The king and the aristocracy
In his account of the deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, Otto of Freising includes a description of Hungary in connection with Frederick’s planned expedition against this country.8 The Hungarians are barbarians, not because they lack a king or an organized government, but because their country differs from Germany and other ‘civilized’ feudal countries by the unlimited power of the king.
The king has full command over the army; he has full jurisdiction over the whole country, including the right to torture and execute counts or local leaders, even for small offences. Such men are arrested by the king’s subordinate servants, even when they are surrounded by their own retainers. No judgement by equals exists; the king’s will is law. There is no private jurisdiction and no privileges of mint or tolls, and the king’s local representatives are only entitled to one-third of the royal revenues. Otto’s description must be interpreted in light of his understanding of what constitutes the right way of organizing society and is therefore not an objective account of Hungarian society.9However, it does illustrate the strongly aristocratic German society at the time and the difference between what we may call the central zone of feudal Europe and the new kingdoms in the periphery, with a less well-defined aristocracy, fewer towns and castles and, in some respects, a stronger monarchy. Eventually, the new kingdoms developed in the same direction as the old ones. They adapted the military technology of heavy cavalry and castles and developed a more exclusive aristocracy, which limited the king’s power.
As depicted by Otto, Hungary thus illustrates what had happened in Western Europe in the previous period. In principle, the Merovingians and the Carolingians had a stronger position compared to the aristocracy than their successors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although, in practice, they were far from the dictatorship Otto depicts.
In Germany, the great wealth of the Ottonians in the form of landed estates was greatly reduced under the later Staufen; under Frederick II, it may have been less than those of the king of Denmark.10 In the later Middle Ages, there was a reduction of the emperor’s revenues from 100,000 guilders per annum in the early fourteenth century to around 13,000 in the early fifteenth.11 Similar calculations have been made for many other countries, for instance, in Scandinavia and East Central Europe. The problem here, however, is that we know very little about royal revenues in the earliest period and that attempts to reconstruct them on the basis of later ones may easily lead to exaggeration. It seems that in many cases the king owned more land in the early Middle Ages than later, but the loss of this may often have been compensated by other kinds of income, such as taxes.12The following strengthening of royal power did not mean a return to earlier conditions but the development of a stronger state based on a more or less successful cooperation between the king and the aristocracy. Neither the change in military organization and technology nor the development of royal courts of law meant a defeat for the latter. On the contrary, state formation under the king’s leadership meant that the aristocracy, i.e., a de facto social elite, was transformed into a formally defined nobility, distinct from the rest of the population by hereditary privileges, coats of arms and various other symbols. What characterized European state formation in contrast to other parts of the world, at least until the age of the French Revolution, was the cooperation between the king and this nobility.13 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were noble families in England able to trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest — French names are still a sign of distinction — and similar examples occur in other countries, although for demographic as well as social reasons, the likelihood of such a long ancestry is not very great.
The class itself, however, shows great continuity. Even at the time of the First World War, nobles dominated the diplomatic service and higher military ranks in many countries. The nobles adapted to new circumstances. They changed their horses and heavy armour for uniforms with epaulettes and distinctions and commanded large armies instead of fighting in person. Their castles were replaced by elegant country houses and their manners became more peaceful and refined.The importance of the nobility is a permanent feature of the European state until the period of the French Revolution and to a considerable extent even later. Turning to the early Middle Ages, we find a sliding transition between kingdoms and smaller units, governed by local lords. As we have seen, the latter developed into around 400 largely independent principalities in Germany, while they had to submit to the king in countries like France and Spain.
The concept of feudalism forms a natural point of departure for a discussion of this development. Traditionally, this concept was used to define the society of Europe north of the Alps and west of the Rhine,14 whereas the rest of the Continent, with some exceptions, was not or only to a limited extent dominated by feudal institutions. The essential feature of feudalism was that the distinction between private property and political power was blurred. The king gave land to his subordinates in the form of fiefs,15 not as permanent gifts, but to hold them from him in return for various services, notably military service. In addition, such a grant might also include the rights of jurisdiction, taxation and other privileges. In a completely feudalized society, governmental power and private ownership would therefore coincide, although both would in principle be limited by the duties to the king or superior lord of the area and his right to reclaim the territory if he found his vassal’s behaviour unsatisfactory. Although fiefs were originally given for a limited period of time, maximum the lifetime of the recipient, they eventually became hereditary; which meant that they could normally only be reclaimed in the absence of legitimate heirs.
In practice, this meant that the vassal was in a stronger position than the lord, a development favoured by the contemporary military technology: the vassal would rule his fief from a castle, which was difficult to conquer. In addition to the changes in military technology, the decline of the Carolingian Empire has been regarded as an important factor in the development of feudalism: the competing kings had to give away large parts of their lands in order to gain support in their internal wars.Since the 1970s, this picture of feudalism has been subject to a series of attacks. The chronology of the process has been revised, notably by French scholars who point to the eleventh century as the crucial period, while attaching little importance to the legal aspect.16 In England, Susan Reynolds has rejected the idea that government and private property became blurred in the early Middle Ages and that vassals owed services to their lords in return for receiving land.17 By contrast, all inhabitants in the country owed obedience to the king as the ruler of the country, although in periods these duties might have little importance in practice. The legal concepts of the fief and vassalage were developed by lawyers in the thirteenth century.
