Kemper Boyd posted:For one, feudalism (in European countries with feudalism) doesn't work like that. The lord of the domain can't call up the peasants for war, because fighting that war is his job. Especially in feudal countries with serfdom. This really very much depends on time and place.
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Feb 24, 2015 18:50
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For those that like to dig around in primary sources, the findings of a project called 'The soldier in medieval England' - http://www.icmacentre.ac.uk/soldier/database/index.php with muster rolls and a lot of other poo poo from 1369-1453.
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Feb 25, 2015 00:50
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Why does everyone always forget the poor ministerials?
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Feb 25, 2015 16:25
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deadking posted:Because technical unfree status doesn't make you a bona fide non-elite! Ministerials are both cool and integral to understanding medieval Germany.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:32
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Jewcoon posted:So what did happen? Well, one point: if you think the government is centralising, what makes you think it's the local nobles who are going to be the ones making GBS threads on peasant revolts? In fairness, you'd have to start getting geographically specific. England and France are obviously much more centralised than Germany (at least outside of Prussia) - and as with everything, it's all very different in Italy. I would also beware of tendencies to always set up nobility in opposition to peasantry. In Italy in particular this is a terrible fit - the popoli in Italian cities are usually reliant on the support of noble houses, as are noble factions who rely on their patrimony external to the city. The Guelf and Ghibbeline distinction, likewise, knows no real class distinction. You also always have to be thinking about your excluded middle - burghers, monks, ministerials. What are these people doing in this story?
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Feb 27, 2015 11:12
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I remember reading somewhere that the majority were probably Muslim in practice, but yes, nominally they were Christians. The Kingdom of Jerusalem also kind of used it as a blanket term for indigenous Syrians in their service. Medieval people were a bit fuzzy about concepts like race or nationality (they didn't really exist) so this poo poo happens all over the place.
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Apr 22, 2015 22:57
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Tomn posted:So, question about the medieval to early modern era: Taxes. How were they assessed, and how were they paid? If you were a peasant, how would you go about figuring out how much tax you have to pay, and what's the procedure for paying them? Would much the same system apply for people living in cities? And if conversely you were a lord or a city mayor, how do you go about figuring out how much people owe you, and how do you collect? This is a super complex question 
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May 25, 2015 16:40
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Tomn posted:Well, that's not a good sign. Any way I can break it down to something easier to answer? I'm mostly interested in how exactly people went about sending money to the government and how the government even figured out how much money you were supposed to send in the first place in an age before modern bureaucracies and oversight. Well to make one simple point - taxes were not always calculated in a very precise manner and not always monetary. Take a basic manorialist economic model - you can have a villein who is obliged to farm someone's land for x number of days in y period. You can also have a tithe, levied on different basis depending on the nature of employment - for farmers, it might be a 10th of the gross production of a field, paid in bushels of wheat, whereas for a craftsman it might be a 10th of the profits, paid in money. How taxes were collected could also differ. For example, you might collect taxes as a farm. So you, the liege lord (say, the king of England) might have granted a fief to a lord in return for his returning a fixed amount of gold/currency to you a year e.g. (from wiki) quote:"William, king of the English, to all the sheriffs and barons of Huntingdonshire, greeting. Know that I have granted the hundred of Normancross to the abbot and monks of Thorney to be held in fee-farm for an annual rent of 100 shillings which I order them to pay to my sheriff at Huntingdon. And I forbid any of my officers to do them injury or insult in respect of this." You simply leave it to them to raise the money however they want, and in return you get a fixed and predictable income. I believe the Ottomans commonly did this. Sorry, that's hopelessly general, but it's what comes to mind as a way of trying to put out a few basic models for how you can approach taxation in this time.
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May 25, 2015 16:55
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bewbies posted:One of the largest privileges of the king was the income from crown justice matters. Also the reversion of property to the crown as bona vacantia or escheat.
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May 25, 2015 17:17
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The emperors always had severe money issues though, because they are playing politics on a very big stage while often having very little land or revenue stream of their own, and a very complex system of governance over what are notionally their vassals. If you can't use the imperial title to squeeze cash and land in the middle ages, or successfully wage wars to acquire tribute like the Ottonians do, you're going to need a good banker or a big silver mine.
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May 25, 2015 21:01
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It's also what makes colonisation / acquiring territory external to the empire so important. The conquest of Pommerania enabled enormously intensive new economic exploitation outside of imperial authority. Likewise the Scandinavian area being part of the Bishopric of Hamburg-Bremen for a while was an enormous moneyspinner.
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May 25, 2015 21:24
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sullat posted:Killing/banishing a wealthy person (or unpopular class of people) and taking their stuff works in just about any era. Extremely prevalent in medieval Italy.
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May 26, 2015 17:42
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Kaal posted:We already have tons of social punishments in our society. Virtually all criminal incidents are heavily reported on, with the accused forced to accept being photographed and often videotaped wearing special clothes that denote criminal behavior. The police and prosecutors deliver long statements about how unethical they are, and what damage their actions have caused, and then the judge or jury renders a verdict typically followed by a stern talking to that often is repeated verbatim by journalists. The knowledge of this crime is publicly recorded so that it will follow the convicted wherever they go, and for felony crimes they are legally obligated to report their criminal status in all sorts of situations. As far as social punishments go, our current system is far, far more effective than setting up stocks. And in the case of certain crimes that have additional taboos, particularly sex crimes, there are additional systems in place as well.
