A historical essay: liberties and liberty
Dec. 7th, 2005 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbOne of the many erroneous and ideologically motivated notions that pass for history in textbooks is the widespread though rather formless notion that freedom and representative government were invented in the English-speaking countries at some time between 1640AD and 1783AD. The scheme of historical interpretation that is commonly taught in schools is that European countries were ruled by kings who held themselves to be nominated by God and whose authority was absolute; until, somewhere in the English-speaking world and in some kind of ill-defined relationship with the religious Reformation, the idea arose that people could govern themselves by appointing and replacing national representatives.
This is about as wrong as any statement of historical fact can very well be. And it is not a matter of subtle interpretation, of dispute, of uncertain facts, but of matters as clear and as plain and as unarguable as the nose on my readers’ face. The issue is not whether representative government and the idea of citizen freedom did or did not pre-exist Cromwell’s revolution (which destroyed both in England, replacing them with military tyranny), but how they came to be, as they were through most of our history, the main defining feature of Western political organization.
Great historical mutations are always mysterious, even when they happen largely in the eye of history and with plenty of documentary sources. For instance, the reason and mechanism by which such a wholly new thing as Christianity arose, along with the truly bizarre explosion of what are now known as Gnostic heresies, in the first and second century AD, remains a matter for extreme controversy, although the sources are plentiful, varied, and ever-increasing. By contrast, the genetic mutation that leads from the institutions of the late Roman Empire in the sixth century to those of western and central Europe in the twelfth, is, except for a few occasional bursts, poorly documented, and further complicated by representing the fusion into one culture unit of several different previous ones – Roman, Greek, Judeo-Christian; Irish and Irish-Christian; British/Welsh; Teutonic-Frankish; Teutonic-English; Teutonic-Longobard; Teutonic-Saxon; Teutonic-Viking; Byzantine; Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian; the ever-alien yet ever-present Jewish communities; and, at the borders, Visigoth-Spanish, Russian, Baltic, and Balkanic.
But the plain fact is this. Western civilization properly so called can be traced back to the split of the Roman Empire’s Latin European provinces away from the larger Roman culture, a slow process that can be said to begin in the sixth century and be complete by the eleventh, and which also involved the entrance into this Latin-speaking culture of many groups – Germans beyond the Rhine, Scandinavians, Irish and British Celts, Magyars, Slavs, Balts – who had never been a part of the old Empire at all. By the time in the eleventh century when documents become plentiful and political developments can be followed with some clarity, most of the West, from Castile to Bohemia and from Italy to Norway, had strong and often prevalent elements of representative and parliamentary powers in its government. Several states – the republic of Iceland, the free cities of Italy and Germany – are purely republican; and every major monarchy is underpinned or opposed by a national assembly, from the Cortes of Castile to the Diet of the Empire, from the Estates of France to the Parliament of England. The Celtic countries, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany, which carried into the Christian age an ancient tribal political form, are an exception (although the last pretender to Welsh kingship, Owain Glyn Dwr, summoned a senedd or national parliament at Machynlleth as part of his claim): on the other hand, even in isolated Sardinia, the four local kinglets (Giudici) were assisted in their function by national assemblies called, bizarrely enough, the Crown of the Nation (Corona de Logu).
The most significant feature of this new Western political organization, however, it is that its form of representative assembly is not restricted to the top layer of political society. The national parliamentary organs tend to be composed of representatives of local institutions, having in effect the powers of ambassadors from their local communities, which in turn had their own local forms of self-government. It has been shown that the powers of parliamentary representatives of the Commons in England were originally drawn from the legal doctrine of the powers of ambassadors and plenipotentiaries.
This is the great Western political discovery: what might be called the technique of liberty. Whatever the complaints against parliamentary/representative government (and I have heard most of them, I think), no other device has ever been found to root the assumption of personal liberty in a complex and effective state structure. The modern world instinctively associates representative government with personal liberty – think of the electors of Iraq on January 30, 2005, holding up proudly their ink-stained fingers to show that they, too, had struck their blow for liberty. And this political discovery, in spite of the textbook lies propagated in generations of schoolrooms, has nothing to do either with the so-called Enlightenment or with the Protestant Reformation. It was present in Western political structure from the moment this could be identified as a definite entity and differentiated from other cultures. It is wholly different from any other culture in the world, not excluding other Christian cultures. Neither the Byzantine Empire nor the Christian Empire of Ethiopia nor the Christian kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia ever dreamed of any such organization. The classic Indian treatise about politics, the Kautilya Arthashastra, only knows two kinds of government: government by the king, and government by a minister appointed by the king. That there might be any source of political power other than the king is something that does not occur to this most subtle of political analysts; nor, indeed, to his colleagues in China or the Muslim world. In 1291, a Mongol king in Iraq sent the Nestorian Christian bishop Rabban Bar Sawma (already a widely traveled man, born near the border of the Chinese empire) on a mixed diplomatic and exploring mission in the Christian extreme west. Among the many things that surprised him, the good Bishop reported on a city called Genoa, which had no king, but called to sovereignty “some great man with whom the people are pleased”. Such a thing, he, who had traveled from China to Syria through most of the known world, had never seen or heard of. It is worth noticing that his lack of understanding was such that he still thought in terms of one absolute ruler, a king in fact – “some great man” – with the sole difference that he had “pleased” the people. The whole mechanism of popular and select assemblies and representative government which created and controlled the Doge of Genoa had passed him by.
Indeed, the technique of freedom by representative/parliamentary government is even unlike Western civilization’s own predecessors. Greece knew about self-governing poleis, but had no idea of representative government: whatever group of free individuals might be counted as citizens, they exercised their power by gathering in great assemblies and taking direct and personal part in the country’s governance. Often magistrates were not even elected but picked by lot from the citizen body, the assumption being that any freeman of the city was good enough to take charge of public matters. When only a minority of the locals were free citizens, as in Sparta, this was called an oligarchy; when it was a majority (or a totality, excluding slaves and aliens), as in Athens, it was called a democracy. But the principle of the active assembly of free citizens remained the same. Greece would never have understood the notion of representative government.
The results are easily enough read in Greek history. It proved impossible to create a national government above the polis except along tyrannical lines. Neither Athens nor Sparta nor yet Thebes ever managed to form a super-local, all-Greek union of poleis that represented anything in anyone’s eyes except the domination of many weaker poleis by a stronger one, and, as such, these mini-empires had no stability or endurance. The man most successful in unifying the Greek people was a crafty bandit chief from the north, alien to assemblies and councils, Philip II of Macedonia; and even so the Macedonian supremacy over Greece did not last, and it was the Romans who forced peace and political organization on the divided poleis at last. Before the end, a couple of permanent and rather successful leagues of poleis, the Aetolian and Achaian, had indeed emerged, with a political organization that showed some features of representation. But by then Greece was caught up in the struggles of great regional powers – Macedonia, Syria, Egypt, Pergamum, Rhodes, Pontus, Rome – and no league of poleis could form enough power to insure independence. Whether or not they anticipate any feature of representative national government, the two Leagues represent nothing more than interesting blind alleys of history,. On the whole, the lesson of Greek urban politics is that there was no way to exercise government of this popular-assembly kind above the local level.
The Romans had no less than three separate kinds of popular assembly, but they were all overshadowed by their famous parliamentary body, the Senate, the most eminent and powerful of many such bodies in the ancient world. However, like all such assemblies, it was unelected and represented nothing except itself. The old Roman joke was rather more serious than people realize: Rome did not need a king, she already had three hundred (Senators). The Romans did elect their magistrates, but this elected element had no direct connection with the Senate (although the Senators were mostly ex-magistrates); rather, one magistrate, the Censor, elected to guard over the morality of the Senate, selected new Senators when needed – and occasionally dismissed old ones who had proved criminal. There is no way that such an assembly can be understood as representative of anything but itself. Besides, it suffered from a similar problem to Athens’ and Sparta’s: being based in one City alone, it could not possibly be an effective representation of a whole country, let alone empire. No mechanism for national election existed. When one man seized the supreme military command (imperator) and used it to become permanently the first man in the State (princeps) and to transmit the position to his heirs, the provinces hardly noticed.
This was partly because, for two and a half centuries, the Empire continued as a sort of federal structure, where the central power was indeed unelected (the Emperor and the Senate, the former having an increasing amount of power, the latter a decreasing but always significant share), but the local administration (ciuitates) preserved the forms, and largely the substance, of the old municipal forms of government. Indeed, the Roman Empire expanded these forms of local government, with local senates and elected magistrates, over territories (such as the Celtic lands of western Europe) which had never known them before. Tribal entities were transformed into Roman ciuitates or cantons, and Roman citizens founded Roman colonies with magistracies on the Roman model. If there was a form of local government that the Empire, through most of its history, tended to abolish, it was the local monarchy. By the reign of Vespasian (68-80AD) there was not, I believe, a single protected monarch within the borders of the Empire, though the reign of Augustus, a century earlier, had known half a dozen or more. The Ciuitas, on the other hand, became the standard of local government. Its ancient roots were taken for granted. When a relative of the great writer Pliny the Younger was sent to be imperial governor to Greece, Pliny recommended him to be moderate and respectful: these ciuitates you will control, he said, were none other than Sparta and Athens and Thebes, the great cities you met in your schooldays – not, he meant, successor states or local entities, but the very same little republics, magistrate succeeding magistrate; only taken into the orbit of the Empire. They still were to be regarded and treated as free peoples.
This balance broke after 250AD, when the Empire entered its long decline. The result was a slow and disastrous collapse in all kinds of local freedom, both personal and community. About the year 300AD, the emperor Diocletian, to insure a steady supply of produce and tax (he thought), ordered that all citizens should follow in their fathers’ trades, and that all peasants among them should be bound to the land; and in 460, the emperor Majorian abolished the institution of the ciuitas with what was left by then of its elected magistrates, placing them under a Count appointed from the centre.
This means that, whatever chain of connection and even causation ties the representative and local institutions of the later West to the elective, if not representative, and local institutions of the Roman Empire, it was not direct. Where the most direct social and legal derivation from the old Empire can be observed – in the Byzantine Empire – the opposite is the case. First, the power of the emperor, though unstable, becomes absolute. Imperial power is dressed in a pathetic pretence at sacredness which never protected any emperor from military revolts, palace conspiracies, and family feuds; but it is limitless so long as it is not destroyed by uncontrolled violence. Second, local political life, in spite of the existence of a network of local governors, bishops, monasteries, is emptied out. To all appearances, the Byzantine empire has no local life worth following, except for those border areas (Syria, Armenia, Italy), where it was contending against opposing forces. For most of the Empire’s history, the only important city was the capital, Constantinople. (Its modern name, Istanbul, is said to derive from a Turkish misunderstanding of the habit of Greek citizens of saying that they were traveling eis ten polein, “to the City” – the City, of course, being Constantinople and none other.) Formerly glorious urban entities such as Athens, Ephesus, Tarsus, Smyrna, Caesarea, Nicaea, Thessalonica, Trebisond, do not seem to have counted as “cities” at all to the Byzantine mind.
