Conflict in Medieval Europe: Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture, coeditor, with Warren C. Brown (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), dust jacket text, ii–x (original) (raw)
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Szellem és tudomány 11, 2020
One of the greatest differences of the modern world with regard to all previous periods is the profound transformation of the rules that determine the use of lawful violence. In former historical periods this right was primarily vested in the individual, or the kin and servants, and only secondarily in a community that was independent from the individual. There could exist several such communities. The village or the town was involved in violence at least to the same extent as the state. Moreover, the violence exerted by a village or town was not licensed by the state, with the latter ceding, as we would say it today, part of its authority to a lower-ranking organisation, but functioned alongside state violence, being the independent activity of communities protecting their own members. It is this individually-based violence that helps to explain the working of countries and empires for thousands of years without an effective police and abundantly staffed judicial courts. Although most sources related to the use of individual violence have come down to us from the late Middle Ages, this by no means implies that we are facing a purely medieval phenomenon. This kind of violence is already recognisable in ancient times, for it was in effect a sine qua non of traditional civilisations. 1 Consequently, it had been a constant companion of human history, gradually losing ground in the past few centuries only, to become finally marginalised by now. This system of un-stately violence can be reconstructed not from laws but from customs, and principally from the practice. Legitimate individual violence was born in the world of customary law, and its working was regulated by customs. There exists no single law-book, no legal treatise that would have catalogued and systemized all the relevant customs. Neither in Hungary nor in any other country of Europe is such a work available. Starting from the Hungarian experience, one can identify five institutions that worked according to the customary rules of legitimate individual violence: arrest, reprisal, defence against damaging a field or forest, and the protection
Reflections on Early Medieval Violence: the example of the" Blood FEud"
Memoria y civilización: anuario de historia de la …, 1999
The period after the fall of the Roman Empire is still widely regarded as one of untrammelled violence. In some formulations it is (to caricature the approach only slightly) thought that the end of Roman civilization was followed by a period wherein: 'the labours and happiness of peaceful development are ... wiped out by the upburst of elemental passions which have only slumbered. The long tranquillity of the Roman sway ended in the violence and darkness of the Middle Age' 2 .
This book reassesses the relationship between the late medieval rise of the state in France and aristocratic violence. Although it is often assumed that resurgent royal government eliminated so-called private warfare, the French judicial archives reveal nearly 100 such wars waged in Languedoc and the Auvergne from the mid-thirteenth through the fourteenth century. Royal administrators often intervened in these wars, but not always in order to suppress ‘private violence’ in favour of ‘public justice’. Their efforts were strongly shaped by the recognition of elites’ own power and legitimate prerogatives, and elites were often fully complicit with royal intervention. Much of the engagement between royal officers and local elites came through informal processes of negotiation and settlement, rather than through the coercive imposition of official justice. The expansion of royal authority was due as much to local cooperation as to conflict, a fact that ensured its survival during the fourteenth-century’s crises
Seigneurial Violence in Medieval Europe
The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Richard W. Kaeuper and Harriet Zurndorfer, vol. 2 of The Cambridge World History of Violence, 4 vols. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge), 2020
This chapter discusses violence associated with the exercise of lordship and the culture of nobility in Europe from ca. 500-1500. For most of the twentieth century, historians argued that lordly violence rose and fell in inverse proportion to the power of ‘sovereign’ rulers, such as kings and emperors. It is now recognized that aristocrats in general and lords in particular played roles in medieval societies and polities that made their use of violence not just tolerable but also necessary. The practice of ‘feud’ has also come in for reassessment, increasingly understood not as anarchic or usurpatory, but re-envisaged as rule-based and self-limiting. Yet, if seigneurial violence now appears much more socially productive and politically intelligible to historians, it is important to realize that the exercise and experience of seigneurial violence varied a great deal according to social position and context. Aristocratic women were less likely than aristocratic men to be involved in such conflicts, and non-aristocrats, of both sexes, bore the brunt of the violence. This essay proceeds chronologically, examining changes in the ideas and practices that shaped how lords and nobles used violence in different regions.
