power, advocated the contractual theory of the origin of power and the principle of elective monarchy, which it delivered the king into the hands of the grandees. This was the theory that Richer attributed to Archbishop Adalberon,[132] the one that underpinned Henry IV’s deposition and Rudolph of Swabia’s renunciation of hereditary transmission of the crown at the Diet of Forchheim[133] and the one outlined by Manegold of Lautenbach over the course of the Investiture Controversy.[134]
When the occasion was ripe, the aristocracy resorted to arms to contain the concentration of monarchical power. In Castile, from Alfonso VI’s death to Alfonso VIII’s minority, rebellious seigneurs sought to acquire the position that effective action by the monarchy – ever stimulated by border defence – prevented them from consolidating.[135] In Germany, the quarrel stirred up by the House of Welf concluded in a full-blown crisis of the monarchy in the mid-thirteenth century.[136] And in England, the struggle came to a head when the aristocracy succeeded in imposing the limitations laid down in the Magna Carta on the crown.[137] Harried by the rise of the bourgeoisie, discouraged by the Church, suppressed by the monarchy, aristocracies sought to fix their status and overcome the new economic and social conditions. Their resistance to paying taxes either to the monarchy or the Church was significant, reaching its peak at the time of the conflict between Urban IV and Frederick II. But their actions were already purely defensive by then, because the power of the monarchy was rapidly gaining an increasingly broad political base.
The monarchy had no shortage of doctrinal arguments to establish the legitimacy of its authority, nor did it lack opportunities to negotiate the pressure from the aristocracy. The right of conquest was joined by the right sought by each king in the principle of association, whereby they secured the consecration of their heirs while still able to assert their strength and influence. The rule of hereditary succession was gradually imposed de facto as a guarantee against anarchy, with the Church’s support and, later on, that of the emerging bourgeoisie, which aspired to a stable order. It was this social force that succeeded in undermining the foundations of the Christian-feudal order, and the efficiency of the monarchy stemmed precisely from its balancing act with the landed military aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, judiciously gauged in just the right measure as these forces waxed and waned in economic and social power. Feudal monarchy was thus gradually able to organise the kind of power required by the changing situation.
Notes
^ 1. Liutprandus Cremonensis, Antapodosis, II, xliii.
^ 2. Historia Silense, Francisco Santos Coco (Ed.), 61.
^ 3. Lucas de Tuy, Crónica de España, IV, xxxvii.
^ 4. Abbo,BellaParisiacaeurbis, I.
^ 5. Flodoardus, Annales, yr. 926.
^ 6. Otto von Freising, GestaFriderici Imperatoris, I, xxxii.
^ 7. Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne; Carlo Cipolla, ‘Encore Mahomet et Charlemagne : L’Économie politique au secours de l’histoire. Sur une façon de comprendre l’histoire qui est nôtre’, in Annales, January–March 1949.
^ 8. What Marc Bloch calls the ‘first feudal age’ I term the ‘feudal period’, and the one beginning with what he calls the ‘second feudal age’, I term the ‘feudal-bourgeois period’. I have coined the expression ‘feudal-bourgeois’ to identify the special character of the society from the mercantile revolution until bourgeois elements begin to predominate over feudal ones. See Marc Bloch, La Société féodale : La formation des liens de dépendance, 95 ff.
^ 9. Nithard, NithardiHistoriarvm libri qvattvor, IV.
^ 10. Primera crónica general de España, ch. 684.
^ 11. Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua, I, xi.
^ 12. Richer,Historiarumlibri V, IV, 2.
^ 13. Le Couronnement de Louis, l. 2246 ff.
^ 14. Wipo, Gesta Chuonradi II imperatoris,XXXIV, yr. 1036.
^ 15. Das Nibelungenlied, 1. 2268.
^ 16. Adalberon, Carmen ad Rotbertumregem, in Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, CXLI, 782.
^ 17. Nithard, NithardiHistoriarvm libri qvattvor, II, viii.
^ 18. Richer,Historiarumlibri V, II, 71; III, 89; IV, 105.
^ 19. Guillaume de Poitiers, GestaGuillelmi Ducis.
^ 20. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, yr. 1087.
^ 21. Raoul Glaber, Histoires, IV, v.
^ 22. Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua, I, viii; Raoul Glaber, Histoires, II, vi.
^ 23. Adalberon, Carmen ad Rotbertum regem, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina.
^ 24. Raoul Glaber, Histoires, II, vii-xii; III, ix; IV, viii.
^ 25. Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua, I, ix ff.
^ 26. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ‘Ynglinga Saga’, XVIII and XLVII.
^ 27. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ‘Ynglinga Saga’, XLVIII.
