Link to Table of Contents
A History of Europe
by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Book One
The End of the Roman World in the West
Chapter I
The Barbarian Kingdoms in the Roman Empire
2. The New States
p35 ... The court [of the Frankish king after the fall of Rome in the West] was composed of various dignitaries whose titles show that they were once borne by slaves, as was the case with all dignitaries of Germanic origin: the marshal (the horse-slave), the seneschal (the senior slave)... But these servants, these household officers, shared in their master's fortunes, and naturally enough, since what was royal was public, they became his ministers....
It wouldn't surprise me if Napoleon was aware of this and even reminded his marshals about the origin of their title from time to time.
Chapter III
The Musulman Invasion
2. The Consequences of the Invasion
p50 ...For centuries Europe had gravetated about the Mediterranean. It was by means of the Mediterranean that civilization had extended itself; by means of the Mediterranean the various parts of the civilized world had communicated one with another. On all its shores social life was the same in its fundamental characteristics; religion was the same; manners and customs and ideas were the same, or very nearly so. The Germanic invasion had not changed the situation in any essential respect. In spite of all that had happened, we may say that in the middle of the 7th century Europe still constituted, as in the time of the Roman Empire, a Mediterranean unity.
This is a little confusing as in the previous chapter Pirenne demonstrated that the Eastern Roman Empire of Justinian -- which had just reclaimed Italy, Africa, and Spain -- was in reality the Roman Empire.
Now, under the sudden impact of Islam, this unity was abruptly shattered. The greater part of this familiar sea -- which the Romans had called "our sea," mare nostrum -- became alien and hostile. The intercourse between the West and the East... was interrupted... The community in which they had lived so long was destroyed for centuries to come...
...
p51 the Byzantine Empire, henceforth confined between the coast of Illyria and the Upper Euphrates, devoted the bulk of its forces to withstanding the pressure of Islam. In its long history, down to the day when it finally succumbed, in the middle of the 15th century... it was to know some moments of splendour... But this history, most of the time was alien to that of Western Europe. Venice alone kept in touch with Byzantium, and found, in her role of intermediary between East and West, the beginning of her future greatness...
As for the West, its separation from Byzantium confronted it with a completely novel situation. This separation seemed to exclude it from civilization, since from the beginning of the ages all the forms of civilized life and all social progress had come to it from the East... For the Christianity of the West, when its traditional lines of communication were cut, became a world apart, able to count only on itself, and in respect of its further development it was turned to the still barbarous regions beyond the Rhine and the shores of the North Sea, European society, continuously expanding, crossed the ancient frontiers of the Roman Empire. A new Europe was created with the rise of the Frankish Empire, in which was elaborated the Western civilization which was one day to become that of the whole world.
Pirenne doesn't specifically mention piracy and the coastal raiding of the Saracens in the south and the Vikings in the north, but this had a substantial effect on "civilization" and trade along the coasts. Cities either fortified or moved inland to safer locations. He does, a little later, describe how the Venetian, Pisan, and Genoan navies eventually restored some degree of order to the Eastern Mediterranean so that trade could resume.
Book Two
The Carolingian Epoch
Chapter I
The Church
p55 During the vicissitudes of the 5th, 6th and 7th centuries, when Europe was torn by the conflicts of the Germans, the Empire, and Islam, what became of the Catholic Church, the great force of the near future? It contented itself with continuing to exist, or rather to vegetate. Its influence upon the course of events was negligible; its moral influence over society was imperceptible. And yet, amidst the ruins of the Empire, it remained intact. It had saved its organization, its hierarchy, its incalculable wealth in land. And it had no enemies. The Germans no less than the Romans were its dutiful children...
...it [the Church] had become barbarized. The Latin literature of Christendom, which was still so vigorous in the 4th century, the century of Saint Augustine, had nothing to show in the 5th century... After this the life of the mind became dormant... the world had to wait for Gregory the Great before the study of theology and religious and moral philosophy was revived, though in quite a new spirit... Introduced into Ireland in the 4th century, Christianity had rapidly spread through the country. In this remote isle, which had no communication with the Continent, it created for itself an original organization, in which the great monastic colonies were the centers of a most ardent religious life. In these centers there were large number of ascetics and proselytes, who, from the 6th century onwards, began to leave their native country, some to seek, in distant lands, inaccessible solitudes, and others, souls to be converted. When the Norsemen discovered Iceland in the 9th century they were astonished to find that the only inhabitants of its misty shores were monks who had come from Ireland. They were Irishmen, too, who devoted themselves with such enthusiasm to the conversion of Northern Gaul and Germany... One must have read the portraits which Gregory of Tours has traced of some of his colleagues to form any idea of the state of their knowledge and their morals. Many of them could hardly read... The honest Gregory is indignant... And what an example he furnishes in his own person... of the decadence of the Church! The Latin which he writes -- as he is aware -- is a barbarous idiom, taking strange liberties with grammar, syntax and the vocabulary; and his morality -- but this, unhappily, he does not realize -- is capable of very irregular indulgences and very surprising judgements. [I read him in translation, so I don't know about his Latin but can confirm the rest.] And after his time things were even worse...
p57 ...decadent though it was, the Church was the great civilizing force of the period... It was through the Church that the Roman tradition was perpetuated; it was the Church that prevented Europe from relapsing into barbarism... [In that last paragraph Pirenne used "barbarous" properly to refer to language and the degeneracy of language. But here he seems to be using "barbarism" in the more common sense of crude and savage. Or maybe this is the fault of the translator?] the Church remained intact, in spite of its temporary decadence; the clergy were protected by the mighty edifice that sheltered them, and by the discipline imposed upon them. Ignorant, negligent, and immoral though some of the bishops may have been, they could not absolve themselves from the essential duties of their functions... Writing, without which no civilization is possible, appertained so exclusively to the Church from the end of the Merovingian period that even to this day the word that describes the ecclesiastic also describes the scribe: clerc in French, clerk in English, klerk in Flemish and Old German, diaca in Old Russian. During the 8th century intellectual culture was confined to a sacerdotal class... Not only were the clergy venerated because of their religious character; not only did they posses, in the eyes of laymen, the prestige which knowledge enjoys in an ignorant community, but they were also an indispensable auxiliary to civil society. The State could not dispense with their services. In the Carolingian period, when the last traces of lay education had disappeared, it was from the clergy that the State was obliged to borrow its staff of scribes, the heads of its chancellery, and all those agents or counsellors in whom a certain degree of intellectual culture was essential. The State became clericalized, because it could not to otherwise, under penalty of relapsing into barbarism... [now "barbarism" seems to mean illiterate] this was not because their character as apostles of Christ made them peculiarly fit to serve it. The servants of Him who has said that His kingdom is not of this world had not learned from Him the conduct of secular affairs. If they had the requisite knowledge it was because they had acquired it from Rome... In short, it was not because it was Christian, but because it was Roman that the Church acquired and maintained for centuries its control over society... The inevitable collaboration between Church and State, which was presently established, bore within it the germ of formidable conflict, which no one could have foreseen in the beginning.