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May 31, 2015 17:15
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Cyrano4747 posted:Quick question, since we don't really have a general medieval thread. Any specific time period or concepts? I think quite fondly of the work of Karl Leyser in general, such as Communications and Power in Medieval Europe, Medieval Germany and its Neighbours and Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society. The two widest ranging monographs I can think of are Arnold, Medieval Germany and Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages and then reference texts like the New Cambridge History. For a more old school take there's also Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany, though you must keep in mind that both Leyser and Barraclough fought against Germany, and Barraclough in particular was driven slightly mad by that experience. If you want to get involved in the Ottonians, Salians, Investiture Controversy, Staufens or the Golden Bull there are plenty of good monographs about that, such as the work of IS Robinson or Brian Tierney for the Papal dimension, and there are also at least 3-4 good biographies of Frederick II, including the Kantorowicz one which is regarded as a classic. Books I can recall liking about medieval Germany in general: Kieckhefer, The repression of heresy in medieval Germany Christiansen, The Northern Crusades Anything about the interaction of Italy and Germany is incredibly interesting, like Waley's The Italian City-republcs. If you have a taste for sources, the most famous are going to be: Thietmar of Merseberg Widukind of Corvey Adam of Bremen Otto of Freising The Liber Augustalis And the Golden Bull of 1356 Brian Tierney also reprints a large number of papal sources re: papal controversies with Germany & France Disinterested fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Jun 13, 2015 |
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Jun 13, 2015 17:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:Thanks a bunch. Let me know how you find it, it's been a while since I read those.
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Jun 13, 2015 23:38
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Tomn posted:So here's a question - it's a common trope in fiction that the aristocracy (no matter the time period or setting) are arrogant sods who believe that they are superior human beings - that because of their noble bloodlines and superior breeding, they don't simply have the right to lead, they are the best possible leaders anyways. Blood will out and all that. But how common was this point of view during the Medieval period, particularly the early period? Did nobles actually believe themselves to be better at what they did because of their birth? Did they instead view nobility as a hierarchy instead, locked in by blood and tradition but with no real connection to competence? Did they not really worry about nobility at all except as a mark of personal privilege to be protected? Or something else? Well you're not taking in to account a lot of stuff. Firstly, what do you mean by aristocracy. On any account, for example, bishops and abbots of major monasteries count, not only because they were usually from rich families - but many of these people, particularly Abbots, were elected, as was the Pope. So they are backed by a kind of corporate authority. Likewise in Italian communes and Venice, even though there is still an aristocratic family interaction with office-holding. Moreover, religion here is very important. Christianity is very effective as a buttress to the existing power structure - rend unto caesar etc. Medieval theology strongly implied that earthly authorities, like it or not, were placed in their position by divine providence. Thirdly, you're forgetting that aristocracy is about property. People seriously forget, as I keep repeating, that 'feudalism' - a word we don't like to really use - is to a large degree, in the former Carolingian areas, a conversion of offices that were once appointed under Charlemagne in to hereditary offices. Being count of Toulouse is not just something you are, it's something you own, and you have an entitlement to pass your property on to your children (and, in fact, in Roman law you also inherit the legal personage of your antecedent). Fourthly, we're also talking about a form of relations that is to some extent contractual. If you're living in a chaotic time without strong central authority, and you're a peasant farmer, you're liable to be stolen from, hurt or hosed over, or lack an external authority to arbitrate your disputes. In that situation making a compact with a castellan of a share of what you farm for security and judicial arbitration may be a good deal. That very basic pattern has happened even outside of European paradigms - notably in Japan, where itinerant warriors providing security to farmers led to a Samurai class emerging by attaching itself to the land and in to the chain of relations to the emperor.
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Jun 17, 2015 19:27
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FreudianSlippers posted:mercenary Also people really hated mercenaries.
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Jun 18, 2015 04:11
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Obdicut posted:A lot of nobles were mercenaries. I didn't say they weren't, but it wasn't lauded, and if you weren't an aristocrat, so much the worse, in part because mercenary companies were a vector for social mobility. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Jun 18, 2015 |
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Jun 18, 2015 12:25
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Guildencrantz posted:Well it's not like commoners were huge fans of mercenaries either, for obvious reasons. Well, quite.
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Jun 18, 2015 12:50
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HEY GAL posted:are we still talking about the early middle ages here A good point. After all, if we're really talking early middle ages, we're talking a pre/proto-chivalric conception of the warrior class for starters.
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Jun 18, 2015 15:44
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deadking posted:Carolingian land holdings (at least those dispensed by the king) were in theory not hereditary, but there was a strong preference on the part of land holders to pass their offices to their children and the end result is a lot of de facto hereditary offices, if I'm remembering correctly (land tenure isn't really my forte). The development of this in to a de jure situation as well as a de facto one is literally how some loose idea of what we call 'feudalism' but don't any more gets going in the Frankish kingdoms. What you're talking about is right, and more and more how things get as the Carolingian era presses on. As an aside, it certainly is the case that chivalric concepts have as one major origin the desire to emulate Frankish warriors like Roland, who was a margrave (Mark Graf/ Leader of a March), although a lot of that stuff is an ex post facto creation. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Jun 25, 2015 |
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Jun 25, 2015 23:39
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:This is a bit sidelining the topic, but does anyone know any good sources on medieval/Renaissance Italian governments? Specifically monarchies like the Duchy of Milan. Do you mean primary?
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Jul 30, 2015 14:42
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:This is a bit sidelining the topic, but does anyone know any good sources on medieval/Renaissance Italian governments? Specifically monarchies like the Duchy of Milan. You could try 'Communes and Despots: The City State in Late-Medieval Italy' by Jones, but it's in the transactions of the royal historical society.
