INTRODUCTION

Today we take the state for granted. We grumble about its demands; we complain that it is encroaching more and more on what used to be our private concerns, but we can hardly envisage life without it.

With these words, the American historian Joseph Strayer draws our attention to one of the most fundamental changes in the Western world — and, by implication, also the rest of the world — the formation of the state, which he dates to between 1100 and 1600, with the thirteenth century as a particularly crucial period. Although there can hardly be any doubt about the importance of Strayer’s obser­vation, both the chronology and the character of European state formation have been subject to extensive debate.

What do we mean by the term state? The definition of a state in con­temporary international law is based on the Treaty of Montevideo of 1933: a state must have a permanent population, well-defined borders, a government and a capacity to honour international obligations. By contrast, there are no demands regarding the quality of government, internal sovereignty, impersonal bureaucracy, etc., which play a major part in the discussion of the origins of the state and of European state formation in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The borders of many of the new states were the result of the divisions of territories between colonial powers, without consideration of lin­guistic and cultural homogeneity. Despite — or rather because of — the arbitrary character of these borders, the United Nations and other international bodies insist on their permanence, fearing that concessions on this point would endanger the whole system.²

If we turn to the scholarly literature, we find widely different uses of the term.

Strayer’s book summarizes the thought of a school of medievalists in Britain and the USA reaching back to the early twentieth century, a school that had rejected the picture of the dark Middle Ages current in the Renaissance and the Enlight­enment as well as the Romantic view of the exotic Middle Ages often to be found in the nineteenth century.⁵ The Middle Ages were the period when the European state was formed, not only in the sense that the modern division of the continent into separate political units took place at the time but also that the origins of their basic institutions can be traced back to this period. Although mostly dealing with individual states, these scholars had a stronger focus on the institutional aspect and regarded the development of law and administration as an attempt to solve the practical problems of government and the distribution of power. Thus, the Middle Ages laid the foundation for the modern state, far more so than classical antiquity or even the Renaissance had.

A reaction against this interpretation began in the 1970s.⁹ Interest turned towards social and cultural history and the history of the common people, women, the poor and marginal, history from below rather than above. The trend can easily be illustrated by the space allotted to political history compared to other fields in general overviews, such as The New Oxford History of England and, somewhat less, The New Cambridge Medieval History, compared to their predecessors. The difference between the past and the present was more strongly emphasized and a negative view of the state became prominent. There has been a renaissance for early med­ieval history, which has often appeared in a more positive light: pre-state society was also able to solve conflicts; the introduction of public justice and royal gov­ernment were more in the interest of the elites than the common people.

These tendencies were partly anticipated by previous French and German tra­ditions. The French Annales School originally had a strong focus on social history. Thus, the state and even more traditional political history have a subordinate place in Fernand Braudel’s monumental La Mediterranee (1949) and local studies on social and economic history largely replaced political history during the following period. Later, the history of mentality resulted in a number of important studies dealing with social ideas, political behaviour and royal ideology.¹¹ However, this school tended to emphasize the similarity rather than the difference between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, referring to the whole period until the French Revolution as the Old Regime (l'ancien regime). Moreover, the increasing impor­tance of social history as a result of the influence of the Annales School and Marxism has led to a stronger focus on the social consequences — often the nega­tive ones — of the development of the state. Both traditions have been influenced by social anthropology and have in turn influenced international scholarship, including the English-speaking world.¹²

German historiography for a long time had a strong focus on the imperial power in the period until the thirteenth century, in contrast to the decline and dissolution in the following period, thus, on the rise and decline of the state. More recently, a new perspective has been introduced, focusing on personal relationships rather than institutions and questioning the idea of state building under the Ottonians and their successors.¹³ To some extent, this perspective was anticipated in the inter-war period by Theodor Mayer’s ‘Personenverbandstaat’ and Otto Brunner’s ‘Herr- schaft’,¹⁴ as well as by Percy Ernst Schramm’s studies of the rituals of rulership.¹⁵ There is still a strong emphasis on cultural factors, political thought as well as symbols and rituals.¹⁶ Regarding the use of the term ‘state’ for the medieval period, there has been some uneasiness among German and Austrian scholars, as illustrated by the big volume of papers from a conference in Vienna in 2007 about the early medieval state.¹⁷