These attacks on the traditional concept have led to more nuances and have somewhat reduced the sharp distinction between a feudal and a non-feudal zone of Europe but have not led to general rejection of the idea of feudalism.18 A number of feudal contracts have been preserved from Southern France in which a castellan takes his land or castles as a fief from his lord and declares his loyalty to him in return. In most cases, the land is not a gift from the lord but more often the vassal’s own property (allod) which is converted to a fief. Although this would seem to favour the lord, the area, which was completely outside royal control until the early thirteenth century, was in practice dominated by the castellans, whereas the greater lords, such as the Count of Toulouse, had their power reduced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.19 There is also plenty of evidence of fiefs and vassals in Germany, although not all the land consisted of fiefs.20 In England, the lawyers’ idea of all land in the country originally having belonged to the king may have some basis in William the Conqueror’s grants to his followers, but is essentially a legal fiction.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it served to legitimate the king’s rights to aid from his tenants-in-chief, to act as guardian for the heir during his minority and to decide over the marriage of female heirs, but otherwise, land was privately owned and there was a clear distinction between ownership of land and governmental functions.The following discussion will deal with the main internal changes that took place in the European kingdoms from the early Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, changes which may be characterized by the term ‘state formation’. The obvious starting-point for this discussion is the king. State formation largely means extended power of the king, either in person or as an institution. On the other hand, we should not imagine the process as the result of a deliberate attempt by kings over the centuries to create the organization we find in the eighteenth century. Kings and other actors at the time acted to achieve immediate aims but the result of these actions were often unforeseen and might lead to major changes. In hindsight, we can characterize state formation as the building of institutions enabling the king to control his country and the forging of alliances with its leading inhabitants, assuring their loyalty to this project. As we have seen, European states were not created through a continuous struggle between smaller power-holders in which the strongest won but by a combination of pressure from the centre and alliances with local authorities. The king was both part of the feudal aristocracy and its superior. He had similar rights over his vassals as other lords, such as the right to financial aid when marrying his daughter, but he was also qualitatively different from them, for instance, in being anointed, having judicial power over all his subjects and the right to issue coinage.21 He had to show his utility by solving conflicts between his subjects, make them his servants and allies and defend the realm against external enemies.
In practice, most kings in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had direct control of only a part of their countries; large parts were in most respects governed by nobles. As we have seen, the king of France in the thirteenth century managed to extend the territory under his direct control greatly, which then also had consequences for the rest, whose rulers to a greater extent had to respect the king. However, European state formation did not consist in the king expanding his power until the whole country was under his direct control. On the contrary, it largely consisted in engaging the local rulers, the nobles, in the government of the realm.Returning to Otto’s barbarians, let us address the question of the new kingdoms of Europe, formed in the tenth and eleventh centuries. In most of them, the formation of the kingdom seems to have coincided with the introduction of Christianity.22 This clearly applies to the three kingdoms in East Central Europe, probably also the Scandinavian ones, although there are some indications that the monarchy may be older in Denmark and Norway. In all of them, however, there is little evidence from the early period. The connection between Christianization and political unification may be due to the fact that the sources become somewhat better from this time on, but the reason is more probably that the Church was an essential factor in state formation. It gave the king both religious legitimacy and an administrative apparatus.
Otto’s observation about the relationship between the king and the aristocracy is clearly correct in the sense that there was no consolidated aristocracy with specific rights and privileges; nor were there any heavy cavalry and castles. There is also evidence of powerful warrior kings, such as Boleslaw I of Poland (995—1025), who fought successfully against the German emperor, and Cnut the Great of Denmark (1016—35), who conquered England and Norway. Immediately before the formation of the kingdoms, both the Scandinavians and the people of East Central Europe had posed a threat to the Christian kingdoms in the west. Some scholars have also concluded that the early monarchy in these countries was strong and then gradually declined with the development of castles and heavy cavalry, which in turn led to the consolidation of the aristocracy. Recent scholarship has been more sceptical of this interpretation. It would immediately seem difficult to imagine a sudden rise of a strong monarchy with full control of the country. At least, it is difficult to believe that one successful conquest would have resulted in permanent control over several generations.
If Otto had written 100—150 years later, he would probably have found Hungarian society more familiar. With some exception for Norway, the new kingdoms had become more similar to the rest of Europe. Whether this meant that they had become feudalized, is disputed, but they had certainly developed a stronger aristocracy and taken over the military technology of the centre. At the same time, they had also been influenced by the new development of European monarchy regarding administration, legislation, public justice, the courtly culture, and so forth. Thus, this chapter will mostly deal with the common features of the two categories of European kingdoms.