Anna Grzymała-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies at Stanford University. She is also the Director of the Europe Center and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Her latest book is Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State.
Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox.
While war creates the need for a state, it obliterates the capacity to deliver one. We’re seeing that in Ukraine right now. That if you want to develop a state, you need peace, not war. War may create the need for a state, but peace is what allows you to build one. I think that that might be a lesson worth emphasizing, especially these days.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:38
- Medieval Governance – 2:42
- Papal Strategies – 16:43
- Law, Taxation, and Representation – 25:07
- Ongoing Influences – 40:25
Podcast Transcript
Longtime listeners know I take a very expansive view of democracy. One of my interests involves its origins and evolution. So, while some might wonder what medieval history has to do with democracy, I found it fascinating to learn how many of what we call democratic institutions have medieval origins. In this episode Anna Grzymała-Busse explains how the Catholic Church shaped many of our modern political institutions.
Anna Grzymała-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies at Stanford University. She is also the Director of the Europe Center and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute. Her latest book is Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State.
Our conversation explores how the church influenced the development of the law, taxation, and political representation. Most of us take for granted how those institutions developed. But Anna explains how they developed over long periods of time through conflict, competition, and experimentation. But this is not just an account of history. I find this perspective helps us better understand politics and governance today.
Now if you like this podcast, please give the podcast a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Strong ratings and reviews really do help independent podcasts like this one stand out. Like always you’ll find a full transcript at democracyparadox.com. But for now… This is my conversation with Anna Grzymała-Busse…
jmk
Anna Grzymala-Busse, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Thank you for having me.
jmk
Well, Anna, I found your book really impressive. It’s interesting because most of the conversations that I have on this podcast obviously talk about modern and contemporary politics. So, I found your book remarkable because when I talk about modern politics, we typically take the presence of the state for granted. It’s just really difficult to imagine governance or politics without the state. So, your new book, Sacred Foundations, really tries to explain the formation of what we called the state. It really looks at, as the book’s subtitle says, the religious and medieval roots of the European state. So why don’t we start before the state starts to get formed. Can you explain how governance worked in the medieval era before the creation of what we call the modern state?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
So, you know, the modern state doesn’t really come around until much, much later. What do we have in the medieval era are forms of lordship and kingship and I think this sort of classic stereotype is of a tight feudal pyramid with the king and his vassals and the peasants. But in fact, these relationships were much looser. They had a lot to do with mutual obligations. Governance was in its ideal consensual. It was very localized and cellular. Kings governed largely by cajoling barons and cajoling large landowners to go along with their plans. It was much less about coercion, which is what the modern state can exercise at this time. It was much more about legitimation, consent, convincing others to go along with your plans, and promising them rewards if they do so.
That’s really how Kings initially governed. So, what basically happens, and this really begins in the 11th century, is there is a conflict between the church and what then becomes known as the Holy Roman Empire over the boundaries of authority. Who gets to, for example, name bishops? Which doesn’t sound like a very big deal now, but it is precisely because of the cellular nature of medieval society. Bishops were critical local administrators. They’re wealthy landowners. They were royal administrators and they were the spiritual emissaries of the pope. So, it’s with that initial conflict that they’re working out where the boundaries lie and the subsequent spread of this conflict throughout Europe where we can begin to think about the conceptualization of the state, of sovereignty, of rule as separate from simply cajoling that really begins to become something that’s institutionalized.
Of course, it takes an incredibly long time for the modern states to arise. These rulers provided justice. They do tax a little bit. They have some institutions that resolve conflict, but it’s a long, long way off from these formalized cages of reason that Weber and others described by the 19th century.
jmk
So, obviously the book touches on not just the creation of the state, but the dynamics between the way that the state’s created through religious institutions and through secular institutions. In the book you write, “Kings and popes were counterweights to each other in ways that rulers in other settings whether the Islamic caliphate or the Ottoman, Byzantine, and Chinese empires never faced.” So, how did the church gain this independence from secular rulers in Europe?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
So, again, this is a story largely of the 11th century basically. Until then in the Carolingian Empire especially, you have a long tradition of nobles and kings basically appointing their bishops, building monasteries, building churches, and controlling the church and its clergy. There’s a power vacuum that occurs when, basically in the 11th century, one of the Holy Roman Emperors dies. The new one isn’t yet named. So, the church uses this to decide that the only way you can select a pope isn’t by Imperial appointment, but by election. So, from that moment on, the cardinals claim that they will elect the Pope. With that then comes a struggle to basically free the church from the secular and to have the church control its own appointments, its own clergy, et cetera, et cetera.
