The Rise of Comparative History 9789633863626

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction. Comparisons, Transfers, Entanglements: A View From East Central Europe
1 Defining the Comparative Method
Cultural History of the Modern Era
Comparison and the Comparative Method, Particularly in Historical Studies
On the Comparative Method in History
Historical Science and Philosophy of History
A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies
2 Structures and Institutions
The Preconditions of Representative Government in the Context of World History
The Balkan Peninsula
The Common Character of Southeast European Institutions
The Genesis of the Corvée System in Central Europe Since the End of the Middle Ages
Serfdom of the Glebe and Its Fiscal Regime: Romanian, Slavic, and Byzantine Comparative Historical Essay
On The Working Group of the Historiography of Small Nations
3 Beyond the National Grand Narratives
The Development of Nationalities in Central-Eastern Europe
What Is Eastern Europe?
An Attempt at a Comparative History of the Peoples of Europe
Aim and Significance of Balkan Studies
The Effect of the War in Southeastern Europe
The Balkan Peninsula and the Question of Comparative Studies
Southeast Europe and the Balkans
About the editors
Index

Citation preview

The Rise of Comparative History

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The Rise of Comparative History Vo l u m e O n e of Perspectives on Comparative and Transnational History in East Central Europe and Beyond A Reader

Edited by

Balázs Trencsényi · Constantin Iordachi · Péter Apor

Central European University Press Budapest–New York

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Copyright © by Balázs Trencsényi, Constantin Iordachi, and Péter Apor 2021 Published in 2021 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36 1 327 3138 or 327 3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 224 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1 732 763 8816 E-mail: [email protected] All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. Disclaimer: The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

ISBN 978-963-386-361-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-963-386-362-6 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Trencsényi, Balázs, 1973- editor. | Iordachi, Constantin, editor. | Apor, Péter, editor. Title: Perspectives on comparative and transnational history in East Central Europe and beyond : a reader / edited by Balázs Trencsényi, Constantin Iordachi, Péter Apor. Description: Budapest ; New York : Central European University Press, 2021| Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: Volume One. The rise of comparative history Identifiers: LCCN 2021002793 | ISBN 9789633863619 (v. 1 ; hardback) | ISBN 9789633863626 (v. 1 ; adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Europe, Eastern--Historiography. | Europe, Central--Historiography. | Balkan Peninsula--Historiography. | Transnationalism--Historiography. | History--Comparative method. | History--Methodology. Classification: LCC DJK32 .P47 2021 | DDC 943.70072--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002793 Printed in Hungary

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contents

Introduction Balázs Trencsényi, Constantin Iordachi, Péter Apor Comparisons, Transfers, Entanglements: A View from East Central Europe · 1

Part 1. Defining the Comparative Method Kurt Breysig · Cultural History of the Modern Era · 31 Louis Davillé · Comparison and the Comparative Method, Particularly in Historical Studies · 39 Henri Pirenne · On the Comparative Method in History · 65 Henri Sée · Historical Science and Philosophy of History · 77 Marc Bloch · A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies · 89

Part 2. Structures and Institutions Otto Hintze · The Preconditions of Representative Government in the Context of World History · 127 Jovan Cvijić · The Balkan Peninsula · 173 Nicolae Iorga · The Common Character of Southeast European Institutions · 185 Jan Rutkowski · The Genesis of the Corvée System in Central Europe since the End of the Middle Ages · 205 Gheorghe I. Brătianu · Serfdom of the Glebe and Fiscal Regime: A Romanian, Slavic, and Byzantine Comparative Historical Essay · 213 István Hajnal · On the Working Group of the Historiography of Small Nations · 235

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Part 3. Beyond the National Grand Narratives Marceli Handelsman · The Development of Nationalities in Central-Eastern Europe · 281 Oskar Halecki · What Is Eastern Europe? · 299 Charles Seignobos · An Attempt at a Comparative History of the Peoples of Europe · 311 Milan Budimir and Petar Skok · Aim and Significance of Balkan Studies · 333 David Mitrany · The Effect of the War in Southeastern Europe · 359 Victor Papacostea · The Balkan Peninsula and the Problem of Comparative Studies · 385 Fritz Valjavec · Southeast Europe and the Balkans · 393 About the Editors · 403 Index · 405

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introduction

Comparisons, Transfers, Entanglements: A View From East Central Europe BALÁZS TRENCSÉNYI, CONSTANTIN IORDACHI, PÉTER APOR

T

ransnational history has emerged as one of the most important and fruitful trends in world historiography in the last three decades. This new orientation has been prompted by numerous factors. First, the gradual shift of historians’ analytical interest from political elites to wider sociocultural groups has stimulated the comparative study of societies at microand macro-levels, enabling historians to move both above and below the nation-state. Second, challenged by the process of European unification, the end of the Cold War, and the acceleration of the process of globalization, historians have started to pay greater attention to the transnational entanglements among historical actors and processes. They have transcended their previous concentration on national history and have gradually moved away from the rigidly defined and excessively politicized Cold War understanding of “area studies.” When we started to chart approaches to comparative and transnational history more than a decade ago, we had two main aims in mind: we were driven by the manifest need to make these increasingly dominant methodological approaches more intelligible to students coming from East Central Europe and beyond, but also, conversely, by our assumed scholarly “mission” to familiarize the global audience with historiographic traditions stemming from this region of the world. The main question that informed our endeavor was thus both local and transnational in scope: what are the current prospects of comparative and transnational history in East Central Europe within the larger global research context? Despite much talk about internationalism during the state-socialist regimes and the subsequent drive towards European integration after 1989, historical studies conducted in East Central Europe have largely remained 1

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a national enterprise. In the post-communist period, the shift of research focus from the nation-state to historical regions, empires and their legacies, or contested borders and borderlands has had both a scholarly and a civic dimension. On the one hand, in order to transcend the prevailing narrow, national-based historiographic perspectives, historians have been challenged to turn toward new fields of inquiry, such as physical and geographical mobility, the transnational circulation of ideas, migration, and the impact of environmental change. On the other hand, following the revival of nationalist political projects after the Great Recession of 2008, the task of rethinking the “shared” and “entangled” history of peoples in the region, assessing transnational influences and transfers, and reflecting on the ups and downs of the process of European integration and its impact on societal development became particularly pressing. During our teaching and research activity in and on East Central Europe, we have found that one of the most important obstacles hindering the teaching of comparative history and the promotion of new transnational approaches is the lack of a comprehensive and easily accessible collection of key texts on this subject matter. Drawing on the experience gained through the Comparative History Project, funded by the Open Society Institute between 2006 and 2010 and hosted by Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies, we hereby offer a comprehensive multi-volume reader, which includes both classical and contemporary texts on the comparative and transnational methods in history. Our selection seeks to avoid the usual Western-centric bias of canonbuilding in the humanities by bringing East Central European works into a dialogue with studies produced in Western Europe and in the United States. Classic renderings of the emergence of comparative and transnational historiographical approaches usually underscore the intertwined French and German traditions of transcending the nation-state centered perspective. While these scholarly legacies are, without a doubt, very important, we argue that there is a remarkable yet largely ignored tradition of transnational history in Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe. In the interwar period, this tradition flourished mainly in the framework of Balkan studies and in comparative studies of nationalism. After World War II, these approaches were further enriched by various new research groups in area studies that focused mainly on political and economic develop2

