Download PDF | The Social Politics of Medieval Diplomacy Anglo-German Relations (1066-1307), By Joseph P. Huffman, The University of Michigan Press 2000.
374 Pages
Preface
This book was written with certain assumptions that should be made plain at the outset. I have not attempted here to write a comprehensive history of the English and German realms, which has been done for both separately and elsewhere more extensively than I would have the audacity to attempt or claim here. Rather, this is a history of the diplomatic relations between the two realms. Hence, this study assumes that the reader has a general familiarity with the political histories of medieval Germany and England. Major regional events and individuals will be referred to but not developed in detail for their own sake.
They shall only appear when they have a bearing on Anglo-German diplomacy. Where appropriate, and in the bibliography, the reader is referred to studies of these events and individuals to enable further consideration. In addition, although the English primary sources have been extensively examined, this study emphasizes the German side of the diplomatic equation. I have chosen this approach for two reasons-firstly, because the vast majority of Anglo-German diplomatic activity passed in one form or another through the city of Cologne. Since our reference point will most often be this flourishing Rhenish metropolis, one can expect that the story will be told with a distinctively German accent. There is, furthermore, a grave paucity of materials on any aspect of medieval German history in English, and so I have attempted to remedy the situation in some modest fashion. The notes and bibliography integrate both the sizable English- and German-speaking scholarly traditions, which is something often lacking in both German- and English-language texts. In an attempt to make German-language scholarship accessible to Anglophone readers, I have translated into English all passages quoted in the notes from German scholarly literature.
This book is not merely a narrative account of Anglo-German diplomatic discourse but one that uses the historical record as a springboard to considerations about the nature of medieval political life and about anachronisms in the existing modern historiography on this period. I hope to accomplish in some degree three goals: to make medieval Germany accessible and relevant to English-speaking, Anglo-French-oriented medievalists, to show the merits of a comparative use of regional sources, and to show the need to reevaluate traditional political history in the light of the insights afforded by social history. If I stimulate any further discussion in these areas, though parts or even all of my thesis might show frayed edges, I shall be satisfied.
Without the support of many the research and writing phases of this book would never have been completed. In particular I wish to thank the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst for the generous research fellowship that made archival research possible. Appreciation for various writing and research grants goes to Messiah College. I extend special thanks to my two sons, Austin and Brendan, whose patience with my work and special wisdom about life have enabled me to love the past and live in the present. It is to them, my future, that I dedicate this book.
Introduction
Methodological Considerations
This book explores medieval European political life as a record of the social dynamics between political communities. Therefore, the social context of political activity will be of central importance. Our focus will be on the role of interpersonal and familial connections in the formation of political policies and in the subsequent implementation, success, or failure of these policies. In particular, we shall see the personal dimensions of political life as they were lived out in the sphere of diplomatic relations. Such a social approach to political history has been the vanguard of a recent revival of interest in medieval politics. In a 1989 American Historical Reviewarticle, Charles T. Wood reviewed no fewer than seven major publications from the years 1979 through 1986 that employed such an approach. 1 Taken as a whole, the results of this (dare we say) "new political history" have restructured our understanding of the basis of medieval political life. Traditional modes of discourse about the origins of the modern nation state, political rhetoric, and the ideological underpinnings of power have given way to interest in the familial, economic, and religious realities of political activity. Each of the works Wood reviewed, however, studies political life in the social context of either France or England.2 Yet in this "new political history," which no longer privileges institutional and state formation as the paradigm of political advancement, medieval Germany looks less "underdeveloped" than previous Anglophone scholarship has asserted and more akin to the Anglo-French political communities studied in the works reviewed by Wood.