So, as the Pope gains in power in doing this and the Holy Roman Empire overextends itself into Northern Italy what winds up basically happening is a struggle between these two powers that fragments Europe. The critical aspect that’s different in the governance, and this has been noted by many historians, is the fact that territorial authority in Europe as a result remains highly fragmented. You know, the Roman Empire falls and with this sort of brief blip of the Carolingian Empire in the eighth and ninth centuries, you don’t have a resurrected empire that ever governs Europe itself. This is very different from the central governance that we see in China. It’s very different from the fusion of religious and secular authority that we see in the Caliphate or in the Byzantine Empire.
What you have instead is a church on one side that’s very much keen to protect its autonomy and Kings on the other that very much don’t want the church to intervene in their politics. The result of this is the church deploying all kinds of weapons to prevent the rise of a strong secular power that could bring it under its thumb. So, the church now relies on wars by proxy, on alliances, on depositions, and perhaps most interestingly on secular crusades to keep any ruler who might have threatened its autonomy from being able to do.
The result of this is the fragmentation of Europe, especially in what is the Holy Roman Empire or what is mostly Germany, Burgundy, and those areas. That’s where authority is most fragmented as well as in Northern Italy. The result of that is the constant counterweight between the popes on the one hand and the kings on the other as they struggle to limit the boundaries of their power.
jmk
It shocks me a little bit that we start the story at 1100 where the folks begin to take their power. I was never taught this, but I think I always just innately assumed that with the fall of the Roman Empire that the Pope all of a sudden became this powerful figure that was independent of any states. But what you’re saying is that that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, different states actually had significant influence over who the Pope would become, had significant influence over the direction of the church, even after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
That’s right. So, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the Empire continues in Byzantium, so the center of the Roman Empire shifts far east. That leaves all these local religious leaders, on the one hand, as sometimes the sole authorities that can provide justice and order. But, on the other hand, the Pope is just one bishop among many. This is a time where the church is in a very weak position. It doesn’t have the kind of protective state power that it had before. It falls easy prey to these local lords. In many cases it’s just local lords who then decide who they’re going to name the bishops, they’re going to get the prophets from the cathedrals and the monasteries, and they’re the ones who are going to rule a church.
That really develops in the Holy Roman Empire. Again, at the time, it’s not called the Holy Roman Empire, but especially under Charlamagne and others, you have the start of churches that are entirely controlled by local lords and by the emperors.
jmk
So, essentially the Middle Ages isn’t this period of stasis. You’re describing the Middle Ages as a period of significant evolution both of the church and the state over many hundreds of years.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
That’s right. I mean, until very recently, the history of the state, as it’s told in at least Western social science really starts with the early modern period. A lot of scholars claimed that what you have initially is in the early modern period are these very expensive wars. The constant jostling for power among these fragmented states. That the expenses of warfare lead to the need for taxation, which then magically produces state institutions as the incidental byproducts, as Charles Tilley called them, of this quest for warfare and domination. But what I argue in this book is that this critical moment of information actually occurs much earlier, several hundreds of years before you first see this conflict between the church and the state.
As a result, what we see are two other differences from this early modern account. One is that the relevant conflict is really between the papacy and secular rulers as they work out what are the boundaries of their authority. Then secondly, we see a lot of emulation. It’s not just about conflict. It’s about the fact that, for example, the Carolingian minuscule, a specific way of writing documents first originates in the church, then gets transmitted to the Carolingians and then travels all across Europe. The fact that new church courts offered relatively cheap and easy justice and became the favored place where not just clerical disputes, but contract disputes would be administered.
The rulers noticed this. The rulers noticed that the papacy has at its disposal, wealthy bishops, an enormous amount of human capital in the form of literate clerks and monks, and it wants to harness this as its own as well. So, in this conflict, in this sort of ratcheting up, what we see is the development of law schools and the use of laws as a weapon, the rise of universities, the rise of parliaments who borrow a lot of the rules for governance from church councils, new ways of taxing the population and administering justice to them.
