Beyond War & Contracts

Remy Maduit | Authors published

Beyond War and Contracts
The Medieval and Religious Roots of the European State

Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science &
the Director of the Europe Center & the Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University, USA.

Where does the state come from? This question is fundamental to our understanding of economic growth, good governance, regime stability, and democratic success. The historical rise of the state matters as a way of understanding both how our contemporary polities are organized and how they function.

There are two canonical (and related) answers to the question of the development of the European state: war between rival rulers and contracts between rulers and the ruled. Competing for territory and authority, rulers of fragmented territories had to wrest resources from their subjects to fight wars—and the resulting institutions allowed states to extract more efficiently. They then reinvested these taxes back into the machinery of the state, allowing rulers both to expand the administrative roles and offices of the state and to merge its power. Larger and more capable rivals dominated smaller and less centralized entities, and medieval fragmentation gave way to state consolidation.

Resource extraction also gave rise to domestic contracts among the ruling elites. No monarch could get assets without the compliance of at least some of the wealthy (and armed) elites—and so kings entered explicit agreements with nobles, merchants, and clergy. In these accounts, representative assemblies limited the discretion of rulers for the income to fight wars, build states, and thus promote growth and state development.

These canonical accounts have left several questions unanswered. First, for example, what is the source of the medieval fragmentation of territory and authority? Conversely, how could small states survive the bloody and unrelenting conflict that favored large and powerful states? Second, why do states take on the institutional forms they do—why are they similar institutions of chanceries, judiciaries, and treasuries? Why did representative assemblies develop as they have? Third, why do states do what they do? States provide contract enforcement, conflict resolution, security, and public goods; but why do they also concern themselves with public morality and social discipline?

To answer such questions, a recent wave of scholarship has pushed back the rise of the state to the medieval period and focused increasingly on domestic forces rather than international competition. I examine these shifts and the new emphasis on the growth of parliaments, universities, cities, and inheritance institutions. These novel approaches owe a considerable debt to earlier literature that saw the Middle Ages as central to the uniqueness of European development. [i] Scholars are now reexamining this period, armed with more precise conceptual tools and sophisticated empirical strategies.

Yet all these explanations largely neglect the fundamental rival for authority and an essential source of domestic state institutions: the medieval Church. In an era of weak coercive power and low human capital, the Church had the wealth, spiritual authority, and expertise to fundamentally mold politics. Precisely because the Popes had little coercive capacity, they instead wielded doctrine, law, literacy, and administrative innovations to shape nascent states. Not only was the Catholic Church the most powerful, wealthy, and pervasive force in medieval Europe—but also, as earlier scholars, stressed, it directly influenced state formation. [iii] Much of the literature on state development has either ignored the role of religious actors or dismissed them as “small-scale authorities” alongside chieftains and petty officials. [iv] Explanations focusing on war also neglect religious actors—even though it was the Church that mandated the spectacular military build-up of the Crusades. [v] Canonical works on the formation of representative assemblies, such as largely neglect religion. [vi] Examining medieval and domestic forces thus entails a renewed focus on the religious actors crucial to medieval state formation.

This review, therefore, examines the early historical and religious roots of European state-building. The European state is a well-plowed intellectual territory—and yet it is fundamental to our understanding of the state, precisely because its templates are diffused globally. There is also enormous variation in the rise, development, and frequent collapses of European states, both over time and across the territory. Even if the lessons are limited, “a serious student of state formation, regardless of the geographic area of interest, should take European state formation as its referent point”. [vii] I focus on the period between the fall of the Carolingian Empire in 888, which saw the fragmentation of political authority, and the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, which traditionally marks the Westphalian institutionalization of states (however incomplete).

The Deep Roots of the State

The dominant view in the literature is that “the state” was invented as a corporate or personalized entity only in early modern Europe. Other practices of rule-making and enforcement may have existed, but the idea of the state before this period is anachronistic. [viii] Scholars from Hintze to Tilly date state formation to the early modern era, from the mid-sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. [ix] Such periodization relies on the Treaties of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648), both of which have been argued to establish the principle of state sovereignty in international relations. [x] Others go further and claim that the sovereign state (marked by a formal monopoly of authority over a distinct territory) dates only to the early nineteenth century. [xi]

Yet sovereignty over the territory was not simply an invention of Augsburg or Westphalia. Well before, “all over Western Europe, the feudal nobility became subordinate to the central governments—the process being complete by 1500 A.D.”. [xii] Spruyt locates the origins of territorial concepts of rule in the late eleventh century. [xiii] By the thirteenth century, “the notion of territoriality [was] best exhibited by the claims of rulers, the kings of Sicily and of Leon, the king of France… [and] they found support in the work of late twelfth-century canonists. Even [Pope] Innocent III in his decretal Per Venerabile of 1202 confirmed that the king of France admitted no superior in temporal matters.” [xiv] Borders had emerged, and customs offices attempted to control the flow of people and goods, as princes asserted their power within these territories.

