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Medieval Unity and the Economic Conditions for an International Civilization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Karl W. Deutsch
Karl W. Deutsch*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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In a world torn with nationalistic conflicts, men's minds are naturally turning to projects of international government and to hopes for a wider acceptance of international loyalties, language, and civilization. One of the last epochs in which a measure of such international unity can be said to have actually existed was the European Middle Ages. The following study of the conditions underlying medieval unity, therefore, may offer some information on a topic of present interest.

Accounts of the rise of modern nationalism frequently begin with a picture of the spiritual, linguistic, and cultural unity of medieval Christendom. Mr. Carlton Hayes speaks of “the traditional internationalism of civilized Europe” before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; other authors similarly use the Middle Ages as a point of departure. New forces are then pointed out, which in their rise toward the end of the Middle Ages broke up that unity into the present multitude of nations and sovereign states. This useful method of exposition, however, suggests further questions. How did that “traditional internationalism” of medieval Europe come to exist? What were the conditions favouring its spread, and how durable was it likely to be under the law of its own growth? Can the medieval vision of cultural unity again be recreated on similar foundations?

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Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , February 1944 , pp. 18 - 35
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Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1944

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References

1 Hayes, Carlton J., The Historical Evolution of Nationalism (New York, 1931), p. 3.Google Scholar

2 E.g. Royal Institute of International Affairs, Nationalism (London, New York, 1939), pp. 7–9.Google Scholar Cf. Kohn, Hans, Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1938), p. 13 Google Scholar; and Mitscherlich, W., Der Nationalismus, Die Geschichte einer Idee (Leipzig, 1929), pp. 63–73, 112–14.Google Scholar

3 E.g. in Hayes, Carlton J., Essays on Nationalism (New York, 1928), pp. 30 ff.Google Scholar

4 “It was easier to sell the high-grade broadcloth of England in the Near East or in the East Indies than to sell such goods to the peasants or shopkeepers of the country” ( Usher, A. P., An Introduction to the Industrial History of England, Boston, New York, 1920, p. 20).Google Scholar

5 “It is the life of these humbler classes in society (artisans and small farmers) that creates the appearance of intense local self-sufficiency …. The cosmopolitanism in the life of the upper classes is quite as characteristic, however, and the difference between modern life and the life of these remote periods really lies in the strange dualism of social organisation in ancient and mediaeval times ….” (ibid., p. 21).

6 In the Carolingian period (ninth century), a “number of monasteries, which might be compared to the printing-offices of the Renaissance, provided for the increasing demand for books. … In addition to Tours, there were Corbie, Orleans, Saint Denis, Saint Wandrille, Fulda, Corvey, Saint Gall, Reichenau, and Lorsch. In most of them, and above all in Fulda, there were Anglo-Saxon monks” ( Pirenne, Henri, Mohammed and Charlemagne, New York, Norton and Co., 1939, p. 281 Google Scholar, with reference to Dawson, [sic], Les angines de l'Europe, French, translation, p. 231).Google Scholar Cf. also the international spread of a new style of handwriting, the Caroline minuscule (ibid.).

7 The collection of wild honey and primitive forms of bee-keeping were practised early among some Germanic and Slavic tribes, but more intensive forms of bee-farming, while known to the Romans, were introduced over wide parts of Europe by the monks, either directly or with the help of the princes whom they advised. Cf. Thompson, James Westfall, Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages, 300-1300 (New York, Century Co., 1928), p. 528 Google Scholar; Parain, Charles, “The Evolution of Agricultural Technique” in The Cambridge Economic History, vol. I, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Eng., University Press, 1941), p. 167 Google Scholar; and particularly Brinkmann, Walter, Bienenstock und Bienenstand in den romanischen Ländern (Hamburg, Hansischer Gildenverlag, 1938), p. 12.Google Scholar “It must be assumed that the Germanic tribes became acquainted only late with regular bee-keeping in containers of wood, wickerwork, or straw. They knew probably for a relatively long time only the keeping of wild bees and the taking of honey from hollow trees …. An important advance was made by bee-farming with the introduction of Christianity …. The monks … engaged … particularly in bee-farming, in order to be able to supply the Church always liberally with wax for worship” (ibid., in German). In addition to the monasteries, German princes endeavoured to advance bee-farming, like Charlemagne in some detail in the capitulare de villis. “In order to force the rural population to take up bee-farming, [Charlemagne] gave the clergy the right to collect a honey tithe [“Honigzins”] from the peasants” (ibid., p. 60). Typical for the new, intensive bee-farming on the demesnes was the use of bee-hives made, of straw, which “spread more and more, according to all appearances, only since Charlemagne, for its extension coincides nearly with the frontiers of the then Frankish-Germanic Empire” (ibid., p. 69).

