Throughout this period, political power was exercised by a small elite, comprising, at best, 3-5 per cent of the overall population. What, then, about the remaining 95 per cent? As far as the rural population was concerned, various writers in our period sought to emphasize the responsibility those in power held towards the peasantry. We thus witness the elaboration of origin myths that—modelled on David’s elevation from shepherd to king in the Old Testament—emphasized the humble origins of powerful families, most famously perhaps in the case of the Premyslads of Bohemia, who traced themselves back to the peasant Premysl, the mythical first ruler of Bohemia. In some cases, the care for the peasantry was ritually enacted, as, for instance, when in 1024 Emperor Conrad II demonstratively interrupted the procession prior to his coronation to do justice to a peasant, and in fourteenth-century Carinthia, where peasants symbolically humiliated the new duke as part of the installation ceremony. As far as their actual involvement in the day-to-day conduct of politics is concerned, that could take a variety of forms, frequently on a local level (see pp. 41-2, 54-6). Moreover, peasants could leave the lands of particularly oppressive lords, and we can, in fact, trace major population movements across Latin Christendom throughout this period. There may have been little formal provision made for the majority of the population to take part in politics, but they still possessed the means to counteract, thwart, or delay the actions of their superiors.
Furthermore, from the eleventh century onwards, a new and formidable challenge to the power of kings and territorial lords alike emerged in the form of urban centres (see also Chapter 2). These towns mattered because of their economic power and their population resources. One contemporary observer, for instance, estimated that after 1158 the income Emperor Frederick Barbarossa received from the rights he claimed over the Italian cities reached ?30,000 per year. Not surprisingly, therefore, towns began to play a greater part in politics, too. In 1167 Milan took the lead in forming an alliance of cities, the Lombard League, whose aim it was to resist Frederick Barbarossa’s expansion of power in Italy, while in Castile, England, and Aragon representatives of urban communities became regular attendants at parliaments and consultative meetings. Some towns became major players in their own right, and the Italian maritime cities soon took a significant role across the Mediterranean. In fact, by the thirteenth century many of these towns came to rule over sizeable territorial empires themselves. Rulers did not always eye these developments favourably; Emperor Frederick II, for instance, not only banned towns from taking in new citizens without the permission of their princely neighbours, but also outlawed confederations of towns. Nonetheless, the sheer financial might towns could muster soon made them a much sought-after ally in politics, and we can see more and more frequently how a ruler’s political power depended on the support he was able to muster from within the urban centres of his realm. During the dynastic wars in late-twelfth-century Poland, the civil war in England of 1215-17, the German Interregnum of 1257-72, or the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, success depended on controlling key cities, rather than the country at large. As always, there were, of course, exceptions to this rule: apart from Paris, few French towns managed to reach a position similar to those of the Rhineland in Germany or Lombardy in Italy. Equally, the twelfth-century kings of Sicily suppressed communal movements within their own realm, and went to great lengths to ensure that they and their officials oversaw the internal governance of urban centres, rather than the citizens themselves. Neither Palermo nor Naples was thus able to match the degree of influence and independence exercised by London, Cologne, or Milan.
What, however, about the traditional elites? How did the upper and middling ranks of the aristocracy engage in politics? To them, politics certainly mattered, but it was just as often politics on a local as on a regnal or international level. Much depended on status and influ-ence—quite frequently, keeping one’s peasants in order, checking the territorial ambitions of a neighbouring prince or town, or dealing with the variety of administrative tasks small lords faced was probably political engagement enough. These more localized concerns, as well as the manner in which the wider world of regnal or international politics could have an impact on small and middling aristocrats, is illustrated by the documents that Count Sigiboto IV of Falkenstein, active primarily in the archdiocese of Salzburg, assembled before setting out on Frederick Barbarossa’s Italian campaign of 1166. These included a collection of conveyances, a manorial register, two texts confirming the free legal status of the count and his family, a letter ordering the assassination of a rival, and a family portrait.45 The great princes and magnates of the central Middle Ages straddled the regional and the regnal. On the one hand, they had to engage with the affairs of the realm at large, while, on the other, they found that their position in dealing with their dependants and less powerful neighbours frequently resembled that of the king in relation to them, and they found themselves bound by similar expectations, restraints, and mechanisms of governance.