It is also increasingly apparent that medieval institutions became the building blocks of the European state as we know it. [xv] In a series of works, Møller [xvi] argues that the roots of the modern state stretch back to the Middle Ages; he finds the institutional origins of the democratic state and the rule of law in medieval communalism and the papal reforms of the twelfth century, respectively. These origins help to answer why we observe constitutionalism and legalism in Europe, but not elsewhere. [xvii] Ertman points to the early twelfth-century growth of chanceries and secretariats, with the expansion of judges, revenue officers, royal clerks, and notaries. [xviii] The concurrent resurgence of Roman law meant that private property replaced possession, written contracts took the place of oral agreements, and formal courts replaced ordeals. [xix] This development of European legal systems in the Middle Ages set the stage for Europe’s political and economic development. [xx] The Crusades, which began in 1096, facilitated the rise of the modern state through the institutions of crusade taxes, sales of feudal land to finance the Crusades, the reintegration of Europe into global trade networks, and the demise of elites who could have competed with monarchs otherwise. [xxi] As a result, war and urban capital accumulation occurred considerably earlier than previously thought.

The critical starting condition for this early and gradual state development was the fragmentation of territorial authority in Europe after the collapse of the Carolingian dynasty in 888. [xxii] Underlying medieval governance was a disjointed system of feudal authority and incomplete territorial control. No empire arose in Europe that could compare to the Roman one; [xxiii] it was simply too difficult to sustain. [xxiv] The plausible causes of this fragmentation vary. Scholarship points to the uneven emergence of urban life [xxv] and the low levels of religious legitimation that made European rulers weak. [xxvi] Christianity also loosened lineage ties, making possible the very system of feudalism and the mutual obligations between vassal and lord. [xxvii]

The prevailing circumstances were fragmentation and semi-autonomy. [xxviii] Feudal banal lords [xxix] controlled their military forces and fortifications (including castles) but did not become independent sovereigns. Bishops served as feudal vassals and papal emissaries, dependent on complex ways on both emperors and popes—yet also exercised territorial lordship as ecclesiastical princes. The granting of sovereign rights to bishops over cities also led to towns asserting the right to govern themselves. [xxx] By the twelfth century, self-governing cities carved out their spheres of governance (notably the maritime Italian republics of Venice and Genoa) and affiliated in “communes of communes,” such as Lega Lombarda, which banded against Frederick Barbarossa in 1167.

The fragmentation of both authority and territory meant that state development would be highly heterogeneous, with city-states and city leagues surviving for centuries, and it meant continued resistance by lords and towns to the ambitions of the Holy Roman Empire. Fragmentation was the precondition for the constant warfare that characterized European state-making. It created the geopolitical context for competition among authorities over territory, offices, and sovereignty—and that rivalry is at the core of the canonical explanation for state development, the bellicose tradition.

Beyond War: Religious Conflict and State Building

In the bellicose account, military conflict forced states to create new institutions of extraction and eliminated those that could not. Beginning with Otto Hintze in 1906, scholars such as Tilly, Downing, Mann [xxxi], and Anderson [xxxii] emphasized that military competition winnowed out weaker states and led to vigorous new efforts to tax and extract resources, which then allowed these states to wage war with greater force and success. In this feedback process, state boundaries are consolidated, and they developed internal state institutions.