I am indebted to Dr. Karl Helleiner of the University of Toronto for having called to my attention the point covered in this note, as well as the subjects of notes 8, 9, and 22. The responsibility for their treatment and choice of documentation is, of course, my own.

8 The making of cloth in the Flemish countryside, possibly indigenous since Roman times, might perhaps be added to this list. In the early Middle Ages it, too, was a scarce, localized skill, with international distribution of its products. The industry “was nowhere else in operation at so early a date and with such remarkable results …. Until the … 9th century, Frisian boatmen regularly carried cloths woven in Flanders along the rivers of the Low Countries; … [they were sent[ … as a gift to the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid…. [From] the 10th century … [the] fineness of the cloths … caused a demand for them along all the coasts frequented by the Northern seamen. …” ( Pirenne, Henri, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, London, Kegan Paul, 1936, pp. 36–7).Google Scholar

9 A locator “was rarely a mere peasant.… The locators of Wichmann of Magdeburg … know Latin. … Generally speaking, we may assign these men to the class which, in other places, directed the trade and self-government of the rising towns. Often this classification is demonstrable.… Locators had to cooperate on journeys into distant places; to deal with foreigners; have property to be risked in a venture; and some knowledge of law” ( Koebner, R., “The Settlement and Colonisation of Europe,” in the Cambridge Economic History, vol. I, pp. 83–4).Google Scholar As to the members of the new colonies, “Flemings and Hollanders were the pioneers … always specially entrusted with the cultivation of marshy land…. West German groups soon followed and imitated them. …” (ibid., p. 85). Once the new villagers had settled as peasants, intercourse within the settlements sufficed to amalgamate Flemings and Germans, but usually there was only slow and limited assimilation with the neighbouring non-German villages. Where the German settlers were reinforced by a large and sustained volume of new arrivals as well as by a German or Germanized nobility, there it still took centuries to make the new rural regions German; and where those conditions were not fulfilled, the medieval practice of importing relatively many men to supply a skill (instead of relying on a few men to teach it quickly to many of the native population) has scattered unassimilated German colonies, like raisins in a cake, over many of the key sites of non-German Eastern Europe.

10 Haskins, C. H., Studies in Mediaeval Culture (Oxford, 1929), p. 94.Google Scholar

11 Haskins, C. H., The Normans in European History (Boston, New York, 1915), p. 22.Google Scholar

12 Zarek, Otto, The History of Hungary (London, 1939), p. 98.Google Scholar

13 Entwistle, W. J., The Spanish Language together with Portuguese, Catalan and Basque (London, 1936), p. 15.Google Scholar

14 Cf. Bauer, Otto, Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, (ed. 2, Vienna, 1924), p. 134.Google Scholar

15 The concepts of “automatic language” and the criterion of sociological completeness for a full-fledged language are developed in Kloss, H., “Sprachtabellen” in Vierteljahres-schrift für Politik und Geschichte (Berlin, 1929, vol. I, no. 2), pp. 107–8.Google Scholar

16 An Appendix documenting this point has been omitted for reasons of space.

17 For a comparison between the Jews and certain Indian trading castes, see Weber, Max, General Economic History (London, 1927), pp. 195–6.Google Scholar