p59 On entering the service of the State, the Church did not submit itself to its employer. Whatever the concessions which it may have made, at certain moments... it still remained, with regard to the State, an independent power. It claimed and enjoyed, in Western Europe, a liberty which it did not enjoy in the Roman or the Byzantine Empire. This was... because the Church was from the first in an economic situation which enabled it to live and develop itself on its own resources... The immense fortune in real estate which lay at its disposal it owed to Constantine and his successors, who transferred to it the wealth of the pagan temples. They not only made the Church the greatest landed proprietor in the world; they also made it a privileged proprietor, by exempting its members from the poll-tax and its property from the land tax...
Whenever I think about the history of Europe I, unlike Pirenne, apparently, think about the great Houses. Starting with the ultimate noble House, the Habsburgs, I find that their lineage is traced back to the Etichonids in Alsace and Burgundy -- the area around Dijon is mentioned in Wiki as a possible point of origin around the 7th century. Curiously, they are described as being, "of Frankish, Burgundian or Visigothic origin" -- which is awfully vague.
I can't find even that much about the House of Hohenzollern or of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The House Bourbon (and House Capet) seem to be Frankish, as you would expect.
Religion and the cities
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Chapter III
The Growth of the Cities and its Consequences
3. Other Consequences
p237 ...The ability to read and write was indispensable to the merchant, and from the 12th century onwards there was no city of any importance without its school. At first the education provided was still entirely Latin... But this was only an intermediate stage... It was obvious that the bourgeois population could not long continue to employ, in its ordinary business affairs, a tongue that was not the language which it spoke. From the beginning of the 12th century the inevitable development took place: the vulgar tongue began to be employed by the urban scribes, and it is characteristic that this innovation made its first appearance in the country whose municipal life was most highly developed: namely, in Flanders. The first document of this kind in our possession is a charter of the corporation (echevinage) of Douai, dated 1204, which is written in the Picard dialect.... From the end of the 12th century an increasing number of... [qualified lay practitioners] entered into the employ of the princes or kings and applied their skill and experience in the service of the State. [Replacing ecclesiastics.] We may say that the first lay personnel in Europe since the disappearance of the Imperial Roman bureaucracy was furnished by the bourgeoisie.
p239 And even while the cities were thus so effectively secularizing the State, they were influencing its very constitution, and this influence constantly increased in the course of the centuries. Everywhere they began to play a greater and greater part in political life, whether, as in France, they helped the king to oppose the pretensions of the great feudal nobles, or whether, as in England, they united with the barons, in order to wrest the first national liberties from the Crown, or whether, as in Italy and Germany, they constituted themselves independent republics. The absence of the bourgeoisie in the Slav States shows what the West owed to it.
Neither the Church nor civil society could escape its influence. With the renaissance of urban life a period began for the Church in which piety and charity received fresh stimulus, but at the same time formidable problems presented themselves, and it was an age of bloody conflict. Nothing could have been more ardent or more deep-rooted than the religion of the bourgeoisie. Of this we need no other evidence than the associations of all kinds, which in every city devoted themselves to prayer, or to the care of the sick, the poor, the aged, and the widows and orphans. From the end of the 12th century the beguines and begards, who practiced asceticism in secular life, were beginning to spread from city to city. But for the bourgeoisie, the foundation of the new Orders -- the Franciscans (1208) and Dominicans (1215) -- whose spirit inspired the orthodox mysticism of the 13th century, would have been impossible. With these mendicant monks monasticism, for the first time, deserted the country for an urban environment. They lived on the alms of the bourgeoisie; they recruited their ranks from the bourgeoisie; and it was for the sake of the bourgeoisie that they exercised their apostolate, and the success of this was sufficiently proved by the multitude of brothers of the tertiary order, among both the merchants and the artisans, who were associated with the Franciscans.
p240 ...The laymen -- and this was still a novel phenomenon -- collaborated directly in the religious life, claiming their right to play their part in it beside the clergy. This represented a twofold peril to the Church. The first and the most dangerous of these was the threat to orthodoxy. The greater the interest of the bourgeois in the things of religion, the more liable they were to adopt the Manichaean doctrines which, in the 12th century, were spreading into Europe from the East; or to be impressed by the mystical dreams of the "Apostolics" or the "Brother of the Free Spirit." [Jansen and Augustine, again.] It is highly characteristic that the West was not troubled with heresy before the renaissance of the cities. The first and most formidable heresy known to Europe before the advent of Protestantism, that of the Cahars, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism] began to propagate itself in the 11th century, and was therefore precisely contemporaneous with the urban movement. And we must not forget that the sect of the Voudois (Waldenses) was founded by a merchant of Lyons. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians] Even after the terrible massacres of the Albigenses the urban populations continued, now in this part of Europe, now in that, to harbor their suspect sects, in which the aspirations of the proletariat tended to orientate mysticism toward confused visions of social transformation, and which dreamed of establishing, on the ruins of the Church and State, in some sort of communistic society, the rule of the just.
All this went entirely over my head when I first read this.
