Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  Overall, the parliamentary tradition gathered strength during the High and Late Middle Ages up to the fifteenth century, when trends began to diverge among different countries. This medieval growth phase was sustained by elite confidence and communal self-organization and owed much to the fact that negotiation improved rulers’ access to the means of war: the recognition of estates was thus not merely a function of internal relations but was driven by interstate competition.21

  Whether rooted primarily in cities or among the nobility, the resultant “society of estates … was unique to Europe.” Its most important legacies were twofold. For one, it created a template for later separation of powers: while rulers and their court staffs acted as the executive, the estates, even if not yet elevated to legislative bodies, already performed basic functions of later parliaments. For another, this setup facilitated integration by establishing denser social ties between local units: rooted in quasi-familial feudal relations as well as urban (and sometimes also rural) communalism, it prepared the ground for the subsequent assimilation of the many building blocks of society into more cohesive fiscal-military and then national states—a feature that was lacking from conventional tributary empires.22

  In many cases, these integrative processes favored federated structures that reflected and preserved the post-Roman shift toward intense decentralization. Rulers who bargained under conditions of fragmented sovereignty needed to recognize urban communes. Regional estates helped create distinct identities and considerable autonomy that likewise limited central power. The incorporation of bishoprics and monasteries acknowledged them as parties to secular power dynamics but also invited conflict with a centralizing papacy.

  Overall outcomes were marked by structural tensions and ubiquitous compromise: a combination of increasingly formalized dispersion of political power and social integration prevented open-ended fissioning while constraining authoritarian centralization. This uneasy balance gave rise to polities that were highly fragmented yet adequately functional. Representation and consensus played a greater role in sustaining this balance than they did in other political systems, most notably in traditional empires.23

  Communes and Corporations

  The erosion of state capacity that plagued the Germanic successor regimes encouraged communalism. Urban communes were personal, oath-based associations of all or many of the local (male) citizens. They convened in assemblies that collectively chose or validated the appointment of magistrates and generally sought to protect property rights and govern local affairs.

  In Italy, the commune movement took off during the power vacuum of the late eleventh century. Conflict between popes and emperors further weakened distant imperial overlordship and boosted urban ambitions. By the mid-twelfth century, most of the cities of northern Italy were organized as communes that were de facto autonomous in the prosecution of war, the administration of justice, and increasingly also in fiscal matters. A second major cluster developed in northern France and Flanders, linked to Italy by the Rhineland. In a complementary process of defining community rights and obligations, huge numbers of cities across Latin Europe were incorporated by charter, alongside thousands of monasteries and, increasingly, universities.24

  On a smaller scale, merchants and professional groups likewise associated in communal bodies known as guilds. Precedence varied: in Italy, urban communes came first whereas in northwestern Europe, guilds were the first to appear on the scene. The underlying principle was the same: groups of (unrelated) individuals formed corporations that remained in existence even as membership changed over time. Such corporate bodies generally proved adept at developing and adjusting institutions: they combined the flexibility needed to respond to change and to negotiate with other parties—most notably rulers—with a high degree of permanence that fostered economic stability and development. In the aggregate, they helped protect commoners against the powerful. The dissemination of this organizational mode across Latin Europe reduced the unpredictability inherent in doing business abroad, a vital benefit in an environment that was so intensely fragmented.25

  The rise of estates and the communal movement shared one crucial characteristic: they produced bodies such as citizen communes, scholarly establishments, merchant guilds, and councils of nobles and commoners that were, by necessity, relatively democratic in the sense that they involved formalized deliberative and consensus-building interactions. Over the long run, these bodies gave Latin Europe an edge in the development of institutions for impersonal exchange that operated under the rule of law and could be scaled up in response to technological change.26

  Urban Autonomy

  As social power dissipated beyond the ranks of the dukes, counts, bishops, and abbots who had carved up the remaining successor states, numerous urban communes gained effective autonomy. This process was concentrated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and even though it was largely reversed between the Late Middle Ages and the early modern periods—except in Germany, where consolidation was often delayed into the eighteenth century—it was by no means ephemeral: in a sample of 81 cities, autonomous status was on average maintained for 341 years.27

  David Stasavage observes that spatial proximity to the principal fault line of successive Carolingian partitions in the ninth century was a crucial determinant of the incidence of urban autonomy. These divisions first created a narrow strip of territory between France and Germany (dubbed “Lotharingia”) that stretched from the North Sea to the Alps and (as shown in chapter 5, figure 5.5) was subsequently partitioned twice. The Treaty of Meersen in 870 permanently split it between the Frankish and German kingdoms. The closer cities were to that final line of partition, the more likely they were to turn into self-governing city-states and the longer that status endured.

