The Catholic Church and European State Formation, AD 1000-1500

Abstract

Generations of social scientists and historians have argued that the escape from empire and consequent fragmentation of power—across and within polities—was a necessary condition for the European development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and modern levels of prosperity. This book inserts the Catholic Church as the main engine of this persistent international and domestic power pluralism, which has moulded European state formation for almost a millennium. It argues that the ‘crisis of church and state’ that began in the second half of the eleventh century fundamentally reshaped European patterns of state formation and regime change. It did so by doing away with the norm in historical societies—sacral monarchy—and by consolidating the two great balancing acts European state-builders have been engaged in since the eleventh century: against strong social groups and against each other. The book traces the roots of this crisis to a large-scale breakdown of public authority in the Latin West, which began in the ninth century, and which at one and the same time incentivized and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late tenth century onwards. Drawing on a unique dataset of towns, parliaments, and ecclesiastical institutions such as bishoprics and monasteries, the book documents how this church reform movement was crucial for the development and spread of self-government (the internal balancing act) and the weakening of the Holy Roman Empire (the external balancing act) in the period AD 1000–1500.

Tilly Goes to Church: The Religious and Medieval Roots of European State Fragmentation

“…They served as administrators for secular monarchs and the spiritual deputies of the pope. They held high spiritual and secular office, kept order and defended territory, collected taxes, issued local judgments and petitions, mediated disputes, and served as papal emissaries (Angelov and Herrin 2012, 170;Møller and Doucette 2022;Robinson 1990, 423). The bishops' loyalty was thus of paramount importance to both monarchs and popes and naming bishops was an exercise in ensuring both fealty and effective administration.…”

“…30 Second, the rise of communes from the late eleventh century to the twelfth century would prevent rulers from establishing and centralizing territorial authority (Abramson 2017;Rokkan 1975;Tilly 1992;Tilly and Blockmans 1994;Wickham 2015;. In the "city belt" that stretched from central Italy to North Germany, self-governing towns arose where the central government was too weak to assert control (Møller and Doucette 2022; see also Stasavage 2010;2020, chap. 5).…”

“…They are thus an indirect result of papal conflict with the emperors (Hyde 1973;Wickham 2015). Further, as Doucette and Møller show, the Church itself diffused norms of local selfgovernance through bishops and monastic reform (Møller and Doucette 2022). Thus, cities expanded greatly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, after the fragmentation of the eleventh to twelfth century.…”

“…In short, I argue that the Church fragmented the territorial authority of powers it saw as hostile (chiefly the Holy Roman Empire), and helped to consolidate and to strengthen states in other areas. By emphasizing the role of medieval religious authorities, this analysis also contributes to a more recent literature that has emphasized the deep (and secular) history of the European state: the influence of the Crusades (Blaydes and Paik 2016), the development of legal systems (Cantoni and Yuchtman 2014;Møller 2019), cities and communes (Abramson 2017;Møller 2017), representative assemblies (Boucoyannis 2021;Stasavage 2010), and urban self-government and interdependence (Bosker, Eltjo, and van Zanden 2013;Møller and Doucette 2022). This study extends the framework first developed by Hintze ([1931] 1975) on the role of the Church in transmitting Roman precedents of the rule of law and the formalization of assemblies, as well as subsequent work exploring how the Church promoted the rule of law and diffused selfgovernment (Bendix 1978;Doucette and Møller 2021;Ergang 1971;Fukuyama 2011;Kiernan 1965;Møller 2019;Møller and Doucette 2022;Poggi 1990).…”

“…Thus, Møller (2019) focuses on the "crisis of church and state" as critical to subsequent "rise of Europe" (by which he means the multistate system, medieval parliaments, and early bureaucratic institutions) but devotes less attention to the mechanisms by which the papacy fragmented territorial rule. Møller and Doucette (2022) focus on the spread of the Cluny reform program, as critical to fragmentation, urban selfgovernment, and the rise of national assemblies. My argument here is that papal effort was the antecedent, leading to fragmentation, communes, and institutional adaptation.…”