...With the rise of the cities the relations between the secular and the spiritual authority entered upon a new phase. Since the Carolingian epoch the conflicts between the two authorities had been due to the efforts of the kings to subjugate the Church and force it to serve their policy... the question was, which of the two was to be supreme in society. But neither... attempted to deprive its rival of its prerogatives or privileges...In the cities the case was very different... The cities openly attacked the tribunals of the Church, its financial exemptions, and the monopoly which it claimed to exercise in respect to education. From the end of the 12th century there were perpetual conflicts between the communal councils and the chapters and monasteries included within the urban precincts, or even between the councils and the bishop of the diocese. In vain did the Church blast them with her excommunication and interdict: they still persisted in their attitude... However religious and orthodox they might be, they claimed the right to prevent the Church from interfering in the domain of temporal interests. Their spirit was purely secular, and for this reason the urban spirit must be regarded as the prime and remote cause of the Renaissance.
p241 ...Never, until the end of the 17th century, was there such a profound social -- I do not say intellectual -- revolution [in Europe]. Hitherto men had been mainly restricted to the relations of producer and consumer. Now they were increasingly ruled by their political relations. The only circulation in Europe had been that of the Church toward Rome and the religious centers. Now this was accompanied by a lay circulation. Life began to flow toward the coasts, the great rivers, the natural highways. Civilization was purely continental but it was now becoming maritime.
p242 ...The Church continued to dominate the world of ideas, and the soil was still the foundation which supported the noblesse, and even the State. But the roots of the tree which had recently planted itself upon the wall would inevitably... by the mere fact of their growth, dislodge the stones. The cities had no desire to destroy what already existed, but only to make a place for themselves. And gradually this place became larger and larger, so that it presently created a new order of things... From the 7th to the 11th century the movement of history was everywhere analogous. But with the 11th century, what variety! The strength of the bourgeoisie differed from country to country, giving to each a national character of its own, a character previously unknown...
There is a sort of contradiction in the enthusiasm of the cities of the 13th century for the mendicant orders and their capitalistic activities. They were filled with enthusiasm for the ideals of poverty but they sought riches.
That sentence covers a great deal of human history. So Martin Luther was not at all the beginning of the spirit of Protestantism. The great Christian factions were starting to pestering the Church centuries before. At the same time the new commercial class was creating a secular niche for itself while breeding the religious fanaticism that would scare the coming age. Was this an indication of a split within the new urban communities? Or were the same people involved in both trends? I am amazed... and still can't believe this didn't stick with me from when I first read the book.
Growth of the Cities
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
Chapter III
The Growth of the Cities and its Consequences
1. The Growth of the Cities
p227 ...In Italy, as in Flanders, the maritime commerce, and the inland commerce which was its continuation, resulted in the activity of the seaports: Venice, Pisa, and Genoa in the South; Bruges in the North. Then, behind the seaports, the industrial cities developed: on the one hand, the Lombard communes and Florence; on the other, Ghent, Ypres, and Lille, Douai, and further inland, Valenciennes and Brussels. It was evidently the proximity of the seaports that gave such an extraordinary impetus to the industry of the cities -- an impetus unique in Europe. The Italian and Flemmish ports, with their hinterland, acquired an international importance, and in this way they were unique.
...The Italian merchants visited Flanders from the beginning of the 12th century. But presently the fairs of Champagne became the point of contact, and, so to speak, the Bourse of Italo-Flemish commerce... But these were merely business rendezvous, and no really important cities were founded on the sites of these fairs...
p228 The South of France was not far behind Italy. Marseilles, Montpellier, and Aigues-Mortes played their part in Mediterranean commerce. And behind them were Albi, Cahors, and Toulouse, which gravitated toward them, and prospered without interruption until the Albigensian War. In Spain the port of Barcelona likewise acquired great importance, though it did not produce any very active urban centres in the hinterland.
Which was also true in Roman times, I believe. Was any of this different than the systems of commerce created by the Greeks, Carthage, and Rome BCE?
Avignon and Lyon develop on the Rhone. Paris is a separate, purely political creation.
Germany had no center of international trade. She was in touch with Italy through the Rhine and the Danube; on the one river Cologne and Strasbourg made their appearance; on the other, Ratisbon and Vienna. The most important of these centres was Cologne, where the Germany of the West and South came into contact with the Germany of the North, and both were in touch with the Low Countries. The Germany of the North... had Hamburg and Bremen on the North Sea, and above all, Lubeck, founded by Henry the Lion, on the Baltic.
There's much more but I'm not interested in the history of Germany and areas east at the moment.
p229 ...a host of small secondary towns arose, of the same character as the large cities, and living under the same law. It had now become indispensable that each region should have its little urban center. [Why exactly?] The disorganization of the domainal system, and the appearance of free peasants, [from where?] necessarily called into existence -- to replace the "courts" from which the servile population had supplied their needs -- little bourgs, which offered an asylum to the artisans, and served as commercial centers for the great cities. [That part I get.] Their urban life was a spontaneous gift from the great cities. New towns were founded... A host of others led a quiet, semi-urban, semi-agricultural existence; Kreuzburg, where I am writing these lines, received its charter in 1213. These were towns of secondary formation, belonging to a period when the bourgeoisie had established itself, and when the princes, impelled by the advantages which they derived from these towns, were establishing them in all directions. Formerly the traveler passed from monastery to monastery; now he journeyed from town to town; there were towns on all the roads, at intervals of a few leagues, constituting a transition between the great cities, like the little beads of a rosary between the dizaines.
p230 The rise of the town provoked an increase of population, relatively comparable to that which occurred in the 19th century. And even more remarkable than the increase of the urban population were the effects of this multiplication of urban centers on the population of the countryside. Compared with the Carolingian population, we may estimate, roughly, that its strength was doubled. The maximum increase was attained at the beginning of the 14th century. From that time, until the 18th century, there was no essential change. [Huh?]
It would be of great importance to obtain some idea of the relative strength of the urban as compared with the rural population. But this is unfortunately impossible. ...we may be certain, that in all the centers favored by commerce the bourgeois population continued to increase until about the middle of the 14th century. Everywhere the walled enclosures... had to be enlarged, and faubourgs which had been built outside the gates had to be enclosed by walls... The largest cities -- Milan, Paris, Gand -- must have contained about 50,000 inhabitants, more or less. The cities of medium size would have contained from 20,000 to 50,000 inhabitants; the small towns from 2,00 to 5,000...
