The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

[See Stubbs, i, 275, 276; cp. p. 4; and Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, pp. 123-24. Under Otto, observes Mr. Bryce (p. 125), "the institutions of primitive Germany were almost all gone." Elsewhere Bishop Stubbs decides (p. 10) that "the essence of feudal law is custom," and again (p. 71), that "no creative genius can be expected among the rude leaders of the tribes of North Germany. The new life started at the point at which the old had been broken off." Then in the matter of the feudal system, "the old" must have been mainly the Gallo-Roman, for feudalism arose in Frankish Gaul, not in Germany. In an early passage (p. 3) Dr. Stubbs confuses matters by describing the government of France as "originally little more than a simple adaptation of the old German polity to the government of a conquered race," but proceeds to admit that "the Franks, gradually uniting in religion, blood, and language with the [Romanised] Gauls, retained and developed the idea of feudal subordination...." The rest of the sentence again introduces error. For a good general view of the evolution of feudalism see Prof. Abdy's Lectures on Feudalism, 1890, lect. v-vii.]

To pass a moral judgment on this system, either for or against, is to invert the problem. It was simply the most stable, or rather the most elastic arrangement possible in the species of society in which it arose; and we are now concerned with it merely as a conditioning influence in European civilisation. Hallam, severe towards all other men's generalisations, lightly pronounces that "in the reciprocal services of lord and vassal, there was ample scope for every magnanimous and disinterested energy," and that "the heart of man, when placed in circumstances which have a tendency to excite them, will seldom be deficient in such sentiments." On the other hand he concedes that "the bulk of the people, it is true, were degraded by servitude," though he affirms that "this had no connection with the feudal tenures"; and he is forced to decide that "the peace and good order of society were not promoted by this system. Though private wars did not originate in the feudal customs, it is impossible to doubt that they were perpetuated by so convenient an institution, which indeed owed its universal establishment to no other cause."[510] The latter judgment sufficiently countervails the others; and the claim that feudalism was a school of moral discipline, which gradually substituted good faith for bad, will be endorsed by few students of the history of feudal times. A more plausible plea is that of Sismondi, that the feudal nobles of Italy, finding themselves resisted in the cities, which they had been wont to regard as their property, and finding the need of retainers for the defence of their castles, affranchised and protected their peasants as they had never done before. There resulted, he believes, an extension of agriculture which greatly increased the population in the tenth and eleventh centuries.[511] This is partially provable, and it gives us the standpoint most favourable to feudalism; which on the other hand is seen in the main to have soon reached its constructive limits, and to have promoted division no less than union.[512]

It is important here to realise how in the new civilisation, with its new language, there subsisted simultaneously all of the forms of spontaneous aggregation which had been evolved in the older Roman life. The aristocratic families in their very nomenclature exhibited anew the old evolution of the system of gentes, men being named "of the Uberti," "of the Buondelmonti," and so on. At the same time the industrial groups formed their communities, as the scholæ of workers had done of old; and in the political history of Florence we see constitution after constitution built out of political units so formed. First came the primary patriotism of the family stock; then that of the trade or industrial group; and only as a balance of these separate and largely hostile interests did the City-State subsist. Thus the new Italian civilisation was on its political side fundamentally and organically atomistic, civic union being never a primary but always a secondary adjustment among groups whose first loyalty was to the primary fraternity. It was hard enough to evolve out of all this a common civic interest: to rise yet higher was impossible to the men of that era. And all the while the separate corporation of the Church, despite its inner feuds, tended to seek its separate interest as against all others.

As regards Italy, then, the value of the imperial feudal system, operating through the machinery of the bishoprics, was that it freed the energies of the cities, where alone the higher civilisation could germinate; but on the other hand it fostered in them a spirit of localism and separatism[513] that was ultimately fatal. The old Roman unity had been completely broken up by the invasions, by the strifes of Goths and Byzantines, by the sheer need for individual defence; and the empire, warring with the Papacy, fixed the tendency. Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Milan, and the smaller cities alike felt and acted as independent States, each against the other, forming occasional alliances only as separate nations or kings might do. In the ever-changing conflict of nobles, emperor, pope, cities, and bishops, all parties alike developed the spirit of self-assertion,[514] and wrought for their own special incorporation. At times prelates and cities combined against nobles, as under Conrad the Salic (1035-39), who was forced to revise the feudal law and free the remaining serfs; later, members of each species sided with pope or emperor in the strifes of Hildebrandt and Henry IV and their successors over the question of investitures, till the general interest compelled a peace. During these ages of inconclusive conflict the cities, thus far acting mainly in conjunction with their bishops or archbishops, developed their militia; their caroccio or banner-bearing fighting-car; and their institution of public election of consuls. Here the very name tells of the power of the Roman tradition, as against the supposed capacity of the Teutonic races for spontaneous free organisation and self-government—tells too of the survival of a majority of Roman-speaking people even in the upper and middle classes of the cities. We may readily grant, as against Savigny and his disciples, that the Roman institution of the curia had not been preserved in the cities of Lombardy. There was no reason why it should have been, even if the Longobard kings had been inclined to use it as a means of extorting taxation; for in the last ages of the Empire it had become detestable to the upper citizens themselves.