It’s all because of this interplay between the church on the one hand and the needs of secular rulers. Indeed, both parties, as a result, develop a much stronger administration. They slowly start to develop what we consider familiar administrative techniques of taxation of the court systems, of parliaments, and of institutions like the accounting offices or the letter writing offices of both kings and popes.
jmk
So, you mentioned Charles Tilley and he’s got that famous quote where he says, ‘War made the state and the state made war.’ He’s obviously talking about the development of very modern style bureaucracies that are capable of bringing in vast sums of money and able to create very large standing armies. But he’s also describing this as if it’s coming from a point of origin, almost like that’s where the beginning is and what you’re saying is that this whole process is very iterative. Not only that, but the way that you’re describing it with taxation and legislatures and the rule of law, you’re saying that it’s even much more expansive when we think about the creation of the state.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
That’s right. I think for a lot of political economists, the state really constitutes on the one hand taxation and on the other hand, the executive constraint and the consent to taxation that exists in parliaments. What I would argue is the state is considerably more expansive and once we look at the Medieval Era what really comes into focus is the emphasis on the rule of law and administering of justice. There’s a fantastic book by Deborah Boucoyannis who argues that the first parliaments weren’t there to pass legislation. That happens much, much later. They were there basically as a conflict dispute resolution mechanism. They were there to deliver justice and nobles attended because this was the one forum where their disputes could be resolved.
I think that emphasis on the law and on peaceful conflict resolution and on establishing rules that persist over time that are clear and predictable occurs in the Medieval Period. Frank Fukuyama notes that this happens in Europe, but it certainly doesn’t happen elsewhere. You don’t have the same kind of predictable, transparent set of rules that begin to apply to everyone, of course, more in theory than in practice. That creates the roots of the rule of law in Europe.
jmk
So, you’ve described the relationship between kings and popes and I’m sure other forms of nobility as being very conflictual as if they’re in a state of conflict or maybe competition might even be the better phrase. How did they treat each other and why did they see each other in this way?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
So, I don’t mean to suggest that this was always competitive. I mean, we can think of them almost as siblings in the sense that there is competition over resources and over authority. But there’s also a great deal of mutual deference and respect. So, there are several incidents where Rome gets sacked and the Pope basically gets killed on the one hand, but, on the other hand, examples where Pope excommunicates one Holy Roman emperor after another. But there’s also a considerable amount of deference because no king would ever claim the kind of spiritual authority that the church can claim. No king would ever say that they can deliver salvation or they can absolve sin or that they can promise a life eternal. The church can do that.
So, for that reason even though the kings resent the interference of the church, they recognize that the church has this moral claim on politics and that the church has this unique capacity, this unique authority, to deliver salvation for their part. Popes also recognize that they don’t have secular armies at their disposal. The few times that Popes lead armies, with the exception of Julius II which is in the 16th century, it ends in disaster. They’re basically totally incompetent, so they rely on the secular protection of kings and local rulers in order to survive as an institution. So, the relationship is definitely competitive at times, but it’s also an interdependence where the kings rely on the spiritual authority of the church and the church itself relies on the physical protection and the physical space in which to survive that the kings and secular rulers can provide.
jmk
But at the same time, the popes needed to be able to demonstrate their independence because if it’s based completely on pure strength, pure force of will, the kings are going to win every time. So, what were the tools that the popes had to be able to fight back or at least demonstrate their independence and their own sphere of influence?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
You know, there’s multiple weapons that the popes wielded. There are spiritual weapons. They could excommunicate rulers. The all-time winner here was Henry IV, who I believe was excommunicated six times or four times by several different popes. So, they could excommunicate rulers and remove entire communities through an interdict, from sort of a relationship to the church and the ability to receive the sacraments. That was one weapon. But as I show, it’s actually really interesting, that’s not the most powerful weapon that the popes wielded. It only slightly affects the durability of rulers and only in the early years of their kingship. So, even though that seems like a very powerful weapon, that actually wasn’t the most useful under the popes.
What they do instead is form a lot of alliances and wars by proxy with secular rulers. They sic secular rulers on each other and they’re constantly shifting coalitions as the popes recognize what their biggest threat is and attempt to form coalitions against that biggest threat. They also rely on political crusades. We tend to think of crusades as these expeditions to the Far East to recover Jerusalem or deliver Constantinople. But in fact, the modal, most popular, form of crusade was a political crusade launched by the Pope against his political enemies. That’s the most common kind of crusade that we observe. I compiled a record of the 170 crusade episodes that we see in Europe originating from the Pope. Most of them are targeting other rulers in an attempt to undermine their authority.