Warfare also led to urbanization, as people sought refuge from conflict in the safe harbors of the cities. The resulting “warfare to welfare” effect comprised economic agglomeration, the accumulation of human capital, and the establishment of local privileges, including self-governance and property rights protections. [xxxiii] Warfare also spread disease, depleted the labor supply (and thus raised wages), increased the demand for urban manufactured goods, and facilitated trade. [xxxiv]

These explanations predict the formation of larger merged states, thanks to gains from trade from a larger area and the fall in per capita defense costs. Warfare was constant, both because rulers poured enormous amounts of money into conflict and because they did not lose their thrones after defeating in war from 1498 to 1715. [xxxv] These relentless pressures eventually meant fewer and bigger states, a change from 500 independent states in Europe in the year 1500 to 30 four centuries later. [xxxvi] In short, “war made the state, and the state made war”. [xxxvii]

Challenging the bellicosity

Yet research on medieval state formation provides important correctives to this powerful and widely accepted account. First, external conflict may have spurred state formation, but internal peace and stability allowed it to flourish, enabling state institutions to arise and merge. [xxxviii] Thus, the period of medieval stability from 1100 to 1300 allowed units to stabilize and form proto-states. In contrast, the war set back the processes of state-making. It led rulers to postpone structural reform and the creation of new agencies, led to solving problems on an ad hoc basis, and sacrificed efficiency for immediate results. [xxxix] War ended intensive growth in both ancient Greece and medieval northern Italy. [xl] Similarly, for Ertman [xli], the early onset of military competition translated into a primitive and patrimonial administration, as in France, while belated military rivalries made it possible to establish a bureaucracy with new administrative techniques developed in the interim. Wars produced fiscal crises: its military ventures exhausted the Ancien regime of France, as was eighteenth-century Poland, leading one analyst to conclude that “precapitalist states made war and war unmade these states”. [xlii] In short, war may have provided the incentives to build states—but peace and stability provided the capacity to do so.

Second, competition between states could take other forms. In modern state-building, state-building elites compete over policy-making authority, not just territory. [xliii] In medieval state-building, would-be states competed in markets for protection and governance. Konrad & Skaperdas [xliv] argue that former states were not simply protection rackets, as Tilly [xlv] had argued, that shielded their citizens from the very threats they created. Rather, they were participants in markets for security, a desirable public good. Acharya & Lee [xlvi] also argue that the territorial state system emerged out of competition for governance. [xlvii] Economic expansion led to demand for governance, or “the package of state-provided services that are necessary for supporting increasingly complex decentralized economies”. Where rulers overlapped, their marginal revenues dropped—and so rulers cooperated to agree on borders.

Third, the domestic balance of power may matter more than international warfare for state formation. Where nobles could threaten to withhold arms, men, and wealth from the monarchy, they could impose constraints on the executive and secure their property rights in the medieval era. [xlviii] Levi [xlix] argues that predatory rulers were constrained by their institutional context, including their bargaining power vis-à-vis other societal actors, and by the costs of achieving quasi-voluntary compliance from the ruled. In a seminal work, North & Weingast [l] contend that the English Parliament’s new powers after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 restrained the rapaciousness of the monarchs and made credible their commitments to upholding property rights. While several scholars have questioned the timing and impact of these reforms, there is considerable consensus on the effects of executive constraint. [li]

Conflicts Between Popes and Monarchs

Above all, the bellicists neglect the most fundamental rivalry of all in the medieval era: the struggle between the papacy and the rulers. The papacy helped to fragment Europe after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century, and it claimed authority over people, territory, and rulers alike. The conflicts between the Church and various monarchs in the early medieval era were recurrent and unrelenting. Both sides had relatively weak coercive capacity: neither could fully enforce laws, rights, or agreements nor claim full control of the territory. As a result, the conflicts were rarely resolved decisively. Further, spiritual and secular authorities were intermingled, as were morality and the law—and this meant these conflicts were not the familiar interstate rivalries, but personalized struggles over authority within territories and souls.

The signal event in this struggle was the Investiture Controversy. This conflict, which peaked from 1075 to 1122, was nominally a series of disputes over the naming of bishops, who served both as spiritual emissaries of the pope and as vassals to monarchs. Because their offices carried considerable wealth and privileges (benefices), the bishops’ loyalty was of paramount importance to both monarchs and popes. Matters came to a head when Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, asserted his naming rights over the Bishop of Milan in 1075—and Pope Gregory VII responded by excommunicating him. For the next 50 years, conflict ensued, and the Concordat of Worms in 1122 was a pragmatic compromise: The Pope selected the bishops, and the kings could veto these choices.