The paper deals with the relationships between judicial practices and the feud, which acquires interesting relevance both in customary systems and in systems governed by the legal process. First is described the crucial transition from customary practices mainly handled by the community (prevailing in the early medieval age) to practices managed by professionals (lawyers) and the procedures successively worked out by them. Feuding is examined along with the researches conducted on single European areas and for different historical periods, especially for the early Middle Ages, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age, considering the various disciplines used. In reality, while focusing on the relationship between the spread of violence and the need for peace, the discussion on the subject of feud in Europe paid little attention to the role played by the spread of Roman canonical procedures and the mediation carried out by lawyers, both in their tracts and their judiciary practice, in order to introduce a new social order. In the early modern period, the intense dynamics of social violence and the decisive interventions of state powers increased along with the use of new trial procedures. These transformations were relevant and even decisive, especially after the introduction of strict inquisitorial rites, which subtracted from the privileged classes the independent resolution of conflicts and the traditional management of procedural practices.
Buc-Medieval European civil wars (forthcoming Leeds; ARC 2023)
"Medieval European civil wars, local and proto-national identities of Toulousains, Parisians, and Prague Czechs", in Y. Stouraitis, War and collective identities in the Middle Ages East, West, and beyond, 2023
cultural conflicts fought in High and Late medieval Catholic Europe look remarkably odd: coloured, to a lesser or greater degree, by an exclusivist religion or by semisecularized byproducts of this same religion, they veer easily to a manichaean blackand-white tenor. Japan was at war for most of its medieval centuries, from the twelfth century that saw the founding of the Kamakura Shogunate (1192), all the way to Sekigahara, 1600, the battle that definitely put an end to the Sengoku jidai, the era of the contending principalities. In contrast with run-of-the mill Western European history writing, Japanese chronicles either depict enmities soberly, led by power politics and thus rich in side-switching, yet without much moralizing, or with an acute sense of the tragic, that is, by putting in dialogue contending norms or duties. 1 Civil wars, understood here as armed conflicts sustained over time and embracing a majority of the politically active members of a polity (civitas), could be expressive or formative of identities. So could be religion, in its purer or secularized forms. While historiography in the 1970s foregrounded the issue of ethnicity, and began fruitfully to emphasize its fluidity, 2 it now recognizes that identity, whatever it is, had in My thanks for input and ideas go to my Vienna University BA seminar (Winter Term 2017-2018) students Joseph de Durfort, Christoph Haill, Karina Müller Mares, and Hannah Riedler. Also, thanks to my colleague Christina Lutter for a close reading of this text and her comments. This chapter was elaborated thanks to two fellowships, one at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Central European University (October 2018 to January 2019), the other at Stanford University (Krater Visiting Professorship in the Department of History, February 2019). My gratitude to both institutions. 1 The idiosyncratic logic of medieval civil war, plus medieval implicit or explicit "emic" understandings of bellum civile, make all the more surprising its absence from a recent book. David Armitage's 2017 Civil Wars. A History in Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) jumps happily from Ancient Greece and Rome to early modern Europe over the medieval European millennium, claiming to provide a genealogy for our contemporary notions of intestine conflict and violence. 2 The earliest Viennese flagship book is Herwig Wolfram, Geschichte der Goten: von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des sechsten Jahrhunderts: Entwurf einer historischen Ethnographie (Munich: Beck, 1979), American translation as History of the Goths (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). The German forerunner was Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: das Werden der frühmittelalterlichen gentes (Cologne: Böhlau, 1961). the medieval West, and already in the earlier Middle Ages, much to do with religion, as envisioned by local elites. 3 The following considerations, therefore, cross-fertilize civil war, religious conceptions and the imagined belonging to a group by focusing on three dossiers. They are, namely, (1) the so-called Albigensian crusade (1208/9-1229); (2) the Franco-French civil war opposing the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons (1407-1435); and (3) the crusades waged by Emperor Sigismund against the dissident Bohemian Hussites and the latter's equally holy resistance to papal Catholicism (1419-1436). In all three cases, one identification at play was the city: Toulouse, Paris, and Prague. 1 Toulouse 4 (...) when the news came (...) that Count Raymond [VII of Toulouse] had entered Toulouse to raise it up again, to destroy the French and to elevate Pretz (Prowess), all through the lands one found speech again, and one shouted out: "Toulouse! May God guide and save her, may He aid and help her, guard and defend her! May He give him [the count] strength to amend what's been lost, to rescue Paratge (Nobility) and fire up joy!". 5 An intertextual reading of the narrative sources produced during the so-called Albigensian Crusade of 1208/9-1229 and in its aftermath allows one to compare a monastic and an aristocratic rendition of civil war, mediated by two source genres with which each outlook has elective affinities-chronicle and epic. The Albigensian Crusade 3 Two publications among many, Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (eds), Strategies of Identification: