Introduction
This chapter has three essential goals.
First, it attempts to theoretically comprehend the environment in which the thirteenth-century “international” politics took place. In doing so, it follows up on an assumption that Charles I and Łokietek’s rise to power happened in the context which in functional terms emerged from the practices observed in earlier decades throughout Europe.
Before any investigation of the Angevin-Piast relations in the early fourteenth century can begin, it is essential to look around and examine the world of “international” politics, in which those relations emerged. Therefore, this chapter does not function as an agglomerate of facts and events of the “international” politics, nor it does not trace the origins of the Angevin-Piast alliance from the “time immemorial”. Instead, with the help of the “three images of international relations” proposed by Waltz, it strives to identify the ordering principle of the thirteenth-century “international” system of Latin Christendom. Determining this principle, that is, the factor that enables to think about a system as a whole by deciding how units are arranged towards one another, is essential to adequately evaluate the interests and behaviors of Charles I and Władysław Łokietek. According to IR theorizing traditions there are two conventional forms of system ordering: 1) anarchical (in which “international” units are equal before each other in terms of their nature and functions); 2) hierarchical (in which the units are ranked according to certain logic). My fundamental task in this chapter is to offer some thoughts about whether the systemic anarchy prevailed in the thirteenth-century
“international” politics or perhaps this “international” system would be better characterized as hierarchical in its structure.
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This leads to the second aim of this chapter, which is polemics with standard IR accounts that regard medieval “international” politics impossible to theorize due to its hierarchical ordering. According to those accounts the medieval system more resembled imperial arrangement than a regular state-system and thus, it remained beyond the interest of traditionally conceived IR theory. I disagree with such understanding. My argument is that system-level anarchy and culturally induced hierarchy are two essential and indispensable components of the thirteenth-century “international” system and they cannot be easily tucked into too rigidly defined conventions. I am basically showing the paradox of co-existence of system-level anarchy and system-level hierarchy that derive: the first from the nature of how the units are arranged; the second from the political culture that attempts to bridle the consequences of naturally unsupervised “international” system.
Ultimately, the third goal of this chapter is addressed. Namely, by analyzing the hierarchical and anarchical components of the system, I put forward the concept of “hybrid”
system that encompasses the interplay of both factors. Next, on the basis of my own analysis and experience and thought gathered from scholarly literature, this chapter presents an opening general characteristics of the thirteenth=century “international” system of Latin Christendom, attempting to agree anarchy with hierarchy by pointing to different forms of hierarchical ordering that the one proposed by Waltz. This type of hierarchy is not functional and bureaucratic but it reflects the imbedded convictions and perceptions about the world in general, and the world of “international” politics in particular, nourished by “international”
units, that is, lords. Consequently, this early characterization emphasizes the cultural factor and its impact on behaviors of the “international” actors, and thus it opens the field for inquiring the cultural concept of “lordly identity” that occurs in Chapter 3.
The Thirteenth-Century “International” System – Anarchy or Hierarchy?
It is relevant to begin this section with bringing back some general assertions made by Bisson and described in more detail in Chapter 1. At the outset of his essay he assumed general human interest in power. Next, by examining political developments in the nine and tenth centuries in Europe, he discovered a gradual decline in the degree of protection and command provided by kings, which in consequence triggered the explosion of lordships. Bisson claimed that public order disappeared, while power-seeking lords routinely injured and intimidated
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people. In his account anarchy prevailed. Lordships differed in size, wealth, power and forms of internal organization but lords were equally interested in maximizing their relative prestige and revenues against their neighbors. Later Bisson observed that towards the thirteenth century violent lordships, which had been existing in a competitive environment, realized that further maximization could occur through progressive institutionalization and more elaborate system of legitimization. This discovery led to the emergence of government, and thus, to continuous transformation of lordships into more state-like units.227 This transition, however, pertained mostly to the form of lordships but did not eliminate competition. Bisson’s argument indicated an improvement in public order, for due to institutionalization a formerly blurred distinction between domestic and foreign became more separate. Nevertheless, as can be extracted from Bisson’s narrative, lordships – although more unified, coherent, and powerful – continued to seek the same goals: prestige and power.
This summary makes evident references to some aspects of the realist tradition in IR Theories. It is apparent that Bisson’s anthropological assumptions were generally in agreement with the pessimistic vision of human nature upheld by the realists. Quest for power and prestige that characterized lords went together with their inclination to violence and rapacity. Self-seeking practices overpowered any dispositions to encourage peace and order.