Before this process was complete, the West had been lost to the empire for ever. Even so, continuity with the old legal establishment of the ciuitas was broken. What the West, and specifically the Frankish Kingdom – from which, ultimately, all Western kingdoms and empires either originated or were influenced – got from the Empire, was not the ciuitas, which was dead, but the institution of the ruling nobleman, the Count. This is evident to anyone who reads Merovingian Frankish history, in which Counts have absolute power over their territories and their titles are lusted after. Soon they were to become hereditary, completing the break-up of the national territory into proprietary units under the total control of single patrilinear dynasties. Anyone who looked at developments within the Frankish kingdom in the sixth and seventh centuries would have found no reason to believe that political organization was going anywhere but towards a total consolidation of the monarchic and absolute model. Even the frequent civil wars did not contradict this. Let us remember, too, that with the exception of Italy and the Mediterranean shore of Gaul and Spain, the ciuitas and the city were imported models of administration in the West, where they had never shown the same vivacity as in the empire’s eastern provinces – Anatolia, Syria, even Egypt.
That being the case, how on Earth does it happen that by the eleventh/twelfth century representative government is present, often dominant, almost everywhere in the West? The kingdoms of France and Italy and the Holy Roman Empire were all direct offshoots of the Frankish kingdom; the kingdom of England had fallen in Norman (French) hands; the kingdoms of Spain and eastern Europe were under unchallenged Frankish influence. In Arabic, the words for “European” and “Frankish”, adopted at this time to cover an increasingly powerful enemy, are the same – Ferengi. The Frankish influence should have been at its height; and as we saw, the formation of the Frankish kingdom was on a foundation of increasingly tight and personal, patrimonial lordship, inherited in the male line, father to son. How did this develop into the representative system of the West? Where did that come from? That is the central question to which this essay means to suggest an answer.
To begin with, there is no doubt that some of the component parts of the new Latin/Frankish West did have institutions that either had the formalities of a full parliament or at least approached it. The Scandinavian kingdoms held regular grand assemblies of the nobility, called things, which especially in Iceland developed into a full regime of national and regional parliaments and courts of justice, with a complex legal system. The early Frankish kingdom held an annual gathering of the nobility, the Field of Mars, in which policy and law were reviewed and war declared; although there can be no doubt that the power and prestige belonged to the king, and later to the great lords who seized power under increasingly helpless titular kings.
Are these assemblies directly relevant to the national and local parliamentary institutions of later periods; or are they as historically separate as the Roman Senate? Well, I feel sure that the medieval assemblies were at least in some way developments or outgrowth of these Germanic assemblies. The chairman of the modern English Parliament bears the ancient title of Speaker, clearly derived from the Lawspeaker who presided the Scandinavian Things, and the earliest name of the city councils that ruled Italian cities in the first age of free republics was Arengo, from Longobard Hring, designating all noble or free people gathered in a ring. (Curiously, this recalls the Sardinian Corona de logu, which also seems to describe a crown, that is a circle, of people. However, there is no evidence whatever of any Teutonic or Italian influence on Sardinian culture before the 1200s, by which time the Sardinian institutions had long been in existence, and were even beginning to wilt under the pressure of Italian interlopers.)
Clearly, however, these institutions do not have the peculiarity of mature Western polities which I repeatedly underlined – the representative character. Teutonic Things and Hrings and Fields of Mars are simply grand assemblies of the whole nobility or free people, not different in type from the assemblies of Athens or Sparta or republican Rome. Also, there is no clear indication of the existence of various layers of organization, from the local to the national, which are typical of the mature structure of England and France and the Holy Roman Empire and so on. These grand assemblies imply a totality of a whole nation. True, Iceland developed a system in which the great Althing was underlain by four local Things. However, by the time this system was stabilized, the country was already Christian, and there is no reason to think that the system was not influenced by pan-European tendencies. To the contrary, Iceland was remarkably open to foreign influences and was one of the most culturally lively and creative provinces of the whole West. (Until, that is, the king of Denmark snuffed its independence in the late twelve hundreds, bringing to an end a period of quite extraordinary brilliance.)
I do not think that the habit of representative local and national government is to be ascribed to one alone of the many sources of Western culture, politics, or law – not even the pervasive Frankish succession. The parliamentary institutions of Sardinia and Iceland, two islands mostly alien to Frankish influence, would be enough to show otherwise. I think the facts indicate a common direction to many parallel developments, tending to increasingly similar results from more than one beginning: from Roman and Teutonic, Welsh and Irish, Slavonic and Sardinian and Magyar origins, towards an increasingly common form of parliamentary assembly representing local communities.
Therefore we have to look to what is common among all these areas. And what is common, without a doubt, is one thing and one thing only – the Western Patriarchate; the peculiar form of Catholic Christianity that evolved, long before the final break, in the area where Latin, rather than Greek, was the common language; the Papacy and the Catholic Church.
To ascribe the origin of the peculiar Western political experience and form to the Church is both intuitive and counter-intuitive. It is intuitive, because if we admit that there is such a thing as a common Western political form, a tendency to do things across the territory of the West in ways that are similar; that tend in time to become more rather than less similar; and that are dissimilar from any other area – then one cannot avoid the idea that this has something to do with the one common factor. And it is counter-intuitive because of our inherited load of pseudo-historical ideas – the kind that are fostered in every schoolroom and every newspaper – which designate the Papacy as the very image, the very centre, of whatever is authoritarian, centralized, absolute, in Western culture. That is, reason strongly suggests that the existence of these two common features – representative elements in government, and the supranational Catholic Church – typical of the West and unknown elsewhere, cannot be casual; habit of mind revolts against the very notion.
What we need, at any rate, is more than an intuition. Intuition proves nothing. What is required is clear evidence: a consistent form of activity or influence, consistently practiced by the Western Church from the beginning and across the board, which directly or indirectly went to stimulate, even to form, this federal shape of society, with local entities governing themselves and sending representatives to be part of national governing bodies.
The first thing to spring to mind, of course, is the Council. Church Councils are really remarkably like Parliaments in many ways, but in none more so than in the fact that those who take part in them, the Bishops, are there by virtue of a definite territorial office. It is not an assembly of a social class, such as a class of free men or noblemen or, in this case, priests, but of people with definite offices bound to the territory and independent of their status. It is not the Bishop that makes the diocese, but the diocese that makes the Bishop; just as no man has the right to enter a Parliament except by the decision of a local constituency. Even the aristocratic parts of the old European parliaments represent, not the whole nobility, but specific offices. There might be twenty male members of a noble family, say, the Viscontis of Modrone (to mention a famous Italian house); but granting a set-up like the English House of Peers or the French Noble Estate, only the actual Duke of Modrone may attend, speak, or vote. This is because titles of nobility, however hereditary they may have become, are originally badges of office – a Count being a local appointed magistrate, a Duke or a Marquess the commander of a border army unit, and so on. And it was the holders of these offices, rather than all people of the noble class, who are summoned to Parliament. To this day, a new member of the English House of Lords must choose a territorial title to designate him or her; it has never been possible, as it has with much of the Continental nobility, to just tack the particle von or a title to the family name. What you are being nominated to is not a caste, but an office – even though, by taking the office, you also become a member of the caste.
For much of Church history, and to a large extent to this day, a Bishop is the Church official who is responsible for a definite territorial area (the Irish Church tended to escape this definition, but never completely) and everything that happens within it. And in early days, the similarity of Bishops in Council to lords in Parliament was even more marked; for although a Bishop had tenure for life (unless he was found guilty of some grave sin), he was in general elected by the Christians of his diocese (appointment from Rome was far in the future), and tended to be one of the local great lords or a leading citizen – just like a typical English Peer or MP before the twentieth century. Conversely, the idea of a permanently sitting Parliament is fairly modern; before the seventeen hundreds, Parliaments tended to meet whenever, and even wherever, the King summoned them – with a summons that is in form really very like the Pope’s call to a General Council. The King of France, always the most despotic and centralizing of European sovereigns, got rid of the nuisance of a national assembly by the simple expedient of forgetting to summon one – from 1614 to 1789. In form, in behaviour, and in the subjects it was apt to cover, an early Western Parliament would not really be very different from a Church Council. And conversely, in Visigothic Spain, Church Councils had already become something like regular parliamentary assemblies for the whole kingdom: they were held every few years and were the focus of political and legislative business, going well beyond the properly ecclesiastical sphere.
Still, even typological similarity is not evidence. Church Councils and territorial episcopates are hardly the patrimony of Western Christianity alone, and neither among the Byzantines nor among the Ethiopians, nor indeed among the various Eastern Churches from Egypt to India, have they ever shown a significant dynamic towards representative government. Nor can it be suggested that the Germanic assemblies, Fields of Mars, Things and Hrings, to which so many local and national parliaments can be connected, were in any derived from Church Councils with which they had nothing in common except the very general idea of an Omnium Gatherum.
Part of the difference, in my view, lies in the wholly unique situation in which what was to become the Vatican operated. The Eastern Churches were, from an early age, minority churches subject to rulers of alien religion – Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, even Manicheans and Jews; like the Jews through most modern history, they tended to form isolated groups with supranational contacts, whose bishops could easily travel from the borders of China to Syria and beyond. They had no major political role except to represent their communities to often unfriendly lords, and it rarely occurred to them that they could in any way affect the larger society. The Byzantine and Ethiopian Churches, though never reduced to merely national entities, were both principally the Church of a definite and powerful territorial sovereign, and dealt primarily with their own emperors. The Church of the West, on the other hand, was from the beginning an autonomous and supranational entity dealing with not one, but many sovereign powers. Most of these independent powers belonged to its flock, but all kept the full liberty of action that is the prerogative of any king with an army. From the beginning, the Western Church was not allowed to drift either towards the situation of a politically irresponsible grouping of minorities, or of a State ministry of religion; it was consistently under the obligation of dealing as a responsible partner with free and powerful partners.
In this world of free sovereign powers, the Church introduced a legal instrument it had derived from late Roman practice, which became central to all its dealings with lay powers: the charter. The charter was a written instrument enacting a definite and, as far as possible, unchangeable grant of lands, rights, duties, and privileges, to certain definite groups. It flattered the king, by making him the permanent source of rights and privileges and involving his enduring power in their defence. Above all, the charter did not merely represent a single gift: it involved a number of presumptions – such as the belief that the office of king was stable, that the power and prestige of his heirs depended on his just as his depended on his predecessors’, that his heirs would be bound to his orders, and – bear this in mind – that the king and his successors relate to the entity to which the charter has been granted as one free, permanent, and self-standing group to another. The king binds himself and his successors to guarantee that abbey X should have the use of fields A, B and C, wellspring D, pastures E and F, and the right to convene a yearly fair at G and build a water-mill at H, and abbey X commits itself in exchange to paying a certain amount of goods and money to the King, to offer a certain amount of masses for him and his descendants, and maybe to allow him to be buried in its church.
It must be clear that the very concept of charter must tend to stabilize society, forming permanent institutions whose life does not depend on the mere contention of Big Men and Big Families. It tends to form a “civil society” of permanent public bodies, which have their own dignity independently of who is their boss and who protects them, and which, to the contrary, can themselves lend prestige to their members and leaders. Any man, perhaps, may become King, but any King is bound by all the charters granted by all his predecessors; whether by force or by peaceful arrangement, he succeeds to a world of stable and settled law.