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Jul 30, 2015 15:19
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Tomn posted:So this isn't perhaps strictly a medieval question and most certainly isn't a combat question, but I'll ask it here anyways since the thread seems best-equipped to answer it - tell me about the way the Italian republics of the late medieval/Renaissance period were organized - Venice, Genoa, Florence, and all that stuff. In particular, I'm interested in the differences between the Italian republics and what we in the modern world would consider a "proper" republican government (i.e. not a veiled dictatorship or oligarchy). At its broadest, I'd be curious about what a time traveler would find most striking about the government if he were transported from modern America to, say, Venice in the 15th or 14th century, or vice versa. More specifically, I'm interested in the relationship between rulers and the ruled - was there any expectation that "Anybody can make it to the top, if they're successful enough"? Was there a serious expectation that those in power should care about the welfare of the poor? How exactly were the rulers of city-states nominated and elected to their position, and what sort of promises did they generally need to make in order to get elected? I'm vaguely aware that Venetian mobs in particular would sometimes riot and cause power shifts in defense of their "freedoms," but what exactly did they mean by that freedom? I know more about the period slightly before this, but: Honestly the biggest problem here is the fact that all of the republics (and by the time you're talking about, a lot of monarchies again) are all very different. By the time you're talking about you've already got a lot of monarchies back - a lot of the republics were so unsuccessful as republics that they turn to podestariates - in Italy in this time 'podesta' doesn't mean what it used to mean, it now means a magistrate capable of being hired from outside of the city who will come in and act as chief magistrate, often bringing his own staff and military forces with him, and then monarchies, or they're communes of various and bizarre types. But, in general, the following holds true: 1) Republican liberty is usually aristocratic liberty. A lot of these city states are following a classical example of republicanism which holds that freedom and human fulfullment come from involvement of the citizen in government, but where a condition of citizenship is being a property-owning male with sufficient free time, education etc. to participate in government. Likewise, republican liberty is also generally merely the liberty of the principle commune - if the city has an empire, like Venice or Florence or Genoa, it does not mean that the possessions are entitled to the liberty of the republics. 2) There are multiple factional lines involved, not merely class ones. For example, cities had popoli, organisations of the 'people' of the city, which tended to notionally claim to represent the people. The popoli, were, however, patronised by the aristocracy, who also supplied the popoli with the means to undertake military action (not uncommon in the cities - a lot of Italian cities had private fortifications within them owned by different groups and families. Most of these have been destroyed as relics of factionalism, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_of_Bologna  There is also the Guelf-Ghibbeline divide, between those who favour or disfavour imperial rule or papal influence, and also internal factions within these (for example, Dante was a Florentine white Guelf (an anti-imperial but not pro-papal)). It's misleading, though, to think what they say they're arguing about is what they're actually arguing about the later it gets. There's a lot more to say. But by the period you've asked about, republicanism in Italy is a largely failed experiment. You see with Machiavelli writing in your period the end to Florentine republicanism. It is widely supposed that republicanism fails for one main reason: it's consistently unable to provide justice impartially to political agitation. Typically the story in most republics like Florentine Italy is one whereby political losers in (sometimes violent) agitation not only lose political office but are also subjected to exile and total expropriation, which is a problem you can see the Italian lawyers (who have hugely revolutionised politics and law through the rediscovery of the corpus juris and the creation of schools of law at which glossators prepare commentaries on the law) wrestling with in this period with concepts like civtias sibi princeps - the city as prince unto itself. Where this is not so, like Venice, it largely seems to be because the constitution is designed to provide patronage to every group in the city, so that no faction is totally left out in the cold without a slice of government or sinecure, and thus there is no incentive to topple the ship - this impulse is more firmly hammered home by the fact that Venice is a big city on effectively an island, where civic strife has the potential to be much more harmful (e.g. if ships can't enter there is almost immediate famine) and its empire becomes impossible to administer. The perceived advantage of monarchy is that it's seen as less precarious and factional. As for what a modern observer would find surprising, probably they would find surprising how clearly personal lots of state authority is (it's not really an office that's seen to be really wielding power a lot of the time, and how that person might be employing private soldiers out of a private fortress in the city), and bizarre things like magistracies that are appointed out of a list of aristocratic families by the drawing of lots (e.g. Machiavelli's family, who were Gonfalonieres of Justice in Florence). But I'd also think they'd be surprised with the sophistication of the learned commentaries on liberty in this period and how seriously people take questions of political theory. Lastly, the immediacy between theory and practice - new ideas and concepts for how to govern and legitimacy are just constantly being worked on and tried out. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 12:53