Politically, the development of the European Union has questioned the idea of the national state as the logical conclusion to a development going back to the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Whereas the importance of the European state has been reduced after 1945, the opposite is the case with the rest of the world, where the number of states increased from 51 to 193 during the post-war period and some kind of a national state for the first time in history became the normal political organization all over the world. This development formed the background of Charles Tilly’s project on European state formation. When and why did the state become the normal poli­tical unit in Europe and how could this development be used as a model for the new states in other parts of the world?¹⁹ In practice, this latter aim proved difficult to achieve and the main importance of Tilly’s and his collaborators’ work lies in their interpretation of the European development.

Tilly’s understanding of European state formation is succinctly expressed in the statement ‘War made the state and vice versa.’²⁰ States were formed through military competition, in particular through the military revolution in the early modern period: the formation of large armies and navies, equipped with more advanced weapons, and large and complex fortifications, led to higher taxation, increased bureaucracy and increased interference from the states in the lives of their subjects. A logical consequence of this emphasis was to date the formation of the state to the early modern period; there were no real states in the Middle Ages. Tilly here continues the tradition from German scholars like Otto Hintze and Norbert Elias, who in different ways regarded the European state as an epochal novelty.²¹

Tilly later developed his theories in a separate monograph, covering the period 990—1990.²² Here he introduces the distinction between coercion and capital, the former characterizing agrarian states, the latter urban ones, although the most suc­cessful states are combinations of the two.

From a historical point of view, tracing the ancestry of the state back to the early Middle Ages is relevant whether we believe in its transformation by the European Union or not. Recent developments have made us more aware of the various forms a state could take and the difference between the classical national state and its earlier predecessors. Not only the Holy Roman Empire but also a number of other units form a reminder of this. The national state is no longer the obvious political unit it was when Strayer wrote 50 years ago. Europe no longer has the central place it then had in historical research and teaching. Concerning the former, however, a comparison with the rest of the world increases the importance of the political division of Europe and its origins — there is no other example of an area of similar size being divided in this way. Concerning the latter, a history of Europe over a period of a thousand years must inevitably imply some comparison with other parts of the world, despite the obvious difficulty in gaining sufficient knowledge of these areas. Fortunately, a number of works have appeared recently which make comparison easier.

Geographically, the present book is confined to Western Christendom, i.e. the part of the continent that adhered to Roman Catholicism in the Middle Ages and was later divided between this religious adherence and that of Protestantism. ‘Europe’ is simply a short and convenient, although not quite correct term for this unit. As the focus will be on common features or at least variations within a common culture, of which religion is an important expression, the European Continent in a strictly geographical sense, covering the whole area west of the Ural, would be too large and complex to handle over nearly a thousand years.

During this long period, we are dealing with great changes, which, however, would seem to be minor compared to the ones that took place between 1789 and today. In 650, the population of Europe is estimated at around 11 million, which increased to around 130—40 million in 1750. In 2014, it was 520 million.²⁹ In the late eighteenth century, there was hardly any industry according to modern defi­nitions of the term; with the exception of a few, rather primitive machines, all work was carried out by the muscular force of humans or animals. Land transport could not be faster than a horse could run and sea transport, although faster, was limited by the strength and directions of winds and streams. The average life expectancy was around 30 years, against 70—80 today in the Western world; this of course mainly because of the high child mortality; people surviving until adulthood might expect a further 20—40 years, largely depending on social status. Politically, there was no democracy in the modern sense. The existing states were ruled either by absolute kings or by small elites controlling the representative institutions. The state provided only very few of the services we expect from it today, such as edu­cation, health care, transport and control of the safety and welfare of its inhabitants. The state system itself has also changed significantly during the last 200 years, from more than 400 units in 1789 to only 25 after 1870, followed by new increases in 1918—20 and in the period after 1989. Finally, the sovereign European state, whose origins have been traced to various dates between the thirteenth century and 1648, has had its independence reduced as the result of the European Union and may possibly, at some point in the future, be replaced by the United States of Europe.