Obviously, this image, as any other generalization, cannot be taken as fully accurate but it has the merit of revealing a few yet important trends. Lords were humans, and thus their power- and standing-seeking nature was responsible for anarchical practices that exploded in Europe.
Furthermore, from Bisson’s perspective restraints to this disorder did not originate from changes in human nature (or from the power of reason that managed to subjugate affections) but were a result of ‘rationalized’ greed, which discovered that progressive institutionalization would prove more effective in maximizing their lordships than ‘old ways’ of extortion and bonding.
227 Susan Reynolds attempted to modify the classical Weberian definition of the state in order to adapt it to less clear-cut medieval conditions and render a concept of a medieval state: an organization of human society within a more or less fixed area in which the ruler or governing body more or less successfully controls the legitimate use of physical force. … The ‘state’ is a combination of both [the ruler or governing body and the body of citizens – wk], expressing the relation between them; it is an organization or structure: Susan Reynolds, “The Historiography of the Medieval State,” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London; New York: Routledge, 1997), 110.
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In reference to the three “images of international relations” described by Waltz (see Chapter 1), it is clear that Bisson’s study represented the application of the first image. This approach has its reasons. Given that lordships were not institutions but private vessels of survival, a sort of individual powers built by persons equipped with capabilities to secure from other men a will to cooperate and to raise revenues by subjugating the powerless; therefore, they were inherently human, for they depended on lord’s will and the force he had been able to muster. Powerful men, preoccupied with imperative to maximize their power and attain noble standing, used lordships to these ends. Hence, figuratively speaking, lordships turned into lords’ extensions in the “international” realm; they competed with each other and therefore, in the condition of permanent threat (posed by other “international” units themselves endangered) war was much more widespread international status than peace.
From this perspective, the structure of the medieval “international” system was related to how individual actors interacted with one another.
Bisson did not investigate what Waltz called the “second image”, that is, he did not pay attention to the question whether “lordships” as such – even if just more abstract extensions of their lords – by their nature contributed to the structure of international system, that is, if their existence made any meaningful change to the structure. Lordships seemed uniform in their concept, other differences notwithstanding, and thus, the appearance of “predatory lordships” or “peace-loving lordships” was not directly linked to various types of lordships, but most of all it derived from personalities of particular lords and their capabilities (broadly understood).228 In other words, Bisson’s observations allowed to claim that lordships as political entities were unable to make a difference in terms of sustaining peace and order on the “international” stage, for humans behind them had been both threatened and insecure, and thus, violent and aggressive. War emerged as a more natural condition than peace, although peace and order remained the general aspiration. Paradox discovered by Bisson was that lordships became more powerful (and hence able to better provide for protection and command internally) by self-restraining themselves in a slow process of institutionalization.
228 In contrast, in the modern IR reflection there have been suggestions that states of certain characteristics (political system) are more predatory than others. Perhaps the best known example of such thinking was the idea of the end of history proposed by Francis Fukuyama who argued that liberal democracies were fundamentally peace-loving political systems and thus, spreading democracy in the world would profoundly contribute to attaining global peace: cf. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin Books, 1992).
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The “third image” was also left unaddressed. In Bisson’s terms people without supervision become anarchical and violent, and this entails antagonisms among lordships.
However, Waltz’s argument pointed to another factor, the systemic (system-level) anarchy, which is not generated by the nature of units that inhabit the system, but is an unintended result of entering the unsupervised system by more than two entities, which therefore look at each other with suspicion.
As noted above, in this chapter, the fundamental question of my inquiry is whether the systemic anarchy also prevailed in the thirteenth-century “international” politics or perhaps this “international” system would be better characterized as hierarchical in its structure (and thus fundamentally different to the modern international system)?
This question is relevant because it addresses the problem of how the environment, in which the thirteenth-century “international” units (lordships) functioned, was structured as well as it implies that this structure had its impact on how the units in the system behaved.
The traditional narrative upheld in IR textbooks encounters problems with proper categorization of medieval politics. This issue also hints to why I keep writing “international”
in quotation marks as long as it pertains to medieval realities.
Can we speak of ‘international relations’ in Western Europe during the medieval era?