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Tomn posted:From the descriptions given, it seems like the main involvement that the average person living in a republican city-state would have with the governance of the city is by being part of some organization or other that is patronized by the aristocracy/elite of the city, correct? It seems like it's not really all that different from a feudal contract, exactly, except that the contract is bound by money rather than land. Would that be about correct? Feudality is a messy concept and it probably does you no favours to try to use it here. To some extent ordinary people could participate in the government of cities. The entire concept of a fiat, for example, is a vote by yelled acclamation by the people of the city in the church square, which has now come to mean 'a decree', quite a commonplace occurance in a commune. But yes. If you're [relatively] poor and in a city it's likely your only shot at influencing politics is through the popoli and armed struggle in factionalism. This in any event obviously would not apply to the totally decrepit, or indeed to peasants outside of the city, etc. or people living in other cities governed imperially: part of the reason communes decline is just that small ones get swallowed by one of Milan, Florence, Venice, Mantua and Ferrara. Tomn posted:Secondly, if republican liberty was largely a matter of aristocratic liberty, and republicanism in general was regarded as a failed experiment, then how did such views apply to the Holy Roman Empire? It seems like the Empire was, in a sense, the ultimate expression of aristocratic liberty. Were there active parallels being drawn between the Empire and the failed republics? Lessons learned to try and strengthen the Empire against the problems that bought down the city-states? For that matter, from a non-contemporary perspective were there actually much in the way of similarities between the organization of the Empire and of any of the republican city-states? The two aren't really alike. Italy was very uniquely pre-occupied with republicanism in this period, and although there are burgher traditions in the rhineland and in free cities, elections and concepts of popular sovereignty are still largely part of the proto-concilliar theory to do with the government of the church. It's very noticeable that the Golden Bull of 1356 is explicitly a document designed to support the great magnates of the Empire in destroying civic governments, city-leagues, and uppity petty aristocrats. It's also worthwhile noting that a lot of the republicanism of the Italian cities comes explicitly from a desire to theorise a form of government that gets the empire the gently caress out of Italy. All in all, I think here you have a mistaken idea here. The aristocratic 'liberty' of the electors of the HRE is a largely practical thing - a lot of the emperors are simply too poor or too weak, like Louis the Bavarian, to attempt to govern such a large kingdom intensively. They're totally reliant upon coalition building, abusing their judicial offices to acquire more land during their period as emperor, and itineracy to communicate their power and build their position - but the Emperors are also expending their efforts on fighting the papacy for the right to govern as they please and the Italian cities for a return of northern Italy to the Empire. It's not based on theory, let alone republican theory, even though it does draw on classical examples e.g. acclamation of the emperor. Liberta of the Italian cities is as contrasted with tyranny, and it involves not being the subject of arbitrary power, guaranteed by your own right to participate in the ongoing administration of and works of government through office holding, and liberty from foreign domination. Mr Enderby posted:Google is telling me that the mid 15th c population of Venice was around 170,000, and the grand council had over 2000 members, and peaked at 2700. So if you factor in blood relatives, servants, and employees, a large swathe of the city would have been quite closely connected to a council member. A lot closer than you are to your elected representative, I would wager. This is a pretty big tribute to the perceived need to have a large bureaucracy so you could patronise anyone in all competing factions. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Sep 16, 2015 |
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Sep 16, 2015 12:17
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Communes and Despots: The City-State in Late-Medieval Italy[/quote posted:
An old paper but you get the idea. On the popoli, a rather confusing concept: quote:.But at no time did the popoloi include the whole people, or even the whole commune. Rather was it a 'party', the pars populi, for which the property qualification might be higher than that for the commune. The groups most powerfully represented were the richer trade guilds, especially the guilds of bankers, businessmen and industrialists - the popolani grassi. The point being made here is that communes, almost regardless of how they're structured, always wound up being oligarchies where political power followed money, and where the conflict was always more likely to be 'new money vs old money' or 'a large group of uppity aristocrats vs. the great magnates'. quote:At Florence in the 1330's over 70 per cent of all major offices were held by members of the three wealthiest guilds: Lana, Cambio, and Calimala. Then, in 1343, by a popular revolution, the full corporation of 21 guilds gained access to governing power. This still only made 3500 out of 80,000 people eligible for office-holding, and of these no more than 750 would be regarded as qualified (usually from the large guilds, often put up through client relationships with smaller ones). This was described by contemporaries as broad-based and democratic. Power always tended to concentrate in to the hands of a few hundred people deemed actually capable of wielding it. This oligarchy was what built the principalities of late medieval Italy, in the end - sometimes, even, by playing popular politics and being acclaimed signorie at the expense of the other oligarchs, but pretty much always and everywhere the people who really ran these cities saw themselves as natural rulers overseeing an inferior class of peasant morons. The humanist republican tradition is really what's happening on paper in this period. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Sep 16, 2015 |
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Sep 16, 2015 12:40
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When does it start becoming more strictly outlawed to do this kind of thing in Western European armies.