Despite these changes, there is much to suggest that the medieval and early modern period were crucial to the development of the state we know today. First, there is more continuity in the European state system than it would immediately seem, in a way that makes the continent unique or almost unique in a global context. Second, existing differences between various European countries can to some extent be traced back to the period before 1789. And third, despite the immediate impression of the period 843—1789 as static compared to the following one, important changes took place, which largely serve to explain what happened later. While Western Christendom in the mid-ninth century was a marginal area compared to the great civilizations in the Mediterranean (the Arab Empire), India and China, Europe in 1789 had for a long time dominated the Baltic and Medi­terranean Seas, had taken possession of most of America and established colonies in Asia (mainly India), Africa and Oceania. Internally, military technology, bureau­cracy, finance and political thought and debate had reached a level of complexity and sophistication far beyond what existed in the ninth century. Thus, the history of European state formation during this period forms an important part of the explanation of the dominance of European or more correctly Western civilization (including the USA) which has characterized the last two centuries, although we may now be approaching its end.

It may be objected to this time limit that it omits the period when the greatest changes in the European state system took place and when European superiority over the rest of the world was firmly established. Apart from practical considera­tions — length and the author’s greater knowledge of the earlier period — the period before 1800 has the advantage of presenting Europe at a stage before its superiority became obvious and before the breakthrough of modern industrialism and mass democracy. There can be no doubt about the importance of the latter period for European dominance, but it is a greater challenge to trace the trends in this direc­tion in the earlier period.

The main aim of the following is to discuss the European state as a phenom­enon, not the individual states. The book will therefore deal briefly with many great events that have played an important part in historical literature. Instead, it will focus on the general patterns of the internal development of the European state, building on the tradition of bureaucratic and administrative history as well as ideological and cultural features. Of course, it will also be necessary to deal speci­fically with various individual states, which makes it difficult to avoid that some of the Great Powers, notably England and France, receive particular attention. These countries also have the advantage of illustrating the two main types of government: constitutionalism and absolutism. The attempt at tracing the characteristic features of the European state logically leads to a comparison with political organizations in other parts of the world. Here the contrast between European division and the great empires, notably China, becomes an important issue. Why was Europe divi­ded and what were the consequences of this division? This in turn leads to a dis­cussion of the reasons for the European dominance of the rest of the world which seems to have been well under way in the late eighteenth century.

Second, the book will be less exclusively focused on administrative and bureaucratic history than many previous accounts, including intellectual history, courtly culture and the difference between absolutist and constitutional govern­ment. It will also include state-like organizations like the Church and the city, both of which were of crucial importance for the development of the European state system. Finally, without neglecting the importance of warfare for state formation, it will maintain that this factor worked in a different way from the formation of the great empires; it was more important for internal development than for the for­mation of territories. By contrast, the latter was to a considerable extent the result of legal and ideological factors: the rise of dynasties.

The following discussion will be divided into three main sections, based on themes rather than chronology. The first section (Chapter 1) will focus on the division of Europe into separate states and the importance of war and military competition in this. The second (Chapters 2 and 3) deals with the main features of the internal develop­ment of the European state, while the final section (Chapters 4, 5, 6) takes its point of departure in the changes introduced in the early sixteenth century: the Renaissance, the Reformation and the European expansion to other parts of the world. The focus will then be on the difference between the various states, notably between absolutist and constitutional ones, and the reasons for this difference. This section will mainly focus on the early modern period, although some of the differences will be traced back to the Middle Ages.

Notes

1 Strayer, On the Medieval Origins, p. 3.

2 0sterud, ‘State Formation’.

3 For example, Service, Primitive Social Organization and Origins of State and Civilization; Fried, The Evolution of Political Society and Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 265—92.

