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Tilly Goes to Church: the Religious and Medieval Roots of State Formation in Europe

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Tilly Goes to Church: the Religious and Medieval Roots of State Formation in Europe Tilly Goes to Church: The Religious and Medieval Roots of State Formation in Europe Anna Grzymala-Busse Stanford University August 31, 2020 Abstract How did the state arise in Europe? Canonical accounts argue that war made the state: inter state conflict led to taxation and state formation. These accounts focus on the early modern period and start with the territorial fragmentation as a given. Yet once we move back the analysis to the Middle Ages, a powerful actor appears: the Roman Catholic Church. The Medieval Church was a powerful rival to monarchs and rulers, challenging their sovereignty and the authority of nascent states, and deliberately fragmenting medieval Europe. It was also a rich source of human capital and administrative solutions, the building blocks of state institutions. Religious rivalry and emulation in the middle ages fundamentally shaped state formation in Europe. Very drafty version: Cite at your own risk Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Arun Advait and Hans Lueders for their expert research assistance. 1 1 Introduction How did the modern state arise? Charles Tilly's answer is as succinct as it is canonical: \war made the state and the state made war" (Tilly 1975, 42). In early modern Europe, violent rivalry among fragmented nascent states for territory and resources led them to tax their populations to extract resources. Rulers who succeeded in building up the administrative and military apparatus of war went on to consolidate their territorial gains and ensure the survival of their states. Yet pushing back the analysis a few centuries, to the Middle Ages, reveals new perspectives on this powerful and venerated \bellicist" account. The most powerful rival for an ambitious medieval ruler was not another monarch, but the Roman Catholic Church. In turn, the fragmentation that is taken as a starting point in these accounts is not simply an exogenous fact on the groundit was the result of deliberate Church policies. The concepts of sovereignty and the state institutions that are critical to the modern state go back to the middle ages and to the conflict with the papacy and the church, not to the Treaties of Augsburg in 1555 or of Westphalia in 1648. Below, I argue that the Roman Catholic Church (or \the Church) played a fundamental role in medieval politicsand in the initial rivalries that gave rise to nascent states. 1 I first review the bellicist narrative. I then take Charles Tilly to church, and examine the church's critical role as a powerful player and adversary in three foundational episodes: the Investiture Struggle, the conflict over sovereignty between Philip IV and Boniface VIII, and the Great Schism. The medieval church helped to develop the state through two distinct mechanisms: on the one hand, constant conflict that led to the fragmentation of authority in Europe, especially in the Holy Roman Empire 2, and early assertions of sovereignty. On the other hand, the material resources and institutional templates of the Church shaped secular taxation, legal frameworks, and administrative division of 1Concepts of medieval political authority, statehood, and sovereignty are debated extensively (Hall and Kra- tochwil 1993, Buzan and Little 2002, Friedrichs 2001, Costa Lopez 2020.) As Davies 2003 argues, even if the concept of \state"usefully captures the structures of power relations and control, it is anachronistic in an age when \lordship"would have been far more legible. Nor was medieval state an organization that was fully hierarchical or differentiated in bureaucratic functions. Yet we can still meaningfully discuss the stated goals of these rulers: a) a more effective set of mechanisms through which they could exercise authority, such as the nomination of officials, a legal apparatus, and taxation and resource extraction (state building) and b) the assertion of that authority over people and territory, free from internal rivals or external influence (sovereignty.) Medieval actors \behaved like mod- ern states strove for exclusive territorial control, protected themselves by military means, subjugated each other, balanced against power, formed alliances and spheres of influence, and resolved their conflicts by the use and threat of force"(Fischer 1992, 428.) 2In Voltaires famous dictum, the Holy Roman Empire was none of those things. The empire became \Holy" under Barbarossa, and \Roman" in 1254 (Sulovsky 2019.) \Of the German Nation" was added in the 15th century. 