Finally, the law is a major weapon. So, as part of the investiture conflict, this 11th century conflict, both sides are scrambling for legal arguments with which to make their case. In the process, what we see is the so-called rediscovery of Roman law in the late to middle 11th century. The first school of law in Bologna arises in 1088 in order to teach Roman law and not to be left behind roughly 70 years later canon law also gets systematized through an integration into the codex of all these laws. So, what happens is that both sides are using legal arguments against each other in an attempt to show who’s right.
The ancillary result of this is that you see the development of law in Europe that melds canon and civil law, on the one hand, in the competition between the emperors and the popes to charter universities. So, they don’t necessarily found universities. Those are mostly organic bottom-up creations. But they chartered them and offered their protection. So, you have this enormous increase in human capital in legal knowledge and the use of law as a tool of diplomacy and international conflict that arises from the 11th century in this conflict between the Popes and Kings.
Here, by the way, my all-time favorite story is how Innocent III inadvertently creates the basis for modern sovereignty. In 1202, he issues this Papal Bull that says each king is an emperor in his own kingdom. This is directed against the Holy Roman Emperor to free all of the princes and the regional nobles from any duty or any deference to the emperor and that works. But what kings very quickly realize is that if each one of them is an emperor in their own kingdom, that means they don’t have to pay attention to the Pope either. So, the basis for sovereignty and for freeing yourself from Papal interference inadvertently occurs in the very early 13th century and that thread persists throughout.
jmk
Why was law so powerful? Because I can understand why the papacy would want to be able to establish rules of the game so they could win legal battles with secular rulers. I don’t completely understand why secular rulers would. Want to buy into legal ideas when they could just utilize brute force to be able to exercise their will. So, why was law appealing to both sides?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
I think it was appealing, because it was cheaper and it was more legitimate. So, we tend to think of kings as having all these coercive powers and having armies at their command and whatnot. But in fact, for medieval rulers waging war was incredibly exhausting. It meant having to call up your nobles and convincing them that they should contribute to the effort. It meant training a whole bunch of quasi-peasants and nobles in the most rudimentary arts of war. It was expensive. It was tedious. It inevitably depleted their personal treasury, because in most cases these wars were fought from the king’s own purse and so law offered a much cheaper way. You’re basically throwing arguments around you and you’re putting forth your representatives to make these arguments. Law offered a much cheaper and safer way of resolving conflict.
But more than that, I think there’s still a huge deference to Rome itself. There’s a reason why the Holy Roman Empire becomes known as a successor to the Roman Empire, at least in name only. Although as Voltaire points out, it was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. But the reason why that’s done is because there’s this enormous legitimation and enormous aura attached to the idea of Roman ideas and recovering the Roman ideal. Because a lot of this law is said to be Roman. It’s the recovery of Justinian’s Codex and others. There’s an enormous legitimacy that this is how the noblest of rulers would have resolved their conflict and so we should do the same.
As a result, as early as the 11th century, the late 11th century, even in the investiture conflict, you have legal documents flying back and forth. Initially, the Popes have a huge advantage. They simply know the law better. They have more human capital. They preserved the knowledge and Kings very quickly realized that it would behoove them to have the same thing. So, Kings then start to found law schools and to pay professors in order to have an advantage in this way of resolving conflict and advocating for their stances.
jmk
So why did the church focus on the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire? Because I can understand why they wanted fragmentation within Italy. It’s where they’re located. I mean, they’re in Italy. I can understand that Spain is already fragmented among a couple different kingdoms. Why did they focus primarily on the Holy Roman Empire instead of a country like France that’s also to its north?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
So, there are two reasons. One is that the whole idea of the Holy Roman Empire naming the Pope and the Pope naming the Emperor really arises in the Carolingian Empire. So, this is basically Charlemagne’s legacy. That’s the locus of a lot of these ideas that somehow the secular rulers ought to control the church. The second reason is that the Holy Roman Empire at its peak extends over the Alps into Northern Italy and it then starts to form a pincer movement and comes up from Sicily. So, the Papal States are basically squished in between, first, the Norman’s coming up from the south and from the Holy Roman empire coming over the Alps and occupying a large sway of Northern Italy.