The legal presumptions of the charter, of course, come from Roman law, and prolong, even in a time and place where Roman law was mostly forgotten, the two most important and novel concept of Roman jurisprudence: the distinction between public and private, and the notion of permanent corporate identities (“juridical persons”). The first notion does not exist in Greek, Jewish, or Indian law (speaking of the three cultures I know best, or less badly). It arose, perhaps not by chance, in the most family-obsessed of all ancient civilizations, establishing a common field of action for the contentions and politicking of the great Roman families: the common matter, the Res Publica or State, distinct and superior to all. The Res Publica is deliberately designed not to have any permanent institutional space for any family or any group of families: no state office, however menial, is hereditary, and, unlike for instance the Athenian state structure, its lowest level of organization had nothing to do with the families – it was the thirty curiae, local assemblies representing all the residents in a definite area of the city. In other words, there was no presumption that any family would dominate any part of the State: all families were, in theory, free to move and act across the whole range of the Roman body politic.
This was probably the only possible way in which Rome’s obsessionally self-regarding noble families, whose leaders were always called “lord King” – dominus Rex – by their menials, could be made to live within a single city without butchering each other. The Res Publica is the stage across which Roman noble families can posture and struggle for supremacy, and the set of accepted rules for their struggles, and the goal of their struggles. Such a common field was not necessary in a world of absolute monarchies such as that of most Mediterranean and Eastern cultures, or even in the free cities of Greece, whose basic idea of themselves is that they were all, rich and poor, friend and foe, one kin and of one blood. All the Athenians, all the Spartans, all the Thebans, regarded themselves as related to each other, and there were heavy barriers against anyone not of the same blood becoming a citizen. Rome, by contrast, had from the beginning had legal devices for accepting foreigners into its citizen body, and, far from regarding itself as of one blood, embodied in its foundation legend the coming together of no less than three nations, each alien to the other.
The other notion, that of corporate law, enters Roman law perhaps later and certainly at a lower level of importance. I am no legal historian, but what I know of Roman law suggests that the notion of corporate rights and legal corporate existence was a reaction to the entrance into the Empire of a number of different cultures with different laws and notions of right – sexual and family morality, property inheritance and conveyance, citizenship, the obligations of social inferiors to their superiors, were different in, say, Egypt, from, say, Gaul. The law had to take cognizance of these differences; and it did so by giving legal status to the local entities and organized groups that existed within the empire. When a quarrel arisen within, say, an Anatolian town, or even the Christian Church, reached the Emperor for judgement, the question he would ask in settling the dispute was: what are the inner laws, or at least the established precedents, of that particular group?
Mention of the Church shows an important fact: that this law of corporate entities did not extend only to conquered states and local administrations, but also to non-territorial groups and volunteer units. The Roman Empire, for instance, recognised guilds, temples, neighbourhood associations, theatre troupes, friendly societies of every sort. The reverse side of this was the claim to have the right to suppress them; the Senate, in 186BC, ordered the suppression of all association for the worship of the god Bacchus – which led to a great deal of violence – and at a later stage certain kinds of collegia or guilds were made illegal. The repeated attempts to destroy the Christian Church are part of this picture.
The institution of the charter passed down to the new Germanic Christian states the presumption that, in dealing with monasteries and bishoprics, they were dealing with permanent bodies, and as permanent bodies. The King related, not to a class of individuals, let alone to single individuals who had somehow achieved prominence, but to a set of permanent institutions; institutions whose possession of certain areas was, unless they alienated them, perpetual; institutions that would continue to exist, at least in law, even if not a single monk or priest were found to staff them, because their rights and duties were fixed. And the abbeys, bishoprics, and other churches, all related to the King not as to an individual who had somehow gained a position of absolute power, but as to a person who had taken on a group of vast but established and codified powers – powers that other had held before him, and others would since. They dealt with an office as much as with a person.
Charters were by far the most practical and safe instrument for holding land and rights of any sort, and quickly drove other legal instruments from the field. Already by 750AD, most of the land in England was held by ecclesiastical or pseudo-ecclesiastical claims, to the disgust of the devout Bede. At the back of this there was a rush by local lords to create permanent claims to the land by means of charters. (However, in the long run, the fact that the best instrument for the legal possession of land or rights was something that the Church had given to society ended up being greatly to the Church’s political and economic advantage. The famous wealth of the medieval Church, which stunned Rabban Bar Sawma and which eventually stimulated the Reformation looters, was due largely to the fact that the Church was better at exercising its legal rights; which is not surprising, given that it had brought those legal rights into existence, and had the largest number of literate and able men. That is comparable with the prominence of the legal profession in modern Britain and America. Lawyers are inevitably the best at dealing with the law.)
Now here is where Western/Frankish/European/Catholic civilization, at its very beginnings, takes a different turn from that of any other comparable entity. Charter grants are well known in other cultures: both Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries are established by written royal charters not different in any major feature from the charters which Augustine and his successors taught the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish kings to grant and respect. But these charters are confined to the religious realm. They exist to withdraw certain definite areas from the worldly realm, where the power of the king is otherwise absolute, and place them in the direct hold of the gods, or of religious corporations such as the Buddhist Sangha, which are altogether otherworldly in nature. In effect, what charter law of this kind does is to make the king the equal of the gods: what is not held by the one is held by the other, and legal instruments must be devised to transfer one area from the one to the other. There is no other claim in law that is comparable to that of the king or of the gods, or alternatively of the Sangha.
But charter law in Catholic Europe extends to all levels of freeborn society, indeed to what was originally the slave level. That is what changes them from slaves to serfs: their duties are written down in charters, and that limits them and makes them firm and enforceable in law. That is, a lord is increasingly incapable of enforcing arbitrary decisions on the human capital of his estate: slaves turn to serfs, and serfs to tenants. The difference between slaves and serfs is that there is a definite limit to what serfs owe their master - customary duties, such as road-mending or turning out for war or yelding a given part of the crops to the lord. And in time, both lord and tenant find it convenient to replace these with money payments, which become a regular rent for the use of the land. At this point the tenant, who began as a slave, is in effect no different from any other free citizen; all led, managed, in fact made possible, by the existence of written charter law. Indeed, the very presumption that definite written law can limit the power of masters on slaves is not one that every society would understand. It is in such details as this that the Christian nature of this development is clearest.
The novelty of the Western development of charter-based law is the proliferation of independent bodies having the structure of autonomous, free-standing powers, a sort of mini-Res Publica existing on their own terms, yet existing within, and being granted those powers by, the greater Res Publica. (So, in medieval times, was the State called.)
Charter law applies to definite entities. It demands the existence of corporate entities and permanent institutions. It appears in the Germanic realms with the establishment of permanent monasteries; soon it is extended to bishoprics; and from thence it spreads to secular offices and institutions. The first mighty flowering of European civilization, from the eleven to the thirteen hundreds, is a flowering of chartered institutions: charters establish universities, monasteries, mendicant orders, communes, guilds, companies, fiefs, harbours, fairs, parishes, chantries. And where they are not granted willingly, they are taken by force. The greatest wars of the period, such as the Barons’ War in England and the War of the Lombard League, which raged in the richest part of Europe (Italy) for twenty years and brought low the greatest German Emperor, are fought for the sake of charters. It is important to notice that the results of such wars are intended to be permanent. The Grand Charter forced from King John by his angry baronage was regarded ever since, in spite of outrageous violations especially in the time of Henry VIII, as the base of English law; and the charters granted by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa after his final defeat at Legnano stood for centuries at the start of all books collecting Italian laws and customs.
It is exactly because the result of wars was held to be legal, chartered and permanent, that wars were fought with such fury – and yet had an end. Rabban Bar Sawma, who landed in Italy in the middle of a great war between French and Aragonese claimants to the throne of Naples, was surprised to find no regions made permanently desolate by war, and impressed by the fact that soldiers only seemed intent on fighting each other. Even at the height of the clash between the Italian cities and Frederick, when he ordered the destruction of Milan, he did not enslave or massacre its people – he only ordered them out of the city, and then had the empty buildings and city walls pulled down. He wanted an end to the city-state of Milan, but not necessarily to its people, or their capacity to work and generate wealth. War in medieval Europe, being a legal procedure, was under strict legal limits. Frederick wanted the Italian cities as part of his realm, under his view of the law; the Italian cities wanted their view of the law to prevail, and, having done that, recognised Frederick as their overlord, on their terms. What happened in Italy for twenty years between 1155 and 1174 was a gigantic trial at law, whose final results were accepted as binding by both parties. The same is true of the history of King John’s reign; indeed, what made the reign of John so disastrous was the general perception that, whatever his other good qualities of political insight and personal bravery, his word could not be trusted – that is, that he would not live within the law. The concept of binding law was already dominant in England when the barons imposed a binding law on their king; or else they could not have imposed it.
This proliferation of chartered, autonomous bodies, is the corresponding term, from below, of the representative nature of national parliaments, above. The conception of society as a multiplicity of interrelated but autonomous and permanent entities becomes a part of the culture. The ancient, indeed prehistoric, conception of society as a group of classes of individuals and families – aristocrats, priests, farmers, townsmen, slaves – is not altogether neglected, since it is still a useful method of understanding society: its terms are clearly visible in real life. The class views and interests of a clergyman, a warrior nobleman, a merchant, or a serf, are as clear and visible on the pattern of society as the corporate interests of a guildsman or a mendicant friar or the citizen of a commune. It is at this point that the ancient national assemblies, without losing their national and class-based character – there are still two classes represented in the English Parliament, three in the French Estates – also become, inevitably, representative of the institutions which gather in society. Parliaments become conferences of ambassadors representing the interests and the views of definite local communities and institutions.
It is here that representative government is born. And it is a conscious birth. The popular nature of representative government was clear to European theorists from the word go. The greatest of them all, Thomas Aquinas, said this: Accordingly, the best form of government is in a state or kingdom, wherein one is given the power to preside over all; while under him are others having governing powers: and yet a government of this kind is shared by all, both because all are eligible to govern, and because the rulers are chosen by all. For this is the best form of polity, being partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e., government by the people, in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose their rulers. (Summa, art.105.1)
The reader who came to this passage from the conventional textbook notion of European history would rub his/her eyes in disbelief. To understand it properly, of course, one has to realize that Thomas, who had learned his political terminology from Aristotle, was using the term “democracy” in its Greek meaning – giving all the political power to the assembly of all the free citizens, with no representative intermediaries; and that he saw it, not without reason, this as dangerously close to mob rule. But once you understand his use of words, you will be stunned. What is this? NO Divine right? NO absolute sovereign? Did Aquinas just prophesy the American constitution, with its one person in authority (the President), with others “under him” having governing powers, all of them being elected “by all,” and the people having “the right” to choose their rulers? Of course not. Aquinas, who was a great nobleman from a great house, second cousin to the Emperor, at home with political power from birth, was describing a contemporary ideal, and to a large extent a contemporary practice. The Emperor was already elected, and most if not all European states, fiefs and cities had a strong representative element in their constitutions. Indeed, the American Constitution and the American Revolution derived their strength from being, rather unconsciously, grown in the soil of Western political civilization. If anyone had told Jefferson or Franklin that the strength of their movement came from being so conservative that it went right back to the middle ages, one rather thinks that they would have sneered; yet it was the truth. The institutions, even the names, that claimed the right of self-government in the Thirteen Colonies, were medieval: elected city councils with aldermen, provincial representative congresses, judicial assizes, juries, local citizen militiae, counties, sheriffs commanded to keep the peace over a county (sheriff = shire-gerefa, “Count of the Shire”). Many English medieval institutions, such as the sheriff, lasted rather better and more functionally in America than in England.