2. The Consequences for the Rural Population
p231 ...in the Middle Ages... the town was absolutely distinct from the open country. It was divided from it even materially, sheltering behind its moat and walls and its gates. Juridically, it was another world. Directly one entered the gates one became subject to a different law, just as one does to-day on passing from one State to another. Economically the contrast was as great. Not only was the city a centre of commerce and industry, but there was no commerce and no industry elsewhere. In the country they were everywhere prohibited. Every city endeavored to dominate the surrounding countryside, to subjugate it. The country had to provide it with a market, and, at the same time, to guarantee its supplies of foodstuffs. There was not, as there is to-day, constant exchange and interpenetration; there was a contrast, and the subordination of the one element to the other...
The rise of the towns... made it impossible to preserve the domainal system... Having no market in which to see its products, the domain restricted its production to the needs of its own consumption... Now, from the moment the towns made their appearance this special situation ceased to exist... For apart from its merchants and artisans, the urban population was a sterile population -- to employ a favorite formula of 18th century physiocrats. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiocracy] It could live only by sending out of the city for its means of subsistence -- that is, by purchasing them from the cultivators of the soil. It therefore provided them with the outlet for their products which they had hitherto lacked... And so the moral and the economic conditions to which the domainal organization corresponded both disappeared simultaneously. The peasant, whose activity was now solicited by the outer world, no longer regarded his work as a mere burden. Further, as a necessary consequence of the new state of affairs, the seigneur himself was even more conscious of the need of a reformation. For since the prestations of his tenants were fixed by custom, he soon discovered that his resources were dwindling unpleasantly. His revenues were still the same, while his expences were constantly increasing. The towns... by their purchases, were putting money into circulation throughout the countryside; and as money became more and more abundant its value diminished in proportion. The cost of living was continually rising, and the landowners, restricted to fixed revenues, found themselves launched on the road to ruin. For the petty military noblesse, who, as a general thing, possessed only small fiefs which just provided them with a living, the crisis was a veritable catastrophe. A large proportion of the chivalry, so numerous in the 11th century, was overwhelmed by poverty, at the close of the 12th century.
YES. And what became of them? And this also explains why the landed interests were so eager to monetize some of their lands around the cities. This was the result of the same Invisible Hand that lead to the Enclosures and the Clearances in Britain.
It is difficult to say whether the increase of the population of the rural districts, which manifested itself at the very time when the conditions of rural life were undergoing such a profound modification, should also be referred to the appearance of the towns. After the devastations of the Normans, the Saracens, and the Hungarians, Europe had known a period of relative tranquility, during which the natural excess of births over deaths must insensibly have increased the numbers of the inhabitants. [Might there not also have been a climate explanation for this tranquility and rise in population?] But it is only in the second half of the 11th century that we perceive, in certain parts of Europe, the traces of a malaise due to excess in density of the population, and we are almost bound to believe that in affording the peasants new means of livelihood, the towns... had contributed... to increase their number. However it may be, it is certain that in the Low Countries, for example, the cultivated land, about 1050, was beginning to prove insufficient for the needs of the inhabitants. Moreover, events like the conquest of England in 1066, and the Crusade, evidently justify the supposition that the population was somewhat excessive, at all events in the North of France.
p234 ...From the beginning of the 11th century we have something more than presumption to go upon. The peopling of the regions beyond the Elbe by immigrants from the banks of the Rhine, Holland, and Flanders, evidently cannot be explained save by the superabundance of the rural population of the countries.
Thus, at the moment when the ancient domainal system had had its day, and no longer responded to the needs of a more economically advanced society, there were numbers of men who offered themselves to whomsoever would give them land. The great landowners, and above all the territorial princes, did not fail to profit by so favourable a situation. They possessed plenty of uncultivated land, for it seems that to the west of the Rhine and to the south of the Danube... the great domains had hardly spread beyond the fertile soil already cultivated in the days of the Roman Empire. The rest of the land was untouched forest, heath, and marshland. The time had come to bring this land into cultivation. This great task... was begun in the middle of the 11th century, reached its apogee during the course of the 12th century, and was completed, at a gradually relaxing pace, towards the end of the 13th century. From that period until the end of the 18th century the area of cultivated soil was not sensibly increased in the Occident, and this fact alone shows the importance of the progress effected by internal colonization in the Middle Ages. No doubt the intakes would have been less extensive had agriculture been more advanced... The crisis of the domainal organization could have been avoided had it been possible to increase the fertility of the soil by more rational methods.
Jane Jacobs maintains that agricultural innovation is also the product of cities. The 18th or 19th century Gentry might have been able to lead agricultural innovation after they had been trained by the city economy (and science) but it would be asking too much of the nobility of the Middle Ages.
p235 In the newly peopled areas, ...The peasant's relations to the landowner were now merely such as arose from his quality of tenant. He paid a rent for the land which he occupied, but his person was free... The area of the "new town" was divided into a certain number of equal units, and these, on payment of quit-rent, could be secured under hereditary title. A charter... recognized the personal liberty of the inhabitants, and determined the powers and the competence of the mayor and the court who were charged with the affairs of the colony and the administration of justice, and defined the respective rights of the seigneur and the peasants as to forestal usage, etc. Thus a new type of village appeared, the village a loi. it no longer had anything in common with the old domainal organization, except for the fact that, like the latter, it presupposed a great property and a small-scale exploitation. For the rest, everything was new. Not only was the peasant a free man, but the pretestations which he had to pay the seigneur, instead of consisting of natural products, were usually payable in money... All over Europe there was a new growth of villages, and the very form of their names, ending in sart in the French-speaking countries, and in kerk, kirche, rode, rath in countries where German was spoken, still enable us to distinguish them from their neighbors in the long-settled regions.