So, if the Popes can fragment the Holy Roman Empire and wage all kinds of attempts to do this, that’s the only way they can remain autonomous. Even though the Holy Roman Empire is far off, its main locus is in Germany, it reaches all the way to Northern Italy. The problem there, of course, is eventually they push out the Holy Roman Emperors. They push out those forces at considerable expense and what happens is there’s a power vacuum because the Pope can’t really broadcast power into Northern Italy. It’s still a relatively weak papacy and it doesn’t have the military or the administrative means to do so.
So that sort of sets the stage for the rise of the Italian city states. Places like Florence and Pisa and Venice all benefit from this power vacuum that results when the Holy Roman Empire leaves Northern Italy. The papacy can’t really broadcast or project power into that area. So, the whole story of Florence can be found in these initial struggles between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire.
jmk
So, let’s go into the core argument within the book that the formation of the state really derives from institutions that begin in the papacy and begin within the church. Why don’t we start with one that we’ve already kind of talked a little bit about, the development of law and actual courts within Europe? How did those arise? Why is it that you’re linking those to what you describe as sacred foundations or sacred institutions?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Well, I think there’s several reasons to think that. The first one is that civil law and canon law basically fuse together to form the corpus of European civil law. You can see influences from canon law everywhere. The second reason is that in many cases, the church gives the first examples of how to structure law. So, the entire idea of the court of appeals, an eventual Supreme Court, that kind of hierarchy, however loose, really starts with the church. The appeals courts that the church produces at its apex has the various courts of the Roman Curiae.
Thirdly, I think another reason why the church is so important is precisely because of this use of the law as such a powerful weapon. So, this gives us the idea of contracts, for example, or corporations. Institutions that we think of that are so familiar, these legal fictions, all come from the church and they’re incredibly useful for subsequent economic and political development. If you have a corporate entity like a city or a university that can sign contracts in perpetuity, that isn’t just dependent on its members but survives them, that is an incredibly useful legal fiction. That fiction largely comes from the church. It’s, for example, what differentiates, and what some people have argued accounts for the divergence between the Muslim lands and Western Christendom from roughly around the year 1100 or so.
Because in the Muslim system you don’t have perpetual corporations, the contract expires as soon as any one of the members of the corporation dies and has to be renegotiated. That makes property rights much harder. That makes investment much harder and that makes a longtime horizon that’s necessary for investment and for sort stable polities also more difficult.
jmk
In the book, you mentioned how people oftentimes had almost a choice between whether they wanted to use secular courts or canon law courts and oftentimes they would take their disputes to canon law courts, not because they thought it was religious or sacred in nature, but simply because it was more effective and they were able to dispense justice in a way that people thought was fair and much more efficient. Why was that?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
It’s partly because these are better developed legal systems. I mean, they had developed earlier. They were staffed not with the local sheriff, but with an actual legal expert, a bishop, and so they were able to arrive at decisions faster. They’re also kinder. The church makes it very clear that it cannot shed blood, so you are not going to get executed if you’re found guilty of a contract violation in the church itself. In fact, what the church eventually winds up doing is handing over people for torture to the civil courts. But it will never sully its hands. A lot of times it’s simply because it’s a more efficient way to get justice. It’s cheaper. It’s more efficient.
You get a decision faster and that decision is every bit as credible if a bishop issues the judgment and says, ‘No, in fact you’ve violated the contract law.’ Everyone will respect that. So, rather than wait for the local Lord’s court to meet, which they meet very infrequently to arrive at a decision, to promulgate that decision, it’s just cheaper and faster. Which is why in various points in history something like 40% of cases that ought to have gone to civil courts, wind up in canon courts simply because it’s easier.
jmk
So, were there secular courts before the canon law courts? Like how did they deal with disputes and justice before the development of canon law?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Two things to note here. I mean, Roman law gets rediscovered in the 1070s or so. So, there is a body of secular law that can be at least accessed by the 11th century. But I think it’s really important to note that for local lords and for kings one of their critical roles was to dispense justice, to keep order, and to resolve conflicts – to keep justice basically. It’s the central role that both legitimated a local ruler and made him a desirable ruler to have. That’s a critical role, but it was never really formalized. There wasn’t a formal procedure, which meant that a lot of law in Europe was highly local. It was very traditional. It didn’t rely on a body of transparent regulations that we can refer to, but instead it was basically tradition.