It is only when you realize this that you realize what a monstrous, indeed cancerous, usurpation the so-called monarchy by divine right was in European history. It simply represents the grab of power by a king against existing institutions and against his own people. It has no business in Western civilization and never did, and it cannot possibly reach the levels of legitimacy that it had in what I described of Hindu and Buddhist cultures. There, as I said, the King was, from the beginning, the partner of the gods, and not otherwise limited in his power on Earth. Such a conception was alien to Europe, where the conception of society as a multitude of autonomous institutions was too fundamental to be altered. Kings might destroy one institution after another, like the king of Castile destroyed the Cortes in 1519, or the King of England destroyed the Church and the Guilds in that monstrous burst of looting misguidedly called the Reformation; but they could not alter the basics of society, the way human beings existed and interacted, which, in Europe, simply excluded the notion of royal uniqueness. Companies must go on being formed, city councils being chartered, property being vested in individuals and in corporations, independently of royal power. Therefore, whatever the claims made for the King by his apologists in the age of growing royal tyranny between 1400 and 1776, these were and remained hollow; and the power of the absolute ruler ended up, in effect, being based only on bayonets, and enforceable only as long as he had the largest number of bayonets. What is more, by tearing at the foundations of the mutual recognition of legal rights which had established the European monarchies in the first place, it destroyed the legal foundation of the rule of the king; and left him nothing, I repeat, but the points of his guns.
By the same token, until you realize this, you do not realize what a great recovery of the real European values, in spite of its fanatical, parricidal, and just plain stupid aspects, the French Revolution really was. The straight path of political development in Europe had been increasingly hijacked by centralized royal power; the Revolution did not indeed reverse the centralization of that power – in fact, it speeded it up – but it removed the presumption of its being arbitrary and unlimited by right. Whatever its aspects of violence and tyranny, its long-term result in Europe was to return the right to choose and control the rulers to the people; where St. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval aristocrat, had confidently placed it.
This is about as wrong as any statement of historical fact can very well be. And it is not a matter of subtle interpretation, of dispute, of uncertain facts, but of matters as clear and as plain and as unarguable as the nose on my readers’ face. The issue is not whether representative government and the idea of citizen freedom did or did not pre-exist Cromwell’s revolution (which destroyed both in England, replacing them with military tyranny), but how they came to be, as they were through most of our history, the main defining feature of Western political organization.
Great historical mutations are always mysterious, even when they happen largely in the eye of history and with plenty of documentary sources. For instance, the reason and mechanism by which such a wholly new thing as Christianity arose, along with the truly bizarre explosion of what are now known as Gnostic heresies, in the first and second century AD, remains a matter for extreme controversy, although the sources are plentiful, varied, and ever-increasing. By contrast, the genetic mutation that leads from the institutions of the late Roman Empire in the sixth century to those of western and central Europe in the twelfth, is, except for a few occasional bursts, poorly documented, and further complicated by representing the fusion into one culture unit of several different previous ones – Roman, Greek, Judeo-Christian; Irish and Irish-Christian; British/Welsh; Teutonic-Frankish; Teutonic-English; Teutonic-Longobard; Teutonic-Saxon; Teutonic-Viking; Byzantine; Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian; the ever-alien yet ever-present Jewish communities; and, at the borders, Visigoth-Spanish, Russian, Baltic, and Balkanic.
But the plain fact is this. Western civilization properly so called can be traced back to the split of the Roman Empire’s Latin European provinces away from the larger Roman culture, a slow process that can be said to begin in the sixth century and be complete by the eleventh, and which also involved the entrance into this Latin-speaking culture of many groups – Germans beyond the Rhine, Scandinavians, Irish and British Celts, Magyars, Slavs, Balts – who had never been a part of the old Empire at all. By the time in the eleventh century when documents become plentiful and political developments can be followed with some clarity, most of the West, from Castile to Bohemia and from Italy to Norway, had strong and often prevalent elements of representative and parliamentary powers in its government. Several states – the republic of Iceland, the free cities of Italy and Germany – are purely republican; and every major monarchy is underpinned or opposed by a national assembly, from the Cortes of Castile to the Diet of the Empire, from the Estates of France to the Parliament of England. The Celtic countries, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany, which carried into the Christian age an ancient tribal political form, are an exception (although the last pretender to Welsh kingship, Owain Glyn Dwr, summoned a senedd or national parliament at Machynlleth as part of his claim): on the other hand, even in isolated Sardinia, the four local kinglets (Giudici) were assisted in their function by national assemblies called, bizarrely enough, the Crown of the Nation (Corona de Logu).
The most significant feature of this new Western political organization, however, it is that its form of representative assembly is not restricted to the top layer of political society. The national parliamentary organs tend to be composed of representatives of local institutions, having in effect the powers of ambassadors from their local communities, which in turn had their own local forms of self-government. It has been shown that the powers of parliamentary representatives of the Commons in England were originally drawn from the legal doctrine of the powers of ambassadors and plenipotentiaries.
This is the great Western political discovery: what might be called the technique of liberty. Whatever the complaints against parliamentary/representative government (and I have heard most of them, I think), no other device has ever been found to root the assumption of personal liberty in a complex and effective state structure. The modern world instinctively associates representative government with personal liberty – think of the electors of Iraq on January 30, 2005, holding up proudly their ink-stained fingers to show that they, too, had struck their blow for liberty. And this political discovery, in spite of the textbook lies propagated in generations of schoolrooms, has nothing to do either with the so-called Enlightenment or with the Protestant Reformation. It was present in Western political structure from the moment this could be identified as a definite entity and differentiated from other cultures. It is wholly different from any other culture in the world, not excluding other Christian cultures. Neither the Byzantine Empire nor the Christian Empire of Ethiopia nor the Christian kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia ever dreamed of any such organization. The classic Indian treatise about politics, the Kautilya Arthashastra, only knows two kinds of government: government by the king, and government by a minister appointed by the king. That there might be any source of political power other than the king is something that does not occur to this most subtle of political analysts; nor, indeed, to his colleagues in China or the Muslim world. In 1291, a Mongol king in Iraq sent the Nestorian Christian bishop Rabban Bar Sawma (already a widely traveled man, born near the border of the Chinese empire) on a mixed diplomatic and exploring mission in the Christian extreme west. Among the many things that surprised him, the good Bishop reported on a city called Genoa, which had no king, but called to sovereignty “some great man with whom the people are pleased”. Such a thing, he, who had traveled from China to Syria through most of the known world, had never seen or heard of. It is worth noticing that his lack of understanding was such that he still thought in terms of one absolute ruler, a king in fact – “some great man” – with the sole difference that he had “pleased” the people. The whole mechanism of popular and select assemblies and representative government which created and controlled the Doge of Genoa had passed him by.
Indeed, the technique of freedom by representative/parliamentary government is even unlike Western civilization’s own predecessors. Greece knew about self-governing poleis, but had no idea of representative government: whatever group of free individuals might be counted as citizens, they exercised their power by gathering in great assemblies and taking direct and personal part in the country’s governance. Often magistrates were not even elected but picked by lot from the citizen body, the assumption being that any freeman of the city was good enough to take charge of public matters. When only a minority of the locals were free citizens, as in Sparta, this was called an oligarchy; when it was a majority (or a totality, excluding slaves and aliens), as in Athens, it was called a democracy. But the principle of the active assembly of free citizens remained the same. Greece would never have understood the notion of representative government.
The results are easily enough read in Greek history. It proved impossible to create a national government above the polis except along tyrannical lines. Neither Athens nor Sparta nor yet Thebes ever managed to form a super-local, all-Greek union of poleis that represented anything in anyone’s eyes except the domination of many weaker poleis by a stronger one, and, as such, these mini-empires had no stability or endurance. The man most successful in unifying the Greek people was a crafty bandit chief from the north, alien to assemblies and councils, Philip II of Macedonia; and even so the Macedonian supremacy over Greece did not last, and it was the Romans who forced peace and political organization on the divided poleis at last. Before the end, a couple of permanent and rather successful leagues of poleis, the Aetolian and Achaian, had indeed emerged, with a political organization that showed some features of representation. But by then Greece was caught up in the struggles of great regional powers – Macedonia, Syria, Egypt, Pergamum, Rhodes, Pontus, Rome – and no league of poleis could form enough power to insure independence. Whether or not they anticipate any feature of representative national government, the two Leagues represent nothing more than interesting blind alleys of history,. On the whole, the lesson of Greek urban politics is that there was no way to exercise government of this popular-assembly kind above the local level.
The Romans had no less than three separate kinds of popular assembly, but they were all overshadowed by their famous parliamentary body, the Senate, the most eminent and powerful of many such bodies in the ancient world. However, like all such assemblies, it was unelected and represented nothing except itself. The old Roman joke was rather more serious than people realize: Rome did not need a king, she already had three hundred (Senators). The Romans did elect their magistrates, but this elected element had no direct connection with the Senate (although the Senators were mostly ex-magistrates); rather, one magistrate, the Censor, elected to guard over the morality of the Senate, selected new Senators when needed – and occasionally dismissed old ones who had proved criminal. There is no way that such an assembly can be understood as representative of anything but itself. Besides, it suffered from a similar problem to Athens’ and Sparta’s: being based in one City alone, it could not possibly be an effective representation of a whole country, let alone empire. No mechanism for national election existed. When one man seized the supreme military command (imperator) and used it to become permanently the first man in the State (princeps) and to transmit the position to his heirs, the provinces hardly noticed.
This was partly because, for two and a half centuries, the Empire continued as a sort of federal structure, where the central power was indeed unelected (the Emperor and the Senate, the former having an increasing amount of power, the latter a decreasing but always significant share), but the local administration (ciuitates) preserved the forms, and largely the substance, of the old municipal forms of government. Indeed, the Roman Empire expanded these forms of local government, with local senates and elected magistrates, over territories (such as the Celtic lands of western Europe) which had never known them before. Tribal entities were transformed into Roman ciuitates or cantons, and Roman citizens founded Roman colonies with magistracies on the Roman model. If there was a form of local government that the Empire, through most of its history, tended to abolish, it was the local monarchy. By the reign of Vespasian (68-80AD) there was not, I believe, a single protected monarch within the borders of the Empire, though the reign of Augustus, a century earlier, had known half a dozen or more. The Ciuitas, on the other hand, became the standard of local government. Its ancient roots were taken for granted. When a relative of the great writer Pliny the Younger was sent to be imperial governor to Greece, Pliny recommended him to be moderate and respectful: these ciuitates you will control, he said, were none other than Sparta and Athens and Thebes, the great cities you met in your schooldays – not, he meant, successor states or local entities, but the very same little republics, magistrate succeeding magistrate; only taken into the orbit of the Empire. They still were to be regarded and treated as free peoples.