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Nov 24, 2015 17:56
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I promised elsewhere to post about the medieval papacy and the 'crisis of church and state'. The idea here is to kind of explore how, in broad survey, the church grew a pair of balls big enough to issue a number of very aggressive papal bulls, the most famous of which is Unam Sanctam of 1302, and how the likely author of that bull felt intellectually justified in claiming in his own treatise that the pope was the owner of all the property in the world. To do that, I'll present you with a lot of background material about the intellectual framework underpinning the medieval papacy, and explain some key concepts of medieval political thought. Medieval Political Thought I: Augustine of Hippo It is often said about the medieval period (as well as the Renaissance) that these are the periods in which Europe re-discovers the legacy of Greece and Rome, as opposed to a more stark Christian vision. When you read Augustine you can see where those people are coming from while simultaneously seeing that they are wrong. St. Augustine (354-430) was a late Roman bishop in the city of Hippo Regius in Algeria who spent a lot of time ruminating about the chaos of late-Roman civilization. He was also a great admirer of Rome’s achievements, and saw a kind of providence in the development of a world empire that could facilitate a world embrace of Christianity. Then he got jaded about it. Augustine’s greatest contribution to medieval political thought comes in his great work of 426, De Civitate Dei contra Paganos [On the City of God Against the Pagans] . One of Augustine’s many achievements in his majesterial 1000 page text is to reconfigure the classical political vocabulary to work with his view of Christianity, particularly by reworking Cicero. The first ten books of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei are concerned with repudiating the arguments made by Roman pagans (there was a lot of pro and anti-Christian polemic in late Rome) that the misfortunes of the empire were caused by the rejection of the ancient pantheon of Roman tradition: such was the stigma in Roman society against the adoption of new ideas against old traditions that this was often referred to as renovatio rather than innovatio in classical Rome to avoid the suggestion that tradition could be broken from or shunned. Breaking with tradition was a terrible taboo; Christianity threatened tradition. Augustine attempts to show how inconsistent it is to claim both that the Pantheon of Roman gods was strong and able to protect the eternal city, when the same gods could not protect Troy – indeed, some of them destroyed it. Minerva showed no power in intervening to prevent such an atrocity against Rome’s mythical father. Moreover, Rome had suffered its own misfortunes over time, Augustine argues, before Christ ever came: “The second Punic War, however, brought with it the greatest loss and calamity to the commonwealth. For eighteen years, indeed, it drained, and almost consumed, the strength of the Romans…Let those who read history therefore recollect how protracted were the wars waged by the Romans of old, and how varied was their outcome, and how lamentable the slaughter which they occasioned.” (Book V, Ch. XXIV) Augustine basically just demolishes Roman paganism at every turn both by pointing to examples of where the Gods have seemingly behaved inconsistently, but also the way in which Roman society has been inconsistent about them. For example, in the ten tables of Roman law, death can be the punishment for slander of a real person; slander of the gods in the theatre, however, is entirely permitted: “Why then, O Scipio, do you praise the fact that Roman poets were denied such licence, lest they inflict any dishonour upon the Roman People, when you see they spared none for your gods? Does it seem to you that your Senate house should be held in greater esteem than the Capitol, and Rome alone than the whole of heaven?” (Book II, Ch. XIII) It’s a devastating onslaught, and once he feels like he’s shown Rome’s paganism to be both immoral and ineffective, Augustine then feels capable of making a more philosophical argument in favour of Christianity and against paganism. Here Augustine makes a couple of moves. In book XIX, Augustine retreads the dialogues of Cicero to lay out Cicero’s definition of the res publica – the republic, or the commonwealth. The commonwealth is defined by Cicero (through the voice of Scipio) simply as ‘the property of a people’. So what is a people? A people is a group ‘united in fellowship by common agreement to what is right and by a community of interest.’ Here Cicero hilariously claims rhetoricians founded the first cities, since they could inspire such agreement. They can use this apparatus to establish justice, which gives each man his due and preserves the life of the commonwealth – the commonwealth fails without justice, and becomes a vile mutation without it is no true commonwealth at all. Then Augustine strikes: ‘But the unjust institutions of men are neither to be called right or supposed to be such’...Where there is no justice there is no commonwealth. Moreover, justice is that virtue which gives to each his due. What kind of justice is it, then, that takes a man away from the true god and subjects him to impure demons? Is this ‘giving each his due’...?’ (Book XIX, Ch. XXI) Augustine therefore denies that the Roman Republic deserved the name Republic at all. For if the republic requires justice, and an agreement as to what is right, how can it ever be a republic without the only true moral precepts, namely, those of Christianity: ‘No such commonwealth ever existed, because true justice was never present in it. There was, of course, according to a more practicable definition, a commonwealth of a sort; and it was certainly better administered by the Romans of more ancient times than by those who have come after them. True justice, however, does not exist other than in that commonwealth whose Founder and Ruler is Christ.’ (ibid) This rich passage is one of the most significant foundations of the political thought of the medieval church. It has a lot going on. On one reading Augustine is saying that true justice exists only in the spiritual world, in which people are seperated in to two celestial cities: the City of God, in which men love god in contempt of self, and the City of self-love, in contempt of God. But on the other hand, Augustine is also talking about reality: though he has contempt for the entire concept of politics, he still thinks it best that the world be governed in accordance with Christian virtues, because it’s as close as we can get to a true commonwealth on earth, and provides us with a framework for contemplating God’s grace. Augustine therefore applauds Constantine and Theodosius as Christian rulers. But in the end he goes further: “The millennial kingdom is not a future reign of Christ in the world, like the Chiliasts say, but the present kingdom of the church. This is the binding of the devil. It began with the spread of Christianity outside Judaism. The ‘thrones and they that sat upon them’ are the rulers of the churches. The souls that reign with Christ a thousand years are the martyrs. The beast is the society of wicked man, opposed to the company of God’s servants and fighting against His holy city.” (Book XX, Ch. VI) This opens the door to a whole line of argument that the Church belongs not only at the head of spiritual affairs, but also at the head of worldly ones. It makes the church the only means by which political unity can be attained because it is only