The Church played a considerable part in this great cultural task of the 12th century. She entrusted the work to the new orders of Cistercians and Premonstrants... the latter founded by St Bernard in 1113, [Footnote: Citeaux (not far from Dijon) was founded in 1098 by Robert de Molesnes, but it did not become the center of a movement until Saint Bernard entered it in 1113.] and the former by Saint Norbert in 1119 -- resumed the ascetic propaganda which the Benedictines had abandoned. In order that the prescription of manual labor be applied in all its rigor, they established themselves, by preference, in uncultivated regions where there was land to be cleared and drained. The princes made haste to help on the pius work by ceding tracts of moor and marshland to the monks. The two orders played a great part in draining the Flemish polders and bringing the soil of Eastern Germany into cultivation. The domains which they constituted there were of a completely novel type, in which we see, for the first time in the Middle Ages, the principle of large-scale agricultural exploitation. Instead of being parcelled out in family holdings, the newly-cleared area were organized into great farms, which were worked by "convert brothers" or free peasants under the direction of a monk. The cultivation of cereals or the breeding of cattle was practiced, not as formerly, with a view to immediate consumption by the convent, but for the purpose of sale in the markets... The profits realized enabled the monks to acquire more land, and to continue the work of bringing it into cultivation... [The proprietors of the old style domains are forced to monetize their holdings to raise cash. Quit-rent and similar methods free the peasants and allow the landowners to survive the inflation of money.] One may say that from the beginning of the 13th century the rural population, in Western and Central Europe, had become or was in the process of becoming a population of free peasants. And this great transformation was accomplished without violence, without the co-operation of principles and theories, as an inevitable consequence of the revival of trade and the appearance of the towns, which, by providing agriculture with the outlets of which it had hitherto been deprived, had compelled it to modify its traditional organization and to adopt freer and more flexible forms of exploitation. Economic progress had destroyed the social patronage which the seigneur had hitherto exercised over his men. In proportion as liberty was substituted for serfdom the landowner put off his old paternal character, and material interest tended to become the sole criterion of his relations with his tenants.
A History of Europe
by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
2. The Cities
p220 ...Toward the close of the 11th century... The princes began to realize that they had more to lose than to gain by persisting in their opposition to the movement. For while it undermined their local authority and imperiled certain of their domainal revenues, it more than made up for these drawbacks by the supplementary payments received in the shape of market tolls, and the inestimable advantage of a constant influx of corn and wares of every kind, and of money. [The same advantage capitalism offers today. So many people -- now and then -- curse the "invisible hand" that feeds them.] By the beginning of the 12th century certain princes had frankly [maybe not the best word when talking about Frankish princes] adopted a progressive policy, and were seeking to attract the merchants by the promise of immunities and privileges. In short, whether by agreement or by force, the claims of the bourgeoisie were everywhere triumphant, just as the parliamentary system was everywhere triumphant in the Europe of the 19th century... [Huh? Is he overstating the triumph of parliamentarism in 19th century Europe or attempting to indicate that the "triumph" was nuanced and uneven from place to place?] Just as continental parliamentarism was an adaptation of English and Belgian institutions to the special conditions of each country, so the urban institutions, although they exhibited, from town to town, peculiarities resulting from the nature of the local environment, might none the less be referred, on the whole, to two dominant types:... that of the cities of Northern Italy, and... of the cities of the Low Countries and Northern France. Here, as in respect of the domainal regime, the feudal system, the Cluniac reformation, and chivalry, Germany and the other regions of central Europe merely followed the impulse that reached them from the West. [Just from the Low Countries? Or is he considering Northern Italy part of "the West"?]
p221 ...the towns of the Middle Ages presented everywhere the same essential features... the mediaeval city was a fortified agglomeration inhabited by a free population engaged in trade and industry, possessing a special law, and provided with a more or less highly developed jurisdiction and communal autonomy. The city enjoyed immunities which did not exist in the surrounding country; which amounts to saying that it had a morally privileged personality. It was constituted, indeed, on the basis of privilege. The bourgeois or burgers, like the noble, possessed a special juridical status: bourgeois and noble, in different directions, were equally removed from the villein, the peasant, who until the end of the ancien regime remained, in the majority of European countries, outside political society.
p223 However, the privileged condition of the bourgeois was very different in its nature from that of the noble. The noble was, in reality, the old landowning freeman. His privilege, in some sort negative, arose from the fact that the mass of the people had lapsed into servitude under him. He had not ascended; he merely belonged to a minority which had kept its place amidst a general social decline. [Wasn't this distinction also based on conquest and ethnicity? Especially in France?] The privileges of the bourgeois, on the contrary, were very definitely positive. The bourgeois was a parvenu, who, of necessity, had made for himself a place in society which was finally recognized and guaranteed by the law. The domainal regime, which set the noble over the head of the peasant, at the same time bound them together by so strong a mutual tie that even to this day, after so many centuries, traces of it survive. The bourgeois, on the other hand, was a stranger both to the noble and to the peasant; both distrusted him and regarded him with hostility, and of this also the traces have not entirely disappeared. The bourgeois moved and had his being in a wholly different sphere. The contrast between him and them was the contrast between the agricultural and commercial and industrial life... [There is also a very important difference when it comes to the Environment. People -- peasants and lords both -- tied to the land have an interest in the health of the land. The bourgeois lacks that kind of interest in any particular piece of land. The consequences of which are obvious to see. The bourgeois,] was a mobile and active element; the traffic of the country was in his hands, and he was an agent of transformation. He was not indispensable to human existence; it was possible to live without him. He was essentially an agent of social progress and civilization.
...The nobility and the clergy constituted homogeneous classes, all of whose members participated in the same esprit de corps, and were conscious of their mutual solidarity. The case of the bourgeois was very different. Living in segregated groups in the various cities, in them the spirit of class was replaced by the local spirit, or was at all events subordinated to it. Each city was a little separate world in itself; there were no limits to its exclusivism and its protectionism. Each did its utmost to favor its own trade and industry at the expense of the other cities. Each endeavored to become self-sufficient and to produce all that it needed. Each endeavored to extend its authority over the surrounding countryside, in order to assure itself of sufficient supplies of food. If it occurred to the cities to act in concert, to conclude temporary or permanent leagues. like the London Hansa, and at a later date, the German Hansa, they did so in order to take action against a common enemy, or for the sake of a common utility, but within its own walls each had room only for its own burgesses; the foreigner could trade there only through the medium of his brokers, and was always liable to expulsion. In order to live there he had to acquire burgess rights. And all of this is readily comprehensible. It was merely a question of local mercantilism... Urban exclusivism came to an end only when the towns were united in the superior unity of the State, just as the State will perhaps one day disappear in the unity of human society.