In one interpretation, they resolved the Investiture Controversy at Worms, and it made secular rulers into more powerful bargainers. [lii] Since the rulers could reject bishops, they could keep control temporarily over the benefices and gain their income. As a result, the Catholic Church had incentives to limit economic growth, while rulers had incentives to increase it. Yet, this account misinterprets the historiographical consensus in three ways. First, Worms was a compromise—but not a resolution. The conflict between the papacy and the monarchies continued. [liii] Second, Worms handed more power to the papacy, rather than to the monarchs: 50 years of struggle eroded imperial authority and the papacy “remained master of the field”. [liv] The Investiture Controversy was a sharp assertion of Church autonomy ^[lv]and emancipation of the Church from the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor. [lvi] Third, it is unclear why the Church would not want to ensure that the benefices remained lucrative since it too stood to gain revenue. Christianity may have encouraged trade and economic growth by providing a common moral framework and greater trust. [lvii]

The conflict between the papacy and the monarchs persisted well beyond the Investiture Controversy. The Church continually pitted monarchs against each other and prevented the consolidation of any larger territorial or authority claims. It recognized the conquests of allied monarchs (such as the Normans in Italy) but not the conquests of its foes and urged “powerful vassals to abandon the emperor’s cause”. [lviii] Well into the fifteenth century, popes tried to establish their primacy over secular rulers by both military and spiritual means and met with vigorous resistance from emperors and kings. Thus, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV and Pope Innocent III quarreled openly in the early thirteenth century, and Innocent not only excommunicated Otto in 1215 but also put France, England, and Norway under interdict. [lix] Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) and Pope Innocent IV launched armies against each other, and Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick in 1227 and again in 1239. These conflicts were less about investiture than about jurisdiction and, by the early fourteenth century, about sovereignty itself. [lx]

This struggle helps to explain the fragmentation of medieval and early modern Europe. [lxi] Popes assiduously worked to keep anyone ruler from getting too strong and reassembling Charlemagne’s empire. [lxii] Throughout this period, the Church actively hindered the Holy Roman Emperor (and other rulers) from achieving hegemony through ideological means as well, by actively promulgating the doctrine of rex in regno suo imperator, which meant monarchs were not beholden to emperors or other secular authorities. [lxiii] Rubin claims Europe was fragmented because rulers were weak, the result of the religious legitimation of monarchs by relatively weak religious “propagating agents.” [lxiv] But this has the historical consensus backward: not that the Church failed to legitimate monarchs—it is that the Church deliberately sought to balance them against each other and prevented any from gaining too much authority.

Beyond Contracts: Domestic Institutions and Religious Influence

The roots of the state are thus deeper, and more entangled with the Church than previously thought. Yet, even as a recent wave of state formation research has shifted focus from international to domestic factors, it has overlooked the role of religion in shaping these institutions. This new literature builds on earlier studies that emphasized domestic constraints on the executive. [lxv] It emphasizes domestic institutions that built the state, such as parliaments, the law, universities, inheritance rules, and cities. They provided the contract enforcement, gains from trade, human capital, and territorial consolidation that were central to state formation—but they also show a powerful, if uneven, influence of the Church.

Parliaments

Parliaments were the principal site where monarchs were constrained, taxes raised, and states legitimated. They began as councils to kings and only gained representational roles later in their existence. Beginning in 1188 with León, these assemblies spread across France, Flanders, the territories of Spain, Piedmont, Naples, Sicily, and nearly all German territorial states. Throughout 1250–1350, assemblies became institutionalized, in strikingly similar form: divided into three estates, which represented the nobility, clergy, and eventually the towns, all of which deliberated and voted separately. [lxvi] Their role was to provide both advice and financial support to the monarch’s foreign alliances and war efforts. [lxvii] In Rubin’s analysis, parliaments served as secular “propagating agents,” legitimating monarchical rule once the clergy no longer served that purpose in Europe. [lxviii] By the late medieval period, they were everywhere in Europe: in Italy, Spain, and southern France in the thirteenth century, and in England, northern France, and Germany 50–100 years later. [lxix]

