Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  This combination of international and domestic hegemony reduced the need for explicit bargaining and favored a different set of dispositions. Conservatism, congruent with the emphasis on maintenance, was one of them. Reliance on domestic resources was another: as energies were devoted to the vast challenges of taxing those who were already subject to the empire’s rule, rulers lacked strong incentives to develop external assets. In turn, prioritization of maintenance and conservatism supported delegational localism that limited the state’s ability to penetrate society.

  In the case of China, the overall result was a sociopolitical order that helped secure peace and basic welfare for a large population but did not lend itself to disruptive innovation. It generated Smithian growth by promoting division of labor, market integration, and intensification of established techniques but could not lastingly overcome Malthusian constraints.

  The differences between these two schematic scenarios are relative, not absolute. Innovation did occur in China, and the societies of early modern Europe labored under the burden of inherited elite privilege and rampant corruption. This comparison is meant to show that certain traits were likely to be more strongly associated with enduring polycentrism than with imperial hegemony, and vice versa. As I argue in this chapter and in chapters 11 and 12, the empirical record broadly supports this impression of variance in developmental dynamics in the aggregate and over the long run.

  Figure 10.1 deals in ideal types. Their closest real-life approximations were late medieval and early modern Europe on the one hand and long stretches of Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing history (as well as the mature Roman empire) on the other. These cases delimit extremes; most others fell in between. Not all very large empires achieved a quasi-monopolistic position: the less they did, the more they strove to enhance their capacities. The later Roman and the Mughal empires belong in this category. China itself underwent phases of increased competitive pressure, most notably under the Song: the self-strengthening measures taken at the time are fully consistent with the predictions of my model. Nor were all state systems effectively competitive: for a long time, many of medieval Europe’s states were so feeble that their wars remained fairly modest affairs, and most conflict took place within their brittle shells.

  Even so, ideal types and extreme cases are useful in offering a template for organizing historical accounts. Most importantly, they encourage us to assess the causal connections between clearly specified base conditions—polycentrism within and without versus imperial hegemony and consolidated social power—and long-term outcomes. Therefore, this part of my book focuses above all on imperial China and post-Roman Latin Europe.5

  I pursue this comparison across three chapters that cover political and cognate institutions, the quest for and exploitation of external resources, and scientific, technological, and valuatory innovation. My approach is at once selective and eclectic. I proceed selectively in that I do not wish to burden my discussion with comprehensive overviews of competing explanations but ask instead how features that other scholars deem to have made a meaningful contribution to the (Second) Great Divergence are linked to Europe’s signature inter- and intrastate fragmentation of power. I do so by focusing on those parts of Europe that were most intimately associated with this process—Latin Europe in general, northwestern Europe more specifically, and, most of all, England—and by moving in time from foundational developments in the Middle Ages to more concrete and recent features such as early modern mercantilism. Throughout, I rely on traditional Old World empires as a foil, most notably imperial China, to put the specific dynamics of European polycentrism in context.6

  But I am also eclectic in my deliberate agnosticism: this is not yet another attempt to critique the many conflicting accounts of the underpinnings of the (Second) Great Divergence and to judge their relative merits. Taking sides in any way would undermine my approach by opening it up to charges of cherry-picking only those theories that can meaningfully be connected to the First Great Divergence. I must cast my net as widely as possible: accordingly, reference to any particular theory should not be construed as an endorsement. The more that existing explanations can be shown critically to depend on Europe’s enduring polycentrism, the more firmly this nexus will be substantiated.

  THE LONG MARCH OF THE INSTITUTIONS

  Eric Jones famously claimed that the European state system “is as crucial to understanding long-run economic development as it is to explaining the pattern of the industrial world that emerged in the nineteenth century.” Yet the precise linkages can prove elusive. Peer Vries, to whom we owe the most detailed critiques of scholarship on the (Second) Great Divergence, defines the problem well: “Those who think there was something like a Western state or a Western state-system that caused the Western economic démarrage must take up the challenge of how exactly to connect political power and steam power.” If we regard steam power as emblematic of modernity, this does indeed take us to the heart of the matter. But this is not merely about the state: polycentrism more generally and the fragmentation of social power are the core issues, as is the need to connect developmental outcomes to institutional evolution.7

  If the onset of the industrial age is our destination, this chapter cannot stop before we reach the early 1800s. But where to start? How far back in time do we need to go? The fall of the Roman empire in the west and the subsequent erosion of its institutions under Germanic rule did not create a blank slate. Cities had long enjoyed considerable autonomy, an ancient tradition that arguably prepared the ground for even stronger localism later on. The church, which had embraced imperial models of hierarchy and administration after its accommodation with the central state, was and remained a supraregional organization, even if it initially lacked the centralizing focus on Rome it would eventually acquire in the High Middle Ages.

  In a more mundane way, even the physical remains of empire produced persistence effects over the very long run. Cities located at Roman road hubs later housed larger populations than did others. More generally, modern road density, medieval and modern urbanism, and even economic activity in the present are measurably correlated with the density of the Roman road network in what used to be Roman Europe.