^ 28. [‘Fueron nuestros abuelos grrand tiempo muy coytados, / ca los tenían los moros muy fuert arrenconados, / eran en poca tierra pocos omnes juntados, / de fanbre e de guerra eran mucho lazrados.’] Poema de Fernán González, ll. 217–220.
^ 29. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Histories of the Kings of Britain, VI, x; then Wace, Le Roman de Brut, l. 6739 ff., including the speech.
^ 30. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ‘Ynglinga Saga’, XLVII–XLVIII; ‘Harald the Fairhaired’, XIV, XX, XXVII and XXXV; in the same vein, see Guillaume de Jumièges, GestaNormannorumducum, I, iv, ff.
^ 31. Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou et des seigneurs d’Amboise, Louis Halphen and René Poupardin (Eds.), 27.
^ 32. [‘You are a bacheler, you are in need of land.’] Le Couronnement de Louis, l. 1369; see also Le Charroi de Nîmes, Albert Pauphilet (Ed.), 138; Enfances Guillaume, ll. 3123 ff. and 3559 ff.
^ 33. Poema del Cid, 33.
^ 34. Robert le Moine, Hierosolymitanaexpeditio, I.
^ 35. Guillaume de Jumièges, GestaNormannorumducum, II, x.
^ 36. Das Nibelungenlied, III, 110.
^ 37. Guillaume de Poitiers, GestaGuillelmiDucis: William the Conqueror’s speech before the Battle of Hastings.
^ 38. Guillaume de Saint-Denis, Vita Sugeriiabbatis, I, iii.
^ 39. Poema del Cid, 122.
^ 40. See the case of Hagano at the court of King Charles: Flodoardus, Annales, yr. 920; Richer,Historiarum libri V, I, 15.
^ 41. Adalberon, Carmen ad Rotbertumregem, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina.
^ 42. Richer,Historiarumlibri V, IV, 78.
^ 43. See the poems Gormont and Isembart, Raoul de Cambrai and Renaut de Montauban, cf. Reto Raduolf Bezzola, ‘De Roland à Raoul de Cambrai’, in Mélanges de philologie romane et de littérature médiévale offerts à Ernest Hoepffner, 1949.
^ 44. Guillaume de Poitiers, GestaGuillelmi Ducis.
^ 45. Das Nibelungenlied, III, 112–113; in the same vein, see Tostig’s speech in Ordericus Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, III, yr. 1066.
^ 46. On the Capitulary of Quierzy, see ‘À propos du Capitulaire de Quierzy-sur-Oise’, in Louis Halphen, À travers l’histoire du Moyen Âge, and M. Bloch, La Société féodale, 299.
^ 47. Le Couronnement de Louis, l. 83; cf. ll. 67, 153, 178, 2362; Chanson de Roland, ll. 317–319; Richer,Historiarumlibri V, IV, 75.
^ 48. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, yr. 1087.
^ 49. Decretos que don Alfonso, rey de León y de Galicia, estableció en la curia de León con el arzobispo de Compostela y con todos los obispos y magnates y también con los ciudadanos elegidos de su reino, in Cuadernos de Historia de España, IX, 1948.
^ 50. Magna Carta, 63–64.
^ 51. Castigos e documentos delreydon Sancho IV, LXXV.
^ 52. Otto von Freising, Gesta FridericiImperatoris, I, xii.
^ 53. Guibert de Nogent, De vita sua, III, xii ff.; Suger, Vita Ludovici Regis, XXI.
^ 54. Suger, Vita Ludovici Regis, XXI; cf. the declaration of the act of Louis VII (ed. Luchaire): ‘A decree of divine goodness has willed that all men having the same origin should be endowed from their appearance with a sort of natural freedom. But Providence has allowed some of them, having lost their original dignity on account of their own failings, to have fallen into the condition of servility. It behoves our royal Majesty to raise them up again to freedom.’
^ 55. Robert le Moine, Hierosolymitana expeditio, I.
^ 56. Ramón Llull, Blanquerna, I, 2.
^ 57. Ramón Llull,Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria, II, 7.
^ 58. Foucher de Chartres,Gesta Francorum Hierusalemperegrinautium, I; Saint Bernard,Epistola CCCLXIII and De laude novae militaeadmilitestempli, II.
^ 59. Guibert de Nogent, GestaDei per Francos, I and II; Ramón Llull, Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria, VI, 3.
^ 60. Philippe de Navarre, Les quatre âges de l’homme, 12–15; Ramón Llull, Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria, II, 4.
^ 61. Ramón Llull, Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria, I, 9.
^ 62. Jean de Meung, Le Roman de la Rose, l. 18,589 ff.