This balance broke after 250AD, when the Empire entered its long decline. The result was a slow and disastrous collapse in all kinds of local freedom, both personal and community. About the year 300AD, the emperor Diocletian, to insure a steady supply of produce and tax (he thought), ordered that all citizens should follow in their fathers’ trades, and that all peasants among them should be bound to the land; and in 460, the emperor Majorian abolished the institution of the ciuitas with what was left by then of its elected magistrates, placing them under a Count appointed from the centre.
This means that, whatever chain of connection and even causation ties the representative and local institutions of the later West to the elective, if not representative, and local institutions of the Roman Empire, it was not direct. Where the most direct social and legal derivation from the old Empire can be observed – in the Byzantine Empire – the opposite is the case. First, the power of the emperor, though unstable, becomes absolute. Imperial power is dressed in a pathetic pretence at sacredness which never protected any emperor from military revolts, palace conspiracies, and family feuds; but it is limitless so long as it is not destroyed by uncontrolled violence. Second, local political life, in spite of the existence of a network of local governors, bishops, monasteries, is emptied out. To all appearances, the Byzantine empire has no local life worth following, except for those border areas (Syria, Armenia, Italy), where it was contending against opposing forces. For most of the Empire’s history, the only important city was the capital, Constantinople. (Its modern name, Istanbul, is said to derive from a Turkish misunderstanding of the habit of Greek citizens of saying that they were traveling eis ten polein, “to the City” – the City, of course, being Constantinople and none other.) Formerly glorious urban entities such as Athens, Ephesus, Tarsus, Smyrna, Caesarea, Nicaea, Thessalonica, Trebisond, do not seem to have counted as “cities” at all to the Byzantine mind.
Before this process was complete, the West had been lost to the empire for ever. Even so, continuity with the old legal establishment of the ciuitas was broken. What the West, and specifically the Frankish Kingdom – from which, ultimately, all Western kingdoms and empires either originated or were influenced – got from the Empire, was not the ciuitas, which was dead, but the institution of the ruling nobleman, the Count. This is evident to anyone who reads Merovingian Frankish history, in which Counts have absolute power over their territories and their titles are lusted after. Soon they were to become hereditary, completing the break-up of the national territory into proprietary units under the total control of single patrilinear dynasties. Anyone who looked at developments within the Frankish kingdom in the sixth and seventh centuries would have found no reason to believe that political organization was going anywhere but towards a total consolidation of the monarchic and absolute model. Even the frequent civil wars did not contradict this. Let us remember, too, that with the exception of Italy and the Mediterranean shore of Gaul and Spain, the ciuitas and the city were imported models of administration in the West, where they had never shown the same vivacity as in the empire’s eastern provinces – Anatolia, Syria, even Egypt.
That being the case, how on Earth does it happen that by the eleventh/twelfth century representative government is present, often dominant, almost everywhere in the West? The kingdoms of France and Italy and the Holy Roman Empire were all direct offshoots of the Frankish kingdom; the kingdom of England had fallen in Norman (French) hands; the kingdoms of Spain and eastern Europe were under unchallenged Frankish influence. In Arabic, the words for “European” and “Frankish”, adopted at this time to cover an increasingly powerful enemy, are the same – Ferengi. The Frankish influence should have been at its height; and as we saw, the formation of the Frankish kingdom was on a foundation of increasingly tight and personal, patrimonial lordship, inherited in the male line, father to son. How did this develop into the representative system of the West? Where did that come from? That is the central question to which this essay means to suggest an answer.
To begin with, there is no doubt that some of the component parts of the new Latin/Frankish West did have institutions that either had the formalities of a full parliament or at least approached it. The Scandinavian kingdoms held regular grand assemblies of the nobility, called things, which especially in Iceland developed into a full regime of national and regional parliaments and courts of justice, with a complex legal system. The early Frankish kingdom held an annual gathering of the nobility, the Field of Mars, in which policy and law were reviewed and war declared; although there can be no doubt that the power and prestige belonged to the king, and later to the great lords who seized power under increasingly helpless titular kings.
Are these assemblies directly relevant to the national and local parliamentary institutions of later periods; or are they as historically separate as the Roman Senate? Well, I feel sure that the medieval assemblies were at least in some way developments or outgrowth of these Germanic assemblies. The chairman of the modern English Parliament bears the ancient title of Speaker, clearly derived from the Lawspeaker who presided the Scandinavian Things, and the earliest name of the city councils that ruled Italian cities in the first age of free republics was Arengo, from Longobard Hring, designating all noble or free people gathered in a ring. (Curiously, this recalls the Sardinian Corona de logu, which also seems to describe a crown, that is a circle, of people. However, there is no evidence whatever of any Teutonic or Italian influence on Sardinian culture before the 1200s, by which time the Sardinian institutions had long been in existence, and were even beginning to wilt under the pressure of Italian interlopers.)
Clearly, however, these institutions do not have the peculiarity of mature Western polities which I repeatedly underlined – the representative character. Teutonic Things and Hrings and Fields of Mars are simply grand assemblies of the whole nobility or free people, not different in type from the assemblies of Athens or Sparta or republican Rome. Also, there is no clear indication of the existence of various layers of organization, from the local to the national, which are typical of the mature structure of England and France and the Holy Roman Empire and so on. These grand assemblies imply a totality of a whole nation. True, Iceland developed a system in which the great Althing was underlain by four local Things. However, by the time this system was stabilized, the country was already Christian, and there is no reason to think that the system was not influenced by pan-European tendencies. To the contrary, Iceland was remarkably open to foreign influences and was one of the most culturally lively and creative provinces of the whole West. (Until, that is, the king of Denmark snuffed its independence in the late twelve hundreds, bringing to an end a period of quite extraordinary brilliance.)
I do not think that the habit of representative local and national government is to be ascribed to one alone of the many sources of Western culture, politics, or law – not even the pervasive Frankish succession. The parliamentary institutions of Sardinia and Iceland, two islands mostly alien to Frankish influence, would be enough to show otherwise. I think the facts indicate a common direction to many parallel developments, tending to increasingly similar results from more than one beginning: from Roman and Teutonic, Welsh and Irish, Slavonic and Sardinian and Magyar origins, towards an increasingly common form of parliamentary assembly representing local communities.
Therefore we have to look to what is common among all these areas. And what is common, without a doubt, is one thing and one thing only – the Western Patriarchate; the peculiar form of Catholic Christianity that evolved, long before the final break, in the area where Latin, rather than Greek, was the common language; the Papacy and the Catholic Church.
To ascribe the origin of the peculiar Western political experience and form to the Church is both intuitive and counter-intuitive. It is intuitive, because if we admit that there is such a thing as a common Western political form, a tendency to do things across the territory of the West in ways that are similar; that tend in time to become more rather than less similar; and that are dissimilar from any other area – then one cannot avoid the idea that this has something to do with the one common factor. And it is counter-intuitive because of our inherited load of pseudo-historical ideas – the kind that are fostered in every schoolroom and every newspaper – which designate the Papacy as the very image, the very centre, of whatever is authoritarian, centralized, absolute, in Western culture. That is, reason strongly suggests that the existence of these two common features – representative elements in government, and the supranational Catholic Church – typical of the West and unknown elsewhere, cannot be casual; habit of mind revolts against the very notion.
What we need, at any rate, is more than an intuition. Intuition proves nothing. What is required is clear evidence: a consistent form of activity or influence, consistently practiced by the Western Church from the beginning and across the board, which directly or indirectly went to stimulate, even to form, this federal shape of society, with local entities governing themselves and sending representatives to be part of national governing bodies.
The first thing to spring to mind, of course, is the Council. Church Councils are really remarkably like Parliaments in many ways, but in none more so than in the fact that those who take part in them, the Bishops, are there by virtue of a definite territorial office. It is not an assembly of a social class, such as a class of free men or noblemen or, in this case, priests, but of people with definite offices bound to the territory and independent of their status. It is not the Bishop that makes the diocese, but the diocese that makes the Bishop; just as no man has the right to enter a Parliament except by the decision of a local constituency. Even the aristocratic parts of the old European parliaments represent, not the whole nobility, but specific offices. There might be twenty male members of a noble family, say, the Viscontis of Modrone (to mention a famous Italian house); but granting a set-up like the English House of Peers or the French Noble Estate, only the actual Duke of Modrone may attend, speak, or vote. This is because titles of nobility, however hereditary they may have become, are originally badges of office – a Count being a local appointed magistrate, a Duke or a Marquess the commander of a border army unit, and so on. And it was the holders of these offices, rather than all people of the noble class, who are summoned to Parliament. To this day, a new member of the English House of Lords must choose a territorial title to designate him or her; it has never been possible, as it has with much of the Continental nobility, to just tack the particle von or a title to the family name. What you are being nominated to is not a caste, but an office – even though, by taking the office, you also become a member of the caste.
For much of Church history, and to a large extent to this day, a Bishop is the Church official who is responsible for a definite territorial area (the Irish Church tended to escape this definition, but never completely) and everything that happens within it. And in early days, the similarity of Bishops in Council to lords in Parliament was even more marked; for although a Bishop had tenure for life (unless he was found guilty of some grave sin), he was in general elected by the Christians of his diocese (appointment from Rome was far in the future), and tended to be one of the local great lords or a leading citizen – just like a typical English Peer or MP before the twentieth century. Conversely, the idea of a permanently sitting Parliament is fairly modern; before the seventeen hundreds, Parliaments tended to meet whenever, and even wherever, the King summoned them – with a summons that is in form really very like the Pope’s call to a General Council. The King of France, always the most despotic and centralizing of European sovereigns, got rid of the nuisance of a national assembly by the simple expedient of forgetting to summon one – from 1614 to 1789. In form, in behaviour, and in the subjects it was apt to cover, an early Western Parliament would not really be very different from a Church Council. And conversely, in Visigothic Spain, Church Councils had already become something like regular parliamentary assemblies for the whole kingdom: they were held every few years and were the focus of political and legislative business, going well beyond the properly ecclesiastical sphere.
Still, even typological similarity is not evidence. Church Councils and territorial episcopates are hardly the patrimony of Western Christianity alone, and neither among the Byzantines nor among the Ethiopians, nor indeed among the various Eastern Churches from Egypt to India, have they ever shown a significant dynamic towards representative government. Nor can it be suggested that the Germanic assemblies, Fields of Mars, Things and Hrings, to which so many local and national parliaments can be connected, were in any derived from Church Councils with which they had nothing in common except the very general idea of an Omnium Gatherum.