So, on the one hand, you definitely have the dispensing of justice and the keeping of order prior to the rise of Roman and Canon law, but it’s developed in a very local and dispersed way and people have to wait until the Lord and his lieges meet and can deliver that justice. So, it’s much less formal.
jmk
It sounds like as economies started to grow again and you started to have wider networks, both social, economic, and political, it sounds like it’s more difficult to be able to use these very intensely local traditions that people might not be familiar with. Like if you’re going to trade with people between two different towns and set a contract, it’d be difficult to know which traditions you’re actually using. Whereas it sounds like if you’re using Canon law, you have one consistent law that everybody agrees with and that they can understand and that they think is more likely to be consistently applied as well. Am I understanding that right?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
So, I wouldn’t say that canon law is used. I mean it’s really the combination of civil and canon law that basically gets used willy nilly and fuses to form European law. But you’re absolutely right. There are huge economies of scale here. So, there’s been some work done by economists that basically shows that those cities that developed universities that then have a higher body of human capital and legal expertise that that promotes trade and local city growth, because you can invest more if you know that there’s a contract that underlies that investment. It’s definitely the case that everybody begins to see the value of law. That doesn’t mean that the law is applied equally or that it’s applied evenly or that in fact it’s even fair. There might still be different punishments, for example, for nobles versus for peasants.
But there’s still some idea that the law is becoming this really useful framework within which you can make durable contracts and agreements. A lot of that stems from the church because that’s how the church has always operated. The church has always formulated these contracts. The very idea of being named a clergy person or being named a bishop rest on the fact that you are vested with certain constrained rights and responsibilities and those are laid out. Sort of a contract that lays out exactly what you’ll be doing as Bishop or as Abbot.
jmk
So, Anna, I think most people have at least heard of canon law, so I think that this part of the explanation isn’t too much of a shock. But the next two I think are much more foreign. How is it that taxation was an institution that more or less developed out of church practices?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
So, I don’t mean to argue that the entire tax system is at the behest of the church, but it definitely influenced it largely through the Crusades. Lisa Blaydes and Christopher Paik make a similar argument where they argue that what the Crusades do is offer an opportunity for these new taxation processes to develop. What I argue in the book is that they can be directly traced to, for example, the Saladin tithe that takes place in England at the end of the 12th century. What you see there are not just groups of people including two monks, a bishop, and a secular official that travel, but they also audit. There’s a process not just for collecting the monies, but for auditing. Did you actually give enough? Their neighbors are asked, ‘Did you give?’
The money is then not just audited, but there’s a whole process for collecting the money, saving it, and then transmitting it. This is the start of all kinds of receipts and all kinds of written documentation of what was collected, when, by whom, and against how much was expected from that person. So, for that kind of systematization of taxation, the church shows the way. It’s not adopted everywhere. In fact, kings struggle to develop taxation mechanisms for a very long time, because they don’t have the power that the church does of having a priest or a bishop in every single town. They simply don’t have that administrative apparatus.
But they take heed and they realize that they need auditing mechanisms too. They need a better collection system. They need to make sure that that money actually travels up the chain to the capital rather than being handed out willy-nilly to various local officials along the way. All of that comes from the church. It’s the template that it presents with the Saladin Tithe and other crusade taxes. It gets adopted imperfectly at best, but you can see strains of it basically being maintained throughout European history.
jmk
It sounds like this wasn’t just the development of taxation, but really the earliest forms of the administrative state.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
That’s right, that’s right. The idea of sending emissaries… and the irony here is that most centralized and capable state of all is also the one that least exhibits the Catholic Church’s influence and that’s England. The Pope blesses William the Conqueror’s conquest in 1066, and William continues the centralizing tendencies of the kings and develops common law, the Parliament, and other institutions that are almost uniquely English. There’s this idea that this all stems from these earlier interactions and from seeing what the church is doing and where the church can influence and where it can’t.
jmk
So, the final piece of the puzzle involves the development of representation and that includes parliaments, but it’s really a bigger picture idea. Can you explain how representation changed through the papacy and the church?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
So, the church develops three ideas that are critical to the functioning of modern parliaments and of parliaments full stop. To be clear, initially, parliaments do not make legislation. They serve, again, first as courts of justice and then to express consent to whatever it is that the king proposes. Initially, they’re very narrow. It’s basically a bunch of nobles, but they take on a more representative role. As the king makes more and more demands, they have to include more and more of society. This idea of representation already starts to rely on what the church is doing.