Typical Belgian pro-EU sentiment :-|
San Francisco, in it's early days, provides a surprisingly valuable example of a city developing on its own. Even after it became part of the United States, it was so isolated that all the logic of local mercantilism applied just as much as it had in the Middle Ages. It wasn't the role of the State, but the revolution in transportation that put the city on the dire path advocated by David Ricardo. The completion of the transcontinental railroad was marked by a depression as cheaper goods flowed in replacing local jobs.
Pirenne, above, does a good job of describing what cities, by their economic nature, do. Unless you can create an economic equivalent of the Roman political system -- whereby cities can participate in the success of a dominant city -- cities are engaged in a war of one against all until a Darwinian economic process eventually produces a winner.
I can't tell if he's suggesting that the bourgeois are also responsible for Nationalistic tendencies; at a minimum, they are destructive of the cohesive nature of Catholic Europe that was the norm before the Reformation. I keep wanting to object that the great Houses of Europe were also agents of heterogeneity, but I'm thinking of later centuries. These remain the "Dark" Ages for me. But really, were the Houses disputing Burgundy and other places really less mutually hostile than the burgers?
And here's an interesting thought: These economic revolutions of the 10th-12th centuries can, I think, be seen as setting the stage for the Black Death which followed in the 14th century. Would the plague have been able to enter Europe before the Crusades? Not easily. And didn't the labor shortage following the Black Death strengthen the hand of the bourgeoisie (and capitalism)?
The moral result of this exclusivism was an extraordinary solidarity among the burgesses. Body and soul, they belonged to their little local patrie, and with them there reappeared... a civic sentiment. Each burgess was obliged... to take part in the defense of the city: to take up arms for it, to give his life to it. The knights of Frederick Barbarossa were astounded to find that the shopkeepers and merchants of the Lombard cities were able to hold their own against them. In that campaign there were examples of civic virtue which remind one of ancient Greece. Other burgesses gave their fortunes to their city, commuted the market tolls, or founded hospitals. The wealthy gave without stint or reckoning, and no doubt they were inspired by charity as much as by pride.
For the rich men were the rulers. The burgesses of the cities enjoyed civil equality and liberty, but not social equality. The bourgeoisie, deriving from commerce, remained under the influence and the leadership of the wealthiest. Under the name of "grands" or "patricians," they kept the administration and jurisdiction of the city in their own hands. The urban government was a plutocratic government, and it actually ended, in the 13th century, by becoming oligarchic, the same familiars holding power in perpetuity. Yet nothing could have been more remarkable than these governments. They were responsible for the creation of urban administration: that is, the first civil and secular administration known in Europe. It was their work from the top to bottom. This has not been sufficiently considered: it should be realized that they had no model, and had to invent everything: financial system, systems of book-keeping, schools, commercial and industrial regulations, the first rudiments of a health service, public works, market-places, canals, posts, urban boundaries, water supply -- all this was their work. And it was they too who erected the buildings which even to-day are the glory of so many cities.
p224 Beneath them, the rest of the urban population consisted of artisans, and it was they who formed the majority in every city. As a rule they were foremen or small employers, masters, with one or two journeymen under them, who constituted an active and independent bourgeoisie. While wholesale trade was free, there developed, for the protection of the artisans. a social policy which was a masterpiece no less interesting, in its way, than the Gothic cathedrals; and of which the last traces have only recently disappeared. Its object was the maintenance of all these petty lives which constituted the strength of the city, and to secure its regular revictualling. Each citizen was a producer and a consumer, and regulation intervened in respect of both production and consumption. The municipal authority undertook to protect the consumer. To this end it revived the old municipal regulations [Roman?] of which some traces had perhaps survived in Italy. Nothing could have been more admirable than the precautions taken against "dishonest" products, fraud, and falsification. [This reminds me of the (not un-controversial) measures taken by the Swiss to manage the cheese production there. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Cheese_Union ] The consumer was protected in the twofold interest of the local bourgeoisie and of the city's good repute in the outer world.
As for the producer, he protected himself by the trade corporations or guilds which made their appearance as early as the 12th century. Their essential purpose was to prevent competition, and it was this that rendered them so odious to the liberal economy of the 19th century. [This also applies to the Swiss and cheese.] Every producer had to earn his living; therefore he had to retain his customers. He must accordingly sell his wares at the same price as his comrades, and he must make them in the same way. The trade or handicraft was originally a voluntary association, like our syndicates or trade unions. But it boycotted the "yellow" workers who did not apply for membership, and it was finally recognized by the public authority. Let us note that this organization had nothing in common with the association of workers whose purpose is negotiation with the employer. It was an obligatory syndicate of petty burgesses. It was created... for the benefit of the small independent producer. In most of the cities of the Middle Ages there was no proletariat. The craftsmen worked for the local market and reserved it for themselves. Their numbers were maintained in proportion to the number of their customers. They had complete control of the situation. In this sense, they had solved the social problem. But they had solved it only where the city was a "closed state," a situation that was not so general as one might suppose. For there was one industry at least -- the cloth industry in Flanders and in Florence -- whose products supplied not the local, but the European market. In this industry there could be no limitation of production, nor was it possible for the small employer to acquire his raw material for himself. Here he was in the power of the great merchant, so that in his industry there was a division between capital and labour which we do not find elsewhere... in the cloth industry the "master" was not an independent producer; he worked for wages, so that here we find something closely resembling the "cottage industry" of our own age. Trade organizations existed, but in this case it was far from protecting the artisan efficiently, as it could not affect the conditions of marketing or of capital investment. Hence there were strikes, conflicts of salaried workers, an exodus of weavers from Ghent, and industrial crises. Hence the uneasy, unruly, turbulent, Utopian spirit that characterized the weavers from the 12th century onwards, and made them the adepts of a naive communism which was allied with mystical or heretical ideals...
p226 With the rise of the towns and the constitution of the bourgeoisie the formation of European society was completed; such as it was to remain until the end of the ancien regime. Clergy, noblesse, bourgeoisie -- these made the trinity that ruled human destinies and played its part in political life. The agricultural people, below the privileged classes, were restricted to their function of food producers until the day when civil equality, and to some extent political equality, should become the common possession of all. For one cannot too strongly insist on the fact that the bourgeoisie was an exclusive and privileged class. It was in this respect that the cities of the Middle Ages differed essentially from the cities of the Roman Empire, whose inhabitants, whatever the standard of their social life, were all in enjoyment of the same rights. The Roman world never knew anything analogous to the European bourgeoisie; nor has the New World seen its like. When the American cities were founded the moment had passed when each social profession had its peculiar law; there were merely free human beings. [No comment.] In our days the word bourgeoisie, which we continue to employ, is completely diverted from its original sense. It denotes a social class of heterogeneous origin which has no common quality except that it is the class which possesses wealth. Of the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages nothing remains, just as nothing remains of the nobility of the Middle Ages.