Legal advances of the Catholic Church and the new interpretations they offered facilitated these representative assemblies. By the mid-thirteenth century, Roman and canon law made “possible the effective representation of larger groups or corporate bodies by delegates armed with plena potestas or full powers of decision”. [lxx] Among these norms and institutions, another important notion was “that which affects all people must be approved by all people” (quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari debet), which became widely accepted by the end of the twelfth century and transmitted to assemblies once “canon lawyers redeemed [it] from oblivion” The rule legitimated the raising of revenues by the popes—and then justified royal taxation, substituting for the weak coercive capacity of both ecclesiastical and lay rulers. [lxxi] Royal councils and assemblies followed the form of ecclesiastical synods, called by archbishops to assemble high-ranking clergy. Bishops and other Church representatives widely took part in the early royal assemblies, with nobles even offering theological advice to the ecclesiastics. [lxxii] Finally, if secular councils emulated the religious, the Church expanded its influence by making sure clergy were represented collectively in the assemblies. [lxxiii]

Parliaments further expanded the role and stability of the state, and “Parliamentary supremacy following the Glorious Revolution enabled a dramatic increase in state capacity”. [lxxiv] They provided the ruler with the revenue to invest in the state. Stasavage [lxxv] demonstrates that under some conditions (powerful merchants and smaller territorial units), parliaments could not only monitor expenditures by vetoing royal proposals but also change them, expanding the credit available. More broadly, by the High Middle Ages, we also see a rise of urban merchants and burghers, who became a powerful force in parliaments, demanding rules and rights that would protect their interests—and promote trade and economic growth. [lxxvi] It was only with the rise of war, the need for a unified command, and the ability to tax immediately, that monarchical rule became increasingly absolutist, and many parliaments declined from the mid-fifteenth to the late eighteenth century.

Papal Templates for Royal Administrations

Royal courts and administrative norms, solutions, and institutions also reflected the influence and templates of the Church. Courtly administrations became the kernel of subsequent state bureaucracies in three respects.

First, the Church was a template for sophisticated administration. From the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, the papal court, known as the Curia, “was infinitely better organized and had more ramifications than its royal counterparts”. [lxxvii] The division of labor in the royal courts mirrored that of the papal administration, with distinct offices in charge of finances, judicial tasks, and correspondence that first arose in the eleventh century—and they adopted the same template across Europe. Papal administrations were both extensive and refined: With over 700 bishoprics across Christendom [lxxviii], the Church developed “a sophisticated financial, judiciary, and administrative apparatus capable of overcoming distance and time”. [lxxix] By the thirteenth century, the Curia had over 1,000 officials in the treasury, its courts of justice, and the chancery—and “became the model for the beginnings of state bureaucracies”. [lxxx]

Second, the Church provided experts. Clergy served at royal courts as administrators, from clerks to notaries to high-ranking officials. In the late eleventh to twelfth centuries, the careers of many bishops began in the royal chancery as well-educated clerks of humble origins were promoted. [lxxxi] The clergy also transmitted institutional norms. With the royal chanceries in ecclesiastical hands, for example, “procedures and ideas… passed from country to country, from court to court, and… in this way, a certain uniformity of thinking about politics and administration was established”. [lxxxii] Bishops served as judges, as in England. Religious discourse and ideas dominated the political advice given in medieval “mirrors for princes” literature. [lxxxiii]

Third, with the sixteenth-century religious reformations, the early modern state received an enormous boost in revenues and wealth, as Catholic churches were summarily expropriated, and their wealth turned over to the state. Both Catholic and Protestant rulers exchanged protection for church revenue. “[T] o be saved from the competition, churches had to pay a high price to their princes. They lost not only autonomy but estates and revenues, too”. [lxxxiv] Perhaps the most notorious example of this process was in England, where over 1,000 monasteries were dissolved and expropriated in 1536–1541, and their resources funneled into the many new state institutions funded by Church wealth. [lxxxv]

Church Influence on Legal Frameworks

A related development is a legal renaissance that took place in Europe in the eleventh century. The Church’s canon law was based on Roman law (ecclesia vivit iure Romano, “the church lives by Roman law”), and the papal reform movement rediscovered the “pure” Justinian’s version of Roman law in the eleventh century. [lxxxvi] The result was that canon law, and the Roman law they based it on, shaped legal understandings in Europe. [lxxxvii] These legal advances altered conceptions of politics and power: For example, until the twelfth century, the defense of the papal or imperial rule was theological. Afterward, these justifications were secularized. [lxxxviii]