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ments. The 1960–70s, in particular, were dominated by Marxist or “Marxisant” economic and social history-based comparative studies concerned especially with the issue of backwardness. After 1989, the “cultural turn” brought historical sociology and intellectual history closer to each other, leading to new transnational and regional perspectives, in direct dialogue and cross-fertilization with Western methodological schools. These intensive exchanges point to the need to valorize local traditions of comparative and transnational history. Yet, most of these texts were either published in local languages and are thus accessible only to national audiences, or appeared in contemporary French or German scholarly periodicals that are now out of circulation. Difficult access to the key texts of this branch of scholarship thus prevented the broader academic community from acquiring a comprehensive picture of the rich and colorful East Central European historiographical landscape. Our reader aims at filling in this gap in two ways. First, it seeks to sketch out the evolution and main features of European comparative history as an exemplary tradition of international scholarship, documenting major theoretical and methodological discourses in the field. Second, and equally important, it underscores the existence of a long and valuable tradition of comparative and transnational historical studies in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe that has been in constant dialogue with Western trends, but which also approached historical research questions in a region-specific manner. On this basis, we argue that comparative history has not simply been an external scholarly approach “imported” into the region, but that it has its own regional tradition worth exploring, continuing, and enriching. Furthermore, we plan to contribute to the fervent debate on the compatibility of comparative and transnational (or entangled) histories that has been taking place especially in the German and French contexts;1 two countries where comparative history had the strongest institutional embeddedness. Our reader seeks to prove that, rather than being distinct or even mutually exclusive—as it is often erroneously argued—these approaches had powerful links from the very beginning. The East Central and Southeast European historiographical contexts in particular provide ample illustrations of the fruitful dialogue and entanglement between these approaches. 1 Philippa Levine, “Is Comparative History Possible?” History and Theory 53, no. 3 (2014): 331–47.

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The Comparative Method: The “Most Effective of all Magician’s Wands”2

The comparative method is routinely described as one of the four fundamental methods of research in the social sciences, together with the experimental, the statistical, and case study approaches.3 Implicitly, comparison has always been an integral part of scientific inquiry as a core operation of reasoning.4 As Guy Swanson fittingly remarked, “Thinking without comparison is unthinkable.”5 In a pre-paradigmatic sense, comparative analytical strategies were thus already present in scientific thinking well before the nineteenth century. The emergence of the comparative method as an explicit scientific approach in its own right was facilitated in the early modern period by the practice of peregrinatio (a secularized version of the medieval pilgrimage to the Holy Land, practiced by students as well as artisans), which was conducive to intellectual experiences contrasting the traveler’s native land to foreign societies, academic cultures or commercial centers. A relevant East Central European example of this Europeanwide practice is the travelogue, Europica varietas, by the young Hungarian Protestant pastor Márton Szepsi Csombor (1594–1623), who visited a wide range of countries from Poland to France and England and described his experiences in a comparative mode.6 With the emergence of the paradigm of “reason of state” in the late-sixteenth century, comparisons of constitutions or of political and economic 2 Quote from Marc Bloch, “A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” in Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Selected Papers by Marc Bloch, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1967), 51 (see page 98 in this volume). 3 Arend Lijphart, “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method,” American Political Science Review 65, no. 3 (1971): 682–93, here 682–83. 4 On the history and theory of the comparative method see Aram A. Yengoyan, Modes of Comparison: Theory & Practice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 1–30; Élise Julien, “Le comparatisme en histoire: Rappels historiographiques et approches méthodologiques,” Hypothèses 1 (2004): 191–201; and, most recently, Willibald Steinmetz, ed., The Force of Comparison: A New Perspective on Modern European History and the Contemporary World (New York: Berghahn, 2019). 5 Guy E. Swanson, “Framework for Comparative Research: Structural Anthropology and the Theory of Action,” in Comparative Methods in Sociology: Essays on Trends and Applications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 145. 6 Márton Szepsi Csombor, Evropica Varietas, avagy Szepsi Czombor Mártonnak Lengyel, Mazur, Pruz, Dania, Frísia… Britanniai, Tengeren való bujdosásában látott, hallot külömb külömb fele dolgoknak rövid le irása… (Kassa, 1620).

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regimes became an important new genre, as can be seen in the works of the Italian Jesuit scholar Giovanni Botero (c. 1544–1617), widely imitated across Europe.7 Present in both East Central and Western Europe, this new approach stimulated cross-regional comparisons. We can find traces of this paradigm in the work of the Bohemian Protestant pedagogue and social theorist Johannes Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský, 1592– 1670). In his political writings, Comenius presented Western Protestant societies, especially the Dutch Republic, as models for the less advanced East Central European political elites.8 In turn, in certain Western European political discourses, references to Eastern European political culture were employed in order to provide implicit or explicit comparative perspectives, stressing the dangers of autocracy and/or anarchy. The English poet and diplomat Giles Fletcher’s (c. 1548–1611) description of Muscovy, and the various seventeenth-century British discussions of Polish noble republicanism are illustrative in this respect.9 The early modern period also witnessed the flourishing of civilizational-attitudinal comparisons between European nations: the schematic genre of Völkertafeln, for example, contrasted the customs and character of different nations within a comparative framework.10 The generalized usage of the comparative method in social sciences can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stimulated by centuries of great geographical discoveries and the emergence of relatively stable territorial states, European thinkers engaged during this period in a systematic comparative study of contemporary polities and societies. The epistemological basis of the comparative method—pertaining at the time to the emerging political, social, and legal theory—was elaborated by

7 Giovanni Botero, Delle relationi universali, 4 vols. (Venice: Angelieri, 1591–1596). 8 Jan Amos Comenius, Gentis felicitas, ed. Julie Nováková and Martin Steiner, in Antonín Škarka, gen. ed., J. A. Comenii Opera omnia (Prague: Academia, 1974), 13:35–66. 9 Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth: Or, Maner of gouernement of the Russe emperour, (commonly called the Emperour of Moskouia) with the manners, and fashions of the people of that countrey (London, 1591); Benedict Wagner-Rundell, “Liberty, Virtue and the Chosen People: British and Polish Republicanism in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795, ed. Richard Unger and Jakub Basista (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 197–214. 10 Franz K. Stanzel, ed., Europäischer Völkerspiegel: Imagologisch-ethnographische Studien zu den Völkertafeln des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Winter, 1999).

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John Locke (1632–1704) in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and further developed by Montesquieu (1689–1755), who hailed comparison as “the greatest faculty of the mind.”11 In his magisterial The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu identified five distinct types of comparison, which were to generate separate disciplines in the human sciences.12 A comprehensive presentation of the comparative method as understood by Enlightenment thinkers can be found in the monumental Encyclopédie (1751–1772): a distinct encyclopedia entry authored by Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (1704– 1779), a disciple of Montesquieu, defined comparison as a basic mechanism in the workings of the human mind.13 These pioneering works indicate that nascent comparative perspectives crystallized in more articulated scientific approaches during the Enlightenment. An important aspect of Enlightenment sociocultural thought was the “temporalization of difference” by placing all societies in the scheme of stadial history, thus reinforcing the notions of civilizational hierarchy and backwardness. The second half of the eighteenth century was also a period when a new framework of symbolic geography was generalized—one in which the North-South axis was gradually giving way to East-West.14 As a result, the European synchronic comparative framework (still prevalent in Montesquieu’s description of the Hungarian and Polish legal and political systems) became supplanted by a developmental scheme that provided a new matrix of thought for describing Eastern Europe as a “backward” region. This new interpretative matrix was internalized by the Enlighteners of East Central Europe: see the Polish reformer Stanisław Staszic (1755–1826), or the Hungarian György Bessenyei (1747–1811), for whom comparative references—contrasting the backwardness of their country with the achievements of Western modernity—became the central argument and tool of mobilization. It is important to stress, however, that most of these works were not historical but rather political treatises analyzing the chances for, and 11 Melvin Richter, “Montesquieu’s Theory and Practice of the Comparative Method,” History of the Human Sciences 15 (2002): 21–33, here 23; see also Melvin Richter, “Two Eighteenth-Century Senses of ‘Comparison’ in Locke and Montesquieu,” Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik 8 (2000): 385–406. 12 Richter, “Montesquieu’s Theory and Practice of the Comparative Method,” 23. 13 Available at https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Encyclop%C3%A9die/1re_%C3%A9dit ion/COMPARAISON (accessed December 15, 2017). 14 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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impediments to, radical social and political reform. It was in the nineteenth century that history became the central framework of cultural and political legitimization. This catalyzed comparative investigations, such as François Guizot’s (1787–1874) monumental history of European civilization, which painted a broad panorama of the evolution of European nations.15 The comparative perspectives employed in this period by East Central Europeans were often double-edged. On the one hand, national revival projects employed an evolutionary vision which projected the achievement of synchronism with the core of Western civilization in the future. On the other hand, they legitimized their projects with reference to inherent virtues which were already present in the archaic stage of their people and which qualified them for entering the community of civilized nations. A typical example of this was the cult of archaic democracy allegedly subverted by feudal lords, as argued by Nicolae Bălcescu (1819–1852) in reference to the Romanian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia.16 In some cases, this also became internalized by Western scholars as in Jules Michelet’s (1798– 1874) Légendes démocratiques du Nord, which extolled the democratic virtues of Poles and Romanians.17 Another growing, comparatively-minded genre specific to this period was that of politically-loaded travelogues: see, for example, József Eötvös’s (1813–1871) study on Ireland, in which the description of the Irish situation under English rule served as a basis of analysis of the analogous situation of Hungary under Habsburg government.18 Going beyond such implicit comparisons, some authors contrasted the Eastern and Western European historical trajectories more systematically. A paradigmatic case is the Polish historian Joachim Lelewel’s (1786–1861) synoptic study of Poland and Spain, which analyzed the rise and decline of two major European composite states at the edges of the continent.19 In a different key, the Hungarian 15 François Guizot, Cours d’ histoire moderne: histoire génerale de la civilisation en Europe (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1828). 16 See Nicolae Bălcescu, Istoria românilor sub Michaiu Vodă Vitézul urmată de scrieri diverse (Bucharest: Tipografia Societăţei Academice Române, [1878] 1887); and Puterea armată şi arta militară dela întemeierea principatului Valahiei până acum (Iaşi: La Cantora Foaiei Săteşti, 1844). 17 Jules Michelet, Légendes démocratiques du Nord (Paris: Garnier, 1854). 18 József Eötvös, “Szegénység Irlandban,” Budapesti Szemle 1 (1840): 89–156. 19 Joachim Lelewel, Parallèle historique entre l’Espagne et la Pologne aux XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Librairie Polonaise, 1835) (written in 1820).

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liberal nationalist historian Mihály Horváth (1809–1878) sketched out a historical parallel between the Hungarians entering Europe in the ninth century and contemporary European social and cultural developments, seeking to show that the Hungarians were capable of smooth integration into the modern European political and civilizational structures.20 After this upsurge of comparative historiographical agendas in the mid-nineteenth century, the second half of that century saw the decline of comparative perspectives. To be sure, the new positivist paradigm was vocally critical of the romantic cult of national uniqueness. Although the positivist theory contained a civilizational scale that evoked comparative approaches, the practical need to unveil and organize historical sources— that became the central preoccupation of positivist historians—was less conducive to comparative approaches. Also, in most East Central European contexts, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the institutionalization of national historiographical schools, which were, by default, self-centered and focused on national consolidation at the expense of comparative perspectives. At the same time, positivist philosophy did offer an integrative vision of the different social sciences and stimulate the search for common methodological precepts. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, new applications of the comparative method became formative of the fields of economics, politics, linguistics, and legal studies. First and foremost, the comparative method was central to newly emerging disciplines such as sociology, associated with the pioneering work of Karl Marx (1818–1883), Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), and Max Weber (1864–1920).21 The central role assigned to the comparative method in sociology enabled Durkheim to argue that “comparative sociology is not a special branch of sociology; it is sociology itself.”22 20 Mihály Horváth, Párhuzam az Európába költözködő magyar nemzet s az akkori Európa polgári s erkölcsi miveltsége között (Pest: Emich Gusztáv, 1847). 21 For the pioneers of comparative historical sociology, see Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (New York: The Free Press, 1895, republished in 1982); Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). See also Stephen Kalberg, Max Weber’s Comparative-Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). On Marx, see Warner, R. Stephen, “The Methodology of Marx’s Comparative Analysis of the Modes of Production,” in Comparative Methods in Sociology: Essays on Trends and Application, ed. Ivan Vallier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 49–74. 22 Cited in Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 21.

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In contrast, the comparative method was more contested in history, turning into a veritable battlefield between the “old” and “new” historical schools at the turn of the century.23 A main catalyst of this methodological debate was Henri Berr’s Revue de synthèse historique (launched in 1900), which also functioned as a trigger of the Annales School. Another important venue of comparative and transnational approaches was the organization of World Historical Congresses, launched in 1898 with a meeting on diplomatic history. The first “proper” congress was held in Paris in 1900 and was actually called the “International Congress of Comparative History.” These efforts at institutionalizing comparative history were temporarily inhibited by the advent of the Great War (1914–1918). However, the pre-1914 debates on comparative history were revived after the hostilities ended, and came to inspire some of the most important historical innovations of the interwar years. Comparative History in Interwar Europe: Between Integration and Ultranationalism

The apparent political victory of liberalism and idealism in international relations and the new emphasis on European cooperation and on collective security that followed World War I led to calls for writing an integrated history of Europe, from comparative and transnational perspectives. Reflecting on the resurgence of nationalism and militarism during the war, the postwar methodological discussion on the heuristic value of comparison was supplemented by an ethical aspect. Comparative history came to be perceived as a possible antidote to nationalism. A protagonist of this approach was Henri Pirenne (1862–1935).24 Deported to Germany for his opposition 23 For a general presentation of the conflict between the old and new history, see Robert William Fogel and G. R. Elton, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). For more recent perspectives, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1987); and Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); on the paradigmatic debate between Seignobos and the Durkheimians, see Erzsébet Takács, “Egy vita története. A szociológusok és történészek viszonya a fin de siècle Franciaországában,” Korall, nos. 19–20 (2005): 5–36. 24 Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, trans. I. E. Clegg (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1937).

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to the occupation regime in Belgium in 1916, Pirenne started to work on a synthetic history of Europe, which was published posthumously. After the war, Pirenne advocated the international cooperation of historians through a comparative and transnational agenda. He hoped that a common comparative research framework would help overcome nationalist biases and facilitate the reconciliation of European nations. At the same time, developing along related yet somewhat different methodological and political lines, German historical sociology offered innovative comparative strategies, as evidenced by the work of Otto Hintze (1861–1940).25 The most comprehensive programmatic call for comparative history was put forward by Marc Bloch (1886–1944), a reputed historian of medieval France and one of the founding fathers of the Annales School. In a seminal article published in 1928 in Berr’s Revue, Bloch sketched out a compelling theoretical analysis of the benefits of comparison for historical research, synthetizing the arguments of the previous decades.26 He defined comparison as the confrontation of “two or more phenomena” which display “certain analogies between them.” The act of comparison means “to trace their line of evolution, to note the likenesses and the differences, and as far as possible explain them.”27 Bloch distinguished three main usages of the comparative method for the writing of history: 1) to identify valid research questions and to formulate problems for historical research; 2) to test hypotheses, a process leading to the formulation, testing, and reformulation of research hypotheses; and 3) to discover historical differences in order to “bring out the ‘originality’ of the different societies.”28 Bloch argued that these usages are united by “the logic of hypothesis testing.”29 He regarded comparative history as “a purely scientific disci25 Otto Hintze, Staat und Verfassung: gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. Fritz Hartung (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1941). 26 Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes,” Revue de synthèse historique 46 (1928): 15–50. English translation: Marc Bloch, “A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” in Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1967), 44–81 (see 89–123 in this volume). See also his The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). 27 Bloch, “A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” 45 (page 92 in this volume). 28 Ibid., 58 (page 105 in this volume). 29 See William Sewell, “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” History and Theory 6 (1967): 208–18, here 208.