18 Thompson, , An Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages, pp. 281–2.Google Scholar

19 Ibid.

20 Bremberg, Erik I., “Wales and the Mediaeval Slave Trade” (Speculum, vol. XVII, 1942, p. 263).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The imposts levied by the Prince of Kiev were at the same time the articles of his trade. “When he became a ruler as a konung, he as a Varangian (Varyag) did not cease to be an armed merchant. He shared the taxes with his retinue, which served him as the organ of administration and was the ruling class. This class governed in winter, visiting the country and levying taxes, and in summer trafficked in what was gathered during the winter” ( ProfessorKlyuchevski, V., quoted in Cambridge Mediaeval History, vol. IV, Cambridge, 1923, p. 206).Google Scholar The commercial element in Viking civilization has frequently been underrated. The late Professor Haskins still assumed that the great emigration from the north in the ninth and tenth centuries had for its “chief cause … doubtless that which lies back of colonizing movements in all ages, the growth of population and the need of more room. Five centuries earlier this land-hunger had pushed the Germanic tribes across the Rhine …, and the Viking raids were simply a later aspect of this same Völkerwanderung ….” ( Haskins, , The Normans in European History, p. 29).Google Scholar This view represents a somewhat one-sided picture of the facts. The Viking raids were not a migration of land-hungry peasants. “Indeed archaeologists are now agreed that in the 8th century there were a good number of Scandinavian merchants settled in Western Europe. Their influence on the trade of the West was only exceeded by that of the Frisians … and it is most probable that it was the crushing of Frisian power by Charles Martel in 734 and their final subjection by Charles the Great towards the close of the 8th century which helped to prepare the way for the great Viking advance” ( Cambridge Mediaeval History, vol. III, p. 310).Google Scholar

Like other men in the Middle Ages, the Vikings desired to rule the land, not to till it. “The primary purpose of the participants was not to settle down permanently in the region to which they came, nor to establish colonies…. [The] aim was to secure immediate material gain, either by piracy, trade and raids on foreign shores, by exacting taxes or tributes, or by serving as mercenaries in the employ of foreign potentates…. Both warrior and merchant Vikings generally retained their headquarters in the North…. With increasingly stronger opposition abroad, consolidations and mergers within the ranks of the Viking leaders became more frequent.… [The] promoters … were forced to take a hand in the administration of the various regions that constituted their ‘markets’ in order … that they might retain their power of collecting tributes.

This entailed … problems which only a king or a leader possessing a military organization could cope with successfully. In this new order, the ‘little fellow’ had no place. On the surface, the ceding of Normandy to the Northmen may seem to be somewhat different from the conquests in England and Ireland, but fundamentally the development was very much the same” ( Anderson, Sven Axel, Viking Enterprise, New York, 1936, pp. 142–3).Google Scholar

The importance of commercialism and oppression in Viking life has been obscured by the heroic poetry of the Eddas. There is a distance between what men do and what they dream. Eddie poems may not be telling us more of the daily realities of Viking trade than Kipling's “White Man's Burden” told of everyday activities of white nineteenth-century traders in Asia. Today we are indebted to Viking thought for the strengthening of the values of individualism, independence, restlessness, and daring in our heritage. But we are endangered by the results of an uncritical glorification of the Viking way of life. In Hitler's Germany a stream of publications is proclaiming to German youth the return of the Viking age. Commerce and piracy are to be reunited in our day, and the “retinue of armed merchants” of the tenth century becomes as Gefolgschaft the hallowed pattern of Nazi education in the twentieth. The Vikings won a free life for themselves in an age which often knew but little distinction between the freedom of the pirate and the freedom of the pioneer. In the thousand years since then that distinction has deepened, and it is vital today.

21 Haskins, , The Normans in European History, pp. 36–7.Google Scholar

22 The late Professor Henri Pirenne ascribed the decline of Kievian Russia and the shift of the centre of the Russian state northward to Moscow in the main to a single, external cause, the invasion of the “Pechenegs” in the eleventh century, which “cut the communications between Russia and her foreign markets” ( Pirenne, H., Medieval Cities, Princeton, 1925, pp. 53–4).Google Scholar