^ 63. Ramón Llull, Llibre de l’orde de cavalleria, III, 10.
^ 64. Jean de Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, VI; Geoffroi de Villehardouin, De la conqueste de Constantinople, LVI; Robert de Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople, XCVIII and CV; Gui de Bourgogne, l. 1094 ff.
^ 65. Das Nibelungenlied, 26 ff.; Saint Bernard, De laudenovaemilitae ad milites templi, passim.
^ 66. Annales regni Francorum, yr. 749.
^ 67. Annales regni Francorum, yr. 750.
^ 68. Capitularia regum Francorum, in M.G.H., I, nos. 35 and 150. See ‘L’Idée d’État sous les Carolingiens’, in L. Halphen,in À travers l’histoire du Moyen Âge, 94–96.
^ 69. ‘L’Idée d’État sous les Carolingiens’, in L. Halphen,in À travers l’histoire du Moyen Âge, 94–96.
^ 70. Capitularia regum Francorum, M.G.H., I, no. 33.
^ 71. Agobardus, Liber adversuslegem Gundobaldi, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. CIV, col. 113 ff. See James Allen Cabaniss, Agobard of Lyons: Churchman and Critic, 1953.
^ 72. Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, 24.
^ 73. Saint Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIX, xiii.
^ 74. Capitularia regum Francorum, M.G.H., I, nos. 172 and 161.
^ 75. Capitularia regum Francorum, M.G.H., I, no. 136.
^ 76. Henri-Xavier Arquillière, L’Augustinisme politique, 180.
^ 77. Cf. Jean Reviron, Les idées politico-religieuses d’un évêque du IXe siècle : Jonas d’Orléans et son “De institutioneregia”. Étude et texte critique, 1930.
^ 78. Saint Isidore, Sententiae, III, 51. See H.-X. Arquillière, L’Augustinisme politique, 148.
^ 79. Epistolae, M.G.H., IV, 302.
^ 80. Cf. Louis Halphen, ‘Le “De ordine palatii” d’Hincmar’, in Revue Historique, 1938, 62–64.
^ 81. Liutprandus Cremonensis, Liber de rebus gestisOttonis Magni Imperatoris, IV. See Pietro Fedele, ‘Ricerche per la storia di Rome e del Papato nel secolo X’, in Archiviodella Società Romana di Storia Patria, XXXIII–XXXIV, 1910–1911.
^ 82. Diplomata regum et imperatorumGermaniae, M.G.H., II, 819, dip. no. 389.
^ 83. Leo of Vercelli, Encomium to Pope Gregory and Emperor Otto; cf. Percy Ernest Schramm, Kaiser Rom und accomodatarenovatio, II, 62–64.
^ 84. Epistolae, M.G.H., IV, Epistolae Karolini Aevi, 93.
^ 85. Gregory VII, Second Letter to Hermann of Metz (1081), cf. H.-X. Arquillière, Saint Grégoire VII : Essai sur sa conception du pouvoir, 1934, 212–213.
^ 86. H.-X. Arquillière, L’Augustinisme politique, 1955, ch. III.
^ 87. Saint Peter Damian, ‘Disceptatio Synodalis’, M.G.H., Libelli de lite, I, 79.
^ 88. Humbert, Libritres. Adversus Simoniacos,M.G.H., Libelli de lite, I, 225.
^ 89. Gregory VII, Second Letter to Hermann of Metz, cf. H.-X. Arquillière, Saint Grégoire VII, 204.
^ 90. Saint Paul, Romans, 13:1–7.
^ 91. Gregory VII, Second Letter to Hermann of Metz, cf. H.-X. Arquillière, Saint Grégoire VII, 214.
^ 92. Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentisChristianae fidei, II, second part, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, CLXXVI, col. 418.
^ 93. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, sive de nugiscurialium et de vestigiisphilosophorum, IV, 3. See Hans Liebeschütz, Mediaeval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury, 1950, chaps. IV and V.
^ 94. Saint Bernard, De consideratione, IV, 3.
^ 95. Innocent III, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, CCXIV, col. 377; Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, Ferdinando Bernini (Ed.), 26. See Jean Rupp, L’Idée de chrétienté dans la pensée pontificale des origines à Innocent III, 1939.
^ 96. Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, in M.G.H., I, 106–108, cf. H.-X. Arquillière, Saint Grégoire VII, 140.
^ 97. Jean-Louis-Alphonse Huillard-Bréolles, Historia diplomaticaFridericisecundi, V. 348. See Antonio de Stefano, L’ideaimperiale di Federico II, 1952, 143.
^ 98. H.-X. Arquillière, Saint Grégoire VII, 339 ff.
