On his book The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government
Cover Interview of May 15, 2009
In a nutshell
This is a book about power in a great period of the European Middle Ages. All societies have governments, right? And surely so in the famously progressive twelfth century? No, not so. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century argues, against an old and massive consensus of historians, that the story of power in the twelfth century is not that of government, but rather one of lordship—and that the exercise of power for social purpose began in the western world only as the resolution of a prolonged crisis of power.
In twelfth-century Europe, the public powers to protect and judge exercised by emperors and kings were subverted by ambitious pretenders to personal powers over people. Building castles in vast numbers, they created multiplied lordships over peasants who were forced into submission, and even servility. The masters of castles and their knights, craving noble status for themselves, had to dominate by force, exploitatively, in order to avoid submission themselves.
The book asks not only how they exercised power, but also how the masses of people experienced power. Their suffering, their voiced complaints against arbitrary lordship, led to reaction and to the revival of public justice. By granting charters, including the English Magna Carta, the greater lord-princes restored public taxation (and consent) in support of public enterprise.
But the crisis thus resolved was not only, perhaps not even primarily, one of suffering people. It was also a crisis of economic growth, for lord-princes were compelled by increased numbers of productive people to impose accountability on their appointed agents, to learn how to manage as well as to exploit. And it was, above all, a crisis of lordship. Could the multiplied masters of castles impose their exploitative domination? Their ultimate failure marked the origins of government in Europe. Could the great lord-rulers overcome the genetic defect of their status: the accident of dynastic failure leading to civil war? Their success in France and England coincided with their success in putting down the castellans, whereas in Germany dynastic conflict long delayed the resolution of crisis.
The compounded crises can be traced in varied “cultures of power”: those of troubadour singers, of moralists such as John of Salisbury and Peter the Chanter, and of the lawyers who rediscovered the concept of public interest in the twelfth century.
What I am calling “the apartment plot” are narratives in which the apartment figures as a central device. This means that the apartment is not only setting, but motivates or shapes the narrative in some key way.Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Interview of November 8, 2010
Critics like to rail against the EU’s supposedly massive bureaucracy. In fact, the EU’s bureaucracy is tiny—with around 25,000 staff it is about the size of the administration of a mid-sized European city.R. Daniel Kelemen, Interview of September 19, 2011
In a nutshell
This is a book about power in a great period of the European Middle Ages. All societies have governments, right? And surely so in the famously progressive twelfth century? No, not so. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century argues, against an old and massive consensus of historians, that the story of power in the twelfth century is not that of government, but rather one of lordship—and that the exercise of power for social purpose began in the western world only as the resolution of a prolonged crisis of power.
In twelfth-century Europe, the public powers to protect and judge exercised by emperors and kings were subverted by ambitious pretenders to personal powers over people. Building castles in vast numbers, they created multiplied lordships over peasants who were forced into submission, and even servility. The masters of castles and their knights, craving noble status for themselves, had to dominate by force, exploitatively, in order to avoid submission themselves.
The book asks not only how they exercised power, but also how the masses of people experienced power. Their suffering, their voiced complaints against arbitrary lordship, led to reaction and to the revival of public justice. By granting charters, including the English Magna Carta, the greater lord-princes restored public taxation (and consent) in support of public enterprise.
But the crisis thus resolved was not only, perhaps not even primarily, one of suffering people. It was also a crisis of economic growth, for lord-princes were compelled by increased numbers of productive people to impose accountability on their appointed agents, to learn how to manage as well as to exploit. And it was, above all, a crisis of lordship. Could the multiplied masters of castles impose their exploitative domination? Their ultimate failure marked the origins of government in Europe. Could the great lord-rulers overcome the genetic defect of their status: the accident of dynastic failure leading to civil war? Their success in France and England coincided with their success in putting down the castellans, whereas in Germany dynastic conflict long delayed the resolution of crisis.
The compounded crises can be traced in varied “cultures of power”: those of troubadour singers, of moralists such as John of Salisbury and Peter the Chanter, and of the lawyers who rediscovered the concept of public interest in the twelfth century.