The conflicts with the papacy relied not only on spiritual warfare and allies but also on the law and a series of legal arguments put forth by both sides. In foundational analyses, Berman [lxxxix] argued that the ecclesiastical rediscovery of Roman law and the increasing development and sophistication of legal systems influenced the development of European states by introducing new ways to resolve conflict among lords, clergy, and merchants. The Church’s legal jurisdiction was extensive and well respected. [xc] Both secular rulers and the Church set up their respective court systems, yet cases were often voluntarily brought to Church courts because of their perceived independence and better ability to enforce sanctions. [xci] As a result, some analysts conclude the European notion of the rule of law stems from the Church’s legal advances in the Middle Ages. [xcii]

The adjudication of property rights, contracts, civil disagreements, and criminal proceedings required judicial experts. Bishops served as judges and rulers of their dioceses. Their role in administering justice also meant fundamental changes in the law. For example, common law in thirteenth-century England abolished the trials by ordeal introduced in the Norman conquest, since they forbid the clergy to take part in the spilling of blood—and most of the judges were clerics. [xciii] Not until the mid-fourteenth century did lay officials replace clerics in the administration and judiciary.

Universities

Universities were another domestic driver of state formation, as a source both of legal frameworks and human capital. There were no universities in Europe before the commercial revolution began in the tenth century; by 1500, there were over 50. [xciv] The pioneers were the universities of Bologna (founded in 1088), famed for its teaching of law, and Paris (founded in 1150), the center of the study of theology and the liberal arts. [xcv] Medieval universities trained experts in canon and civil law and made them literate in Latin, the lingua franca of medieval scholarship. If universities promulgated legal knowledge, much of that expertise came from the Church. They found early universities in areas where Roman law prevailed—and nearly all taught theology and law. [xcvi] Groups of scholars often found them spontaneously but got papal (and eventually royal) charters. By the thirteenth century, the papacy protected the new universities by granting charters and exemptions against the attempts by local cities and nobles to restrict university freedoms and privileges. [xcvii]

University-trained experts and clerks were vital both to economic growth and to the rise of the state. They served as notaries and legal experts, and markets flourished close to universities. [xcviii] Universities thus also encouraged the formation of legal, scientific, and trade networks, and allowed written contracts and property rights to replace oral agreements. As a result, the ready supply of university candidates after 1450 allowed “bureaucratic” state-building in several Western European countries. [xcix]

Church politics also led to the proliferation of universities. Religious factions founded rival universities during the Papal Schism (1378–1417), which saw rival popes (backed by competing rulers) in Avignon and Rome. The university of Paris remained loyal to Avignon, the towns and princes of Germany, to Rome. The split reinforced nascent national loyalties in the new states and reinvigorated the formation of new universities in northern and eastern Europe. [c] Because the Schism closed off German students’ access to French universities, the Roman pope set up German universities (the first one in 1386), transforming Germany from a land with no universities into one increasingly populated by university students. The result was the expansion of German markets and economies closest to these new universities. [ci] Some elements of this story may need further explanation: For example, what were the Roman pope’s incentives and where did he find the capacity to find German universities? The exogenous effect of the Schism is essential to the story, yet it was the prior alliance between popes and monarchs that led to the Schism in the first place—the same popes that would then set up the universities. [cii]

Inheritance and Succession

Inheritance and succession helped to merge states. Heirs were paramount to ensuring stability through orderly succession once political office and authority became private property that could be divided and transmitted. [ciii]

The Church changed the laws regarding succession, primogeniture, monogamy, and female inheritance. [civ] Primogeniture meant one successor inherited those territories rather than fracturing among the many sons of the ruler. The Church also allowed for the disinheritance of younger sons. Further innovations that led to the consolidation of territorial control were changes to the marriage law and the insistence on monogamy, as well as female inheritance. After the demise of Salic law, women inherited both property and the titles and power that came with it.

As a result, areas of medieval Europe with primogeniture experienced greater political stability and, thus, growth. [cv] Shortages of heirs led to instability and difficulties in early state-building. Wang argues that a multiplicity of heirs led to even greater stability and growth in China from 1000 to 1800 than in Europe. [cvi] Yet it was the institutions of inheritance, not the number of heirs or their surplus, that mattered; where primogeniture existed, the number of heirs had a more limited impact. [cvii] This is consistent with the argument of Kokkonen & Sundell [cviii] that the transition to primogeniture should increase both leader tenure and political stability. The Church had autonomous wealth and patronage powers, and the competition for benefices enhanced family prestige. As a result, the Church became an attractive option for the younger sons of the nobility—the “excess” sons. [cix] The Church thus legitimated primogeniture and made it possible for would-be rivals to thrive without challenging their eldest brother’s claim.