  This zone was thus characterized by precocious political fragmentation. It centered on the Rhine axis that sustained interregional trade. Polycentrism, commercial development, and existing urban infrastructure converged in supporting a rich ecosystem of mercantile cities that fiercely guarded their local institutions and prerogatives. In northern Italy, the subsequent near-collapse of the Frankish imperial order produced similar outcomes.28

  Urban self-governance entailed considerable economic benefits. For a while, politically autonomous cities grew faster than others. The local dominance of commercial interests was advantageous: merchant guilds exercised considerable political power, on occasion even to the extent that only their members were entitled to hold municipal office. Among well-documented autonomous cities before 1300, merchants occupied on average almost three-quarters of the seats on governing councils. For all intents and purposes, in this environment mercantile guilds were in charge.

  From the fourteenth century onward, power frequently came to be shared with craft guilds, an arrangement that broadened the base of governance without altering its character. This fusion of political and economic power protected property rights, upheld commitments within the elite and to the community, and encouraged human capital formation through established training procedures. These inducements in turn attracted trade and fostered innovation.

  It is true that in the long run, both unfettered guild power and scale constraints inherent in urban self-governance became uncompetitive. Within cities, oligarchic structures raised barriers to entry and eventually stifled adaptive change: by the early modern period, the initial growth advantage of politically autonomous cities had been lost.29

  Moreover, as territorial states began to overcome their internal divisions, the medieval balance between princely states, city-states, and city leagues was upended in favor of the largest polities. Yet even as city-states were gradually incorporated into territorial states, their merchant elites were well positioned to participate in administration and obtain state support for colonial and capitalist ventures. Absorption into larger polities did not destroy accumulated capital and established social and political structures, and merchants continued to occupy powerful positions in commercial c
ities. They generally proved adept at using the expanding infrastructure generated by territorial state formation to their advantage.30

  Political consolidation did not merely grant mercantile elements a seat at a larger table. Rich merchants were the main driving force behind Latin Europe’s “systematic policy of capital accumulation derived from an ongoing process of colonization, exploitation, and domination of a subjugated periphery by a core area.” As we will see in chapter 11, it was independent Italian city-states such as Venice and Genoa that pioneered this strategy in the Mediterranean, from where it gradually expanded into and then across the Atlantic to create the vast complex of slavery and plantations that helped fuel Britain’s industrial takeoff.31

  Assemblies and Development

  As we have seen, assemblies had multiple roots: in local gatherings for dispute arbitration, in the much grander meetings of the estates that had grown out of (top-down) royal councils, and in the (bottom-up) communal movement. In practical terms, their operations and thus their influence were constrained by logistics and therefore by geographical scale. The presence and the power of such bodies consequently tended to be inversely correlated with polity size or whatever else determined their catchment area.32

  According to a study of twenty-four countries from 1250 to 1800, statewide assemblies that exercised control over public funding were more likely to exist and met more frequently in more compact polities. The same principle even applied within states: in France, provincial estates that bargained with rulers over taxation convened more often in the kingdom’s smaller provinces. Scale thus appears to have been critical in sustaining representative bodies that exercised tangible power. For example, France, unlike England, might simply have been too large for an active national assembly. When it came to the intensity of political participation, less (territory) was more.33

  Owing to this constraint, city-states were best positioned to develop and maintain powerful representative institutions. During the Late Middle Ages and the early modern period, assemblies that exercised fiscal authority—in terms of approving and collecting taxes and administering spending—were therefore more likely to be found in city-states than in territorial states. Moreover, and again in contrast to most territorial states, merchants were much more strongly represented in the governance of city-states.34

  This favored economic development. Local political autonomy and the presence of an assembly raised a city’s growth rates. In several Western European countries, assembly control over taxation increased growth correlations between cities, which suggests that assemblies favored freer trade.35

  Most important, the combination of representative institutions and commercial bias provided city-states with significant advantages in developing public credit arrangements. When elite groups were small, cohesive, and dominated by the mercantile element, the decisions of assemblies were likely to be aligned with those of creditors. This rendered commitments to repay debt more credible. In territorial states, where assemblies did not meet often enough and included fewer members of the commercial elite, credit formation lagged behind. As a result, autonomous city-states introduced long-term loans much earlier than territorial states did, and up to the seventeenth century enjoyed lower interest rates.36

  This yielded two major benefits for Western Europe. For one, it helped city-states survive longer alongside more populous and gradually centralizing territorial states than would otherwise have been possible. This persistence significantly contributed to European polycentrism in terms of interstate fragmentation and institutional diversity. More specifically, the Dutch United Provinces, a product of the vibrant city-state ecology of the Low Countries, relied on the sale of annuities backed by local revenues to resist their much larger and bullion-rich Habsburg enemy. In so doing, the Dutch not only helped stymie the latter’s aspirations to imperial hegemony but also pioneered a new form of developmental state that fostered higher economic growth.37

  As a second benefit, public debt appeared on the scene earlier than it might otherwise have, if indeed it would have done so at all. It is hardly a coincidence that in all of documented history, only city-states invented public credit, first in the ancient Greek world and then once again in the Middle Ages.