Part of the difference, in my view, lies in the wholly unique situation in which what was to become the Vatican operated. The Eastern Churches were, from an early age, minority churches subject to rulers of alien religion – Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, even Manicheans and Jews; like the Jews through most modern history, they tended to form isolated groups with supranational contacts, whose bishops could easily travel from the borders of China to Syria and beyond. They had no major political role except to represent their communities to often unfriendly lords, and it rarely occurred to them that they could in any way affect the larger society. The Byzantine and Ethiopian Churches, though never reduced to merely national entities, were both principally the Church of a definite and powerful territorial sovereign, and dealt primarily with their own emperors. The Church of the West, on the other hand, was from the beginning an autonomous and supranational entity dealing with not one, but many sovereign powers. Most of these independent powers belonged to its flock, but all kept the full liberty of action that is the prerogative of any king with an army. From the beginning, the Western Church was not allowed to drift either towards the situation of a politically irresponsible grouping of minorities, or of a State ministry of religion; it was consistently under the obligation of dealing as a responsible partner with free and powerful partners.
In this world of free sovereign powers, the Church introduced a legal instrument it had derived from late Roman practice, which became central to all its dealings with lay powers: the charter. The charter was a written instrument enacting a definite and, as far as possible, unchangeable grant of lands, rights, duties, and privileges, to certain definite groups. It flattered the king, by making him the permanent source of rights and privileges and involving his enduring power in their defence. Above all, the charter did not merely represent a single gift: it involved a number of presumptions – such as the belief that the office of king was stable, that the power and prestige of his heirs depended on his just as his depended on his predecessors’, that his heirs would be bound to his orders, and – bear this in mind – that the king and his successors relate to the entity to which the charter has been granted as one free, permanent, and self-standing group to another. The king binds himself and his successors to guarantee that abbey X should have the use of fields A, B and C, wellspring D, pastures E and F, and the right to convene a yearly fair at G and build a water-mill at H, and abbey X commits itself in exchange to paying a certain amount of goods and money to the King, to offer a certain amount of masses for him and his descendants, and maybe to allow him to be buried in its church.
It must be clear that the very concept of charter must tend to stabilize society, forming permanent institutions whose life does not depend on the mere contention of Big Men and Big Families. It tends to form a “civil society” of permanent public bodies, which have their own dignity independently of who is their boss and who protects them, and which, to the contrary, can themselves lend prestige to their members and leaders. Any man, perhaps, may become King, but any King is bound by all the charters granted by all his predecessors; whether by force or by peaceful arrangement, he succeeds to a world of stable and settled law.
The legal presumptions of the charter, of course, come from Roman law, and prolong, even in a time and place where Roman law was mostly forgotten, the two most important and novel concept of Roman jurisprudence: the distinction between public and private, and the notion of permanent corporate identities (“juridical persons”). The first notion does not exist in Greek, Jewish, or Indian law (speaking of the three cultures I know best, or less badly). It arose, perhaps not by chance, in the most family-obsessed of all ancient civilizations, establishing a common field of action for the contentions and politicking of the great Roman families: the common matter, the Res Publica or State, distinct and superior to all. The Res Publica is deliberately designed not to have any permanent institutional space for any family or any group of families: no state office, however menial, is hereditary, and, unlike for instance the Athenian state structure, its lowest level of organization had nothing to do with the families – it was the thirty curiae, local assemblies representing all the residents in a definite area of the city. In other words, there was no presumption that any family would dominate any part of the State: all families were, in theory, free to move and act across the whole range of the Roman body politic.
This was probably the only possible way in which Rome’s obsessionally self-regarding noble families, whose leaders were always called “lord King” – dominus Rex – by their menials, could be made to live within a single city without butchering each other. The Res Publica is the stage across which Roman noble families can posture and struggle for supremacy, and the set of accepted rules for their struggles, and the goal of their struggles. Such a common field was not necessary in a world of absolute monarchies such as that of most Mediterranean and Eastern cultures, or even in the free cities of Greece, whose basic idea of themselves is that they were all, rich and poor, friend and foe, one kin and of one blood. All the Athenians, all the Spartans, all the Thebans, regarded themselves as related to each other, and there were heavy barriers against anyone not of the same blood becoming a citizen. Rome, by contrast, had from the beginning had legal devices for accepting foreigners into its citizen body, and, far from regarding itself as of one blood, embodied in its foundation legend the coming together of no less than three nations, each alien to the other.
The other notion, that of corporate law, enters Roman law perhaps later and certainly at a lower level of importance. I am no legal historian, but what I know of Roman law suggests that the notion of corporate rights and legal corporate existence was a reaction to the entrance into the Empire of a number of different cultures with different laws and notions of right – sexual and family morality, property inheritance and conveyance, citizenship, the obligations of social inferiors to their superiors, were different in, say, Egypt, from, say, Gaul. The law had to take cognizance of these differences; and it did so by giving legal status to the local entities and organized groups that existed within the empire. When a quarrel arisen within, say, an Anatolian town, or even the Christian Church, reached the Emperor for judgement, the question he would ask in settling the dispute was: what are the inner laws, or at least the established precedents, of that particular group?
Mention of the Church shows an important fact: that this law of corporate entities did not extend only to conquered states and local administrations, but also to non-territorial groups and volunteer units. The Roman Empire, for instance, recognised guilds, temples, neighbourhood associations, theatre troupes, friendly societies of every sort. The reverse side of this was the claim to have the right to suppress them; the Senate, in 186BC, ordered the suppression of all association for the worship of the god Bacchus – which led to a great deal of violence – and at a later stage certain kinds of collegia or guilds were made illegal. The repeated attempts to destroy the Christian Church are part of this picture.
The institution of the charter passed down to the new Germanic Christian states the presumption that, in dealing with monasteries and bishoprics, they were dealing with permanent bodies, and as permanent bodies. The King related, not to a class of individuals, let alone to single individuals who had somehow achieved prominence, but to a set of permanent institutions; institutions whose possession of certain areas was, unless they alienated them, perpetual; institutions that would continue to exist, at least in law, even if not a single monk or priest were found to staff them, because their rights and duties were fixed. And the abbeys, bishoprics, and other churches, all related to the King not as to an individual who had somehow gained a position of absolute power, but as to a person who had taken on a group of vast but established and codified powers – powers that other had held before him, and others would since. They dealt with an office as much as with a person.
Charters were by far the most practical and safe instrument for holding land and rights of any sort, and quickly drove other legal instruments from the field. Already by 750AD, most of the land in England was held by ecclesiastical or pseudo-ecclesiastical claims, to the disgust of the devout Bede. At the back of this there was a rush by local lords to create permanent claims to the land by means of charters. (However, in the long run, the fact that the best instrument for the legal possession of land or rights was something that the Church had given to society ended up being greatly to the Church’s political and economic advantage. The famous wealth of the medieval Church, which stunned Rabban Bar Sawma and which eventually stimulated the Reformation looters, was due largely to the fact that the Church was better at exercising its legal rights; which is not surprising, given that it had brought those legal rights into existence, and had the largest number of literate and able men. That is comparable with the prominence of the legal profession in modern Britain and America. Lawyers are inevitably the best at dealing with the law.)
Now here is where Western/Frankish/European/Catholic civilization, at its very beginnings, takes a different turn from that of any other comparable entity. Charter grants are well known in other cultures: both Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries are established by written royal charters not different in any major feature from the charters which Augustine and his successors taught the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish kings to grant and respect. But these charters are confined to the religious realm. They exist to withdraw certain definite areas from the worldly realm, where the power of the king is otherwise absolute, and place them in the direct hold of the gods, or of religious corporations such as the Buddhist Sangha, which are altogether otherworldly in nature. In effect, what charter law of this kind does is to make the king the equal of the gods: what is not held by the one is held by the other, and legal instruments must be devised to transfer one area from the one to the other. There is no other claim in law that is comparable to that of the king or of the gods, or alternatively of the Sangha.
But charter law in Catholic Europe extends to all levels of freeborn society, indeed to what was originally the slave level. That is what changes them from slaves to serfs: their duties are written down in charters, and that limits them and makes them firm and enforceable in law. That is, a lord is increasingly incapable of enforcing arbitrary decisions on the human capital of his estate: slaves turn to serfs, and serfs to tenants. The difference between slaves and serfs is that there is a definite limit to what serfs owe their master - customary duties, such as road-mending or turning out for war or yelding a given part of the crops to the lord. And in time, both lord and tenant find it convenient to replace these with money payments, which become a regular rent for the use of the land. At this point the tenant, who began as a slave, is in effect no different from any other free citizen; all led, managed, in fact made possible, by the existence of written charter law. Indeed, the very presumption that definite written law can limit the power of masters on slaves is not one that every society would understand. It is in such details as this that the Christian nature of this development is clearest.
The novelty of the Western development of charter-based law is the proliferation of independent bodies having the structure of autonomous, free-standing powers, a sort of mini-Res Publica existing on their own terms, yet existing within, and being granted those powers by, the greater Res Publica. (So, in medieval times, was the State called.)
Charter law applies to definite entities. It demands the existence of corporate entities and permanent institutions. It appears in the Germanic realms with the establishment of permanent monasteries; soon it is extended to bishoprics; and from thence it spreads to secular offices and institutions. The first mighty flowering of European civilization, from the eleven to the thirteen hundreds, is a flowering of chartered institutions: charters establish universities, monasteries, mendicant orders, communes, guilds, companies, fiefs, harbours, fairs, parishes, chantries. And where they are not granted willingly, they are taken by force. The greatest wars of the period, such as the Barons’ War in England and the War of the Lombard League, which raged in the richest part of Europe (Italy) for twenty years and brought low the greatest German Emperor, are fought for the sake of charters. It is important to notice that the results of such wars are intended to be permanent. The Grand Charter forced from King John by his angry baronage was regarded ever since, in spite of outrageous violations especially in the time of Henry VIII, as the base of English law; and the charters granted by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa after his final defeat at Legnano stood for centuries at the start of all books collecting Italian laws and customs.
It is exactly because the result of wars was held to be legal, chartered and permanent, that wars were fought with such fury – and yet had an end. Rabban Bar Sawma, who landed in Italy in the middle of a great war between French and Aragonese claimants to the throne of Naples, was surprised to find no regions made permanently desolate by war, and impressed by the fact that soldiers only seemed intent on fighting each other. Even at the height of the clash between the Italian cities and Frederick, when he ordered the destruction of Milan, he did not enslave or massacre its people – he only ordered them out of the city, and then had the empty buildings and city walls pulled down. He wanted an end to the city-state of Milan, but not necessarily to its people, or their capacity to work and generate wealth. War in medieval Europe, being a legal procedure, was under strict legal limits. Frederick wanted the Italian cities as part of his realm, under his view of the law; the Italian cities wanted their view of the law to prevail, and, having done that, recognised Frederick as their overlord, on their terms. What happened in Italy for twenty years between 1155 and 1174 was a gigantic trial at law, whose final results were accepted as binding by both parties. The same is true of the history of King John’s reign; indeed, what made the reign of John so disastrous was the general perception that, whatever his other good qualities of political insight and personal bravery, his word could not be trusted – that is, that he would not live within the law. The concept of binding law was already dominant in England when the barons imposed a binding law on their king; or else they could not have imposed it.