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pline orientated towards knowledge”; its main aim was to look for similar causes, influences, and connections. He believed that the “process of testing, reformulating, and retesting” of a working hypothesis renders a most conspicuous service to researchers, “by setting them on the road that may lead to the discovery of real causes.”30 Testing allows one to distinguish between local and more general (regional or continental) phenomena and refute “pseudo-causes.”31 Bloch also reflected on the units of comparison. He argued that the two phenomena chosen for comparison should preferably be from “different sides of a state, or national frontier,” or at least from different “environments.” But he recommended that students of comparative history identify their “own geographical framework, fixed not from outside but from within.”32 Bloch distinguished between comparative operations when the entities were unconnected (e.g., in the case of “diachronic” comparisons) and those “synchronic” ones, which also had to take into account the interplay (“societies that are at once neighbouring and contemporary, exercising a constant mutual influence”33) between the compared entities. Surely, Bloch was aware that the comparative method has its analytical limitations.34 He believed, nevertheless, that it was an “excellent tool” for the study of European history. Its large-scale application to historical research was “one of the most urgent tasks” for the scholarship of the time, one on which “the entire future of the discipline” depended. As indicated above, Bloch’s work was part of a broader discussion on the heuristic value of the comparative method. From the early twentieth century onwards, comparatism has been widely employed in history and in various social sciences, especially in historical sociology.35 However, rather 30 Bloch, “A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” 54 (page 101 in this volume). 31 Building on Bloch’s argumentation, William Sewell argues that the comparative method is “the equivalent of a scientific experiment,” in humanities and social sciences: “Whether employed by historians or by social scientists, the comparative method is an adaptation of experimental logic to investigations in which actual experimentation is impossible.” Sewell, “Marc Bloch,” 208. 32 Bloch, “A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” 46, 71 (pages 92 and 118–19 in this volume). 33 Ibid., 47 (page 94 in this volume). 34 Ibid., 44 (page 91 in this volume). 35 For overviews of the field of comparative history, see Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, “Comparative History,” in International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, vol. 4, ed. N. J. Smelser and P. B.

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than reshaping the national “grand narratives” of history, comparative questions typically came from off-mainstream branches that were either crossdisciplinary—like in the case of socioeconomic history linked to more nomothetic sociological approaches—or were linked to topics that did not comfortably fit the national logic, such as transnational regions or projects of supranational focus like the history of Europe. Apart from the discussions in the traditional centers of European historiography, there were also pioneering initiatives coming from the “peripheries.” A case in point is the Norwegian Institute for Comparative Cultural Research, founded in 1922 by the legal scholar and protagonist of the international peace movement, Fredrik Stang (1867–1941).36 Combining various disciplines (legal studies, anthropology, linguistics, history), the Institute sought to respond to the search for a new national identity, using Scandinavia as a model of transnational cooperation in a Europe shaken by the devastating World War. Progress was also made on the international institutionalization of comparative research, in the framework of international congresses and cooperative endeavors. Thus, the 1920s saw the blossoming of thematic working groups within the framework of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, founded in 1926 under the presidency of the Norwegian agrarian historian and promoter of the comparative method Halvdan Koht (1873–1965). The intellectual yield of this networking is well represented by the studies of the Hungarian social historian István Hajnal (1892–1956), whose comparative sketch is based on the paradigm of small nations, which brought Central Europe together with Scandinavia.37 The debates on transnational and comparative methods in history reached East Central European scholars already in the 1910s, as some of them Baltes (Amsterdam: Pergamon, 2001), 2397–2403; Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, “Comparative History: Methods, Aims, Problems,” in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, 23–39 (New York: Routledge, 2004), here 26– 27, 37; and Chris Lorenz, “Comparative Historiography: Problems and Perspectives,” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (1999): 25–39. 36 Jon Røyne Kyllingstad, “Nationalist Internationalism: Danish and Norwegian Historical Research in the Aftermath of the First World War,” in Making Nordic Historiography: Connections, Tensions and Methodology, 1850–1970, ed. Pertti Haapala, Marja Jalava, and Simon Larsson (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 152–85. 37 István Hajnal, “A kis nemzetek történetírásának munkaközösségéről, I–II.,” Századok (1942): 1–42 and 133–65 (see 235–277 in this volume).

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were directly involved in French and German research networks (such as the one around the Leipzig professor Karl Lamprecht [1856–1915], who was particularly influential in East Central Europe as well as in Scandinavia).38 The problem of historical regions was a principal field for the discussion of transnational and comparative aspects by East Central European historians. Polish historians Marceli Handelsman (1882–1945) and Oscar Halecki (1891–1973) were at the forefront of debates on regional approaches. Their contribution was especially visible at the Seventh International Congress of Historical Sciences held in Warsaw in 1933. The regional focus also served as a challenge to monolithic national narratives in Southeast Europe. Although not devoid of nationalist fervor, the master narrative of Balkan studies formulated by the Serbian anthropogeographer Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927) set the stage for a wide-ranging historiographical discussion on the common social and cultural patterns of the historical itinerary of Balkan nations.39 Inspired by Lamprecht, the prolific Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940) developed a similarly influential regionalist paradigm, launching, as early as 1913, the Bucharest Institute of Southeast European Studies. His agenda was continued, in many ways, by his compatriot Victor Papacostea (1900–1962), who founded the Institute of Balkan Studies in 1937.40 Especially in the early 1930s, in the context of a short period of politically driven regional rapprochement (such as the Balkan Pact, signed in 1934), this approach gave birth to a number of programmatic statements on comparative history and the formation of a transnational research network that had a considerable impact on the historical cultures of these nations.41

38 See Marja Jalava, “Latecomers and Forerunners: Temporality, Historicity, and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Finnish Historiography,” in “Regimes of Historicity” in Southeastern and Northern Europe, 1890–1945, ed. Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsényi, and Marja Jalava (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 43–61. 39 Jovan Cvijić, La Péninsule Balkanique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1918). 40 Nicolae Iorga, Cinq conférences sur le Sud-Est de l’Europe (Bucharest: P. Suru, 1924); Le caractère commun des institutions du Sud-Est de l’Europe (Paris: J. Gamber, 1929). 41 Diana Mishkova, “Academic Balkanisms: Scholarly Discourses of the Balkans and Southeastern Europe,” in Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vol. 4: Concepts, Approaches, and (Self-)Representations, ed. Roumen Daskalov, Diana Mishkova, Tchavdar Marinov, and Alexander Vezenkov (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 44–114; as well as her Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making (London: Routledge, 2018).

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Furthermore, several East Central European historians sought to devise a socioeconomic history on a regional/translational level, often by entering a creative dialogue with the emerging Annales School. This is mainly visible in the studies by Jan Rutkowski (1886–1949) on Central European agrarian history and Gheorghe I. Brătianu (1898–1953) who focused on Southeast Europe and the Black Sea region. Both of them developed a multi-layered comparative model of regional development and inserted the question of the divergence of Western and Eastern European patterns of socioeconomic and political development into a longue durée perspective. At the same time, the late 1930s and early 1940s witnessed the radicalization of nationalism all over Europe. In this context, the original moralpolitical imperative behind comparative history as a tool of overcoming the national conflicts was increasingly questioned, while historical narratives seeking to underpin nationalist politics proliferated. That said, even the markedly anti-liberal and ethnocentric historiographical projects made use of comparative and transnational approaches, as it can be seen in the case of the German Ostforschung.42 This ambiguity can be seen in the work of East Central European scholars as well, such as the above-mentioned Brătianu, whose methodological innovation and regionally comparative approach was combined with a strong ethnonationalist political stance, the latter becoming especially manifest during World War II. Converging Historiographical Agendas in a Divided Europe?