2 labor.3 2 The Bellicist Accounts Bellicist explanations share three perspectives: first, they view the peak of violent state building as taking place in the early modern era, from roughly 1500 to 1800. Second, the starting point for these analyses is the fragmentation of territory. Third, bellicists emphasize that nascent secular states were the main actors in the conflicts drove state formation. Kings, princes, and emperors fought to consolidate territory and control people and resources. Those who succeeded developed as states. The dominant view is that \the state" was invented as a corporate or personalized entity only in early modern Europe. Other practices of rule-making and enforcement existed, but the idea of the state before this time period is anachronistic (Anderson 2018, Skinner 2018). Scholars from Hintze to Tilly date state formation to the early modern era, from the mid-16th to late 18th centuries (Tilly 1975, 170; Ertman 2017, 54; Spruyt 2017, 81). In this conventional periodization, the Treaties of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648) established the principle of state sovereignty in international relations. 4Others go further and claim that the sovereign state (marked by a formal monopoly of authority over a distinct territory) dates only to the early 19th century (Gorski & Sharma 2017, 103; see also Teschke 2003). The starting point for state formation in Europe was a high degree of territorial fragmentation after the collapse of the Carolingian dynasty in 888 (Mitterauer 2010; Wickham 2016; Ertman 2017, 63; Gorski & Sharma 2017, 99). Europe was a raft of principalities, ill-defined kingdoms, and territories controlled by local warlords. Subsequent medieval governance was a disjointed system of local authority and incomplete territorial control. No empire arose in Europe that could compare to the Roman one: it was simply too difficult to sustain (Scheidel 2019). The plausible causes of this fragmentation vary. Scholarship points to the uneven emergence of urban life (Abramson 2017), the 3Another paper examines the institutional transfer of courts, exchequers, chancelleries, and other administrative institutions from the Church to the state. 4See Morgenthau (1985), Watson (1992), Held (1995), and Philpott (2000. Others dispute the idea that West- phalia marked the rise of state sovereignty (see Krasner 1993, Osiander 2001, Teschke 2003). Augsburg established the principle of cuius regio, eius religioa rulers right to choose the religious denomination for his people. As Carvalho et al. (2011) note, this principle was retracted at Westphalia. 3 rise of local warlords and bands of knights (Bisson 1992), and the low levels of religious legitimation that made European rulers weak (Rubin 2017). State development was highly heterogeneous, with city-states and city leagues surviving for centuries (Abramson 2017), and lords and princes continued to resist the centralizing ambitions of kings and emperors. This fragmentation of both authority and territory was the precondition for the constant warfare that characterized European state making. Modern states arose from the constant fighting between early modern rulers. Following in the footsteps of Otto Hintze (1906), who argued that the threat of war led to the ratcheting consolidation and centralization of European states, scholars such as Tilly (1992), Downing (1992), Mann (1986), and Anderson (2013 (1974)) emphasized the fierce pressures of military competition. Warfare was constant, both because rulers poured enormous amounts of money into conflict and defeat did not depose princes or kings (Hoffman 2015, 2627.) Repeated invasions and wars winnowed out weaker states and led to vigorous new efforts to tax and extract resources. War thus led rulers to develop taxation (Herbst 1990, 120, Mann 1986, 486). Such extraction of taxes, tributes, and rents then allowed these states to wage war with greater force and success. The collection of these taxes required surveillance, which in turn prompted the growth of state administrations (Tilly 1992, 87.) The extraction of taxes, accounting for their collection, and distributing and investing these funds expanded and strengthened the state, and this effect persisted even after the violent threats receded. As a result, familiar modern state institutions such as bureaucracy, the treasury, courts, or parliaments are the byproducts of these preparations for war (Tilly 1992, 75 and 117.) Variation in state formation is due to when and how war occurred, as mobilization strategies, military technology, and economic development interacted (Bean 1973.) War had two main effects. First, it consolidated larger states. The relentless pressures even- tually meant fewer and bigger states, a change from as many as 500 independent states in Europe in the year 1500 to 30 four centuries later (Tilly 1992, 4546; Bean 1973, 204). Winners had to develop more powerful governments to govern the numerous losers, which in turn promoted peace and economic development (Morris 2014, but see Abramson 2017.) Larger states also lowered their per capita defense costs. Second, the threat
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