Only with difficulty because, as already indicated, medieval Christendom was more like an empire than a state system. States existed, but they were not independent or sovereign in the modern meaning of these words. There were no clearly defined territories with borders. The medieval world was not a geographical patchwork of sharply differentiated colors which represented different independent countries. Instead, it was a complicated and confusing intermingling of lines and colors of varying shades and hues. Power and authority was organized on both a religious and a political basis: in Latin Christendom, the Pope and the Emperor were the heads of two parallel and connected hierarchies, one religious and the other political. Kings and other rulers were subjects of those higher authorities and their laws. They were not fully independent. And much of the time, local rulers were not fully independent either. The fact is that territorial political independence as we know it today was not present in medieval Europe.229
229 Jackson and Sørensen, Introduction to International Relations, 11.
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I disagree with this characteristics of the medieval “international” system. Leaving aside the fact that over ten centuries, which are traditionally included to the medieval era, the system evolved and transformed, the lack of the modern notion of sovereignty cannot stand for exclusion of the medieval “international” systems from the IR picture.230 It is true that these systems varied but if a system is not like ours does not necessarily mean that it does not (or cannot) exist at all. Furthermore, in order to eschew stepping into a grand debate about the medieval origins of sovereignty231 or about the fluctuating and confusing modern understandings of sovereignty,232 Waltz’s definition could be provided, which has its merit that it reinstates the sufficient degree of independence to lordships, so that they could be perceived as a “system of states”:
What then is sovereignty? To say that a state is sovereign means that it decides for itself how it will cope with its internal and external problems, including whether or not to seek assistance from others and in doing so to limit its freedom by making commitments to them.233
The fundamental question about the medieval “international” systems, and the thirteenth-century system in particular, concerns the problem of its ordering principle – whether it was hierarchy (as in domestic politics characterized by relations of super- and subordination) or anarchy (specific to unsupervised political systems). Now, my argument in this Chapter suggests that the medieval systems could be categorized as “hybrid-systems”, that is:
230 Regarding these common notions in the field of IR and general approaches to medieval “international” politics, Peter Halden asserted: Certain social sciences such as International Relations (IR) tend to simplify the Middle Ages to a binary opposition between emperor and pope. Conversely, within the historical disciplines the view that there was no “international politics” in this era has long prevailed. Both are results of identification of the state with the Weberian definition and of inter-state politics with institutions such as sovereignty and the “balance of power”. With this background, two options have been left to synthetic approaches, focusing on feudal relations between minor lords or concluding that Europe was governed by unitary structure made up of the emperor and the pope until the system differentiated into fully autonomous units at the peace of Westphalia: Peter Halden,
“From Empire to Commonwealth(s): Orders in Europe 1300-1800,” in Universal Empire. A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and Representation in Eurasian History, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 283.
231 This concept was traditionally related to the problem of the emergence of the modern state in the Middle Ages, and was discussed in numerous books and articles.
232 Interestingly, both authors of the quoted textbook were well aware of the conceptual challenges in regard to sovereignty. Cf. Robert Jackson, “Sovereignty in World Politics: A Glance at the Conceptual and Historical Landscape,” Political Studies 47 (1999): 431–56.; Georg Sørensen, “Sovereignty: Change and Continuity in a Fundamental Institution,” Political Studies 47 (1999): 590–604. See also: Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner, eds., Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a Contested Concept (Cambridge; New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
233 Waltz, Theory, 96.
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Medieval (geo)politics was neither purely anarchical nor purely hierarchical, but contained both vertical and horizontal relations of subordination and coordination among highly differentiated bearers of political power.234
Teschke, who analyzed medieval political systems from the Marxist perspective, was right in observing in them both elements: hierarchy and anarchy. Jackson and Sorensen in their characteristics stressed the hierarchical aspects as vital; by contrast, Fischer – in his neorealist survey of feudal Europe – emphasized anarchy as the ordering principle of medieval
“international” systems. Historically speaking, it would be most appropriate to concur with Teschke’s point as the most adequate to the medieval political phenomena. However, given that for the sake of theoretical clarity it would be better to point to one principle as the essential one, the following overview of the thirteenth-century “international” politics intends to investigate whether the “international” realities could either indicate which of these ordering principles dominated, or – if not – how this “hybrid-system” functioned.
The IR scholarship developed throughout the twentieth century and it has made this twentieth-century international system its central issue. All IR theoretical traditions, even if they reach to theorists and philosophers of the past centuries for inspiration and solid grounding, they were in first place devised to elucidate the behavior of the twentieth-century states. Although the discipline did not confine itself to the contemporary matters, the focus on the recent developments remained principal. This was partially due to the IR’s aspirations (not shared by historians) to offer meaningful predictions about the future transformations on the international stage. Having said this, it could be analogically argued that the examination of the thirteenth-century “international” politics Europe-wide (leaving out most of Central Europe as this is going to be more carefully investigated in the next chapters, Scandinavia, and the so-called “crusader states”) should provide material sufficient to make claims about this “international” system. At least it should be enough to seek statements about its ordering principle.
