This book aims to investigate, from a comparative point of view, the forms of political articulation and social organisation in Western Europe during the early middle ages with the intention of contributing to the debates on social complexity that have been taking place in recent years in the field of social theory. The book is divided into two different but complementary areas. In the first part, “Rethinking Central Authority”, the essays offer a general framing of the problems linked to the study of power and its relations with the spaces over which central authority (from León to Italy) exercised its power. The second part, “Interpreting Local Strength”, focuses on the study of some specific examples which, from local tales to the use of communal goods, show the ways in which authority was exercised in different areas of Western Europe. Finally, the chapter that closes the book will try to bring together in its conclusions the main arguments that articulate the whole volume.
Igor Santos Salazar is assistant professor at the Department of Humanities, University of Trento
From Chapter 11 - Social complexity and weak states in the early medieval west: a conclusion (pag.147-151)
The problem we have to confront, and in these articles we have confronted, is, in particular, how was the power of rulers negotiated and thus established locally? Because it had to be. No early medieval state, certainly in the Latin west, where tax-raising was absent or vestigial —indeed, vanishingly few tax-raising states until well into the twentieth century— had the coercive capacity to dominate everyone all the time, when peasants were 90-95% of the population (at a rough guess, but it cannot be far off before 1100) and communications were poor. Rulers had to take into account how local societies operated, and had to adapt themselves to the degrees of practical coercion which were in reality possible to exercise. When intervening in local societies, they sometimes tried to create a balance in which the strong could not necessarily crowd out the weak (Riccardo Rao), or a set of safeguards for the best operation of local use-rights (Iñaki Martín).
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The title of this book stresses weak states; and, overall, the states in early medieval Latin Europe were all weak by international standards – as the immediate neighbours of al-Andalus and the Byzan tine empire knew full well. But this title also, to an extent, puts a stress on León-Castile and Italy, for here not only rulers but also aristocracies were not so strong, so the issue of topdown private coercion had to be more mediated too – aristocrats and churches, too, had to negotiate, at least sometimes.
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Actually, even in the heartland of the power of the Franks, in the region between the Seine and the Rhine, which was certainly, across the early middle ages until the early tenth century, by far the most powerful and hierarchically-organised political system in the west, although rulers, churches and aristocrats had the wealth and power to dominate any peasant society in a general way, and certainly to destroy any resistance, they could not easily penetrate into such local environments, as Charles West illustrates here.
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In the Kingdom of (north-central) Italy, a general domination by a relatively weak state was easier than in León, for, although the kingdom was never militarily powerful, it was highly complex. Igor Santos here shows very clearly how even a powerful and ambitious aristocrat had to negotiate a set of different parameters for establishing political power: institutional position, the control of assemblies, Königsnähe, as well as establishing his landed base sufficiently firmly that it could survive reversals of fortune. That complexity made it hard indeed for local powers to establish themselves autonomously.
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There will have been many villages where neither was available —or unavoidable— and where local societies had to solve their own problems, between themselves and with lords, without recourse to superior powers at all. Except in zones where fiscal land was strong, the impact of the state will hardly have been experienced in any way in this environment, except in ad hoc interventions from outside, such as demands for public service, in road-building and similar (wars being relatively few in Italy before the late eleventh century).
In León, kings were weaker. (See for this Martín, Santos, Álvaro Carvajal, Escalona.) Administrative structures hardly existed outside the capital, so the kings were even more reliant on negotiating support from local powers, large and small. Almost the only infrastructural advantage which the kings had was the widespread knowledge and availability —often in detail— of Visigo thic law, which (as Escalona comments) must have helped elements of the acceptability of topdown power. Royal lands were as extensive as in Italy, which meant that royal power was never really under threat, and could gain support even at moments of crisis (Carvajal); but these were present above all in the north-eastern third of the kingdom, in Galicia and extending outwards to the lands around the two successive capitals, Oviedo and León, and were virtually absent in the increasingly important southern lands of new conquest, in the valle del Duero and southwestwards from there (MARTÍN VISO 2019, 195 and 208). In the southern lands, instead, the kings had to deal with local societies which had had no real rulers at all before the Christian conquests of the late ninth century, and which would need, more than usual, to be negotiated with, both coercively and not, one by one.