  Yet these legacies tend to be weak. In some ways, the demise of the empire’s infrastructural inputs mattered more than their endurance. In England, the collapse of Roman urbanism allowed later cities to develop closer to waterways, a proximity that was conducive to commercial development. In France, by contrast, greater urban resilience preserved less favorably located sites, which negatively impacted long-term growth.8

  Overall, however, material residue did not count for much. Institutions were decisive, in terms of both their survival and, especially, their disappearance. In the wake of the empire’s disintegration, centralized state structures faded while the church persisted and became more centralized over time. Eroding state capacity did not merely prevent the return of hegemonic empire, as discussed in Part III. It also laid the foundations for institutional arrangements that subsequently promoted economic activity and helped create political conditions that were conducive to sustainable growth. Let us review some of the most influential features and developments that contributed to this outcome.

  Church and Papacy

  The Christian church was the most powerful and enduring legacy of the Roman empire. As we saw in chapter 5, church leaders supported Germanic rulers by acting as their vassals, councilors, and legitimators. Their services added to state capacity, and rulers’ investiture rights and feudal claims sustained rulers’ authority over these enfeoffed clerics, even as the latter’s abiding loyalty to a separate organization was a potential source of friction. These conflicting commitments were not normally a serious concern as long as the church itself remained regionally decentralized, mirroring therein the growing fracturing of secular power across early medieval Latin Europe.

  This changed once the introduction of the pontiff’s election by cardinals in the eleventh century had pu
t the papacy on a more secure footing. In the twelfth century, centralization enabled popes to arrogate to themselves hugely increased powers, including supreme doctrinal authority, control over canon law as sovereign lawgivers and judges, and the right to confirm archbishops. By 1300, the Roman curia had grown to a thousand mostly celibate clergymen, a body without equal among the secular courts of the period. Papal legates acted as roving agents who overrode the decisions of local bishops.

  The harmonization of canon law—which among many other topics also covered wills and contracts—had repercussions far beyond the clerical sphere: by shaping wide-ranging socioeconomic interactions, it bolstered the church’s influence in secular affairs. Investiture agreements with the kings of France and England and the German emperor in the early twelfth century not only affirmed the existence of separate spheres of authority but effectively positioned the pope as an equal partner of the major rulers of Latin Europe.9

  Roman emperors had been able to summon several hundred bishops to their councils: around 300 for the very first one, at Nicaea in 325, and more than 500 at Chalcedon in 451. While Byzantine emperors continued this practice, in Latin Europe, synods and councils gathered much smaller numbers of church leaders in regional circuits. Only with the First Lateran Council of 1123, convened by Pope Callistus II in Rome, did the Catholic Church match earlier imperial traditions: several hundred bishops and an even larger number of abbots from all over Latin Europe followed the pontifical call. The Fourth Lateran of 1215, a particularly grand affair, attracted some 1,400 clerical leaders alongside representatives of several kings and Italian cities. Not only did the pope ensure attendance: the resultant canons, which covered a wide range of issues, were disseminated all over Europe.10

  The church thus became Europe’s only functioning international organization. Its reach benefited from its vast infrastructure and regularized communications system, rooted in the ubiquity of local churches and steadily expanding, thanks to the conversion of Europe’s northern and central-eastern peripheries. Monastic establishments recorded explosive growth: by 1200, some 2,000 monasteries existed in France, the Low Countries, Germany, and Northern Italy, three times as many as there had been just two centuries earlier.11

  Drawing on this immense network of followers, popes targeted foreign and domestic opponents in concert with secular rulers. At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade, and half a century later Eugene II convinced the French king and the German emperor to launch the Second. Innocent III secured Venetian support for the Fourth Crusade and also got the Fifth off the ground. In 1209, the same pope, in concert with the French king, helped instigate a crusade against reformist Cathars, and in 1420 Martin V authorized a crusade against the dissident Hussites of Bohemia. Announcing crusades was not merely a formal papal prerogative: secular rulers generally lacked the capacity to coordinate resources and operations on this scale. Much the same was true of the inquisition, another innovation of the medieval papacy.

  By the same token, papal authority could just as readily be employed against the secular establishment, most famously when Pope Gregory VII capitalized on aristocratic resistance to the German emperor Henry IV to humble him at Canossa in 1077, and again when in 1245 Innocent IV convened some 250 bishops and other principals in Lyon to declare the Roman/German emperor Frederick II excommunicated and deposed.12

  Such spectacles were without parallel elsewhere in the world. Papal might amplified the dispersion of social power in medieval Latin Europe. Intersecting with royal claims to authority, it forced secular rulers into compromises not only with the church itself but also with other constituencies from nobles to cities and other communal bodies that might otherwise enter into alliances with the religious leadership. However much the church contributed to cultural integration within Europe—and I return to this in the epilogue—this was outweighed by its role as a driver of the multifarious polycentric fragmentation that shaped institutional development.13

  In the end, of course, church power itself proved vulnerable to the same trend. The papacy was never in a position to construct an imperial polity: it influenced, checked, and balanced but did not rule, at least not beyond Rome’s own hinterland. Increasingly, it became a victim of its own success, as growing benefits from administrative and financial opportunities, centered on Italy, invited criticism and dissent.