[Savigny's proposition seems to be sufficiently confuted in a page or two by Leo, Geschichte von Italien, 1829, i, 82, 83. Karl Hegel later wrote a whole treatise to the same effect, Geschichte der Stadtverfassung von Italien, Leipzig, 1847. See also F. Morin, Origines de la démocratie, 3e ed. 1865, pp. 34-35, 59, 94, 122, etc. Guizot uncritically followed Raynouard, who held with or anticipated Savigny. As to the general revolt against the curia, cp. Leo, i, 47, and Guizot, Civilisation en France, i, 52-63. As to the theory of a Roman basis for the early civic organisation of Saxon Britain, cp. Pearson, History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, 1867, i, 264; Scarth, Roman Britain, App. i; Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, 4th ed. i, 99; and Karl Hegel, Städte und Gilden der germanischen Völker im Mittelalter, 1891, Einleit. pp. 10, 33, 34.]

But other Roman institutions remained even in the Lombard cities, in respect of the organisation of trades and commerce;[515] and apart from the Roman survivals at Ravenna,[516] the free cities of the coast, which had remained nominally attached to Byzantium, had their elective institutions, not specially democratic, but sufficiently "free" to incite the Lombard towns to similar procedure.[517] Venice in particular was moulded from the first by Byzantine influences. "Industry, commerce, economic methods, and financial institutions were affected as much as manners, the arts, and even religious life. Greek was the language of eastern trade, and served many Venetians as a second tongue."[518] Venice and Genoa alike developed a national police on Byzantine lines, prescribing the shape, construction, and manning of vessels[519] in the very spirit of late imperial Rome. And the cities of the peninsula could not but be similarly influenced. At all events it was in the train of these earlier developments, and perhaps in some degree on stimulus from papal Rome, that the new organic life of the Lombard and Tuscan cities began to develop itself in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The first seats of new commerce were in those cities to which, as we have seen, numbers of the old Italian population had fled before the Gothic invaders. Amalfi was such a seat even in the ninth century; and to its merchants is credited the first traffic with the East in the Saracen period, as well as the first employment of the mariner's compass in navigation.[520] Next flourished Pisa, where also, perhaps, the ancient commerce had never wholly died out;[521] then her successful rivals, Genoa and Venice. And always commerce formed the basis of the revival.

Once begun, the new life was extraordinarily energetic on the industrial and constructive side, the independence and rivalry of so many communities securing for the time the maximum of effort. Already in the seventh century, indeed, their industry stood for a new era in history.[522] Where before even the men of the cities had gone clad in skins after the manner of the barbarian conquerors, they now began to weave for themselves woollen cloths like the civilised ancients.[523] Soon the art of weaving the finer cloths, which had hitherto been imported from Greece in so far as they were used at all, followed the simpler craft of wool-weaving.[524] It was in these cities that architecture may be said to have had its first general revival in western Europe since the beginning of the decay of Rome. Walls, towers, ports, quays, canals, municipal palaces, prisons, churches, cathedrals—such were the first outward and visible signs of the new era in Italian civilisation.[525] On these foundations were to follow the literature and the art and science which began the civilisation of modern Europe, the whole presided over and in part ordered and inspired by the recovered use of the great system of ancient Roman law, which too began to be redelivered to Europe early in the twelfth century from Italian Bologna.

[The public buildings of the eleventh century are to this day among the greatest in Italy. Cp. Sismondi with Testa, History of the War of Frederick I against the Communes of Lombardy, Eng. trans, p. 101. Before the tenth century the houses were mostly of wood, and thatched with straw or shingles (Testa, p. 11). It seems highly probable that the great development of building in the eleventh century was due to the sense of a new lease of life which came upon Christendom when it was found that the world did not come to an end, as had been expected, with the year 1000. That expectation must have gone far to paralyse all activity towards the end of the tenth century.]

And whereas the common political path to independence had been originally by way of the headship of the bishop as against the count, that headship in turn disappears during the eleventh century without any visible or general cataclysm. It would seem as if, when the obsessing fear of the end of the world with which men entered the year 1000 had passed away, the secular spirit recovered new life; and the intimate tyranny of the feudal representative of the military monarch being no longer a danger, the hand of the bishop was in turn thrown off. For a time the combination of city and prelate was politically valid, as in the case of Archbishop Aribert of Milan, under whose nominal rule the civic caroccio seems to have made its appearance; but even Aribert was shelved before his death, in the course of a civil strife between the people and the nobles. Thenceforward, for an age, the great Lombard city practically ruled itself, the nobles being included in a compromise brought about by Lanzone, who, himself a noble, had led the faction of the burghers. Fresh strifes followed, in which the succeeding archbishops bore part; but the virtual autonomy of the city remained.[526]