through the church that grace can be conveyed and only with God’s external agency that justice can be attained. But it's not actually Augustine's intention to make the church and state one, he's much to pessimistic about the murky nature of the real world to try to make paradise in it. But these passages allow later thinkers to easily conflate the idea of the ‘two cities’ with the later tension between secular and religious power. There are a few other quick things to say about how Augustine gets here. For one thing, his view of human nature is much dimmer than that of, say, Aristotle or Cicero. Plato and Aristotle maintained that man was a social being capable of virtue and rational thought, and that by a conscious application of at least some men’s natural gifts they could attain a state of happiness within an ordered society, the highest virtues of which were justice and reason. This, to Aristotle, was man’s natural purpose, and by reaching it one could attain the highest virtue and therefore the highest good, happiness. The later Augustine, having immersed himself in the bible after his ordination, could not accept this: “Felicity consists in the full attainment of all desirable things…it is…a gift of God. Therefore no god should be worshipped by men except one who is able to bestow felicity on them…if felicity itself were a goddess, we might fairly say that Felicity alone would be the proper object of worship….” Augustine saw all good as emanating from god, and evil merely defined as his absence; when Adam committed the original sin, he made a wrong and wilful choice to turn away from God. There is a contempt for the worldly and profound religiousity, however, in Platonism, and insofar as Augustine owes a deep philosophical debt to the Greeks, it is to that part of the neoplatonist tradition (though he did not have the Laws in which Plato himself shows himself to be sceptical of secular life). This will be important later. Moreover, Adam’s original sin, also lost for his entire race the natural order in which man was intended to live: man, then, was fundamentally flawed, bound for the duration of earthly time to endure pain and suffering and the scourge of temporal power. In Aristotle, man is the ‘political animal’ - political association is a high expression of his nature. For Augustine, the polis is emblematic of man’s defects, and is unnatural: we require the state to hold off the utmost anarchy, and, moreover, as a scourge from God to punish us for sin. To quote directly: “sin is the mother of servitude and the first cause of man’s subjection to man.” (Book XV, Ch. XV) Living in divine love and good will, man would have dwelled in spontaneous peace and cooperation, and in total equality and without government except before god. ‘Not man over man, but man over the beasts. Hence, the first just men were established as shepherds over flocks, rather than as kings of men.’ (Book XIX, Ch. XV.) Augustine was not a politician, and his views on these matters were scattered and inconsistent. He didn’t actually care about church/state arguments very much, he was too busy trying to work out predestination and observing his world explode. Augustine, after his own personal conversion, and particularly after his experience of the sack of Rome, valued political association and all other temporalities with a far greater sense of skepticism; the ultimate value of all things, for Augustine, related only to the spiritual benefits that could accrue from them. What Augustine does here is subvert the classical political vocabulary in a Christian way, opening a door through which ambitions men will follow. And he leaves belief in worldly institutions and human virtue at a very low level. Which is where we'll pick up with Aquinas. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 02:20 on Oct 4, 2016 |
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Sep 30, 2016 20:40
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History of Medieval Political Thought IIA – Aristotle returns to the western canon We’ll get in to hard politics eventually, but for now I want to provide some more deep intellectual background and we’ve taken a big leap from the last post about Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas. A great deal of other thinkers of course came between the 400’s and the 1200’s. A few names in particular come to mind: Gregory the Great, Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, the Decretals, Gregorian Reform, Gregory VII, Averroes, the investiture controversy etc. etc., some of which we’ll touch on in future posts. But in terms of fundamental intellectual underpinnings the undoubtedly three biggest names of post 13th century medieval Europe are Aristotle, St. Augustine of Hippo, and Thomas Aquinas, whose project was to try to unify Augustine with the Aristotelian tradition. This post will introduce Aristotle’s political project. Perhaps I should have done this first. I. Aristotle’s political project Aristotle was a commentator on virtually every subject of inquiry of his time. There’s an old saying that he may have been the last person who could have claimed to have known everything a person could know about the world. His influence on the medieval period was wide-ranging, far outside of the political realm – which is why I’m not going to get too far in to it. Suffice to say, he revolutionised subjects like legal theory, artistic theory, logic, ‘biology’, as well as ethics and theology, and continued to do so in to the renaissance; scholastic education is only truly dead at around the time someone like Blaise Pascal is writing in the early 17th century. There are two primary sources, the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics, which were probably designed to be understood as a unity. Their relationship can be described like this: ‘The Ethics sets out the form of the good life as it may be realized by the best men in a good state, while the Politics exhibits the constitutive principles of the good state itself.’ As that quotation suggests, Aristotle believed in building a system up from first principles. Here are some of the first principles of his political project. i. Distributive Justice In the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle famously gives a definition of justice that is preserved today, and defines his political theory: ‘equals to equals, and unequals to unequals’(V.iii). This is sometimes called his concept of ‘distributive justice’. What Aristotle meant by this was that justice consists in an idea of equality, where people are treated in proportion to their conduct and characteristics. For example, we accept as axiomatically just that a man who invests 10 pounds of silver receives ten times the return on his investment as a man who invests one pound of silver. Equality and Justice, for Aristotle, function in this way. ii. Self-Sufficient Happiness, the Highest Good Aristotle also defines the purpose of the good life and the good state: eudaimonia, which literally means having a good spirit but is usually translated as happiness or human flourishing. Aristotle’s definition of happiness is not typical. Everything, Aristotle claims, has a purpose (telos): the end of ‘every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good’, and if everything we do aims for something good which ‘we want for its own sake’ and ‘if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else’, then there must be an ultimate good we are aiming for. Aristotle calls this happiness. In other words, happiness is the good in which all other goods consist. To give an example: I don’t eat because I want to eat, I eat because of hunger; I don’t satisfy my hunger