So, the church would have councils. These huge international councils that sometimes had as many as a thousand clergy participating and those clergy represented their home parishes and their home communities. They became known as proctors. Proctorial or binding representation, which meant that a priest would travel and they would agree to whatever it is that the Pope wanted them to do at the council on behalf of his community. That committee was then bound by that decision. That move is critical to the functioning of parliament. If you’re going to have representation, it has to be binding. You can’t have representation when your representative goes to Congress and comes back and says we agree to this tax law that then he has to renegotiate that all over again with the people who brought him or her into power.
So, that idea of binding representation that entire communities can be bound by the decision of a representative comes from the church. Another idea is the one that underpins suffrage to begin with, which is the idea that that which touches all ought to be decided by all. Again, it comes straight from church councils. This justifies representation in the first place. If this is going to affect me, I need to have a voice in how this policy is being created. That idea comes directly from church councils and from the idea that you can’t just be a bunch of narrow cardinals making these decisions. A much broader group of people ought to be included in making decisions, because those decisions touch them.
Finally, there’s the idea of majority and super majority voting. So, until the 12th or 13th century, most votes didn’t really take place by majority rule. It was much more important to achieve consensus. So, when these early councils of nobles would meet with the king, it was really important to achieve full consensus in order for that decision to be legitimate.
What the church introduces is the idea of the bigger and better part. It introduces the idea that the majority of the better kinds of people who attend the council suffices for consensus. That, of course, makes parliaments and representative assemblies much more efficient. It introduces the rule that we live by today, that you need a majority, which is 50% plus one or a super majority that can be two-thirds or three fourths or whatever in order to make decisions. But you don’t need consensus. You don’t need unanimity and that’s a huge institutional innovation. So, these are some of the most basic ways in which church councils serve as a template for representative assemblies and, in fact, enable them and make them possible.
jmk
So, we’re talking about these as individual creations, but what I found remarkable in the book was that a lot of these kind of synergized with one another.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Yes, that’s right.
jmk
Yeah. The rule of law specifically had a lot to do with the creation of some of these ideas about representation. That these deep legal ideas that they’d been researching help them come up with these new ideas about representation and all of the work that they were doing within the law made it necessary to be able to create more administrative apparatus. I mean, again, I love how a lot of these ideas build upon one another so that it starts to create the semblance of something that’s an organic whole rather than just pieces.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
And that also means that what you don’t have in this era is the classic division of labor that we would like to see in a quote unquote rational bureaucracy. A lot of times somebody who’s a noble in the parliament will also serve as a judge. A lot of cases are brought before parliaments, because the parliament still continues to decide cases. They then turn to new legal experts to find out exactly how they should decide these and, of course, all of this generates reams of paper or parchment that has to be accounted for, put away, and archived in some way. So, you’re absolutely right. All of these things are working together to basically both create the demand and the supply of more administration, more state, more records on which states rely and so on.
None of these things work in isolation and it might be one of the reasons why historians note that in the 12th century you have something known as the 12th century revolution, which is a burgeoning of universities, towns, trade, and new ideas in art. It might very well be that this follows on the heels of this development of the state. These institutions and these solutions that together also helped to foster greater human capital, greater trade, communication between cities, the attractiveness of cities as someplace to live and work. I mean, I don’t want to suggest that I’m explaining the entire Medieval History or the state itself, but I think you’re absolutely right. These threads definitely interweave and you can’t look at them separately.
jmk
Anna, we’ve been talking about Medieval History, but I’m more familiar with your work dealing with contemporary politics and post-communist politics. So, I know that you’re very familiar both with politics today as well as how we got to politics today with the work that you’re doing right now on state formation in the Medieval Era. So, let me ask you about how this work translates to contemporary politics. How do you see our institutions still reflecting some of these different sacred origins right now?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Well, it’s not that difficult to find these. I mean, we already mentioned representative assemblies and to this day we have binding representation and the idea of majority rule, but there are also other sort of importations. The whole idea of a corporation, of a universitas comes from church influence and teachings and legal expertise. The idea of certain fictive personality whether it’s a parliament or university, a town or the church itself proved very convenient. It’s basically what the modern capitalist economy relies on. The fact that a corporation is very distinct from the individuals who form it and the individuals are not necessarily personally liable in the way that the corporation as a legal fiction is.