With these changes in inheritance laws, dynastic unions could now form, uniting territories, and ruling through marriage. The emergence of the Habsburg Empire, for example, is a story of dynastic and territorial consolidation, not of war. As a result, the number of dynasties ruling Latin Europe decreased from a dozen in 1300 to five in 1610. [cx] Curiously, small states may have survived because of these dynastic practices. While Abramson [cxi] sees small states surviving thanks to urbanization, Sharma[cxii] argues that where partible inheritance persisted, as in the Holy Roman Empire, the result was an archipelago of tiny principalities: The “Kleinstaaterei, as they would be contemptuously called by German nationalist historiography, were devoid of economic or military logic and can be only explained by dynasticism.” New research could specify when, why, and how the fragmentation of territory and authority declined.

The Rise of Cities

Medieval cities were another site of state formation, hosting parliaments and creating new institutional claims, notably in the “city belt” of former Roman cities that stretched from northern Italy to southern Germany and Switzerland. [cxiii] In Italy, a bishop in a town could help to gain greater autonomy, though in Germany the cities had to first liberate themselves from their ecclesiastical lords. [cxiv]

The communal revolution of the twelfth century meant a new balance of power, with growing urban populations and increasing claims of the towns and their citizens vis-à-vis the monarchs. [cxv] Thus, German state formation from the twelfth century onward took place on two levels: imperial authority on the one hand and the territorial level of cities and princes on the other. [cxvi] Princely territories gained power relative to the empire, which was enormous, inadequately administered, and prone to dynastic accidents that repeatedly led to short-lived and contested imperial rule. The cities, distrustful of the territorial princes, initially sided with the empire but changed sides after 1470, when imperial taxation demands grew. [cxvii] Urbanization led to the formation of small and independent states over the seven centuries between 1100 and 1790—and allowed them to succeed. [cxviii] Contra Tilly [cxix], small political units not only thrived in the territorial’s age state but were more likely to survive than their larger counterparts. They did so because new wealth allowed urban social groups to buy access to coercion, project force, and assert themselves as independent states. [cxx]

The growth of cities also meant executive constraints and the growth of new legal and administrative apparati. As cities gained new rights and privileges as corporate entities, so did their citizens. In the free city-states in medieval Italy, the source of the power was the people, not the Church or dynasty, and rules and laws were applied to all. The executives were more constrained, and several institutions, including courts, protected personal freedoms. The original pacts of cooperation and mutual help (patti giurati) in some cities, as in Pisa, were guaranteed by the bishop. [cxxi]

The rise of self-governing cities may have contributed to the rise of parliaments. Van Zanden et al. argue feudal territorial units and communes together made parliaments possible. [cxxii] Specifically, with the communal revolution, “cities became to a large extent self-governing, and were able, as corporate bodies with rights and privileges, to gain access to what had been often a rather informal assembly”. [cxxiii] The growth of the merchant class meant that parliaments changed from a small gathering of elite peers into a more formalized meeting of representatives from different estates. [cxxiv] That said, the relationship may be curvilinear: Stasavage argues that self-governing cities had negative long-run consequences for urbanization because of the rise of oligarchic structures. [cxxv] Further, the causal relationship between urbanization and the rise of parliaments is contested. On the one hand, Van Zanden et al. show that the historical activity of assemblies may support urbanization. [cxxvi] On the other, Dincecco & Onorato[cxxvii] argue that urbanization led to the growth of parliaments and the checks on executive power they provided, and Abramson & Boix agree. [cxxviii] Others note that “correlations cannot discriminate between assembly-urbanization and urbanization-assembly causation”. [cxxix]

States’ Concern with Religious Morality

Finally, clergy and princes worked hand in hand to regulate societal beliefs and behavior. In the medieval era and beyond, the Church prosecuted heretics, sinners, and clerical offenders alike, both through its system of ecclesiastical courts and through ad hoc institutions such as the Inquisition. (Sin and crime were not distinct in the early Middle Ages, as they offended God and man alike.) In the mid-thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas elaborated on a concept of a divinely ordained “natural law” that delineated true morality and trumped man-made rules—and which was subsequently used by the Catholic Church to justify policing public behavior. Modern churches used these claims of natural law and their moral authority to influence public policy in areas such as abortion, marriage and divorce, reproductive technologies, and education. [cxxx]