merely to sate it, but to permit myself to to be nourished undertake activity, like work; I don’t work just to work, but for money and to fulfill a part of my nature etc. etc. and I can go up this causative chain until I find that it’s all structured towards one ultimate goal of contented self-fulfillment, that is subservient to no other purpose, or is ‘self-sufficient’. To put it another way, it is an unimproveablly good state of affairs. This teleological attitude extends to the Politics, where, in the prolegomenon, he described politics as 'the highest master science' that aims for the 'highest good'. Since every skill and activity aims at a certain good, and since, according to Aristotle, there cannot be an infinite progression of goods, since this would make human activity without fulfilment, the highest skill must aim at the highest good. His highest activity must be politics, since politics affects the way in which all other arts and sciences are practised, and to what degree. (Ethics I.i-ii) Moreover, the virtuous life of the individual involves participation in the life of the community if it is to be completely happy, rendering the happiness of the individual contingent on the welfare of the polity and visa versa. iii. The Necessity for Citizen Participation in the Polity There are several reasons that Aristotle believes that citizens should participate in the life of the polity, including in government. The principal three are: Firstly, Aristotle argues that political association is natural: 'man is by nature a political animal [zoon politikon]' (Politics, I.ii). Basic forms of association are necessary to satisfy basic needs: family, the need for reproduction; the village, the need for safe housing, goods and food. As the complexity and magnitude of the association increases, so does its potential for satisfying higher goods, like culture, as a natural extension. This is a stark contrast with Augustine’s attitude seen in the previous post – Augustine sees dominion of men over men as an unnatural punishment for original sin. Secondly, as we have seen, the highest activity of man is politics, since it directs all other aspects of the community. If the fully happy life is unimprovable, it follows that that life must involve civic participation as one of its activities. Thirdly, it is vital to Aristotle’s preferred constitutional arrangements – mixed constitutions or aristocracies – that there be some diffusion of political power. iv. Who gets to be a Citizen – and why Distributive Justice Matters to Politics What Aristotle believed with regards to equality ultimately sets up a set of political relationships, whereby the principle of distributive justice determines which group of people should be given political rights in accordance with their capacity and characteristics. By dint of nature, women, children and natural slaves are all taken to be incompetent to possess political rights. Women are taken to possess the 'deliberative element to the fullest degree...the slave is wholly lacking…the female has it but lacks authority; the child has it but is incomplete'. (Politics, I xiii) Later, when Aristotle considers different forms of constitutions, he finds a despotic form of rule appropriate only for natural slaves, since some individuals are taken to lack a deliberative faculty and therefore require a natural master to direct them. Paternal and marital rule is taken as separate and defensible on the grounds of the female lack of authority, constituted according to nature. In both cases the relationship is ordained for “common advantage” and such arrangements are “correct and just without qualification.” (Politics, III.vi) Realistically this also removes ill-educated free males from the ranks of citizens, as well as those without the financial resources to have sufficient leisure to pursue things other than their profession. v. The Oscar for Best Constitution Goes to... Aristotle developed a system of analysing constitutions which became the dominant paradigm of the middle ages and the renaissance. In Aristotle, constitutions are of three principle types – rule by the one, the few and the many (Politics III.vii). These constitutional types can be pursued correctly or incorrectly, leading to there being six possible constitutional permutations: kingship and tyranny; aristocracy and oligarchy; and polity and democracy. In his third book, when Aristotle discusses the explicit link between these constitutions and distributive justice, he goes on to dispute the relative virtue of each system. As above, Aristotle describes the way in which each system reflects a certain view of distributive justice, and thereby also each constitution's conception of the purpose of political association. For Aristotle, democratic constitutions seek a broader expansion of liberty, whereas oligarchic constitutions pursue fiscal and material interests. Kingship, on the other hand, is held to be illogical because the virtue of a single person extremely rarely exceeds the virtue of a group. None of these ends is the telos of the city, which instead is taken to be 'the good life' – a life which permits the pursuit of noble actions (Politics III.ix). Just rule is therefore inherently aristocratic because political rights are assigned to those who pursue the virtuous and good life – but aristocratic in the true sense, where it means ‘rule by the best’, rather than something to be contrasted with meritocracy. If, the “good life is the end of the city-state”, if political arrangements are best where they are ordained for common advantage, if justice consists of giving to each his due and if some are created with a greater deliberative faculty than others, then the most just constitution is necessarily aristocratic. These ‘best’ individuals would share in government, since Aristotle's definition of citizenship is a capacity to hold office, sharing their best judgements so as to produce the best decisions. The people must be included so as to prevent their anger, and because the wisdom of the masses is in some respects still valid: 'combined with the better class they are useful to the state'. Aristotle ultimately accepts that his ideal is an unlikely balance to be struck and accepts that monarchy or a 'mixed constitution' is a more likely and pragmatic form of government for most states, since a 'mixed constitution' combines elements of all constitutions and provides political stability by involving almost all of the classes, slaves excepted, in political society; aristocratic government, while good, is a high wire act to pull off and hold on to. II. Aristotle’s Transmission to Medieval Europe i. Format of his work Aristotle originally wrote in dialogues in the manner of Plato, and these were, like Plato’s, studied across the Greco-Roman world. They are more or less entirely lost to us. A likely reason for this loss is the increased availability in the Roman era of many of the works we have today. The Ethics and the Politics both were not, it is supposed, written by Aristotle, and are likely lecture notes made by a student of his speeches in the Lyceum, or else works written under his supervision. Resultantly, they’re a condensed and more direct form – it is a lot easier to discern what Aristotle thinks and why he thinks it than it is for Plato. It also renders his work occasionally dry. These lecture notes were lost in almost their entirety in medieval Europe after the fall of the Roman empire, as were Greek and Latin literacy to a large degree until the Carolingian renaissance from the late 700’s to the early 800’s. Not only was a lot of work destroyed by violence and neglect, but also simply by lack of active efforts at