Pirenne continued
A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War
It is hardly surprising that I keep going back and forth between Pirenne and Braudel, as Pirenne influenced the Annales School of social history. According to Wiki, Pirenne's ideas about the linked rise of the Bourgeoisie and of cities, has survived best when it comes to his academic reputation today.
What I think is interesting is that I remembered Pirenne more than Braudel. (At least I think this is true. I still haven't found other parts of what I remember about the markets, so it may have been a mix of the two authors.) I suspect one reason for my preference for Pirenne is that his books are based on his lectures. They are a literary version of an oral tradition. No one would sit through a lecture of Capitalism and Material Life. Even I would consider that cruel and unusual punishment.
I'm going to continue and read a chapter or two about cities, but I may try to get my hands on a copy of Pirenne's Medieval Cities. The final chapters of this book are about the Renaissance and Reformation, extending into the middle of the 16th century. That may be worth a quick re-read.
I thought I could just skim the chapter on cities... wrong.
The Formation of the Cities
I. The Episcopal "Cities" and Fortresses
p215 A society in which the population lives by the soil which it exploits, and whose produce it consumes on the spot, cannot give rise to important agglomerations of human beings; each inhabitant being tied, by the necessities of life, to the soil which he cultivates. Commerce, on the other hand, necessarily involves the formation of centres in which it obtains its supplies and from which it sends them forth into the outer world. The natural result of importation and exportation is the formation in the social body of what might be called nodes of transit. In Western Europe, in the 10th and 11th centuries, their appearance was contemporaneous with the renewal of urban life.
...almost invariably these sites were already inhabited when the afflux of merchants restored them to renewed activity. Some -- and this was the case in Italy, Spain, and Gaul [within the old Roman Empire] -- were already occupied by an episcopal "city"; others -- for example in the Low Countries and... [outside the borders of the Roman Empire] were already the site of a bourg -- that is a fortress... But neither the "cities" nor the bourgs presented the faintest trace of urban life... they contained nothing that resembled a bourgeoisie...
p216 It was in the "cities" of Northern Italy and Provence... and in the bourgs of the Flemish region, that the first merchant colonies were established... in the 10th century... ...in the 11th century... in the "city" as in the bourg, the merchant colony was beginning to play the leading part. The immigrants dominated the old inhabitants just as the commercial life of the place dominated the old agricultural life, and the opposition of these two interests gave rise to conflicts and necessitated expedients by force of which... a new order of things was elaborated.
p217 If we are to understand this phenomenon of the formation of the middle classes, a development so pregnant with consequences, we must try to realize clearly the full extent of the contrast which existed... between the old population and the new. The old population, consisting of clergy, knights, and serfs, lived by the soil, the lower class working for the upper classes, who, from the economic point of view, were consumers who produced nothing...
In this tiny, changeless world the arrival of the merchants suddenly disarranged all the habits of life, and produced, in every domain, a veritable revolution. To tell the truth, they were intruders, and the traditional order could find no place for them. In the midst of these people who lived by the soil, and whose families were maintained by labors which were always the same, and revenues that did not vary, they seemed in some way scandalous, being as they were without roots in the soil, and because of the strange and restless nature of their way of life. With them came not only the spirit of gain and of enterprise, but also the free laborer, the man of independent trade, detached alike from the soil and from the authority of the seigneur: and above all, the circulation of money.
p218 It was not only the work of the merchant that was free: by a no less astonishing innovation, his person also was free. But what could anyone really know concerning the legal status of these newcomers, whom no one had ever seen before? Very probably the majority of them were the children of serfs, but no one knew this for certain, and as their condition of servage could not be presumed, they had of necessity to be treated as free men. It was a curious result of their social condition that these forebears of the future bourgeoisie did not have to demand their liberty. It came to them quite naturally; it existed as a fact even before it was recognized as a right.
This passivity of the Medieval Establishment is a little surprising. And returning for a moment to Pirenne's assumptions about origin of these Free Men, wouldn't it make at least as much sense to think that some at least of them were the superfluous sons of the gentry? Wouldn't that better explain why the Establishment let them be? But then they didn't just let them be, they sold or rented accommodations in these proto-cities where transactions like this must have been an unusual thing. Yes, they had ready cash, but in the kind of stable and conservative local economy Pirenne has described, housing these "new men" would require some local initiative (enterprise) or a profound need for cash.
All this would make more sense if these "new men" were, at least assumed to be, the sons (if only the natural sons) of the gentry. This would not have upset the proprieties of the day. And who did own the land the cities grew onto?
To these characteristics of the merchant colony... another must be added: the rapidity of its growth. It presently exercised, upon the surrounding region, an attraction compatible to that which the modern factory exercises over the rural population. By the lure of gain, it awakened the spirit of enterprise and adventure that lay dormant in the hearts of the domainal serfs, and it attracted fresh recruits from all directions... the merchant colony... provided employment for a host of workers -- boatmen, carters, lumpers, etc. At the same time artisans of every kind came to settle in the town. Some of them -- bakers, brewers, shoemakers -- found an assured livelihood there, thanks to the constant increase of the population. Others worked up the raw materials imported by the merchants, and the wares which they produced swelled the export trade. In this way industry took its place beside commerce. By the end of the 11th century, in Flanders, the weavers of woolen stuffs were beginning to flock from the country into the towns, and the Flemish cloth trade, being thus centralized under the direction of the merchants, became what it was to remain until the end of the Middle Ages, the most flourishing industry in Europe.