One of the constants of our period was the role attached to the process of consultation between kings and nobles, and this extended to almost every aspect of political and royal life, and included marriages of a ruler or his family as well as matters of war, justice, finance, or ecclesiastical administration. This had ideological as well as practical reasons. After all, as we have seen, kingship was perceived as an office, with the ruler expected to act for the welfare of the realm. The process of consultation was one means by which this communal aspect of royal power could be demonstrated. Kings made their decision only after taking the advice of those who were to be bound by their decision. This leads to our second point: taking the advice of one’s leading subjects was above all a matter of public confirmation, and it created a greater number of witnesses for an agreement or a decision. In fact, one can often gauge the importance of a particular act by the occasion when it was made public. Quite frequently, this involved important religious feast days, such as Christmas or Easter, when a larger number of prelates and nobles attended a king’s court. The more splendid the occasion, the larger and more prominent the list of those witnessing a decree. Furthermore, those participating in these assemblies not only witnessed a decision, but by their presence also volunteered themselves to be called upon in future to enforce or corroborate it. In moments of political crisis we thus find rulers taking particular care to ensure that their claims and actions were corroborated by as many people as possible, and, if required, by as many assemblies as needed. In eleventh-century Germany, this could mean that rulers were not fully accepted until they had toured all the regions of their realm, while in twelfth-century England King
Stephen in 1135 and King John in 1199-1200 traversed the realm to demonstrate both their royal status, and to force a public recognition of their succession from as many nobles, towns, and prelates as they could. Assemblies provided a ruler with advice and counsel, they symbolized the political structure of the realm, and they demonstrated the necessary public backing for important political decisions.
The form these consultative bodies could take varied across Europe. In Iceland, for instance, regional assemblies, the quarter courts, existed to deal with matters pertaining to the judicial administration of parts of the ‘free state’ (commonwealth), while at the annual althing*, attended by the chieftains of the four quarters of the island and their entourage, those issues were dealt with that had not been settled previously, or where important decisions concerning the community at large were negotiated. In Castile-Leon, on the other hand, the cortes*, as it began to emerge from about 1187/8 onwards, consisted of elected representatives of the towns and royal officials who had been appointed by the king. Members of the aristocracy participated as royal officials, not as members of a—however loosely defined—body of royal vassals. That, by contrast, was one of the defining characteristics of English parliaments. Their membership could vary greatly, depending on whom the king chose to summon, and from the 1250s onwards they normally included elected representatives of the shires and royal boroughs, as well as barons, who included both major aristocratic landholders as well as the prelates of the realm and the heads of religious houses. Last but not least, in the Holy Roman Empire, consultative meetings or ‘diets’* were called irregularly by the monarch, and no formalized criteria existed until the fourteenth century as to who was to participate in them. Partly because the exact composition of these bodies was at best loosely defined, we need to keep in mind that a full parliament consisted not only of those who had been called upon to attend, but also their attendants, relatives, and friends. The Icelandic althing, for instance, was as much a prolonged feast, an opportunity to trade goods, make payments, or arrange marriages, as it was one for debating issues such as whether to adopt Christianity or how to reform the community’s legal organization; imperial diets, like the one at Mainz in 1184, included tournaments, the knighting of the emperor’s sons, and a feast of legendary proportions; while even English parliaments were as much a social as they were a political occasion. In 1270, for
Instance, King Henry III ordered the citizens of Southampton to provide 200 casks of wine for an imminent parliament, ‘which cannot be celebrated without wine’.4
The range of business conducted by such assemblies changed throughout this period, as did the importance attached to them. To some extent, this reflected the increasing scope of royal power as well as the increasing need for funds on the part of kings. While in the tenth and eleventh centuries the chief business of such assemblies had been matters of law and political organization, by the thirteenth century issues of finances became more and more significant. The Castilian cortes, for example, was a forum where royal demands for money were granted in exchange for the confirmation of privileges, while in the Empire, from 1277 onwards, Rudolf of Habsburg called assemblies by towns and others directly subject to the king’s authority to have their agreement in raising levies from them. Increasingly, such public assemblies became one of the chief means by which royal policy could be discussed, and throughout the thirteenth-century West a demand to hold such assemblies on a regular basis, and to define more clearly what their role and function were, became evident. The most notorious example for this was probably England, where in 1258 the king was forced by a group of rebellious barons to promise a regular holding of parliaments, and to cede control over his government to his barons and to parliament. Although the extent to which parliament was intended to take control in England was unusual, the greater significance attached to public assemblies in governing the realm or kingdom was not. Alfonso of Castile equally had to concede a greater role to the cortes in the 1260s, while in 1284 the duke of Poland had to issue a privilege in which he promised to call a consultative meeting at least once a year.
Similar mechanisms applied to the regional and local level. In Austria, for instance, the death of the last Babenberger duke in 1246 initiated a period during which a loosely structured assembly of knights, town representatives, heads of monastic houses, and bishops took over much of the running of the duchy; by the end of the thirteenth century, it had begun to have a decisive say in who could claim to act as duke of Austria. Equally, in England shire and manorial courts brought together the most important political officers Calendar of Liberate Rolls, 1267-72, no. 1341.
And landholders in a given region, and provided a forum to discuss regional and local concerns, as well as issues of significance to the kingdom as a whole, with similar mechanisms in place in most towns and cities across the medieval West.
World History