retransmission – his work would have originally existed largely on Papyrus, which needs to be replaced periodically by an industry of copyists. This is one thing the new monasteries founded by the Carolingians recreates. ii. Retransmission from the Muslim World Though lost to Europeans, these works were, however, preserved in the Islamic world, where scholars had conscientiously built upon Greek learning for centuries, particularly in Persia, Spain and Iraq. The most famous Islamic thinkers who responded to and built on Aristotle were ‘rationalist’ theologians like Al-Kindi (801 – 873), Avicenna (Ibn-Sīnā , 980– 1037), Al-Biruni (973 – 1048) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126 – 1198). Then came Ash’arites, who overthrew their school – most famously Al Ghazali (1058 – 1111) who rejected Greek philosophy. Cultural interaction with the Islamic states became much more serious and substantial in the 11th and 12th centuries, principally because of the Spanish Reconquista and the Crusades, as well as the Norman conquest of Sicily. Although we don’t tend to think of war as a form of cultural exchange, wars between cultures often facilitate it – particularly where there is conquest and an adjustment to new cultures, as there was in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. This led to the translation of Islamic texts in to Latin over the course of the next several centuries. Aristotle’s was the first to be reproduced from Greek philosophy, with Latin translations of the following works appearing at approximately the following times: Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations – trans. Boethius, early 5th century. Posterior Analytics, De anima, Physics – James of Venice, c.1125-1150. Metaphysics – Michael Scot, 1220’s. Nicomachean Ethics – Robert Grosseteste, 1247. Politics – William of Moerbeke, 1260 (consequently, not available in time for Aquinas’s Summa). Plato’s work was not to be reproduced in Latin until the 1400’s, by Marsilio Ficino, with the exception of the Timaeus, translated by Chalcidius in c. 400. Plato did, however, retain a powerful underlying influence over medieval philosophy indirectly, through the neoplatonism of St. Augustine, as well as that of a number of commentators on Aristotle, including Averroes; Plotinus was also highly popular in the Islamic world, while unavailable in the west. And, of course, Platonism is an element of Aristotle’s work. We’ll come to how this effects medieval thought in coming posts. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Oct 6, 2016 |
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Oct 6, 2016 02:07
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a kitten posted:Man, these are great posts and perfectly timed since i just finished rereading The Name of the Rose and my curiosity was piqued about this very subject. If you want to know something about the intellectual dimensions of that question, ask. The depiction of the argument concerning the property of christ is certainly very accurate: this was indeed a defining question for Franciscans and more radical heretic strands, which resulted in some extreme theological flexibility on the part of the church to keep the Franciscans in.
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Oct 6, 2016 06:31
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Baron Porkface posted:Did a True absolute monarchy exist outside of fairy tales? Helps if you set your bar for what a 'true' one would be.
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Oct 13, 2016 04:13
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The strongest big medieval monarchies that come to mind are the early-mid medieval English and then to some extent some Eastern Roman Emperors, in terms of in terms of theoretical power, in their own kingdom, claimed for themselves. The most intensively governed place I can think of in actuality is probably colonised Pomerania.
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Oct 13, 2016 21:10
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Elyv posted:So, about your custom title, was there anything interesting about lumber in medieval times? VIL is an expert in intruding on ancient rights to firewood.
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Oct 14, 2016 07:21
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Anyway, i was kidding dude. Your hate boner for the Normans is weird. The Harrying is a horrifying and unjustifiable event, but that opinion was shared by contemporary and near-comtemporary Norman observers. It's also atypical of Norman warfare and it's weird to hold an entire people culpable, especially when you don't know anyone who was killed and they're more reviled than lionized in popular memory. Particularly since there are plenty of them elsewhere with nothing to do with it, like Sicily.
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Oct 15, 2016 19:33
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:It me I hope you plan to be buried in a porphyry tomb.
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Oct 15, 2016 19:45
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HEY GAL posted:who in this thread doesn't I'm sure someone hates the Eastern Roman Empire itt.
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Oct 15, 2016 19:49
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HEY GAL posted:on the contrary, this thread and the christianity thread are 100% Pro Eastern Roman Empire Zones Hugbox! Safe space!
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Oct 15, 2016 19:52
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Doesn't everybody??? Unless it's impossible to construe you as unbrokenly aboriginal then I think common consent is the only real factor, I don't think you can put a timer on it or set strict criteria. To bring up a yet more controversial topic, there are attempts made on both sides of the Israel/Palestine debate to construe the other as not native (Palestinians) or not related to the aboriginal people (Khazar conspiracy). On the other hand, we were posting just moments ago as if Saxons and the English were fully overlapping. I'm not sure. Tough question. I suppose it also relates to how a people integrates, in line with various aspects of identity: Jews are always an Other. Norman Sicilians, on the other hand, have a relatively syncretic attitude to government. But Normans retain a distinct Norman identity for a while even when they integrate with a local culture. Yeah I have no answers here.
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Oct 15, 2016 20:02
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:In the sense of "Anglo-Saxon" (rather than saxons from saxony) they *were* fully overlapping by 1066. People from York to Yeovil considered themselves "English", that's what I meant in this post I know, I'm just remarking that this identity exists in the face of historic migration.
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Oct 15, 2016 20:24
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SlothfulCobra posted:Back in medieval times, I think people would've mostly cared about being native to their own village rather than to their country. I'm really not sure if they really bothered much about who was ruling them unless they were part of the aristocracy. This is a really controversial topic, and nobody's really sure how affinities were structured for medieval people, but I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to insist there aren't working regional identities or loyalties to liege lords.
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Oct 15, 2016 21:15
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