Having considered the institutional and organizational framework of politics in the central Middle Ages, let us now turn to the means and ends of political action. What were the tools people had at their disposal to express their demands, beliefs, and concerns, and to what ends were they employed? Let us begin by looking at the process of communication. After all, people had to convey their aims, their demands, and complaints; they had to consult, advise, and sometimes even debate. All this normally involved an audience: of rulers, their courts, advisers, and attendants, but also the friends, lords, subjects, clients, and officials of the individual who had a complaint, request, or point to make. Politics, in short, were as much a public affair then as they are today. However, for this process of communication to work, certain mechanisms had to be elaborated to ensure that chaos was avoided and the right political order of the world maintained. Not everyone could easily approach everyone else, and certain rules of behaviour had to be obeyed. These rules, in turn, could be used to express messages: the way an individual acted, the number of attendants he had with him, how he approached others, the occasions he chose to do so, the rituals or ceremonies that were conducted in the process, all this (often called ‘symbolic communication’ by modern historians) informed bystanders of the status of the persons involved, of the business they had to conduct, of their aims and objectives. We will return to a number of these points as this section continues, but at this stage we ought to focus on two key aspects of symbolic communication: its public nature, and the ease with which it allowed complex legal, social, theological, and political messages to be condensed into one highly visible act. The act of knighting, performed with increasing regularity from the eleventh century onwards, provides a good example. It demonstrated a clear hierarchical relationship, it denoted the new knight’s legal status, his coming of age and ability to exercise fully his functions and duties as a lord, and it confirmed his membership of the military and social elite of his community, while also reminding him of the moral obligations and duties this entailed. The public handing over of a belt or ring, or of other insignia of knighthood, conveyed all these concepts and messages much more poignantly and publicly than any written document would have done. Finally, it also provided numerous witnesses who could be called upon in future to confirm the act and the obligations it represented. Because of this public nature, and because of the political and legal implications of such occasions, the exact structure of rituals could be hotly debated. In 1162, for instance, negotiations about the terms of reconciliation between the citizens of Milan and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa centred on the form in which this submission was to be performed, and, in particular, whether the Milanese were to encounter the emperor barefoot or wearing sandals or shoes. The degree of humiliation expressed in each version was directly related to the political consequences facing those who performed them.
This increasing use of ritual and symbolic acts soon combined with a familiar phenomenon: a desire to codify. Gestures and encounters like the ones described posed particular problems: after all, rituals were inherently ambivalent. When in 1013 Emperor Henry II demanded that Duke Boleslaw Chobry of Poland carry the emperor’s sword, this was both an honour—someone was singled out before others to perform a particular function—and a sign of subservience by one ruler towards another. How could this balance of meaning be defined? In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we thus find increasingly elaborate ceremonials in communication between rulers—such as in the rituals surrounding the homage that the kings of England had to perform to their French counterparts for the lands they held in fief from their Capetian neighbours, which aimed both to underline and to soften the hierarchical relationship thereby expressed. The act of homage might thus not be performed by the king of England, but by his eldest son (as in the cases of William, son of Henry I, in 1120, and Eustace, son of King Stephen, in 1137). That way, the obligations they owed as dukes of Normandy would be fulfilled, while, at the same time, their royal status would not be undermined by having to perform an act that made them hierarchically inferior to the king of France. Even so, contemporaries realized that the dilemma at the heart of their relationship remained unresolved, and increasingly elaborate steps were taken to embed the act of homage in a public and ritual display of equality and friendship. In 1187, for instance, when Count Richard of Poitou (the future Richard the Lionheart) met King Philip Augustus, Richard’s homage was surrounded by manifestations of his and Philip’s amity and companionship, and included them sharing a bed and feeding each other. These acts were performed in public and before as many witnesses as possible, and should thus not be read as sexual encounters. Rather, they had been designed as public demonstrations of the friendship that tied Philip and Richard together, and that superseded their legal relationship as lord and man. On the other hand, and especially in thirteenth-century Germany, we find more and more written documentation that outlined exactly how public rituals were to be performed.