The Thirteenth-Century “International” System in Operation
While investigating the ordering principle of the thirteenth-century “international”
system of Latin Christendom, that is, whether it was an anarchical environment inhabited by
234 Teschke, The Myth of 1648, 48.
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units uniform in political nature and differentiated only in material capabilities (wealth, manpower, resources) or it was a hierarchical structure, in which units were additionally categorized according to their functions; the most efficient way to determine the answer would be to focus special attention on “international” actors that claimed universal supremacy and thus implied a form of hierarchy in the system: the papacy and the empire. It seems particularly relevant to analyze the scope and breadth of the papal authority in the
“international” affairs, because on many occasions it superseded the range of claims put forward by the emperors of the Romans.
For a historian, the easiest way to grapple with the issue of the ordering principle of thirteenth-century “international” system is to assume anarchical state-system-like structure, in which all actors were fundamentally preoccupied with securing their own individual interests. Since the conventional IR scholarship suggests the domination of hierarchy in the system, for the sake of the polemical argument the papacy – as the supposed generator of the
“Papal Empire” – becomes the focal point of my inquiry. In other words, if hierarchical order among the lordships prevailed in the thirteenth-century medieval Europe, it was only the pope who could engender it (as the claimant of the most universal range of authority). Therefore, identifying the papal contribution to the “international” affairs, its interests and scope, limits and constraints will reveal most about the ordering principle that dominated in the thirteenth-century Europe.
In the thirteenth century the “Christian society”235 developed a special way to view the problem of legitimacy. The pope emerged as the grand judge of Latin Christendom.236 In the late twelfth century the number of appellations to the pope’s court drastically increased. The pontiff became the only figure in Latin Christendom who purposefully attended to matters Europe-wide. Theoretically, he maintained contacts with all Christian rulers and also engaged in relations with Byzantium, the Crusader States, and beyond. By 1200 the annual output of papal letters could reach 50,000.237 The papacy transformed into a vast “international
235 This concept is conventionally used here. I will return to it in more details later in the chapter and elaborate it further in the next chapter.
236 Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (London; New York: Routledge, 2003), 228.
237 William C. Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 189.
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lawcourt”238 which was believed to efficiently dispense justice, unlike lordly or episcopal courts, which were less productive and cherished minor prestige. In many respects the papal household transformed into a center of the Christian society, which provided guidance and binding resolutions to emerging conflicts and problems.
Walter Ullmann provided a brief but eloquent overview of the early thirteenth-century papacy’s political qualifications:
As monarchic Ruler the pope claimed not only the ownership of all islands (on the basis of the Donation of Constantine), but he was also … the feudal lord of a great many countries.
As the general ‘overseer’ … he was entitled to depose princes, release subjects from their oaths of allegiance, confer crowns by making kings (as evidenced in Croatia-Dalmatia, Sicily, Armenia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and so on) and to dispose of territories.239
Ullmann’s conception was very much juristic. He referred to the papal claims, entitlements and other legal capabilities. It could be argued, however, that the unique position of the papacy was not a direct product of the legal culture that exploded in Latin Christendom throughout the thirteenth century, and thus created a sort of a papal imperial jurisdiction, but its fundamental aspect was that it “made sense” to the thirteenth-century lords. This idea of
“making sense” implies that the lords, drawing upon their concepts and understandings of the political, the moral, and the social, could comprehend the papal power as an example of legitimate authoritative order.240 The context of the Christian society was of crucial importance there, since it created a special social space that favored the pope’s qualifications to confer legitimacy, especially at the level of “international” system.
This overwhelming image of the papal omnipotence on the “international” stage has to be viewed in its context, however. The pope could play an essential role because it was generally accepted by other lords, who all “were born into” to the “international” politics when its rules had been already somewhat defined. This does not mean that these “rules of the game” were established once and for all. The famous conflict between Boniface VIII and Philip IV of France in the turn of the fourteenth century evidenced that there was still room
238 Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford [England]: New York:
Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1989), 575.
239 Ullmann, A Short History, 2003, 227.
240 Cf. Matt Sleat, “Bernard Williams and the Possibility of a Realist,” European Journal of Political Theory 9, no. 4 (2010): 488.