So, we see these elements and I think to this day there is, I wouldn’t call it a struggle, but there’s that autonomy, that sort of independence of church and state remains. I think it’s absolutely critical for the development of certainly modern polities and modern economies where we see certain attempts for the church to play a more political role inevitably it hurts the church and inevitably it makes the politics much more conflictual. That’s certainly the case in places like the United States or Poland or others where the church wants to play a more political role. So, it’s a lesson that I think the church still hasn’t learned a thousand years later about the importance for its own sake of preserving these boundaries between the two.
But these are just some of the ways in which we have this information. The modern university is basically a creation of the church in many ways. The idea that you have university accreditations, that there’s a body that accredits universities. So, if you get a degree from one university, you can teach in others. That’s a church invention. So, the genealogy of a lot of what we think of as intensely secular institutions actually rests on very religious foundations.
jmk
So, obviously we can see the development of a separation between church and state going all the way back to the Medieval Era. But I feel like we can see other parallels too that establish divisions between the state and even just society as a whole. I mean, I think the entire concept of civil society doesn’t exist in the same way that we think of it right now if there hadn’t been this sense of a second parallel world which the church embodied during the Middle Ages that allowed people to express themselves in a different way or think of things in a very different way rather than saying everything was public. It feels like we’re still living in that world today to the extent that we have the state and we have a society that has a division. But it’s not always clear where that division lies.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
I think the very idea of private lives as being equally worthy as the public political life, which would be totally foreign to classical Greeks, for example, but it’s very much embraced by the church, that what happens in the family is very important. That your personal conscience and your personal thoughts are your own and no states, no actor can reach into those. Those are very much ideas that the church had promulgated on both sort of religious and political grounds for a very long time.
jmk
So, as we’re trying to translate the lessons that we’ve learned in terms of state formation during the Medieval Era, how has this study changed how you think about contemporary politics, whether it be internationally, whether it be within specific countries?
Anna Grzymala-Busse
I think it’s not necessarily changed, but it’s made me definitely think two separate things. One is that there’s a lot of sort of defense of war that as you pointed out in Tilly’s famous dictum ‘war makes states and states make war.’ But while war creates the need for a state, it obliterates the capacity to deliver one. We’re seeing that in Ukraine right now, that if you want to develop a state, you need peace, not war. War may create the need for a state, but peace is what allows you to build one. I think that that might be a lesson worth emphasizing, especially these days.
I think the second aspect is just the importance of separating religious from secular authority. Those lines are often blurred. It is very much the case that both sets of authorities care about the moral implications of what they’re doing, for example. But unless the two can be separated, you have both a religion that’s highly dependent on the state, as is the case in the Orthodox churches or it could be said about the Muslim lands, and you have a state that doesn’t recognize the limits of its own action. That doesn’t recognize, as you point out with civil society, that there are limits to the appropriate exercise of its authority. So, I think this separation of church and state, and this is not a new point, is critical both to European development and a constraint on an overweening and predatory state as well.
jmk
Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Anna. The book, once again is called Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the Europeans State. It’s an absolutely fascinating read. It’s one where it feels like every page you’re learning something new because this is definitely a subject that I was not as familiar with. So, thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
Thank you so much for a great conversation, Justin. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Key Links
Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State by Anna Grzymala-Busse
Follow Anna Grzymala-Busse on Twitter @AnnaGBusse
Learn more about Anna Grzymala-Busse
Democracy Paradox Podcast
Olivier Zunz on Alexis de Tocqueville
David Stasavage on Early Democracy and its Decline
More Episodes from the Podcast
More Information
Apes of the State created all Music
Email the show at jkempf@democracyparadox.com
Follow on Twitter @DemParadox, Facebook, Instagram @democracyparadoxpodcast
Democracy Paradox is part of the Amazon Affiliates Program and earns commissions on items purchased from links to the Amazon website. All links are to recommended books discussed in the podcast or referenced in the blog.