This emphasis is not shared by a number of other historians. That the same nomads who had been defeated in the tenth and eleventh centuries should begin to triumph themselves in the twelfth, is explained by them by important internal factors in the decline of Kiev and, by some, by the reopening of direct trade between the West and the Orient in the Mediterranean and the resulting decline of the Byzantine Empire. The most frequently stressed internal causes seem to have been the large-scale practice of slavery and the slave trade, which tended to turn the recurrent feuds of the princes into slave raids for captives, exploitable at home and salable abroad. To the depopulation caused by the slave trade was added, it seems, the growth of agriculture in the regions to the north, north-east, and west, with increasing independence from the old central authority, and with a considerable peasant exodus from the Kiev state to these new regions of lesser oppression and greater opportunity. Cf. Kluchevsky, V. O. [sic], A History of Russia (New York, Dutton, 1911), vol. I, pp. 185–94Google Scholar; Mavor, J., An Economic History of Russia (ed. 2, New York, Dutton, 1925), pp. 18–21 Google Scholar; Thompson, , An Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages, p. 282 Google Scholar; Pokrovsky, M. N., History of Russia (New York, 1931), pp. 37, 63–4)Google Scholar; Mirsky, D. S., Russia, A Social History (London, Cresset Press, 1931), pp. 44–5, 49–55 Google Scholar; Karpovich, Michael M. in An Encyclopedia of World History (ed. Langer, William L., Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1940), p. 246 Google Scholar; Kerner, Robert J., The Urge to the Sea-The Course of Russian History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1942), pp. 19–20.Google Scholar For the similar emphasis in recent Russian textbooks see Shestakov, A. V., A Short History of the USSR (Moscow, Coop. Publ. Society of Foreign Workers, 1938), pp. 26–7Google Scholar; Pankratova, A. M., Istoria USSR (Moscow, Izdatelstvo Narkomprosa RSFSR, 1940), pp. 53, 55–6Google Scholar (in Russian).

Pirenne's theory about the Pechenegs was advanced in 1925 in order “to have proved, by the example of Russia, that the economy of the Cardlingian era was … the result of … the closing of the Mediterranean by Islam,” but it is no longer found in his Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (London, 1936; New York, 1937)Google Scholar, nor in his last work, Mohammed and Charlemagne (New York, 1939).Google Scholar

23 Haskins, , The Normans in European History, pp. 44–6, 49.Google Scholar

24 [The] traffic … was discontinued when it ceased to be profitable. The rulers across the seas obtained a firmer hold on their respective regions … All along the western front of Viking operation, the traditional victims overcame the technological advantages of the Northmen by securing fleets with which they successfully resisted the attacks. of the Vikings … Since no honor was attached to being repelled and returning empty-handed, marauding as an occupation lost its appeal … and the warrior Viking lost caste also in the North … The changed conditions … caused trade to be pursued on a new basis. Fighting prowess became less important. Under the conditions that the new order imposed, most Northmen apparently lacked the qualifications for successful traders and faded out of the picture…. North German and Frisian merchants came to the North in increasing numbers, and … they soon gained virtual control of the commercial life of Northern Europe. They became the predominant element of the population in practically all the commercial centers of the North; Visby … reached its height under the influence of German traders chiefly …” ( Anderson, , Viking Enterprise, pp. 144–5).Google Scholar

25 Langer, William L. and Blake, Robert P., The Rise of the Ottoman Turks and its Historical Background (New York, 1932).Google Scholar Reprinted from the American Historical Review, vol. XXXVII, 1932, pp. 468–505.Google Scholar

26 ProfessorWestermann, Diedrich, “Some Notes on the Hausa People and their Language,” in Bargery, G. P., A Hausa-English Dictionary and English-Hausa Vocabulary, Compiled for the Government of Nigeria (London, 1934), p. xiv.Google Scholar Italics mine.

27 Cf. Walsh, J. J., The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries (Georgetown University Edition, New York, 1910).Google Scholar The deceptive picture of medieval homogeneity has lured respectable scientists to strange conclusions. In Martin's, A. V. article, “Kultursoziologie des Mittelalters” in Vierkandt's, Handwörterbuch de Soziologie (Stuttgart, 1931)Google Scholar we read: “The whole Germanic-Romanic family of peoples felt themselves-in view of the far-reaching mixture of blood-as blood-kinsmen of each other.… The root of this sense of community … was a direct blood-bound feeling of the western peoples; it was only in their consciousness that the ecclesiastical bond obtruded itself into the foreground.… The cultural unity reached only as far and could reach only as far as one felt oneself somehow belonging together by kinship” (p. 373). With such a theory the author is forced to disregard the fact that Celtic and Slavic countries formed a significant part of western medieval civilization. The contributions of the Irish, the Czechs, the Poles, the Croats, and the Magyars to the spread and development of Latin Christianity cannot be reconciled with the theory of “blood-kinship.”