1945 marked a new era in the history of comparative historical studies. Although comparative thinking in both Western and Eastern Europe benefited from the growing interest in socioeconomic structures, the gradually solidifying political divide of the Cold War era disconnected previous transnational contacts and intellectual contexts, ultimately driving scholarship in these two geopolitical regions into different trajectories. While the early postwar years witnessed a series of genuinely comparative historiographical ventures in East Central Europe, such as the Hungarian Revue d’Histoire Comparée, which 42 On the anti-modernist historiographical trends in Germany, see Peter Schöttler, ed., Geschichts­ schreibung als Legitimationswissenschaft, 1918–1945 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997).

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focused on the question of nation-formation in the region, or the comparative history of historiography by Czech historian Josef Macůrek (1901–1992), the Stalinization of politics and culture in these countries cut short these endeavors for creating a more empathic regional historical narrative.43 Thus, in the early 1950s, the comparative historical perspective was confined to the use of a common Marxist terminology and interpretative framework. What is more, most local communist leaderships pressed for the merger of Marxist and nationalist topoi, readjusting national romantic narratives focusing on national liberation to the language of class struggle. There were only few exceptions to this trend, such as the historian of Transylvania Zoltán I. Tóth (1911–1956), who continued his earlier work on creating a common Hungarian-Romanian historical narrative “from below.” In postwar North America and Western Europe, comparative scholarship was fertilized by a plurality of theoretical approaches and methodological insights linked to the rapprochement of sociology and history.44 Significantly, the comparative method played a major role in the evolution of the discipline of political science, especially in the subfields of comparative politics.45 Historical sociology also experienced an extraordinary proliferation after World War II, resulting in the establishment of the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History (1958) and in the publication of major comparative analyses.46 Sociologists discontent with the regular synchronic 43 Josef Macůrek, Dějepisectví evropského východu (Prague: Historický klub, 1946). 44 For the post-1945 rapprochement between history and sociology, see Peter Burke, Sociology and ­History (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980); W. J. Cahnman and A. Boskoff, eds., Sociology and H ­ istory (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1964); Franco Ferrarotti, “The Relation between History and Sociology: Synthesis or Conflict?,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 34, no. 1 (1997): 1–16; Gary G. Hamilton, “The ‘New History’ in Sociology,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 1, no. 1 (1987): 89–114; Seymour M. Lipset, “History and Sociology: Some Methodological Considerations,” in Sociology and History: Methods, ed. Seymour M. Lipset and Richard Hofstadter (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 20–58; John Lukacs, “The Evolving Relationship of History and Sociology,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 1, no. 1 (1987): 79–88; Mildred A. Schwartz, “Historical Sociology in the History of American Sociology,” Social Science History 11, no. 1 (1987): 1–16. 45 Lijphart, “Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method,” 682; Jonathan Hopkin, “Comparative Methods,” in Theory and Methods in Political Science, ed. David Marsh and Gerry Stoker (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 249–50. For classical works, see Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives, and Outcomes (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 46 For the comparative method in historical sociology, see Roland Axtmann, “Society, Globalization and the Comparative Method,” History of the Human Sciences 6, no. 2 (1993): 53–74; Bertrand Badie, “Comparative Analysis and Historical Sociology,” International Social Science Journal 133 (1992):

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study of contemporary societies argued for the consideration of historical trajectories and processes in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of social dynamics.47 Postwar comparative historical studies were directly linked to this boom of comparative sociology as evidenced in the works of Reinhard Bendix, Neil J. Smelser, and Shmuel Eisenstadt.48 This intellectual agenda was supported by a neo-positivist epistemological position, which held that the laborious gathering of case-studies would lead to well-grounded generalizations concerning the developmental trajectories of societies and, ideally, of politics. The comparative method was thus considered a key analytical tool for establishing macro-social causal chains, testing various theoretical presumptions, or limiting the validity of hypotheses by demarcating contrasting cases.49 From this perspective, comparative history was acclaimed as the highest form of historical research as Hans-Ulrich Wehler (1931–2014), the influential German social historian, put it in 1972.50

47

48

49 50

319–27; J. A. Banks, “From Universal History to Historical Sociology,” British Journal of Sociology 40, no. 4 (1989): 521–43; Victoria E. Bonnell, “The Uses of Theory, Concepts and Comparison in Historical Sociology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 2 (1980): 156–73; Daniel Chirot, “Thematic Controversies and New Developments in the Uses of Historical Materials by Sociologists,” Social Forces 55, no. 2 (1976): 232–41; Comparative Social Research, Special issue on “Methodological Issues in Comparative Social Science” 16 (1997); Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 22, no. 2 (1980): 174–97; Charles Tilly, As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981). For works in comparative-historical sociology, see selectively Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires: The Rise and Fall of Historical Bureaucratic Societies (New York: Free Press, 1963); Seymour M. Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1963); Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Jeffery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 1993); Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956); Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959); Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Modernization: Protest and Change (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966). Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984); Skocpol and Somers, “The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry.” See Monica Juneja and Margrit Pernau, “Lost in Translation? Transcending Boundaries in Compara-

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Politically, emergent comparative historical studies were shaped by the concerns of the Cold War: scholars sought to understand, and often also to provide, historical justifications for the division of Europe. Nevertheless, comparative history did not lose its essentially dialogic nature. Interpretations of European and regional historical development were refined in a virtual and, from the 1960s onwards, increasingly real dialogue of scholars on both sides of the Iron Curtain. A key figure of comparative research in the 1950–1960s was the Norwegian Stein Rokkan (1921–1979); he focused on European political systems and developed an increasingly historical explanation for understanding the causes for, and the ways in which diverse political structures functioned.51 Rokkan’s method was to identify the most important social and cultural processes that determined the outlook of contemporary political systems. Rokkan became very influential in political sociology and increasingly in comparative history, as his work implied a model of the formation of modern nation-states and Europe as a geopolitical area. In Rokkan’s view, Europe represents the sum of various responses to largescale processes that impacted each region and population in the continent. Rokkan distinguished a set of major forces, such as large-scale migrations, urbanization processes, the impact of empires, the outcome of religious conflicts, and the structure of agricultural production, which catalyzed a central feature of European socio-political development: the diversity of nationstates. This diversity was due to the particular ethnic and linguistic heritage marking these states, the religious culture endorsed by them, the expansion of their urban and trading networks, and, finally, their relationship to landed property and the propertied classes. Along these lines, Rokkan distinguished between Western and Eastern European states with regard to their elites’ access to sea trading networks. Taking another axis into account, Rokkan also distinguished a Roman Catholic South and a Protestant-dominated North. Likewise, Barrington Moore Jr. (1913–2005) and Cyril E. Black (1915– 1989) addressed the trajectories, regional differences, and general tendencies tive History,” in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. Heinz- Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 107. 51 Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-national Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967); Stein Rokkan et al., Citizens, Elections, Parties: Approaches to the Comparative Study of the Processes of Development (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1970); Stein Rokkan and Shmuel Eisenstadt, eds., Building States and Nations (Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1973).