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It is best to see these lands as approximating to the great quasi-estates which Anglo-Saxon kings controlled in the seventh and eighth centuries, which were similarly not full property (no matter what the recently-introduced ecclesiastical documentary tradition claimed), but, rather, territories over which the king had a ‘superiority’, as Frederic Maitland called it, and simply took lowish amounts of tribute – a situation which indeed continued, with the territories more divided, into the tenth century.
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It remains the case that kings and other outside powers such as the counts of Castile had to negotiate their way into these coherent local societies— more than in Francia or even Italy, and more, probably, than any other ruler did in Latin Europe, until its rapid extension into the western Slav lands and Scandinavia in the tenth and eleventh centuries, each with their slowly-crystallising networks of kingdoms.
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As all the authors here know, one of the mistakes one can make when considering early medieval possession is to consider Roman-style full property, proprietas, as not only very common, at least inside the old frontiers of the Roman empire, but also normative. In reality, various forms of quasi-rights were characteristic of wide areas, particularly but not only areas where a silvo-pastoral economy was a strong local element; they were differently characterised in detail and terminology, but they shared common elements. These could be lands characterised by autonomous collective ownership, as sernas on the Meseta may well have been in c.850, before the conquest by the kings of Oviedo and then León. But in documented parts of Europe they were more typically in some sense royal lands, whose inhabitants paid a variety of tributes and dues when holding land and using woods and pastures there, which they did not regard as rent, but rather as recognition of political domination, over fields and rights of access which they undoubtedly considered fully their own.
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These were all moves in one direction, towards greater landlordly control over full property, and greater signorial control over remaining commons. We can see resistance to this, but by the nature of our evidence we would not expect to see much successful resistance, let alone reversal.
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Rulers could not control everywhere all at once, least of all rulers of the weak states of the early middle ages, but across the centuries they developed the means of doing so more effectively, with outliers more visible and more exposed as a result. And the small-scale lords which emerged in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were, precisely because of their more restricted range, better able to establish local power structures more definitively and more pervasively.
We can best see this latter point through the development of judicial powers inside such lordships. In the tenth century in Italy, local justice was in most places hardly regulated from above, as already noted, and often multi-faceted and ad hoc. In León-Castile, law-courts, although in themselves formal and public occasions, seem simply to have been held by whoever was most locally influential in any given locality – de facto élites, that is to say, who included counts and other officials, but not necessarily always because they had official roles, as well as kings and bishops, in their official role by definition (DAVIES 2016, 23-25, 155-160, 202-203). Further north, it was associated with local assemblies, as in the Brittany of the machtierns, in Anglo-Saxon England, as far as we can infer from the enigmatic evidence (LAMBERT 2017, 12-110), and also in Scandinavia, as much better, but much later (largely thirteenth-century) evidence makes clear. But by the twelfth century, in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, local justice was for the most part directly in the hands of lords, and their rights were increasingly clearly defined. As West has put it elsewhere, «age-old informal powers of more or less ad hoc coercion which had long existed in practice were now put on a formal footing» (WEST 2013, 185). This formalisation went with hierarchisation, and enabled the development of capillary signorial powers which would in the end indeed reach the parts which other powers could not reach. It was then that top-down power became clearly hegemonic, pretty much everywhere in the lands of the former Roman empire. That hegemony would in the end generate its own resistance movements, too; but that is another story.
Reproduced with the permission of UPV/EHU Press from “Social complexity and weak states - the forms of governance in Western Europe between the eighth and eleventh centuries” edited by Igor Santos Salazar