  Given that the credit financing of public expenditures and the financial instruments it spawned played an important role in later economic development, it must count among the key contributions that Europe’s intense political fragmentation (which produced and sustained city-states) and domestic fracturing of power (which allowed merchants to dominate such polities) made to economic modernization. For all we can tell, these innovations were highly unlikely to arise in traditional empires that could cover shortfalls by coercive means and lacked substantive constraints in dealing with creditors’ claims.38

  War and Development

  Several of the features highlighted here—assemblies, bargaining over tax collection, public debt—were intimately bound up with war. War—both within and (increasingly) between states—compelled rulers and other constituencies to cooperate and compromise in multiply fractured environments. Funding was key: intensifying interstate competition coupled with technological change generated demand for larger armies and more and better armaments that required ever-larger expenditures. While the economic recovery of the High Middle Ages provided the necessary means, bargaining mechanisms regulated access to them. As states rebuilt their capacities, they did so in order to meet this challenge. Warfare made England precociously united; it limited fragmentation in Castile, a frontier society facing Muslim polities; and the Hundred Years’ War helped restore royal wealth and power in France.39

  Sustained by the security threats and promise of rewards for aggression that a polycentric state system offered, European belligerence was exacerbated by the pervasive dominance of Germanic-inflected warrior elites that influenced elite preferences over the long run. Thanks to the way society had come to be organized during the post-Roman and post-Carolingian dispersions of power, military culture proved extremely persistent.

  Internal fragmentation of social power was another vital factor: warfare furnished otherwise weakened rulers with an opportunity to mobilize and coordinate the resources of the nobility and the commercial class. The effective fusion of military control and local civilian governance in the knight-and-castle system of the High Middle Ages had turned military institutions into the principal integrative force, which shaped norms, values, and expectations. Religious motivation also boosted belligerence, first in the struggle against heathens within and outside Europe and later between Catholics and Protestants.40

  Endemic warfare, enduring international fragmentation, and the polycentric configuration of social power that sustained a balance among political, military, ideological, and economic forces were thus the main ingredients of early European state formation. Notwithstanding its very considerable costs, warfare is widely regarded as a driver of economic advancement.

  John Hall telescopes centuries of European history into his assertion that “only when long-lasting states were forced by military competition to interact strongly with their civil societies was economic progress possible.” What this means is that states had to be durable in order to permit and benefit from the evolution and accumulation of institutional adaptations and their economic consequences; that they had to be locked into open-ended and inconclusive competition and conflict in order to maintain a focus on performance; and that they had to be constituted in a certain way for rulers to be compelled to engage with civil society through negotiation and compromise in order to obtain the material means for interstate conflict. Only under those conditions did transformative economic development arise.41

  In the next section, as we move on to the early modern period, I review these connections in more depth. For now, one argument that reaches farther back in time shall suffice. Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Bin Wong argue that warfare played a role in the rise of urban manufacturing in Europe. Unlike agriculture, manufact
ure was mobile and could shift behind protective walls. War-rich regions such as Italy and the Low Countries thus experienced a concentration of manufacture in urban settings.

  Mark Dincecco and Massimiliano Onorato develop this “safe harbor” argument more broadly by documenting a positive correlation between exposure to conflict and urban growth between 1000 and 1800. Artisans and entrepreneurs moved to cities, bringing financial and human capital with them. They benefited from fortifications and scale effects, and even though the concentration of resources turned cities into more attractive targets, the relative rarity of sackings, the mobility of urban capital, and common regeneration after wars compensated for this risk. Moreover, cities were not merely physically safer. They also offered personal freedoms and protection from predation by the powerful. Urban residents benefited from local governance and the privileges rulers granted as they bargained for funds for war.

  Urban density lowered exchange costs and fostered division of labor and thick labor markets, while higher real wages provided incentives for technological innovation and human capital formation and, more specifically, for the substitution of capital for labor. For all these reasons, endemic warfare made Europe not only more urban but also more developed than it might otherwise have been.42

  England, by contrast, followed a different path: for the most part—and unlike Scotland—spared similarly intense conflict, rural manufacture thrived and most cities long remained relatively small. As we shall see, England relied on other drivers of industrial development that were however equally firmly grounded in violent competition.43

  Fragmentation and Development

  The beneficial effects of political multipolarity took many forms. In the High and Late Middle Ages, more strongly fragmented regions—the Low Countries, Germany, and northern Italy—experienced higher rates of urban growth and greater book production than others. More generally, Latin Europe’s competitive state system offered exit options to minorities, dissidents, and material and human capital.44