Can such a theory explain satisfactorily why medieval unity was so much weaker in the seventh and eighth centuries than it was in the twelfth and thirteenth? Most of the intermingling took place during the migration of nations, and the earlier period was much closer to that than the later. Again, there was more intermarriage between Arab and Spaniard than between Spaniard and Pole, yet Pole and Spaniard belonged to a common civilization and Spaniard and Arab did not. If A. V. Martin's theory of “blood-kinship” thus fails to explain the unity of medieval culture, it furnishes at least a significant example of the trend toward racial mythology during the last years of the German Republic.

28 In the Cambridge Historical Journal, vol. V, Cambridge, 1935, pp. 15–40.Google Scholar

29 The rate of entry discussed in this study should not be confused with Professor Sorokin's concept of “vertical mobility.” Professor Sorokin deals with the entry of individuals into the ranks of the élite; our study deals with the entry of large numbers of people into more frequent contacts within a larger community. A farmer's son becoming an apprentice in a town may not have risen “vertically” according to Professor Sorokin, but he has entered into more intensive intercourse with a larger number of other people. Cf. Sorokin, P., Social Mobility (New York, 1927).Google Scholar

30 What national characteristics are physically inheritable? Certain bodily characteristics like colour of skin, curliness of hair, shape of lips or nose are transmitted by heredity. Under certain circumstances such bodily marks may be made to serve as national characteristics. The olive colour of the light Mulatto is not a mark of separate nationality in Egypt, which would set off its bearer from the other Egyptians. But it may function as a national characteristic in important parts of the United States where it often has set off its bearers from their white fellow-citizens, exposing many of them to discriminatory treatment and aligning thousands of them with various movements of Negro nationalism. Whether the bodily marks themselves are likely to be preserved by heredity, or to be wiped out by intermixture or assimilation is a problem in the science of biology. The social scientist can only try to investigate why political emotions have become attached to bodily marks in certain cases, and the chances for the future strengthening or weakening of these emotions. No such attempt is made in the present paper. The analysis developed in its main text is applicable to acquired, i.e. physically not inheritable characteristics only.

31 National differences would have to be considered a primary factor of conflict if their presence could be shown to lead to important clashes in situations where no significant social conflicts were found in similar, but nationally uniform, societies.

32 In the discussion of short term policies the demand for skilled persons in a given economy has been sometimes treated as stable, such as in the case of Professor Sorokin's warnings about the increase in American college graduates during the 1920's: “for any prosperous society there is an optimal proportion of the upper strata in relation to its population … Hence, the possibility of an overproduction or underproduction of candidates for the upper strata …” ( Sorokin, , Social Mobility, pp. 197 ff.Google Scholar) For a long-term policy, however, the changes in the demand for skilled persons and intercommunications must be taken into account and, indeed, become the most significant. The development of that demand with economic and technological progress is cardinal to the present analysis.

33 Recent political thought stresses increasingly the importance of a solution for all people rather than for a minority. “Our insistence upon tolerance is being broadened into respect and appreciation for peoples with a different culture from our own. But to date, we have thought too much in terms of minorities, racial, cultural, and religious. In the emerging world order it is not merely a matter of minorities, but of the majority of mankind” ( Friedrich, Carl J., The New Belief in the Common Man, Boston, 1942, p. 308).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Much of this long-range task seems implicit in the public statements of the Vice-President of the United States: “From a long-term and fundamental point of view there are no backward peoples which are lacking in mechanical sense. Russians, Chinese, and the Indians both of India and the Americas all learn to read and write and operate machines … Everywhere the common man must learn to build his own industries with his own hands in a practical fashion. Everywhere the common man must learn to increase his productivity …” ( Wallace, Henry A., The Price of Free World Victory, An Address before the Free World Association, New York City, May 8, 1942, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1942, p. 3).Google Scholar