Vengeance, Exacted and Suppressed, As a Means to Establish Universitas: Toulouse, 1120-1230
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Vengeance, Exacted and Suppressed, as a Means To Establish Universitas: Toulouse, 1120-1230 Christopher Gardner George Mason University Medieval cities, especially those along the French Mediterranean littoral and in northern Italy, have long appeared as the launching pad for modernity. Such cities as Marseille, Montpellier, or Toulouse – the town upon which this paper shall focus – retained the last vestiges of Roman law and a monetary economy that were reinvigorated in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Within a generation of such reinvigoration, local urban councils began to separate themselves from their lords' courts, whether those lords were laymen or ecclesiastics. Historians rightly take the earliest references to such governance by any given council of laymen as a necessary turning point from a feudal order of landed rural aristocrats who might also have had extensive interests in the cities of their patrimonies to an oligarchic order of local potentates who rose to power because they tailored their interests with those of the swelling bourgeoisie or "middle classes."1 In most of these 1 The classic statements of this trajectory come from Max Weber's early work on the economies of medieval towns and the rise of secular western bureaucracy from urban governments, statements that have been nuanced and expanded ever since. An excellent survey of Weber's career can be found in R. C. van Caenegem, "Max Weber: Historian and Sociologist," in Legal History: A European Perspective (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 201-21. For the spread of references to town 1 2 Christopher Gardner studies, the corollary to such economic vigor and administrative activity was the articulation of a communal, corporate identity. In the last thirty years, anthropological studies of "pre- modern" or "customary" legal systems in the contemporary world have modified the sociological paradigm of medieval cities as harbingers of the modern, secular, public space. Recent work on medieval cities has largely concentrated on their legal and juridical systems, in particular the disputes that arose within them. The disputes most often discussed can be schematically classified as conflicts between lord and urban population,2 between urban population and rural inhabitants, or between socio-economic groups within cities.3 Any resultant feuds, often launched to satisfy disputes concerning reputations or property, were subsumed into burgeoning judicial systems in the thirteenth century.4 For these scholars, the intramural feud opens a window on the development of a competitive, urban, "post- medieval," market economy, and it foregrounds the tendency of conflict resolution to move from personal vengeance to a public institution open to those capable of profiting from its presence. City dwellers also experienced conflicts among groups deemed a threat to the unity of the councils across Occitania, see André Gouron, "Diffusion des consulats méridionaux et expansion du droit romain aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles," Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes 121 (1963): 26-76. 2 David Nicholas, The Growth of the Medieval City from Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century (New York: Longman, 1997), 141-9, 57-67. 3 Thierry Dutour, La Ville médiévale. Origines et triomphe de l'Europe urbaine (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003), 165-78. 4 Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2003). Proceedings of the Western Society for French History Vengeance 3 Latin Christian world: heretics, lepers, sodomites, or Jews.5 In these instances, willful mischaracterization of and violence toward these groups encouraged the Catholic majority to create a vital and positive ideal of their own community. Studies of intramural conflict hardly undermine the notion of a definable, and self-defined, urban identity, although they do remind us that local governments struggled as much with internal divisions as they did with the presentation of a unified front to outsiders. Therefore, historians perceive cities of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even in conflict, as passing some threshold that moved them toward a modernity defined by a self- appointed communal identity infused with Christian expectations, perhaps, but devoid of ecclesiastical influence. The clearest marker of such a threshold is the use by urban populations and governing councils of terms such as communitas, res publica, or universitas, the term which was given to and ultimately also used by the people of Toulouse to describe their association: the universitas Tholosa.6 This universitas Tholosa was in process of definition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but this urban self- definition had unexpected elements. In particular, urban governments exhibited an underappreciated passivity and sometimes reactionary flexibility when defining their enemies and working through the conflicts in which they found themselves and their constituents embroiled. Perhaps 5 R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 113-23. 6 Communitas was used in Agen and villages around Toulouse by the late twelfth century, while res publica can be found in Nîmes in the 1150s. Volume 33 (2005) 4 Christopher Gardner the least surprising quality, flexibility was part of a willful construction of urban identity by members of the population who saw profit in that construction. This flexibility, however, had to contend with issues that did not stop at the city's walls. Outlaw elements or members of alternative religions – in the case of Toulouse, Cathar dualist Christians – could severely fracture a community, and often leaders within a community such as Toulouse would simply accept intramural and private warfare as part of the cacophony of urban life. The passive quality of Toulousans' efforts to give a name to their community draws us back to the realization that the Church retained the best minds to articulate communities, be they friend or foe. As church-generated concepts influenced local urban concerns, the people of Toulouse often accepted what they received from their institutions of public governance, the Consulate (Consulat), as they continued their "traditional" forms of dispute resolution. Familial and communal violence thus remained part of the makeshift construction of urban identity, and Toulousans often turned to their Consuls (Consules) merely to legitimate their feuds, not to adjudicate or mitigate them. This situation invokes what David Nirenberg describes as a "local context of violence and cooperation" to show the fitful and usually reactionary steps the leading citizens of Toulouse took to establish some unity among their constituents.7 At issue is not the relative modernity of Toulouse but the social role of violence and the communal identity that was both strengthened and diluted by such violence. 7 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 7-8. Proceedings of the Western Society for French History Vengeance 5 In French studies, the city of Toulouse has been portrayed as the modern medieval city par excellence. Its tradition of local historical narrative goes back to the 1290s when an ostensibly anonymous academic at the fledgling University of Toulouse wrote an idiosyncratic gloss to the town's customary laws, which had been published under some duress only a decade earlier.8 The tradition continued through the Old Regime as Toulousan historians argued that their town's medieval Consulate formed a bridge between the glories of the ancient Roman Empire and those of the contemporary Bourbon kingdom.9 Into the twentieth century, Toulouse has been presented as an Italianate secular city and even as the fount of modern notions of civic participation and liberty.10 Such interpretations have arisen because Toulouse provides a depth and a breadth of material sufficient to allow generations of historians to study its urban economic, social, legal, and geographic 8 Henri Gilles, "Les coutumes de Toulouse (1286) et leur premier commentaire (1296)," Recueil de l'Académie de Législation 6th ser., 5 (1969): 23-39. Gilles concluded that the most likely author was the legal scholar, Eudes Arpadelle, who taught at the university through the decade. 9 Germain de La Faille, Annales de la ville de Toulouse depuis la réunion de la comté de Toulouse à la couronne, 2 vols. (Toulouse: Guillaume-Louis Colomyez, 1687; 1701); and Barnabe-Farmian de Rozoi, Annales de la ville de Toulouse, 4 vols. (Paris: Duchesne, 1771- 76). 10 Roger Limouzin-Lamothe, ed., La Commune de Toulouse et les sources de son histoire (1120-1249) (Toulouse: Privat, 1932), 99-132. Limouzin-Lamothe also edited the earliest cartularies of the "city" and of the "bourg," which were first collated in 1204 and updated from 1226 to 1249 (Archives municipales de Toulouse [hereafter AMT] AA1 and AA2). I have used his edition in the excerpts quoted below. See also John H. Mundy, Liberty and Political Power in Toulouse, 1050-1230 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954); and Philippe Wolff, Histoire de Toulouse (Toulouse: Privat, 1958), 74-5. Volume 33 (2005) 6 Christopher Gardner identity. To make these claims, however, historians have been rather too quick to subsume conflicts intimated or expressed in documents drawn up at the Consuls' behest with moments of apparent unity that clearly coincided with the arrival of greater