In the sixteenth century, churches and states worked together to regulate sexuality, education, bureaucratic norms, consumption, and poverty relief. [cxxxi] Calvinist discipline permeated both state and society, transforming bureaucracies and shaping social behavior. [cxxxii] Church and state again grew interdependent: in Protestant countries, church building required state support—and the creation of territorial churches enhanced state power. In Catholic lands, rulers expanded control over clerical appointments and established agencies to oversee Church administration. [cxxxiii] And in ironic echoes of medieval state development, the flood of legislation on everything from poverty relief to sumptuary laws required that the state turns to ministers and priests to monitor and discipline conduct. [cxxxiv]

In short, many of the domestic factors identified as central to state formation in the Middle Ages and beyond have religious roots. The medieval Church had its impact on state formation through the struggles between popes and rulers, the export of legal and administrative templates, and the service of clergy in the roles of judges, lawyers, chancellors—and feudal vassals.

Conclusion

The literature on state-building has increasingly made two significant shifts: from war to domestic institutions, and from the early modern to the medieval period as the foundational moment. Revisiting domestic medieval institutions such as parliaments, the law, inheritance rules, and universities have generated new understandings of the common threads of state development.

Yet pushing back the rise of the state to the Middle Ages also causes us to give credit to a powerful political force of the time: the Church, with its challenge to secular rule and its provision of human capital and administrative resources. Its clout explains the persistence of territorial fragmentation in the Middle Ages, the similar division of labor within state administrations, and the concern of secular states with morality and social discipline.

The Church was not omnipotent, and it continually struggled with secular rulers over authority, revenues, and legitimation. Yet its relatively high stores of human capital as literate clerks and legal archives meant it was an administrative, legal, and moral innovator—and that nascent states could follow its templates and benefit from its expertise. Indeed, the Church eventually became a victim of its success, as secular states coopted these innovations, accumulated coercive and institutional power, and overwhelmed the Church’s political authority after the Protestant Reformations. The medieval “wholesale transfer of structures and effective juridical skills from the Church… to the state made new assertions of secular supremacy possible whose structures were still feeling their way”. [cxxxv]

This exciting new research also prompts caution, given the difficulties in establishing the continuity of causal effects. Arguments that rely on historical legacies need to specify a clear, consistent, and sustained mechanism of reproduction. Yet the very processes of state formation mean that there is little continuity between the kingdoms and principalities of the medieval era and today’s nation-states. The nature of authority has changed from a divinely granted appointment to a hard-won and constrained executive power. Causal claims must contend with enormous disruption and transformation. For example, Paris may be so prosperous today because it experienced uninterrupted rule by a single Capetian dynasty from 987 to 1316. [cxxxvi] This is a strong claim, and a plausible one; over 300 years of history surely left their mark. Yet this legacy would have to survive shifting alliances and regimes, vast institutional changes (including the French Revolution of 1789 and the institutional deconstruction that followed), the waves of plague and de-urbanization that began in 1346 and lasted well into the seventeenth century, and, above all, the cycles of war that began with the Hundred Years’ War of 1337–1453 and lasted through the slaughter of World War I and World War II. [cxxxvii]

In the end, despite the new analytical shifts, the irony here is that war continues to matter in explaining state development—by disrupting the long-run historical development of the modern state, characterized by domestic forces and religious initiatives.

---

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[xv] Id.
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[xviii] Ertman T. 1997. Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press
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[xxi] Blaydes L, Paik C. 2016. The impact of Holy Land crusades on state formation: war mobilization, trade integration, and political development in medieval Europe. Int. Organ. 70(3):551–86
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[xxiii] The Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire, in Voltaire’s famous dictum.
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[xxviii] I am grateful to Gary Cox for this formulation.
[xxix] Banal lords not only owned land but also had military authority, jurisdiction over violent crimes, and the right to raise taxes within their territory. Both secular and ecclesiastical lords could hold these rights, which were specified by the Carolingians in the ninth century (see Duby 1974)
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[cxvii] Idem.

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[cxxxvii] These included the various Italian Wars (1494–1559), the French Wars of Religion (1562–1622), the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697), the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763), the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1798), the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871).

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