This proliferation of chartered, autonomous bodies, is the corresponding term, from below, of the representative nature of national parliaments, above. The conception of society as a multiplicity of interrelated but autonomous and permanent entities becomes a part of the culture. The ancient, indeed prehistoric, conception of society as a group of classes of individuals and families – aristocrats, priests, farmers, townsmen, slaves – is not altogether neglected, since it is still a useful method of understanding society: its terms are clearly visible in real life. The class views and interests of a clergyman, a warrior nobleman, a merchant, or a serf, are as clear and visible on the pattern of society as the corporate interests of a guildsman or a mendicant friar or the citizen of a commune. It is at this point that the ancient national assemblies, without losing their national and class-based character – there are still two classes represented in the English Parliament, three in the French Estates – also become, inevitably, representative of the institutions which gather in society. Parliaments become conferences of ambassadors representing the interests and the views of definite local communities and institutions.
It is here that representative government is born. And it is a conscious birth. The popular nature of representative government was clear to European theorists from the word go. The greatest of them all, Thomas Aquinas, said this: Accordingly, the best form of government is in a state or kingdom, wherein one is given the power to preside over all; while under him are others having governing powers: and yet a government of this kind is shared by all, both because all are eligible to govern, and because the rulers are chosen by all. For this is the best form of polity, being partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e., government by the people, in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose their rulers. (Summa, art.105.1)
The reader who came to this passage from the conventional textbook notion of European history would rub his/her eyes in disbelief. To understand it properly, of course, one has to realize that Thomas, who had learned his political terminology from Aristotle, was using the term “democracy” in its Greek meaning – giving all the political power to the assembly of all the free citizens, with no representative intermediaries; and that he saw it, not without reason, this as dangerously close to mob rule. But once you understand his use of words, you will be stunned. What is this? NO Divine right? NO absolute sovereign? Did Aquinas just prophesy the American constitution, with its one person in authority (the President), with others “under him” having governing powers, all of them being elected “by all,” and the people having “the right” to choose their rulers? Of course not. Aquinas, who was a great nobleman from a great house, second cousin to the Emperor, at home with political power from birth, was describing a contemporary ideal, and to a large extent a contemporary practice. The Emperor was already elected, and most if not all European states, fiefs and cities had a strong representative element in their constitutions. Indeed, the American Constitution and the American Revolution derived their strength from being, rather unconsciously, grown in the soil of Western political civilization. If anyone had told Jefferson or Franklin that the strength of their movement came from being so conservative that it went right back to the middle ages, one rather thinks that they would have sneered; yet it was the truth. The institutions, even the names, that claimed the right of self-government in the Thirteen Colonies, were medieval: elected city councils with aldermen, provincial representative congresses, judicial assizes, juries, local citizen militiae, counties, sheriffs commanded to keep the peace over a county (sheriff = shire-gerefa, “Count of the Shire”). Many English medieval institutions, such as the sheriff, lasted rather better and more functionally in America than in England.
It is only when you realize this that you realize what a monstrous, indeed cancerous, usurpation the so-called monarchy by divine right was in European history. It simply represents the grab of power by a king against existing institutions and against his own people. It has no business in Western civilization and never did, and it cannot possibly reach the levels of legitimacy that it had in what I described of Hindu and Buddhist cultures. There, as I said, the King was, from the beginning, the partner of the gods, and not otherwise limited in his power on Earth. Such a conception was alien to Europe, where the conception of society as a multitude of autonomous institutions was too fundamental to be altered. Kings might destroy one institution after another, like the king of Castile destroyed the Cortes in 1519, or the King of England destroyed the Church and the Guilds in that monstrous burst of looting misguidedly called the Reformation; but they could not alter the basics of society, the way human beings existed and interacted, which, in Europe, simply excluded the notion of royal uniqueness. Companies must go on being formed, city councils being chartered, property being vested in individuals and in corporations, independently of royal power. Therefore, whatever the claims made for the King by his apologists in the age of growing royal tyranny between 1400 and 1776, these were and remained hollow; and the power of the absolute ruler ended up, in effect, being based only on bayonets, and enforceable only as long as he had the largest number of bayonets. What is more, by tearing at the foundations of the mutual recognition of legal rights which had established the European monarchies in the first place, it destroyed the legal foundation of the rule of the king; and left him nothing, I repeat, but the points of his guns.
By the same token, until you realize this, you do not realize what a great recovery of the real European values, in spite of its fanatical, parricidal, and just plain stupid aspects, the French Revolution really was. The straight path of political development in Europe had been increasingly hijacked by centralized royal power; the Revolution did not indeed reverse the centralization of that power – in fact, it speeded it up – but it removed the presumption of its being arbitrary and unlimited by right. Whatever its aspects of violence and tyranny, its long-term result in Europe was to return the right to choose and control the rulers to the people; where St. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval aristocrat, had confidently placed it.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-07 04:53 pm (UTC)This is very, very good stuff (and the Trekkie in me is tickled at the etymology of the Ferengi). The thing that struck me most was the idea of the charter in an influential role-- it's so often passed over by history books that you get the idea it developed on a much lower level of importance. You're right, as usual... and once again, this is brilliant stuff.
Also St. Thomas Aquinas was eaten up with brilliant like it was leprosy. It astounds me, the sheer number of world-shaping ideas he tapped into, developed and (centuries before anyone really understood them) simply stated.
I need to read more of his work.
[WARNING: FACETIOUSNESS AHEAD]
Date: 2005-12-07 06:58 pm (UTC)Re: [WARNING: FACETIOUSNESS AHEAD]
Date: 2005-12-08 04:32 pm (UTC)Re: [WARNING: FACETIOUSNESS AHEAD]
Date: 2005-12-08 06:57 pm (UTC)9.9
no subject
Date: 2005-12-07 11:38 pm (UTC)*is curious*
no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 11:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 12:38 am (UTC)V. minor point: it may be a good idea to italicise the "thing", so it's less like a thing. Also check the tags here: eis ten polein
freedom and representative government were invented in the English-speaking countries at some time between 1640AD and 1783AD [...]The reader who came to this passage from the conventional textbook notion of European history would rub his/her eyes in disbelief.
Ehrm... I was always under strong impression that my textbooks were pretty standard and they - albeit in much less detail and without the careful discussion of charters (except for Magna Carta) - told the story: from the Germanic gathering, through the early medieval parliaments to the modern ones. With the absolutism thrown in as a break, 18-19th century :)
The first mighty flowering of European civilization, from the eleven to the thirteen hundreds, is a flowering of chartered institutions: charters establish universities, monasteries, mendicant orders, communes, guilds, companies, fiefs, harbours, fairs, parishes, chantries.
I'd risk saying that you missed the most important one in this very enumeration (or else I lost it in the reading): the city.
Unless the foundation act (forgive my terminology if wrong; I mean the settling using Magdeburg Law or similar) is very different fom charter - and it doesn't seem so - the city based on a charter would be of extreme importance. You do mention it later on, but somehow "in passing".
Now, why do I feel the need of a "chartered city" to be stressed more: because as a coherent unit it was many time stronger than any guild or university (as proven by cases of many indepedent Italian cities you quote). There is a rather strong opposition between "the city" and "the lord" in medieval Europe, which v. effectively curbed the autocratic tendencies of large feudals, kings included. You discuss more the life of ideals here and my point is more sociopolitical - the cities offered real power to uphold the rights in charters.
Maybe it's my private peeve, since it's the role of a city, which is so strikingly different in Europe and China. There the city was the very center of a lord/king power. There was never an opposition between "the city" and "the castle" - the city was the castle, so to speak. Therefore the city had never any autonomy: if something it was a village which had a degree of it. Also there was no "break" between city and rural life (in matter of rights for example) in China. The city was something like a larger there was strong legal continuity between them, even if the city was currently the biggest and shinest in the world.
The second thing, which might have been touched here (no more, this a subject for a separate book) is the opposition between "the Church" and "the lord". In the West the Church was separate from the state from v. early time. The king has his "divine power" etc. but it was granted by an outside source (the Pope, local archbishop etc.), therefore could have been denied/withdrawn. Again it created some political tension, which curbed the autocratic tendencies: the word of the church officials counted in early parliaments and the the aristocrats, who opposed a king, often could count on Church's support. Again, the very opposite is true of chine, when (in v. specific shape) the emperor ahd and entire power in his hand: the worldly and the sacral. Such close Church-state union, was also the case of Byzantium, wasn't it? Cesaropapism, as Weber calls it.
You may consider the above as being outside the scope of a present text, but I think it should be noted that the charters must have been efficient if they were so popular and they couldn't be efficient without force backing them.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 07:10 pm (UTC)Must say I didn't know the specific meaning of commune - maybe would be wortto emphasize the point a bit to clear it up for less educated :)
In short - I may look for sources for you afterwards - about the Chinese cities: they are born of course both ways; but I think we can safely say that predominantly they were adminitrative units, or at least the cities which count</> are/were administrative units. The establishing of a city was avery carefuly prescribed process and the cities are - especially in comparison to European "chaos" - remarkably uniform, square, with rectangular plan and the main objects (e.g. administrative centers or water tanks) always in the same places. The uniformity alone shows they were v. regulated and not "free". Another interesting feature is that the uniformity of plan had a really long history, say 1500 years at least, but actually for longer time the cities, whenever possible, were always built almost identical.
I will gladly write some more later - I also have a few more points about the text. For a moment see here - the centre of Suzhou, one of the ancient capitals:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=31.310382,120.621815&spn=0.064091,0.110893&t=k&hl=en
In this page you'll be able how regular the pattern of cities - towns- villages was in good conditions (Chinese Lowland flatlands). Increase the scale step by step to see the network of commercial-administrative centres. The city in the very centre of the map has also nice, square centre with a moat:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=35.246040,115.446310&spn=0.980198,1.774292&t=k&hl=en
no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 07:12 pm (UTC)Continued....
Date: 2005-12-08 12:39 am (UTC)I think some time markers are much needed here - I'd like to know about the election by believers/appointment by a king/appointment from Rome timeframe and the protoparliaments/medieval parliament forms timeframe. Also the ration of chosen/appointed bishops.
Extremely interesting notions about the "place" and being a "place" (community) representative, not personal/class etc. representative.
Last, but not least, interesting may be incorporating Polish example into it: the country from outside the Frankish circle, but not outside early Germanic influences; in chich "charter movement" was likely to be less developed (but to what extent less than in other parts of Europe this I cannot say in the moment), but at the same time preserving and developing parlamentary forms and - during elections - usually presenting a king with a charter o liberties to swear it. And finally never experiencing any absolutism, instead parliamentarising itself to death, by unchecked and unbalanced development of one-sided liberties. And actually weakness of cities, which were not able to fight for their chartered liberties likely faciliated the process.
Republic of Novgorod may be worth looking into, as well.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-08 07:35 pm (UTC)Heck when I have time to read them I usually enjoy your historical essays. (Even if in context of HP your history is interesting and I usually just find myself disagreeing with the literary analysis aspect, which is a bit subjective.)
I've always had issues with the presentation of history as a progressive line in which things become less barbaric and more civilized. I'm generalizing a lot here, but at least in Texas, that is generally how it's taught, which leads to the idiotic asusmption you attacked so well here.
Sadly in a lot of classrooms, history is much less about learning what's happened and much more about propaganda.
Recently a whole batch of American history textbooks was rejected for being too honest about the Founding Fathers, so is it any wonder that the more complex development (and less US-centric)of Representative Government is not taught?