4 See e.g. the discussions between Johannes Fried and Hans-Werner Goetz about the Carolingian state and between Susan Reynolds and Rees Davies about the use of the term for the Middle Ages as a whole: Fried, ‘Der karolingische Herrschaftsverband’ and ‘Gens und regnum’; Goetz, ‘Zum politischen Denken’, pp. 113—16, 170—3 and 183—9; Reynolds, ‘The Historiography’ and ‘There Were States’; Davies, ‘The Medieval State’. Whereas the former discussion seems to be about the character of the Carolingian Empire, the latter is mainly about terminology, without any profound difference of opinion about the historical reality.

5 Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages, pp. 48—78, 245—86, 337—70, with references to scho­lars like F.W. Maitland, Charles Homer Haskins, R.W. Southern and, of course, Strayer.

6 Ibid., pp. 277—83.

7 Southern, Medieval Humanism, pp. 206—33, on Henry I’s government and Western Society and the Church, pp. 100—33, on the development of papal government.

8 Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.

9 Iggers, New Directions; Freedman and Spiegel, ‘Medievalisms Old and New’.

10 Cf., in particular, Foucault’s studies on justice, opening with the destruction of Damien’s body in the eighteenth century and continuing with the total control of the soul in contemporary justice in Surveiller et punir. However, I tend to share Pinker’s surprise at the paradox that the present age, which, according to a number of criteria, represents a clear progress compared to earlier periods, has been subject to such criticism by a number of intellectuals; see Pinker, Enlightenment Now, pp. 395—409.

11 For example, Duby, Les trois ordres; Le Goff, Saint Louis.

Burke, History and Social Theory and Varieties of Cultural History; Geary, ‘Living with Conflicts’, and Koziol, ‘Begging Pardon and Favour’. Bartlett, in England 1075—1225, pays considerably more attention to factions, personal alliances and political culture than does traditional constitutional historiography.

Althoff, Freunde, Verwandte und Getreue: Kaiser Otto III; Spielregeln; Keller, Zwischen Regionaler Begrenzung; Reuter, Germany.

Mayer, ‘Die Ausbildung’, and Brunner, Land und Herrschaft.

Schramm, ‘Die Kronung in Deutschland’; Der Konig von Frankreich; Geschichte des eng­lischen Konigtums, etc.

Skinner, The Foundations and Visions of Politics, vols II, III; Blanning, Culture of Power and Pursuit of Glory; Althoff, Die Macht der Rituale, cf. also Buc, The Dangers of Ritual. For a general discussion of the new trends, not confined to the question of the state, see Freedman and Spiegel, ‘Medievalisms Old and New’.

Pohl and Wieser, Der frühmittelalterliche Staat, where the term ‘Staatlichkeit’ frequently occurs, although there are also a number of examples of ‘Staat’. Nevertheless, ‘Staat’ in German is used in a more restricted sense than English ‘state’, as pointed out by Jussen, ‘The King’s Two Bodies Today’, p. 107.

For example, Scales, The Shaping; Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, pp. 655—86.

Tilly, ‘Reflections’.

Tilly, Coercion, p. 67.

Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft; Hintze, Staat und Verfassung; Elias, Zivilisation, vol. II, pp. 123-311.

Tilly, Coercion.

Anderson, Passages and Lineages form examples of this interpretation.

Downing, The Military Revolution; Tallett, War and Society; Ertman, The Birth of Leviathan; Hui, War and State Formation; Nexon, The Struggle for Power; Hoffman, Why Did Europe? Spruyt, The Sovereign State.

Fukuyama, Origins, pp. 229-89, 402-57.

Mann, The Sources of Social Power, pp. 416-49.

Tilly, The Formation; Hui, War and State Formation; Morris, War; Hoffman, Why Did Europe?

The numbers are based on statistics for the whole of Europe, with deduction of the countries outside Western Christendom, notably Russia. Russia was very sparsely populated in 1750; its total population was probably less than that of France, which is estimated at 20 million. This and a little more for the other non-western countries thus have to be deducted from the 163 million inhabitants of Europe as a whole.