Therefore this book, while following in the footsteps of these earlier studies, applies this methodology in two new ways. First, there is a geographical shift away from traditional Anglo-French historiography. As Alfred Haverkamp has argued, of all the regions of Europe, Germany was the most affected and transformed by the rapid changes occurring in European society during the Central Middle Ages. Indeed, Germany not only constantly received the cultural and economic impulses from western European and Mediterranean regions but also came to serve a mediating role between these regions and the north and east of Europe. 3 Medieval Germany should therefore be seen as moving inward from the periphery and beginning to merge with the currents of western European and Mediterranean civilization during the Central Middle Ages. This being the case, Germany is an especially suitable vantage point from which to consider the growing ties of the larger Western world with central Europe during this period of expansion.4 The setting aside of former historical and historiographical boundaries established by earlier political writers seems eminently appropriate at the close of the twentieth century, and therefore it is time that Germany is grafted more soundly onto the historiography of the medieval West. This study is intended to contribute to such a needed integration, which bridges both modern political and intellectual boundaries through a distinctly interregional approach.s Second, the insights of social history are applied here to a neglected subcategory of political history-diplomacy. Virtually nothing has been written on the nature of medieval diplomacy since the fundamental works of Pierre Chaplais and G. P. Cuttino.6 Yet since medievalists have reconsidered political history in general recently, it is equally appropriate to revisit the world of medieval diplomacy with an eye toward its social aspects. And this we shall do. Hence, to achieve the dual goals of considering the social world of medieval diplomacy and grafting medieval Germany more solidly onto western European historiography, the social history of dIplomatic relations between Germany and England in the Central Middle Ages forms the substance of this book. What specifically is the nature of the social approach to political history? In a word, it places less emphasis on the institutions and levers of power and more on the social groups that pull the levers and run the institutions. German scholars employ a most appropriate term for this process of combining medieval social and political history: family politics (Familienpolitik).7 From early research that reconstructed the social and kinship networks of Carolingian Europe8 down to recent work on Ottonian/Salian Germany,9 crucial insights have been reached into the sociopolitical life of the Early Middle Ages. Here we shall move into a later period (the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries) and build on the firm foundation already laid. What, then, is the result of understanding medieval politics from a social history perspective? Ironically, it is the dismantling of traditional categories of political history as established by the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medievalists. When set next to the insights ofthe "sociopolitical" approach, the old themes of traditional political historiography appear anachronistic and more appropriate for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century political life than for anything medieval. When the pioneer professional historians of the nineteenth century wrote the first modern histories of the Middle Ages, their goal was to "tell of their nation's successes and of the unique national character that had made them possible. "10 In an age of profound nationalism and the rise of the modern nation-state, historians endeavored to find the seeds of these fruits in the origins of their national histories, deeply embedded in the Middle Ages. Such a preoccupation assumed the centrality of political institutions and nationalism in medieval life and also presupposed that one's contemporary national character (understood in political, not social, terms) existed in some incipient medieval form. Perhaps the most significant element in this view of the past was the formulation of all political history using the dichotomy of "national history" and "external history" (these are William Stubbs's words).l1 Such intellectual categories built on modern national boundaries did much to hinder a true, comprehensive medieval European history; indeed, they ran counter to the concepts of Europe held by medieval people themselves. 12 This original foundation of medieval historiography remained thereafter the bedrock of historical scholarship well into the twentieth century. The Anglo-American historiographical tradition was built around Whig notions of state building and modernization.
The key theme for this tradition was the rise of constitutionalism, whereby the unique English national character expressed itself in balancing centralized, bureaucratic government with limited executive (i.e., royal) power. Conversely, the French traced the convergence of centralized political power and the personal power of the king. The common purpose of both AngloAmerican and French historiography was to show how the rise of impersonal institutions shaped the state. Historians understood this process as something apart from the individuals who happened to staff and administer such institutions. Hence, political history was essentially institutional history, the story of political institutions that ultimately either buttressed or restricted royal power. Of course, such a historical paradigm naturally produced the conclusion in Anglo-French historiography that medieval Germany was simply backward in comparison to western Europe, since it proved unable to fashion a unified constitutional state like England and France-hence scholars have often cited a German "special path" (Sonderweg) into modernity.