...neither the ancient "cities" nor the ancient bourgs could contain within the narrow circumference of their walls the increasing influx of these newcomers. They were forced to settle outside the gates... Like the original "city" or bourg, the new town was itself a fortress: it was called "nouveau-bourg" or "faubourg" -- that is to say, outer fortress, for which reason its inhabitants were known, from the beginning of the 11th century, by the name bourgeois. The bourgeoisie underwent the same development as the nobility in this medieval society, which enjoyed, thanks to the abstention of the State, [?] the advantage of complete plasticity. Before long its social function had transformed it into a juridical class. It is obvious that the law and administrative measures then in force, which had come into existence in the heart of a purely agricultural society, could no longer suffice for the needs of a merchant population. The formalistic apparatus of legal procedure, with its primitive means of proof, bailment, and seizure, had to give way to simpler and more expeditious rules. The judicial duel [Blogger won't let me make a link today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_combat], that ultima ratio of the litigants, appeared to the merchants the very negation of justice. To ensure the maintenance of order in their faubourg, which was swarming with adventurers and jailbirds of every kind, such as had hitherto been unknown in the tranquil environment of the ancient Bourg or "city," they demanded that the ancient system of fines and compositions should be replaced by punishments capable of inspiring a salutary terror: hanging, mutilation of every kind, [I wonder if Foucault wrote about this?] and the putting out of the eyes. They protested against the prestations in kind ["feudal law : a rent, tax, or due paid in kind or in services"] which the collectors of tolls demanded before they would pass the merchandise that the merchants were exporting or importing. If it happened that one of their number was recognized as a serf, they would not suffer his seigneur to reclaim him. As for their children, whose mothers were necessarily almost always of servile condition, they refused to admit that such offspring should be regarded as servile. Thus the encounter of these new men with the ancient society resulted in all sorts of clashes and conflicts, due to the opposition of the domainal law and the commercial law, of exchange in kind and exchange for monetary payment, of servitude and liberty.
p220 Naturally, the social authorities did not accept the claims of the nascent bourgeoisie without resistance. As always, they endeavored first of all to conserve the established order of things: this is to say, to impose it upon these merchants, although it was in absolute opposition to their condition of life: and as always, their conduct was inspired as much by good faith as by personal interest. It is evident that it took the princes a long time to understand the necessity of modifying, for the merchant population, the authoritarian and patriarchial regime which they had hitherto applied to their serfs. The ecclesiastical princes especially displayed, in the beginning, a very marked hostility. To them it seemed that commerce endangered the salvation of the soul, and they regarded with mistrust, as a criminal derogation from obedience, all these innovations whose contagion was spreading from day to day. Their resistance inevitably led to revolts. In Italy and the Low Countries, and on the banks of the Rhine, the War of Investitures provided the bourgeois with an occasion or a pretext for rebellion against their bishops; here in the name of the Pope, and there in that of the Emperor. The first commune of which history makes mention, that of Cambrai, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrai] in 1077, was sworn by the people, led by the merchants, against the Imperialist prelate of the city.
We just this week marked the historic Battle of Cambrai during the Great War. The first coordinated experiment in armored warfare by the British Army -- and successfully countered by the German Army.
Dreams
This morning (last night) our landfill and recycling were picked up. This means that I was sleeping "on alert." I woke at 5:15 with the first noises out on Powell and went out to investigate. I awoke again around 5:30 when our usual scavenger was going through the toters in our alley. I woke again at 6:00 to haul up our recycling toter and to clean up most of the mess the scavenger made of my neighbor's trash. And I woke around 7:00 when the trash was collected, and then hauled our toters back down into the laundry room.
All this to say that my sleep -- and dreams -- were often interrupted which caused me to recall them more than normal. The first dream I remember I was driving by a cluster of four small houses I had seen articles or videos about. They were at the end of a long road on the edge of the ocean. I was surprised, cruising by, to see actual people lounging about in the two that were most open to view. I was both pleased to see that people were actually enjoying these curious houses -- they seemed to be either reading or napping or just lounging about like dogs -- but also afraid I was being intrusive, so I headed back the way I must have come. A couple hundred yards down the road, however, I came to the point where the road cascaded down from the ridge above. There was the merest hint of a road. Or half a road as most of the roadway had eroded away. Since there were no other cars down there, I concluded that it was somehow possible to defy the laws of physics and race up the impossible road. Unfortunately, again, my car was both under-powered and running poorly. I was trying to get in position to try to get up the slope when I segued into the next dream.
I awoke from that dream walking down a street in what I recognized as the Mission district here in SF, though I saw nothing to give me a specific street or block. I think I was carrying laundry. I didn't think I had blacked out because I remembered the dream so clearly (do people with multiple personalities dream when they aren't in control? I think not.) I was concerned that I had been sleep walking to this random point in the city. As I walked along trying to get oriented, a crazy person cruised by making me feel vulnerable since my hands were full. In response (?) I tried to pull the car I was now in (same under-powered beast) out across and into traffic. Since in my dreams my brakes and transmission never work properly, I ended up rolling helplessly into an oncoming car.
Next scene, I am on a gurney in a hospital
(?) corridor. I seem to be paralyzed. The hospital person is saying, "There's one more thing we can try" when that dream ends.
The next scene, and I'm pretty sure this was after one of the interruptions listed above, I am a passenger in a car driven by my father. I don't know what we are talking about, but, when we come to a cross street, the driver appears not to notice the car ahead of us and just plows into it full speed. I am unhurt. There was a whole other, confused, section after the second accident, and that I have lost. Which is too bad as there was something in there that I found interesting. I assumed since I was remembering all this earlier stuff, I would retain the end as well. Wrong.
All four settings were completely different. In two I was by myself. In two I was with a number of other people. None of it was particularly disturbing in the context of the dream.
I don't understand why I couldn't have dreamed that I was beating in the head of our annoying scavenger with a rock. That would seem to be both possible and a relatively healthy way to work out stress and aggravation.
