On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State

Joseph R. Strayer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780691121857, 9780691051833
• eBook ISBN: 9781400828579
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The modern state, however we conceive of it today, is based on a pattern that emerged in Europe in the period from 1100 to 1600. Inspired by a lifetime of teaching and research, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State is a classic work on what is known about the early history of the European state. This short, clear book book explores the European state in its infancy, especially in institutional developments in the administration of justice and finance. Forewords from Charles Tilly and William Chester Jordan demonstrate the perennial importance of Joseph Strayer's book, and situate it within a contemporary context. Tilly demonstrates how Strayer's work has set the agenda for a whole generation of historical analysts, not only in medieval history but also in the comparative study of state formation. William Chester Jordan's foreword examines the scholarly and pedagogical setting within which Strayer produced his book, and how this both enhanced its accessibility and informed its focus on peculiarly English and French accomplishments in early state formation.

ON THE MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF THE MODERN STATE

i

Today we take the state for granted. We grumble about its demands; we complain that it is encroaching more and more on what used to be our private concerns, but we can hardly envisage life without it. In the world of today, the worst fate that can befall a human being is to be stateless. Hale’s “man without a country” does exist now, and he is wretched in ways which Hale could never imagine. The old forms of social identification are no longer absolutely necessary. A man can lead a reasonably full life without a family, a fixed local residence, or a religious affiliation, but if he is stateless he is nothing. He has no rights, no security, and little opportunity for a useful career. There is no salvation on earth outside the framework of an organized state.

This was not always so. There were periods—not long ago as historians measure time—when the state did not exist, and when no one was concerned that it did not exist. In those times it was the man without a family or a lord, without membership in a local community or a dominant religious group, who had no security and no opportunity, who could survive only by becoming a servant or a slave. The values of this kind of a society were different from ours; the supreme sacrifices of property and life were made for family, lord, community, or religion, not for the state. The organizing power of such societies was less than ours; it was difficult to get very many people to work together for any length of time. There was a strong sense of reciprocal obligation among those who knew each other personally, but this sense of obligation faded rapidly with distance. Imperfect and spatially limited types of organization meant that the society could not make the best use of its human and natural resources, that its level of living was low, and that capable individuals were unable to realize their full potentialities. The development of the modern state, on the other hand, made possible such a concentrated use of human resources that no other type of social organization could avoid being relegated to a subordinate role. We pay a price—sometimes a dangerously high price—for this concentration of power; and it is theoretically possible that we could retain the benefits of complex organization while reducing the role of the state in providing a framework for organization. In practice, no one has yet accomplished this feat. Only the most remote and primitive peoples can do without the state. As soon as the modern world touches an area, the inhabitants must either form a state or take refuge in the shadow of an already existing one.

If we cannot escape from the state, it is of some importance to understand it. One way of understanding it is to study its history—to see how and when this form of organization came into existence, what needs it satisfied, on what principles it was based. A study of the origins of the modern European state may throw some light on the characteristics and problems of the state today. It may be especially helpful in illuminating differences among types of states, and in explaining why some states have better balanced or more effective types of organization than others.

We should perhaps begin with a definition of the state, but most attempts to make such a definition have not been very satisfactory. A state exists chiefly in the hearts and minds of its people; if they do not believe it is there, no logical exercise will bring it to life. States have flourished which meet none of the criteria of the political scientist, for example the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Rather than definition, let us look for some of the signs which show us that a state is coming into existence. These signs will be especially useful for our enquiry, since we are concerned with origins and not with the final form of states.

The first sign is easy to recognize because it is purely external. A human community must persist in space and time if it is to become a state. Only by living and working together in a given area for many generations can a group of people develop the patterns of organization which are essential for state-building. Temporary coalitions of groups which have some common interests are not apt to be the nuclei of states unless the emergency which causes the coalition lasts so long or recurs so frequently that the coalition gradually becomes permanent, as it did, for example, in the case of the Franks. Even regular meetings and repeated alliances of groups which acknowledge a common origin will not suffice to form a state; the contacts must be continuous, not intermittent. The history of ancient Greece illustrates both these points; neither coalitions against Persia nor the Olympic Games ever made a single state out of the Greek cities. Geographically, there must be a core area within which the group can build its political system, though a certain amount of fluctuation along the fringes is permissible. States require permanent institutions, and it is difficult to establish such institutions if the area in which they are to be applied changes constantly, or if the cohesion of the group is greater at one season of the year than at another. This is why true nomads do not establish states;¹ a certain proportion of them must become sedentary before any high degree of political organization is possible. Even a non-nomadic people which leaves its old home—voluntarily or involuntarily—usually loses some of its political coherence and has to start the process of state-building afresh, as the history of the American West demonstrates.

With continuity in space and time the next sign of the possible emergence of a state appears: the formation of impersonal, relatively permanent political institutions. Primitive or temporary political groupings can function through personal, unstructured relationships, such as meetings of prominent men, or neighborhood assemblies. Even at this level certain customary ways of dealing with matters of general concern will develop; there will be procedures for settling internal disputes and for organizing armed groups in case of war. More than this is needed, however, if the community is to persist in time and retain its hold on a geographical area, if loosely linked neighborhoods are to be welded into an effective political unit, if more effective use is to be made of the varied resources and abilities of the people. There must be institutions which can survive changes in leadership and fluctuations in the degree of cooperation among sub-groups, institutions which allow a certain degree of specialization in political affairs and thus increase the efficiency of the political process, institutions which strengthen the sense of political identity of the group. When such institutions appear, a key point in state-building has been reached.