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of modernization, often with the manifest aim of assessing the divergence of Western and Eastern social and political paths to modernity.52 Their comparative historical sociologies of modernization were largely influenced by theories of economic backwardness, most importantly by the work of the Odessa-born economic historian at Harvard, Alexander Gerschenkron (1904–1978).53 Gerschenkron specialized in Russia and Eastern Europe and had large influence on comparative history precisely because his model proved to be much more sensitive to historical context than the generally static ideas of both contemporary Marxism as well as the anti-Communist Walt Whitman Rostow’s (1916–2003) developmental theory.54 While Rostow argued for a uniform model of economic development consisting of mandatory stages to be passed, Gerschenkron highlighted the importance of the particular socioeconomic conditions prior to the beginning of industrialization. For Gerschenkron, factors such as per capita income levels, literacy, available savings, the level of technology, the relationship between agricultural and industrial production, the level of state centralization, and, finally, relationships with more advanced countries that might provide credits and technology, shaped a country’s economic growth.55 Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) alloyed these intellectual currents into a sweeping theory of global economic and social structures. In his works, modernization theory, historical sociology, and the investigation of economic regions culminated in the study of global world-systems, which built on the comparison of historical and economic patterns.56 Wallerstein’s 52 Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Cyril E. Black, The Dynamics of Modernization: A Study in Comparative History (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 53 Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962). 54 Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 55 Paul R. Gregory, “A Note on Relative Backwardness and Industrial Structure,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 88 (August 1974): 520–27; Gregory, “Some Empirical Comments on the Theory of Relative Backwardness: The Russian Case,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 22 (July 1974): 654–65. 56 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1975), vol. 2: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980), and vol. 3: The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730– 1840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989); The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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theory sought to explain the transformation of European feudal economies into capitalism as the consequence of the decline of agricultural production and the quest for ensuring future economic growth. Around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, he argued, Europeans expanded their economic networks well beyond the continent, which resulted in the emergence of heavily intersecting economic sub-units and the intensification of global economic linkages. Consequently, certain regions emerged as centers of this new global economic system, and experienced accelerated capital accumulation, industrialization, and urbanization. As the outcome of the intensification of monetary economies and population growth, states of the core built effective bureaucracies and military power. In contrast, societies that could not accumulate such resources from overseas trade increasingly turned to agricultural production and lagged behind in industrialization.57 Eastern European comparative studies in history were not simply fertilized by these theories of global regions and world systems; scholars from the other side of the Iron Curtain did actually play an important role in shaping the debate on these topics. In post-Stalinist Eastern Europe, comparative historical research focused on the emergence of modern capitalist economy and contrasting the developmental patterns in Western Europe with the “backwardness” of the lands lying outside of the center. Hungarian and Polish Marxist historians, especially Witold Kula (1916–1988), Marian Małowist (1909–1988), Zsigmond Pál Pach (1919–2001), György Ránki (1930–1988), and Iván T. Berend (1930), tried to establish a distinct path of historical development for Eastern Europe in dialogue with Gerschenkron’s and Wallerstein’s center-periphery and dependency theories. The Western and Eastern approaches were similar in their objective to establish historical laws that validly describe the emergence of capitalism and the modern world market. Despite their intellectual commonalities, East Central European Marxist historians drew different conclusions concerning the origins and future of the state socialist regimes in the region. While Pach argued that the historical trajectory of Eastern Europe proved the inevitability of a state socialist 57 Ch. K. Chase-Dunn, “The Kernel of the Capitalist World Economy: Three Approaches,” in Contending Approaches to World System Analysis, ed. W. R. Thompson (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1983), 55–78; Osvaldo Sunkel, “The Development of Development Thinking,” in Transnational Capitalism and National Development: New Perspectives on Dependence, ed. José J. Villamil (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), 19–66.

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type of modernization, Berend gradually moved toward a reform communist position hoping to combine socialism with the market and thus facilitate the socioeconomic modernization of his country, while Kula maintained the validity of the Marxist analysis of capitalism, but increasingly considered the postwar Eastern European state socialist regimes a dead end.58 The exploration of socioeconomic structures, influenced by the Marxist analytical framework on both sides of the Iron Curtain, was complemented by a growing interest in historical forms of statehood and the processes of modern state formation. In North America and Western Europe, the historical sociology of Charles Tilly (1929–2008)59 and Theda Skocpol (1947),60 influenced by the comparative approach to sociopolitical structures and institutions, as well as Perry Anderson’s (1938) critical Marxist study on the origins of the modern state in early modern Europe, dominated the field.61 The focus on the state as the object of comparative interest was complemented by the study of collective action and social behavior, particularly revolutions and protest.62 In contrast, the main focus in East Central Europe was not the state, but the nation. Since nations in the region used to belong to composite imperial polities, their identity was bound to ethnocultural categories rather than to state structures. For the historians working in this region, assessing the formation of modern nations seemed to be a particularly pressing concern. Along these lines, historians such as Miroslav Hroch (1932), Józef 58 Zsigmond Pál Pach, Hungary and the European Economy in Early Modern Times (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994); Iván T. Berend and György Ránki, Gazdasági elmaradottság, kiutak és kudarcok a XIX. századi Európában: Az európai periféria az ipari forradalom korában (Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1979); Berend and Ránki, Gazdasági útkeresés 1956–1965: A szocialista gazdaság magyarországi modelljének történetéhez (Budapest: Magvető, 1983); Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System: Towards a Model of the Polish Economy 1500–1800 (London: Verso, 1976); Kula, Historia, zacofanie, rozwój (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1983). 59 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984); Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 60 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 61 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974). 62 Jack A. Goldstone, “The Comparative and Historical Study of Revolutions,” Annual Review of Sociology 8 (1982): 187–207; Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1963); S. N. Eisenstadt, Revolution and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study of Civilizations (New York: Free Press, 1978); Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading: Addison Wesley, 1978).

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Chlebowczyk (1924–1985), Henryk Wereszycki (1898–1990), and Emil ­Niederhauser (1923–2010) comparatively explored the genesis of nations and national consciousness in Eastern Europe as an outcome of complex sociocultural processes and interactions, focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on the lands of the Habsburg Empire. While in geopolitical terms, during the Cold War the Federal Republic of Germany became firmly anchored in the “Western world,” the complex historical experiences of German scholars stimulated comparative historical studies. Seeking to explain the emergence of Nazism and the reasons for which the development of Germany “diverged” from the “Western” liberal road to modernity, German historians turned to the concept of the country’s Sonderweg (special path). Through the very contrast of the “normal” and the “special” paths, this theory involved implicit or explicit comparisons to other European societies in the modern period.63 In this context, leading German social historians of the 1970s and 1980s such as Gerhard A. Ritter (1929–2015), Hartmut Kaelble (1940), Jürgen Kocka (1941), and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (1943) became increasingly interested in the commonalities, divergences, and crossovers of the social history of Europe. They focused mostly on the comparative dimension of the emergence of the welfare state (in the German context: Sozialstaat), civil society, and social and national integration.64 Thanks to the East-West rapprochement and the relatively liberal intellectual climate in some of the countries of the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s, 63 Jürgen Kocka, “Assymetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg,” History and Theory 38 (1999): 40–50; Jürgen Kocka, “Historische Komparatistik in Deutschland” in Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung, ed. HeinzGerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 1996), 47–60. 64 Gerhard A. Ritter, Der Sozialstaat: Entstehung und Entwicklung im internationalen Vergleich (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991); Hartmut Kaelble, Industrialisierung und soziale Ungleichheit: Europa im 19. Jahrhundert; Eine Bilanz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983); Soziale Mobilität und Chancengleichheit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im internationalen Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983); Auf dem Weg zu einer europaischen Gesellschaft: Eine Sozialgeschichte Westeuropas 1880–1980 (Munich, 1987); “Vergleichende Sozialgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts: Forschungen europaischer Historiker,” in Geschichte und Vergleich: Ansätze und Ergebnisse international vergleichender Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1996), 91–130; Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, 1780–1914: Enterprise, Family, and Independence (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London and New York: Methuen, 1984); Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, 3 vols, (Munich: dtv, 1988).