What was absent, however, was the attempt at systematization that we have encountered in the case of law codes and legal texts. The specific ritual to be performed in a given context may have been defined, but there was no equivalent of the Byzantine Book of Ceremonies, a treatise compiled in the late tenth century that claimed to give a detailed description of how ceremonies ought to be performed. That is, what exactly happened was a matter of negotiation and planning, rather than of following a clearly defined and unchangeable precedent, although such precedent was sometimes invoked, of course. We should thus not make the mistake of assuming that ritual and literacy excluded each other. Rather, the surviving evidence seems to indicate that the two frequently entered into a symbiotic relationship, with the one drawing and depending upon the other. Rituals enabled those who performed them to emphasize those elements in their relationship or position they wanted to be highlighted and made public. The same was true, for instance, of King Ladislas I of Hungary (1075-95), who was famously said to have refused to wear a crown. By doing so he demonstrated his humility and thus his moral suitability to occupy the throne. That, in turn, legitimized the act of usurpation that had made him king: unlike his brother Solomon, whom he had driven from the realm, he had the moral make of a proper ruler.
Like any tool of communication, however, ritual, ceremonial, and symbolism were inherently ambivalent. The meaning and performance of ritual were open to challenges, and could be rejected as well as accepted. In the case of dealings between the kings of France and their Norman vassals or between the Canmore kings of Scotland and their English neighbours, the exact meaning of the homage performed, and the power that this granted to those who received it, remained a point of conflict that was settled only when Philip Augustus of France seized most of the Angevins’ French lands in 1204, and when Edward I set out to conquer Scotland after 1296. Moreover, rituals could be appropriated to mean something different from the context within which they had first been employed. In twelfth-century Sicily, for instance, Roger II sought to demonstrate his independence from Byzantine claims to overlordship by adopting some of the paraphernalia and ceremonial of Byzantine kingship. Rituals were not static, but developed in relation to the broader context within which they were performed. Equally, those who objected to the message or concept a ritual act was to convey could seek to disturb it. In 1268, for instance, the question of whether the men of London or those of Winchester were to provide the services of butler to the king resulted in a riot that forced Henry III to abandon a solemn ceremony of crown wearing. Finally, men could refuse to attend a meeting or assembly, and in 1073 Emperor Henry IV was forced to seek a compromise settlement with his opponents in Saxony when the German princes refused to attend a diet in which he had planned to have the Saxons condemned as traitors.
The ambiguity of ritual leads to a final point we need to consider— that is, the complex goals that politics were meant to achieve. Ultimately, it would be futile to try to distinguish clearly between material objectives (a desire for lands, castles, offices, or money) and a desire to meet abstract moral and ethical norms. More often than not it was impossible to separate the one from the other. If a lord attacked his neighbours, he never claimed that he did so for economic gain alone, but usually justified his action by arguing that he simply did what was necessary to defend his honour or his right, to protect his subjects or the Church. Equally, however, he would be unable to defend his honour or his dependants if he did not have the economic, military, or political resources to do so. This complex relationship is illustrated by the exercise of patronage, one of the chief means available to any lord for rewarding his followers, for recruiting new ones, and for assuring himself of their loyalty. Patronage certainly included palpably material benefits, such as grants of land and castles, of privileges, of positions of power. In fact, as for most of our period land and its proceeds were the chief sources of wealth, considerable pressure existed on monarchs and princes to make new properties available to their dependants. An inability to do so, or to reward them for losses they might have experienced, could cause considerable political difficulties, and was, for instance, a contributing factor to the problems facing King John of England after he had lost most of his possessions on the Continent in 1204. This was not, however, the only means at a monarch’s or lord’s disposal. Equally significant was one of the age-old tools of rulership: distributing the spoils of war. In fact, when first approached about claiming the Norwegian throne in 1177, Sverrir was said to have turned down the offer as he was too poor to reward his supporters, and too inexperienced to become a successful leader at war. In this context it is worth remembering that much of medieval warfare consisted of raiding parties, aimed primarily at weakening an opponent’s economic basis of power. Consequently, the distribution of plunder and tribute assumed considerable political significance, especially in those regions like the Welsh Marches, the eastern regions of Germany or Bohemia, the crusader states or Iberia, where small-scale border warfare was a fact of everyday life. Material rewards mattered, and being able to provide or receive them was often a motivating factor in political actions. Moreover, they were one means by which abstract lordly virtues—generosity, justice, protecting one’s inferiors—could be defined in practice.