Anyway, again fascinating and I wish I could say more as I think I told you, art, art history and English were my areas of study.
If you've written anything on the development of art in Italy however, I'd love to read that!
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 06:25 pm (UTC)About the Founding Fathers, while I do not like the notion of history as unilinear progress, I am also a sworn enemy of relativism, moral equivalence, and the more extreme versions of multi-culturalism. While I would revise the position of the Founding Fathers in the kind of historical mythology I condemned, I nevertheless regard 1776 as a grand turning point in history, and in the right direction; a recovery, in fact, of the right path of Western civilization. I said more than once that I place the opening words of the Declaration of Independence only slightly below the Gospel, and anyone who wants to downgrade their importance will not find me to agree.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 05:57 am (UTC)I'd rec something back, but my books are very art specific, like Alberti's "On Painting" (which I need to find another translation for). The last purely historical book I read was "The Cultivation of Hatred" by Peter Gay.
As for the Founding Fathers, I agree that what they did was an important step in the evolution of the modern world; however, my complaint is more against the exageration of their character into near mythological heros. I don't mind folklore rising up about them, such as Washington and the Cherry Tree. I think that's inivitable and says something important about our culture. What I have issues with is when people, like my third grade teacher (Texas education is an oxy-moron), introduce that as historical fact rather than a folk tale! Which is probably an example of the historical mythology you mention condemning.
I said more than once that I place the opening words of the Declaration of Independence only slightly below the Gospel,
I only wish more politician's did!
no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 10:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-02 12:49 pm (UTC)1776? You mean 1680, surely?
And the Res Publica distinction was what let Rome become an Empire where other city states couldn't -- Rome could widen the border of citizenship, though it didn't do it easily.
I think you underestimate the significance of the Rule of Law which was the enduring Roman legacy to the West -- often via the Church, especially outside the old borders. During the collapse of the Western Empire, people kept saying what a scandal it was that Bishops administered their own justice and held courts, but in fact it was a way Roman law and Roman concepts of law survived. If you look at the Laws of Hywel Dda (ninth century, Wales -- and he had a parliament too) you see all these odd Celtic survivals mixed with odd Roman survivals but what you see most of all is the idea of a codified law code and a land ruled by laws not people. I don't think you'd have had the charters and so on if not coming from this soil -- it was lost in the East.
Also, you touch on this idea with John not keeping his oaths -- the underlying bedrock of "Christendom" as they called their civilization, was that everyone (except enemies across the borders and the Jewish minority, whose rights were accordingly limited and who were from time to time persecuted) was a Christian and could take a Christian oath and be counted on to keep it. I don't think you can have an oath-bound society under law without the belief in a deity on top watching and making sure everyone keeps their word.
One of the things that drives me mad in fantasy and religious novels is the author assuming that the Church of some early period of the Church of the Spanish Inquisition, or even worse, modern US fundamentalism.
I don't suppose you've read my novels The King's Peace and The King's Name? Because I did a lot of stuff with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and the Saxon invasions and the consequent shifts in society, and the incoming of Christianity, as well as the change from a city-based to a village based civilization -- the whole cusp of Late Antiquity to Early Medieval thing -- in those books, and you seem like someone who might actually appreciate that.
Gnostic heresies
Date: 2007-07-14 02:11 pm (UTC)-thanks
Re: Gnostic heresies
Date: 2007-07-14 05:05 pm (UTC)Re: Gnostic heresies
Date: 2007-07-15 06:14 pm (UTC)It is taking me some time to get through this with other things going on this weekend. I ran into this...
"And in early days, the similarity of Bishops in Council to lords in Parliament was even more marked; for although a Bishop had tenure for life (unless he was found guilty of some grave sin), he was in general elected by the Christians of his diocese"
I did not know that. Another request. Where should I look for a good, concise, neutral, historical account of the Catholic Church?
Re: Gnostic heresies
Date: 2007-07-15 07:59 pm (UTC)The history of the Church stretches over 2000 years and five continents, include any amount of dramatic turns and conflicts which make even the notion of a bare narrative a frightening one, includes several immensely important yet obscure periods (for instance, the rise of Christianity in the British Islese and especially in Ireland) and cannot ignore the history of other Christian bodies. And difficult though it it is to be concise, to be neutral is impossible. That is because the position you take on a number of historical issues is going to affect your view of the Church. In particular, an important question is whether there is a legitimate organizational and ideological continuity between the most ancient Church and the modern Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, without any recognizable perversion or radical alteration of essential matters. You cannot possibly be neutral about this: either you think so, or you do not. If you do, you recognize the validity of the Catholic Church on its own terms - whether or not you are yourself Catholic; if not, you are taking the viewpoint of the Protestants. And I am afraid that there is no middle ground in these or many other issues (e.g., what does one make of the numerous eyewitness accounts of miracles that dot Catholic history?) - either you take one view, or another.
So what should you do? Just read. Start anywhere, and use your native intellect and critical faculties. And discuss what you read with others. The material is ample, and there is no reason to hold back. Have fun!
Re: Gnostic heresies
Date: 2007-07-16 03:40 pm (UTC)As for discussing with others, you might give me some advice in that area. As you probably realize, I do not personally believe in anything supernatural. I would not say I have a firm position on all of the issues that surround religion, but in general I can't honestly say I believe in any form of diesm.
This puts me in an awkward spot in some of the discussions on JCW and other people's journals. I often feel that I have insulted someone by stating my view. Sometimes, I admit I get a bit agitated and overstep but even when I am dispassionate, I think I may be insulting people.
For religious people, it seems obvious that religion is a very important and sensitive topic. My view implies a direct assult on the foundation of people's most dearly held beliefs. I'm not sure how to stay true to my view of the world and converse without causing needless injury.
Re: Gnostic heresies
Date: 2007-07-16 06:36 pm (UTC)Another important point is, in my view, that argument is not about trying to convince the other guy. If that happens, that's great, but the real purpose of argument - which can be usefully carried out even against the most unyelding of opponents - is to expose your own views to challenge, counter-argument and criticism, so as to find out weak points, improve them, or even abandon them if you find something is just plain wrong. Argument is part of the process of refining one's ideas, and as such can be usefully and even courteously carried out even with people who have nothing in common with you except honesty. At least, that is my ideal.
Re: Gnostic heresies
Date: 2007-07-16 07:11 pm (UTC)I was thinking about this myself. I need to keep saying it to myself as a mantra. It is actually the motivation at this point for me. I do forget myself though. Feel free to nudge me with a sharp elbow if you see me doing that in the future.
I finished your essay. It took me about 1 hour with about 6 hours of detours to follow the references. I have some questions which I'll post later.
thanks
no subject
Date: 2007-07-17 09:05 pm (UTC)Again, this was news to me. When did this change? I have the image of the Church structure in my head such that the clergy pick each other with no real control or counterbalance from the laity, no checks and balance, and that the pope is supposed to have all authority as the Vicar(substitute) of Christ. In general is that now correct? If it changed, when did it happen and why?
It is too much to ask you to answer this thoroughly, just a couple of reference points that I can run with.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-23 06:04 pm (UTC)The short answer is that there is no clear timeline from election by the locals, to election by the king, to selection by the Pope. One clear case study is that of the important Archbishops of Tours, in western France, told in some detail by Gregory of Tours (himself an Archbishop) and his friend Venantius Fortunatus. King Lothar, an adventurer who was to go in twenty years from landless royal exile to king of all the Franks, took power in Tours about 542, and found there an unfriendly and powerful Archbishop, Iniuriosus. Who elected Iniuriosus is not clear, but when he did the King the favour of dying, Lothar disregarded the townsmen's choice and picked first one, then another of his own courtiers. The first died early, the second not only died, but went disastrously senile first - this was a major setback in the King's efforts to bring Tours under control, because this man was the first Frank by birth he had appointed to this obstinately Roman town. After his death, the townsmen nervously approached Lothar with the name of an irreproachable and very rich local aristocrat, and the King answered: "That is one of the noblest houses in the country - let the will of God and of St.Martin be done". This was a surrender; but when Gregory himself was elected his successor, Venantius' poem in his praise shows that everyone was terrified that the king (Lothar's successor) would react to the election with violence, and that everyone was relieved to see him come back alive from the King's court. This is a microcosm of a European macrocosm in which the kings and other secular powers would always struggle to bring such a powerful office as that of Bishop under their direct or indirect control.
However, the tradition that a Bishop had to be in communion with the Pope was a limit to this. A Bishop selected without the Pope's knowledge or consent was in an effective state of schism. In the grim sixth and seventh centuries, this did not much matter, since a good few of the Christian areas of Europe were not even physically able to reach the Pope. A touching story shows the kind of events this could lead to: Chad, a monk nominated to be Bishop of Lichfield, met Theodore, sent by the Pope to be Archbishop of Canterbury. The great Theodore, one of the finest churchmen in his time and the effective founder of the English Church, examined Chad's titles to be a Bishop and declared them defective. Chad humbly answered: "If my title is defective, I shall gladly renounce it. I never thought myself good enough, and indeed I only took the office at the request of my betters." Theodore then decided that he was the right kind, and personally reconsecrated him. As Chad had a religious objection to riding a horse, and this was necessary to perform his functions as Bishop, Theodore even personally held his stirrupt to show that he could legitimately do so.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-11 02:28 pm (UTC)Thanks for the update. Medieval history is one of those areas I wander into and realize how little I know relative to the scope of the subject.
...continued...
Date: 2008-02-23 06:04 pm (UTC)The situation of the Church in the USA shows why the twelfth-century Church-State compromise collapsed. From the beginning, at least some bishops - such as those in Muslim countries - had to live with non-Catholic authorities. As the Church extended to distant countries such as China, gained a foothold in Russia and the Orthodox East, and recovered or rebuilt its presence in the Protestant countries, the idea of depending on the State in any way became increasingly irksome or plainly impossible. At the same time, the remaining Catholic powers tended to a kind of creeping Anglicanism that increasingly sought to nationalize the Church by stealth. IN France this was called Gallicanism, in Germany Febronianism. Even rule by Catholic sovereigns became intolerable.
In a series of violent changes during and after the Napoleonic period, the Church managed to break altogether with any kind of State control. A new generation of Bishops, happy with their independent status and willing to go it alone without State support, arose. This has not been always and everywhere the case, but in the twentieth century any attempt by any State however powerful to control episcopal nominations - France in 1905, Mexico in the 1930s, China from the 1950s - has led to violent conflicts, and even most Communist countries have had to allow the Church to nominate its own officers. The practice at present is for the diocese to present a roster of candidates to the Pope - as they once did to the Emperor - and for him to select a candidate, and it is very rare indeed that the Pope ever goes beyond the local choices.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-24 04:35 am (UTC)The Iroquois seem to have had something similar.
Athens didn't just have assembly and random magistrates; it also had random council of 500 and large juries. It's interesting to imagine how they could have grown to encompass a larger polity, perhaps with random representatives from the colonies or Delian League members. And for Rome, tribunes of some sort from the provinces, to veto decisions regarding them.
Early India had republics of some sort, just as later India had charters, as you say. Semi-elected kingship seems fairly common around the world. The something special of Europe is perhaps more a coming together of elements, rather than the elements themselves being unique.