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but also reflective of the transnational intellectual current that came to be labeled the “cultural turn,” the interest in nationalism and state formation marked a remarkable turn in comparative historical thinking. All this signaled a growing awareness of common patterns of European development and historical entanglements that bound together countries and regions across the Iron Curtain. The increasing sensitivity to broader European issues was fostered by French-German common projects of transnational history. While socioeconomic comparisons frequently contrasted the German with the English trajectory, the cultural turn triggered the study of the entanglements of France and Germany, thereby laying the foundations for broader European transnational investigations, which gained momentum after 1989.65 A similar negotiated transnational narrative under a European aegis became more plausible for East Central European historians only after the transformations of 1989. Yet, there were scholars who had already engaged in a transnational cultural history before the fall of the Berlin Wall and were, thus, integrated into an international academic field. A case in point is the Hungarian historian Péter Hanák (1921–1997), whose comparative studies on the formation of urban cultures and societies in Vienna and Budapest, or more generally, on the commensurate processes of modernization in Central Europe, forecasted the subsequent boom in cultural and social histories of East-West entanglements, common patterns of European modernization, and transnational historical trajectories.66 Another important work along these lines was written by the Serbian historian Andrej Mitrović (1937–2013), who had already mapped the interwar European modernist cultural scene from a transnational perspective in 1983.67

65 Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, Transferts: Relations interculturelles franco-allemandes (XVIIIe– XIXe siècle) (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1988); Helmut Berding, Etienne François, and Hans-Peter Ullmann, ed., Deutschland und Frankreich im Zeitalter der Französischen Revolution (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1989). 66 Péter Hanák, A Kert és a Műhely (Budapest: Gondolat, 1988). English translation: The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 67 Andrej Mitrović, Angažovano i lepo: umetnost u razdoblju svetskih ratova 1914–1945 (Belgrade: Narodna knjiga, 1983).

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Historical Cultures Beyond the Nation-State?

Although both the interwar period and the post-World War II era witnessed the rise of comparative and transnational approaches, on the whole, the “mainstream” national historiographical traditions have proved rather unreceptive to comparative history. As Jürgen Kocka pointed out, comparative history has, to date, remained marginal among historians, having been placed “not in the center but in the periphery of historical research.” In Kocka’s view, comparison in history “means to discuss two or more historical phenomena systemically with respect to their similarities and differences in order to reach certain intellectual aims.”68 He identified four main analytical usages of the comparative method: 1) heuristic, leading to the identification of problems and questions that one would otherwise miss; 2) descriptive, allowing historians to clarify the profile of single case studies, by comparing them with others and thus challenging notions of “uniqueness”; 3) analytical, enabling historians to answer causal questions; and 4) paradigmatic, having a de-provincializing or “liberalizing eye-opening” effect on the research agenda of the historian. In the 1990s, however, the comparative method came under scrutiny from various directions. New analytical frameworks have been elaborated for approaching global, continental, or regional history from cross-national or transnational perspectives, such as global history, shared or entangled history,69 histoire croisée,70 and the history of transfers.71 Although arguably 68 Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 39–44, here 39. 69 On the approach of “entangled histories,” see Wolf Lepenies, ed., Entangled Histories and Negotiated Universals (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2003); Yehuda Elkana et al., eds, Unraveling Ties: From Social Cohesion to New Practices of Connectedness (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002); Jörn Rüsen, Hanna Leitgeb, and Norbert Jegelka, eds., Zukunftsentwürfe: Ideen für eine Kultur der Veränderung (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2000). 70 On histoire croisée and its relation to comparative history, see Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et réflectivité,” Annales 58, no. 1 (2003): 7–36; Philipp Ther, “Deutsche Geschichte als transnationale Geschichte: Überlegungen zu einer Histoire Croisée Deutschlands und Ostmitteleuropas,” Comparativ 13 (2003): 155–80; Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, eds., De la comparaison à l’ histoire croisée (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2004); Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50. 71 On the history of transfers and the debate over its relationship with the comparative method, see mainly Johannes Paulmann, “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei For­ schungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 649–85; Hartmut Kaelble, Der historische Vergleich: Eine Einführung zum 19. und 20.

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introduction

stemming from the tradition of comparative history, these new transnational approaches attempted to critically reevaluate the comparative method and shift the focus of research from variable-dependent methodology and causal reasoning to multiple levels of interaction.72 For proponents of transnational approaches, the “classical” comparative method seemed too mechanistic. In order to identify similarities and differences among various case studies, it treated units of comparison as stable, compatible, and neatly separated entities, and thus unavoidably obscured the reciprocal influences and inter-relations among them. In contrast, new transnational approaches, influenced by post-colonialism and subaltern studies, emphasized the processes of reciprocal perceptions, mutual influences, and entanglements among historical actors. Surely, in many respects, these approaches are not brand new; they have been applied, implicitly or explicitly, by historians and social scientists over a long period of time. Yet, in their most recent articulations, they challenge comparative historians to reflect on their analytical categories, their units of comparison, and their own position in the research process. This debate has reached its climax around the turn of the millennium, but by the early 2010s a relative convergence seems to have emerged in the sense that most practitioners fuse some elements of comparative and transnational history. They do not question the relevance of comparative analytical operations but give up the idea of conceiving of two disjunctive units of analysis. This convergence was far less controversial in East Central Europe, where the comparative perspective was intrinsically linked to the study of common (post-)imperial frameworks. Thus, historical comparison and the study of influences and transfers has always been complementary.

­Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1999); Matthias Middell, “Kulturtransfer und Historische Komparatistik—Thesen zu ihrem Verhältnis,” Comparativ 10 (2000): 7–41; Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung: Der Ansatz der Histoire croisée und die Herauforderung des Transnationalen,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 607–36; Hartmut Kaelble and Jürgen Schriewer, eds., Vergleich und Transfer: Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2003); Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” 42–44; Philipp Ther, “Beyond the Nation: The Relational Basis of a Comparative History of Germany and Europe,” Central European History 36 (2003): 45–73. 72 See Bénédicte Zimmermann, Claude Didry, and Michael Werner, Histoire croisée de la France et de l’Allemagne (Paris: MSH, 1999), an experimental empirical application of the new method of histoire croisée.

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Building an alternative framework and overwriting this cleavage, global history seems to be much more natural for Western European and North American scholars, whose historical traditions entail the study of (post-)colonial trans-continental networks and transfers. In contrast, in East Central Europe, transcending the nation-centered perspective usually implied a meso-regional(ist) narrative (focusing on Central Europe, the Balkans, or the Baltic). The challenge of global history seems to relegate these regional frameworks to the background. Thus, global history often tends to factor Central and Eastern Europe out of the narrative, as it is neither perceived to be part of the West, nor part of the post-colonial, nonWestern world, let alone the “global South.” Structure and Organization of the Reader

In order to render the comparativist tradition and the current debates more accessible to students and researchers, our reader presents, in three volumes, a broad selection of “canonic” and also less well-known texts. This selection is intended to reflect the multiplicity of historiographical debates shaping the comparative historical approach. Alongside the excerpts, we also provide short biographical sketches and contextual information to place the given text in its broader historiographical framework.73 We included a number of formative texts stemming from Western Europe and the United States that had a major global impact, as well as samples of “locally produced” texts tackling the problems of comparative and transnational history-writing in East Central Europe. Despite undeniable differences in the political and institutional contexts, the agenda and the intellectual outlook of comparative historians in East Central and Western Europe reflect the existence of personal connections, transnational networks, imagined or real dialogues, as well as the heterogeneity of approaches that remained typical to all historiographical contexts in Europe. We believe that documenting these traditions and their intersections provides a wealth of material for studying and teaching comparative history and a firm basis for understanding regional and transnational 73 On the whole, we left most of the original bibliographical references of the selected excerpts intact, but homogenized their format and also corrected a number of evident errors, such as misspellings or wrong dates of publication.