On the other hand, the appearance of specialized institutions does not inevitably lead to the creation of a state. The institutions may be developed simply to protect the private interests of the wealthy and the powerful. A tribal leader, for example, may wish to have a regular accounting of the income from his lands or his herds, just as any prudent property-owner would. Such an accounting does not necessarily lay the foundations of a Treasury Department. A group of aristocratic landholders may wish to reduce feuds which are damaging their properties or decimating their numbers, and so be led to create a system of law courts. As the early history of Iceland shows, the existence of such courts does not necessarily lead to the acceptance of the supremacy of law, nor to the emergence of an authority which will enforce the law. The courts may be only a convenience, to be used or not depending on the circumstances.

Nevertheless, precisely because in the pre-state era there can be no sharp distinction between public and private, any persisting institution may in time become part of a state structure though it was not originally intended to have this function. We have seen this happen in comparatively recent times. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the British Empire of India grew out of the institutions of private corporations. One of the oldest public offices in the world today is that of the sheriff, but the earliest sheriffs were simply estate-managers of Anglo-Saxon kings.

A stronger objection to placing too much emphasis on permanent institutions is that institutions may be purely external devices by which a ruler (or ruling class) dominates a subject people. The existence of permanent institutions does not prove that subjects have accepted them as necessary, or that they have created the climate of opinion that is essential for the existence of the state. But persisting institutions are likely to produce a gradual change in attitudes. They may form a trellis on which the idea of the state can grow. Even colonial institutions which struck no deep roots among subject populations can and have been used as the skeleton of the structure of a new state.

More important than the existence of continuing institutions is evidence that they are growing in prestige and authority. For example, are there courts which can give final decisions that bind all the people in a given area and which cannot be reversed by any other authority? Medieval popes proclaimed that they “judged all and could be judged by none”;² when were certain secular authorities able to make such a claim? In more general terms, when does the idea of sovereignty begin to emerge? It is harder to prove the existence of an idea than the existence of an institution, and the difficulty is compounded by the inadequacy of the European political vocabulary of early periods. Sovereignty existed in fact long before it could be described in theory (1300 AD as opposed to 1550).⁸ It is also true that rulers who claimed what was in effect sovereign power were not always able to make their claims good. But the turning point was the recognition of the need for a final authority, not the possession of a “monopoly of power.” As long as most of the politically active population admitted that there should be an authority capable of making final decisions, a good many violations of the principle could be tolerated in practice.

This leads to the final, most important, and most nebulous of our tests: a shift in loyalty from family, local community, or religious organization to the state and the acquisition by the state of a moral authority to back up its institutional structure and its theoretical legal supremacy. At the end of the process, subjects accept the idea that the interests of the state must prevail, that the preservation of the state is the highest social good. But the change is usually so gradual that the process is hard to document; it is impossible to say that at a certain point on the time scale loyalty to the state becomes the dominant loyalty. The problem is complicated by the fact that loyalty to the state is not the same thing as nationalism; in fact, in some areas nationalism worked against loyalty to existing states. Even in the fortunate countries where nationalism eventually reinforced loyalty to the state, loyalty to the state came first and was a much cooler kind of emotion. It had about the same temperature as humanitarianism, and it was, in some ways, a kind of humanitarianism. The state gave greater peace and security, more opportunity for the good life, than loose associations of communities; therefore it should be supported.

To sum up this part of the discussion, what we are looking for is the appearance of political units persisting in time and fixed in space, the development of permanent, impersonal institutions, agreement on the need for an authority which can give final judgments, and acceptance of the idea that this authority should receive the basic loyalty of its subjects. We shall be seeking evidence of these changes in Western Europe in the period 1100 to 1600. This is not because there were no states in earlier periods, or in the non-European world—certainly the Greek polis was a state, the Han Empire of China was a state, the Roman Empire was a state. But we are looking for the origins of the modern state, and the modern state did not derive directly from any of these early examples. The men who laid the foundations for the first European states knew nothing of East Asia and were far removed in time from Greece and Rome. While they learned something from Rome through the study of Roman law, and something from Greece through hints in Aristotelian treatises, basically they had to reinvent the state by their own efforts. And the type of state they invented proved more successful than most of the earlier models. In the ancient world, states tended to fall into two classes: the great, imperfectly integrated empires, and the small, but highly cohesive units such as the Greek city-state. Each type had weaknesses. The empires were militarily strong, but could enlist only a small proportion of their inhabitants in the political process or, indeed, in any activity that transcended immediate local interests. This meant a considerable waste of human resources; it also meant that loyalty to the state was lukewarm. The vast majority of the subjects of an empire did not believe that the preservation of the state was the highest social good; in case after case they viewed the collapse of empires with equanimity, and either reverted to smaller political units or accepted without protest incorporation in a new empire ruled by a new elite. The city-state made far more effective use of its inhabitants than the empire; all citizens participated actively in the political process and in associated community activities. Loyalty to the state was strong; at times it approached the intensity of modern nationalism. But no city-state ever solved the problem of incorporating new territories and new populations into its existing structure, of involving really large numbers of people in its political life. Either the city-state became the nucleus of an empire (as Rome did) and so be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Forewords
• Preface
• Chapter I
• Index