Issues of status and prestige played, however, an equally prominent part in patronage relations. To some extent this was the case because the standing of one noble in relation to another was publicly demonstrated and expressed through their role in acts of representation. Prestige was visualized, for instance, through proximity to a lord or king, the functions with which he entrusted his followers in the performance of public rituals, the manner in which he asked for the counsel and advice of a particular person, or the tokens and gestures of friendship he displayed. Being invited to sit next to a lord, a king attending a feast given by a noble or bishop, the value and frequency with which presents were made or honours conveyed and confirmed mattered. Rank was demonstrated publicly, and it depended on being demonstrated frequently and lavishly. Equally, keeping someone waiting for several days before receiving him, as Pope Gregory VII did with Emperor Henry IV in 1077, for example, expressed dissatisfaction with and a loss in status for the latter, while, on the other hand, the willingness with which, in the 1230s, Henry III of England invited the bishop of Winchester, whose appointment he had bitterly fought and whom he had sought to prevent from entering his cathedral, to share his meal with and sit by him, symbolized the latter’s restoration to favour.
Because of the public nature of its demonstration, a loss or increase in status could have palpable political consequences. Someone regarded as close to his superiors and on good standing with them would be more capable of rewarding his own followers; he was expected to be more successful in gaining grants and privileges, and to plead the case of his supporters. This should alert us to the fact that abstract concepts such as honour, for instance, could play as important a part in the conduct of medieval politics as economic or legal issues. After all, one’s honour was the public expression of one’s legal, political, social, and economic status. Furthermore, medieval men, too, could go to war for their beliefs. They went on crusade, they fought for the reform of the realm, and they took up arms to defend their king and kingdom against foreign invaders or their ancient liberties against royal encroachment. Abstract moral good was something by which actions and undertakings could be justified, and by which resistance could be legitimized. No rebel ever admitted resisting his king out of greed, a lust for power, or as a result of regional or dynastic rivalries, but always justified his actions by arguing that a king was unjust, impious, sought to oppress his people, or was unable to defend the realm. Success in medieval politics all too often depended on the ability to force one’s position upon one’s neighbours, peers, or subjects, but at the same time a system of values existed that was intended to channel the use of power, and to direct it towards accomplishing a greater good.
Last but not least, those engaged in politics were bound by a variety of personal bonds. These could include dynastic links (whether by blood or marriage), ties of friendship or dependence, bonds of rank or institution. Nobles and kings were expected to reward their friends, family, and followers, while at the same time balancing this against the need of their dependants as a whole. If they were too mean in their patronage, they would alienate the former, and if they were too generous, they violated their duty to protect and safeguard the latter. This problem was perhaps most pronounced in the case of rulers, and rebellions were frequently justified by the undue favour kings were accused of having shown to one group within the realm over another. This happened, for instance, in Saxony in 1073, in England in 1258, or in Bohemia in the early fourteenth century. Equally, personal ties might lead to conflicts of interest. Nobles normally formed part of a complex web of friendships, alliances, and family relationships, and frequently found themselves forced to choose between their friends and their lords. Monastic houses could face a not dissimilar problem, especially in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when many were forced to choose between their ecclesiastical superiors and their secular patrons and relatives. The forming, strengthening, restoring, or destruction of such ties was a key element in the day-to-day conduct of politics. Kings, magnates, and nobles constantly sought to make new friends and keep their old ones, while trying to win over those who might have resisted them in the past and to isolate or terrorize those who might oppose them in future.
All this should warn us against too simplistic a view of the political structure of the central Middle Ages. Those involved in the conduct of politics, whether on an international, regnal, regional, local, institutional, or dynastic level, had to operate within a complex web of ideas, precepts, power relations, and harsh economic and social realities. More importantly, there was an inherent dialectic at the heart of medieval politics. Every means, every innovation or tool that provided a new way by which a lord or prince might increase his power at the expense of his peers and subjects, also gave the latter a new set of ideals against which to judge the performance of their rivals and lords, by which to legitimize resistance or through which to practise it. A greater emphasis on legal and administrative procedures strengthened the ability of those who could afford them to increase their economic and political power at the expense of their peers and neighbours, but the latter also gained a means by which to challenge them. More elaborate theoretical concepts of power certainly raised the standing of a particular group within society, but at the same time also imposed new obligations upon them, and gave their dependants the means to thwart and resist their ambitions. Negotiating the balance between privileges and obligations and defining what abstract values and concepts meant in practice was rarely a smooth or peaceful process. It was, however, what gave European society in the central Middle Ages its political dynamic.
World History