Germany maintained a Personenverbandsstaat (a social polity based on the relationships between ruler and magnates), while England and France were said to have developed a "state" complete with "government" (bureaucratic institutions) and "policy." This interest in the state as a depersonalized institution remained the driving force in political historiography, both in Europe as well as in North America, until the close of the 1960s,13 when the entire enterprise was undermined by the rise of a new generation of medievalists who produced the "new social history" and discarded political history as too narrow and socially elitist in focus. These scholars doubted the maxim that the modern nation-state was the focal point of human history; they relocated the center in society. And so it has been until the past decade, as social historians have begun to reconsider political history anew and integrate the two historiographies. The German historiographical tradition also had its origins in the same nineteenth-century preoccupations of the nation-state and national character, but with decidedly different results. Nineteenth-century German historians lamented the lack of political unification and sought the origins of this modern Sonderweg predicament in the Middle Ages. It is crucial to remember that modern German historiography on the Middle Ages originated during an era dominated by the forces of unification, nationalism, and unprecedented European imperialism.14 So just like their British contemporaries,15 German scholars thought of medieval politics in terms of their own age. 16 Therefore, while Whiggish Anglophone historiography marginalized medieval Germany as a failed experiment in constitutional development, nineteenth-century German historiography was constructed around a paradigm of imperialist competition for national legitimacy and power. Here we find a political history with constant references to the "empire-building" schemes and "strategic alliances" of medieval monarchs; in particular the historiography on medieval Anglo-German relations reads much more like an account of modern than medieval AngloGerman political relationsY After the horrors of two world wars and the Nazi era, topics dealing with nationalism and an essential national character naturally faded in postwar German historiography. Reichsgeschichte (comprehensive imperial history) was supplanted by research on local and regional political traditions that shaped the regional diversity of the German people. The rise of territorial lordship became the new focus in medieval history, with scholarship on regional history (Landesgeschichte and Territorialpolitik) remaining prominent to this day.18 Local and regional research has done much to illuminate the nature of medieval society and political order within its original local contexts. In particular, it has presented the medieval German aristocracy as positive contributors to the German political tradition rather than as destroyers of some imagined centralized state under royal control. 19 Yet these regional researches have left behind earlier efforts at understanding medieval Germany in the larger context of Europe. Only recently has this subject reemerged, no doubt because of the momentous historical changes in Europe in the past few years. 20
Hence there is still a great deal of nineteenth-century prose on medieval German "power politics" (Machtpolitik) to be addressed and corrected. Up to this point I have attempted to show the convergence of several trends in the historiography of medieval politics to indicate why a study of the social aspects of Anglo-German diplomatic relations is a worthwhile endeavor. In many ways it is the natural result of the convergence of the previously mentioned trends and will not only bridge the broad chasm between national history boundaries but also provide new insights into the social nature of medieval politics between communities. We shall find a political history that looks less like an account of imperial alliances and the building of modern nation-states and more like an account of medieval social groups building and maintaining local and regional bases of power. Political ideologies will not always be the central driving force in policy decisions but rather are reflections of the interests and goals of a given social group. Familial, social, personal, and religious motives will prove to be as important as institutional and geopolitical motives. What emerges is a paradigm that looks more medieval than modern and that reveals medieval Germany as more normative and intimately connected to the political communities of western Europe than the predominant Anglo-French historiography of Anglophone scholarship has hitherto suggested. Just because Germany cannot trace the origins of its modern nation-state and modern political institutions to the Middle Ages does not mean that it was therefore cut off or somehow disconnected from England and France, though these ties were not the stuff of imperialist competition either.
One final word concerning methodology is needed still, in regard to the merit of studying medieval diplomatic history. It is the one area of political life to which the social history approach has not been applied extensively (at least in medieval historiography). The traffic of embassies and negotiators from one court to another has still not been fully analyzed as a social history of interactions between political communities. There are three reasons for this. First, medieval diplomatic activity appears to many as the core of the "old elitist political history" that focused on an aristocratic minority of the population.
This approach has emphasized administration (that is, institutions over people) and sought the origins of modern mechanisms of diplomatic discourse. Hence one reads more about the office of the ambassador than about the movement of an ambassador within an actual sociopolitical network that linked regions and kingdoms. 22 Second, the intellectual boundaries of scholarship on the Middle Ages tend to line up with the current political boundaries of Europe. Hence, given the political history of the twentieth century, there has been little interest among its British and German historians for such joint ventures. Third, with the growth of social history the emphasis on regionalism and local history has predominated over questions of interregional social and political intercourse. As we have seen, German scholars have emphasized regional studies at the expense of a comprehensive integration or interregional studies until quite recently, while British historiography has shown a profound lack of interest in Anglo-German relations and has favored the traditional Anglo-French paradigm. Fortunately these are only perceived limitations. By the time of the Central Middle Ages, bourgeois participation in diplomatic activities was expanding along with its members' economic influence. Thus historians studying this period must begin to broaden the definition of diplomatic history beyond the merely aristocratic. We shall soon meet many merchant families who were deeply involved in Anglo-German diplomacy and who served as intermediaries between archbishops, dukes, and kings over great distances. In addition, a social study of diplomatic discourse is eminently suited to the pursuit of an interregional medieval historiography. There are few better means of crossing existing intellectual and political boundaries than by a comparative use of primary sources on activities that built unifying ties between regions in the Middle Ages.
These sources ultimately indicate that medieval Europe was much more interconnected than national, regional, and local histories imply. They also make clear that medieval Anglo-German diplomacy was characterized neither by a sharp disparity in political development nor by imperialist competition.
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