^ 99. Otto von Freising, GestaFridericiImperatoris, III, xi. See Robert Folz, L’Idée d’empire en Occident du Veau XIVe siècle, 1953.
^ 100. Epistolae,M.G.H., Register Gregors VII, I, 29.
^ 101. Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum,M.G.H., I, 108.
^ 102. Otto von Freising, Gesta FridericiImperatoris, III, xi.
^ 103. Gabriele Pepe, Lostatoghibellinodi Federico II, 1938, 77.
^ 104. H.-X. Arquillière, Saint Grégoire VII, 319 ff.
^ 105. H.-X. Arquillière, Saint Grégoire VII, 341 ff.; Heinrich Brunner, Historia delderechogermánico, 130.
^ 106. ‘Crónica de Alfonso VII emperador’, in España Sagrada, XXI, 345. See Ramón Menéndez Pidal, El imperio hispánico y los cinco reinos.
^ 107. Otto von Freising, Gesta FridericiImperatoris, III, xi.
^ 108. Otto von Freising, Gesta FridericiImperatoris, IV, lxv.
^ 109. Yves de Chartres, Correspondance, Jean Leclerc (Ed.), I, no. 60.
^ 110. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, yrs. 1051–1053.
^ 111. Mattaeus Parisiensis, Chronica Majora, II, 651. On the subject of King John of England’s cession of his kingdom, he says: ‘No king or prince may give his kingdom without his barons’ assent’; cf. the ideas in Philip Augustus’s apocryphal speech before the Battle of Bouvines, in Récits d’un ménestrel de Reims au treizième siècle, Natalis de Wailly (Ed.), 168.
^ 112. Suger, Vita Ludovici Regis, II.
^ 113. Suger, Vita Ludovici Regis, XXI.
^ 114. Suger, Vita Ludovici Regis, XXI.
^ 115. Rigord, Chronique.
^ 116. See Austin Lane Poole, FromDomesday Book to Magna Carta, 1951, and Charles Petit-Dutaillis, La monarchieféodaleen France et enAngleterre, 1933.
^ 117. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ‘Ynglinga Saga’, XVIII and XLVII.
^ 118. Helgaud, La Vie du roi Robert; Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, Les Miracles de Saint Louis, See M. Bloch, La Société féodale, II, ch. II.
^ 119. Alfonso el Sabio, Cantigas de Sancta Maria, 321.
^ 120. Guillaume le Breton, La Philippide, I. See Georg Waitz, Die Formeln der deutschenKönigsund der RömischenKaiserkronungvomzehnten bis zumzwölftenJahrhundert, 1873; Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, ‘Un ceremonial inédito de coronación de los reyes de Castilla’, in Logos, Buenos Aires, yr. II, no. III.
^ 121. Anonymous of York, De consecrationepontificum et regum, inM.G.H.,Libelli de lite, III.
^ 122. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, yr. 1086.
^ 123. Louis Halphen, ‘La place de la royauté dans le système feodal’, in Revue Historique, vol. CLXXII, 1933.
^ 124. Hugo Falcandus, Historia de rebus gestis in Siciliaeregno, in Ludovico Antonio Muratori, VII, 261; Romuald Guarna,Chroniconsive annales, yr. 1155–1156; Michele Amari,Storia dei musulmani di Sicilia, III, 493 ff.
^ 125. Guillaume de Poitiers, GestaGuillelmi Ducis; Jean de Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, XI and CXXXII.
^ 126. Richer,Historiarumlibri V, V, IV, 2.
^ 127. Richard, son of Nigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, Prefatio.
^ 128. Jacques Boussard, ‘Les Mercenaires au XIIe siècle : Henri Plantagenet et les origines de l’armée de métier’, in Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, CVI, 1947; Charles Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages, 1953, 65.
^ 129. Ordericus Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, VII.
^ 130. Guillaume de Saint-Denis, Vita Sugeriiabbatis, III.
^ 131. Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz, ‘Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought’, in American Historical Review, April 1951.
^ 132. Richer,Historiarumlibri V, IV, 11.
^ 133. Bruno, ‘De bello Saxonico’, M.G.H., ScriptoresrerumGermanicarum in usumscholarumseparatimediti, V, 365; H.-X. Arquillière, Saint Grégoire VII, VII, 176 ff.
^ 134. H.-X. Arquillière, Saint Grégoire VII, 319 ff.
^ 135. Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, La potestad real y los señoríos en Asturias, León y Castilla, 1928.
^ 136. Karl Hampe, Deutsche Raisergeschichte in der Zeit der Salier und Staufer, 1949, 126 ff.
^ 137. A.L. Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, ch. XIV.