  The Great Schism of the thirteenth century temporarily brought the papacy under French domination and reduced its revenue and control over appointments. In the following centuries, the growth of the vernacular revived regional divisions within the church that posed challenges to the increasing centralization and intrusiveness of the papal network. Its eventual fracturing by reformation movements was in no small measure made possible by the political fragmentation of Latin Europe that the church had effectively helped sustain.14

  Councils and Estates

  The huge papal councils that commenced in the High Middle Ages were merely the most dramatic instantiation of a deeply entrenched tradition of collaborative and consultative decision-making within the church. Any synod required consensus to pass resolutions. Bishops had traditionally been elected by the local clergy of their dioceses. Growing royal influence in this process was stemmed by charging the canons of the episcopal cathedrals with selecting their bishops. It was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that papal control was imposed and shared with secular rulers.

  Even as the fortunes of collective choice among the clergy waxed and waned, secular deliberative traditions that were not rooted in Roman precedent proved highly resilient and gathered strength. Perpetuating customs that were typical of the small-scale face-to-face societies of northern Europe, the Germanic successor regimes generally featured political and judicial assemblies. These bodies operated on different scales. On specific occasions, rulers convened mixed councils of bishops, counts, and assorted noblemen to debate and make decisions regarding war and political disputes as well as legal affairs. In less-rarified settings, local assemblies, variously composed of notables or even all free men, tended to focus on conflict resolution. These gatherings did not reflect continuity of earlier Roman practice, which had not survived urban collapse: “an importation from the North,” they “represented in almost all respects a break with the Roman past.”15

  As a matter of fact, assemblies were at their strongest where Roman traditions were weak or nonexistent. Under the Visigoths, royal councils played only a minor role, and Lombard rulers in Italy found it easy to control them. The Frankish placitum generale convened powerful aristocrats who needed to be carefully managed by their kings to broker consent.

  In Anglo-Saxon England, both rulers and elites keenly participated in deliberative gatherings. Emphasis was put on collective decision-making: resolutions were passed by the “king and his witan,” the “wise men” who upon England’s political unification in the tenth century came to be understood as representatives of the entire realm. Second-tier assemblies that drew in participants from well beyond elite circles were held at the level of the individual shires, and lesser ones in their subdivisions. I return to this tradition below. Norwegian and Swedish kings faced unrulier assemblies, and at the extreme end of the spectrum, in Iceland, an island-wide supreme deliberative and legislative assembly—the Althing—made kings altogether redundant.16

  In continental Europe, as post-Carolingian rulers found themselves progressively constrained by the effective autonomy of formally subordinate secular and clerical powerholders, the consent of their principal vassals eclipsed mere consultation. Nobles increasingly entered sworn agreements to monitor their rulers’ conduct and to withhold support if they failed to honor their obligations. Wherever royal power declined, these arrangements not only imposed significant controls on rulership but also laid the foundations for the later formalized dualism of kings and estates.17

  Thus, the grand councils convened by kings evolved into more broadly based meetings of the “estates.�
�� Rulers of the High Middle Ages, faced with growing fiscal pressures to fund war, expanded the scope of these gatherings beyond clergy and nobles by admitting representatives of cities and other types of communities. Members of the gentry were included in England and France, and agents of castles and certain village communities in Spain. In Flanders, cities came to dominate meetings and eventually even displaced lesser nobles.

  Meetings became structured into chambers and curias that represented differed orders, bringing together personally entitled participants such as lords and representatives of larger groups, such as the English Commons. On these occasions, rulers and the estates came to jointly represent the state and exercise power. Within the humongous German empire, the multiplicity of hierarchies eventually gave rise to two types of estate gatherings, one for individual principalities and one for the empire as a whole.18

  This marked the beginnings of the parliamentary tradition: no longer mere royal councils, these more inclusive and independent bodies exercised greater power by negotiating and authorizing taxation. Gatherings of magnates, bishops, and elected representatives of cities commenced in Leon in the late twelfth century. This practice soon spread across the Iberian peninsula and to Sicily. France convened the first kingdom-wide assembly in 1302, after regional conventions had already begun a century earlier. The English parliament, established in the thirteenth century, came to meet with considerable regularity. On the continent, the autonomy of cities was of critical importance in widening the base of powerholders who needed to be heard. In England, the boroughs played that role.19

  Yet even as participation broadened, aristocratic assertion of liberty remained a crucial driving force. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century charters such as the English Magna Carta, the Hungarian Golden Bull, the Unions of Aragon and Valencia in Spain, and the Pact of Koszyce in Poland compelled rulers to recognize rights and to formally seek consent for royal initiatives.20