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introduction

entanglements in Europe. Revisiting these traditions and interferences would also enable a profound rethinking of the way the common European historical narrative is being constructed and contribute to a more multidimensional understanding of the European cultural and political space. The present volume maps various historiographical paradigms that tackled the problem of comparison. We focus, in particular, on the complex entanglement of comparative methodological approaches with various transnational and supranational frameworks and scales from universal history to meso-regional (i.e. Balkans, Central Europe, etc.) and pan-European perspectives. The anthology starts with French and German methodological discussions around the turn of the twentieth century, stemming from the effort to integrate history with other emerging social sciences. The method of comparison was conceived as an expedient instrument to create a more scientific-analytical framework, breaking through the unique and irretrievable singularity of historical events. The task of comparing different historical trajectories posed the question of causality: what are the factors that should be singled out as essential in creating similarities and differences? Along these lines, the second part of this volume turns to the question of structural and institutional comparisons, reviewing various historiographical ventures striving to sketch out a broader (regional or European-level) interpretative framework to assess the specificities and parallels of the legal systems, patterns of agrarian production, and the common ethnographic and sociocultural features. In the third part, we present a number of texts from interwar Europe that sought to formulate a supra-national research framework as an antidote to national exclusivism. While in Western Europe the most obvious geopolitical framework was that of Europe, in East Central Europe the agenda of comparison was linked usually to a meso-regional framework. Volume Two will present the challenges comparative history had to tackle in the postwar period and the ways it adjusted to the growing political polarization of the Cold War but also the increasing globalization of the world. It will discuss how comparative history developed in the early postwar decades into a major tool for debating the perspectives of modernization, democratization, and social change. To this end, the volume will explore modes of redefining comparative history as a method of studying social change in general, and a framework for understanding issues of regionalism, transnationalism and interconnectedness in East Central 26

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­ urope in particular. Volume Two will also tackle three major themes that E framed the comparative discussion: states, nations, and empires. In so doing it will show that the emergence of such grand frameworks for comparative analysis proves how firmly comparative history was linked to contemporary macro-theories of sociology and political science. Attention will also be devoted to the debates on modernization and backwardness in East Central Europe—debates in which the notions of core and periphery in world systems became central concepts employed to make sense of uneven economic and social development in a global context. Finally, the second volume will address the ways in which comparative history situated Europe in the wider world and constructed European meso-regions in an increasingly globalizing framework. Volume Three will focus on the evolution of comparative history after 1989, and discuss the ways in which the collapse of state socialism, the disintegration of the “socialist camp,” and the end of the Cold War liberalized historical discourses in East Central Europe and created the premises for the proliferation of comparative and transnational approaches. By addressing recent methodological debates, the volume will also document the emergence of critical discourses on “classical approaches” to comparative history and evaluate the relationship between the comparative method and new forms of cross-histories, such as shared/entangled history and histoire croisée (Verflechtungsgeschichte). Furthermore, it will explore the underlying tension between the process of European integration and calls for writing the history of Europe from an integrated perspective on the one hand, and the emergence and consolidation of new national historiographies in the region on the other. Last but not least, by focusing on regional and relational histories after the fall of Communism, it will showcase new and innovative comparative and transnational approaches to the history of East Central Europe. Needless to say, given the huge body of potentially relevant texts, our selection in this and future volumes cannot provide exhaustive coverage of the rich tradition of comparative history, but offers only a sampling of different national and transnational historiographic traditions. Rather than aiming for the reproduction or establishment of a “canon” on comparative history, the three volumes will provide an interpretation of these comparative perspectives in the light of the multiple entanglements of the historical cultures 27

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introduction

in which they were produced. In so doing, we hope to offer our readers the opportunity to continue this dialogue by reflecting on the national, regional, and international contexts of their own scholarly work. ***

We are especially grateful to the Open Society Institute Higher Education Support Program, which funded our project on comparative history in Eastern Europe (initiated by Sorin Antohi back in 2005), thus making the publication of this collection possible. We would also like to thank the numerous fellows, coming from a dozen countries across the region, who took part in the activities of this project. They all stressed the need for such a reader and provided us with useful feedback on its contents. Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies at the Central European University provided us with institutional backing and with additional financial resources to prepare the manuscript for publication. We are thankful to Mónika Zsuzsanna Nagy, who helped us with our work throughout these years, as well as to Bogdan Iacob and Silviu Hariton, who worked as research assistants at various stages during the completion of the project. Likewise, we would like to thank Ágoston Berecz for preparing the index, Emily Gioelli, Cody Inglis, and Amy Brouillette for editing the manuscript linguistically and to Lucija Balikić for her help in formatting it. We are also grateful to József Litkei from CEU Press for processing the book manuscript with exemplary care. In the midst of a series of unprecedented political attacks on academic freedom in Hungary and in other countries of the region—and beyond it— we dedicate this work to the Central European University, an intellectual environment that has served as a catalyst of historiographical exchanges transcending the boundaries of self-centered nationalist “grand narratives,” thus stimulating a pluralist and comparative approach and bringing the Eastern and Western parts of Europe into a fruitful and creative dialogue. We strongly hope that the university will be able to continue this mediating role in the future as well.

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1 Defining the Comparative Method

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Cultural History of the Modern Era s o u r c e

Kurt Breysig, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit: Vergleichende Entwicklungsgeschichte der führenden Völker Europas und ihres sozialen und geistigen Lebens (Berlin: Bondi, 1900), 217–24.

Kurt Breysig (1866–1940) was born in Posen (today Poznań in Poland) and

raised in Erfurt. He studied in Berlin and Tübingen with the leading authorities of German historiography at the time, such as Hans Delbrück, Hans Droysen, and Heinrich von Treitschke. The greatest influence on his thinking was,

however, exerted by the economic historian Gustav von Schmoller. Following this inspiration, he started to combine socioeconomic and cultural history and went through all the stages of the German academic hierarchy,

becoming a full professor in 1923. In contrast to the politically centered mainstream, Breysig sought to map the interplay of the cultural and socioeconomic spheres while creating sweeping synthetic narratives. His Kulturge-

schichte der Neuzeit provided a panorama of cultural development all over the world and identified different civilizational circles as representative of different stages of human evolution. Along these lines, he tried to replace the

linear evolutionary narrative that characterized the mainstream of positivist

historiography in the late nineteenth century, offering the model of a spiral instead. Comparative analysis was a central element of this framework of civilizational history.

As the present excerpt shows, Breysig considered comparison an essential

analytical tool for any scientific investigation, and an excellent means to move beyond the purely descriptive method that had characterized history-writing for many centuries. In contrast to political history focusing on individual actors

and occurrences, modern historiography since the Enlightenment “proceeded systematically insofar as it did not only trace this event following the principle of temporal sequence, but analyzed it in substantively ordered and divided

series of development.” In this framework, the principal agents of history were

peoples representing different civilizational characteristics rather than heroic

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individuals. In an effort to institutionalize his program, Breysig tried to establish a Seminar of Comparative and Cultural History in Berlin in 1910, but his attempt failed. After this he became more and more preoccupied with the nationally specific patterns of development, a shift that was not unrelated to the radicalization of German nationalism. On the whole, his work can be located

in-between the turn-of-the-century trends of cultural history (along the lines

defined by Karl Lamprecht) and interwar constructions of cultural morphology (as the one devised by Oswald Spengler).

· Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Ein universalgeschichtlicher Versuch), vols. 1–2 (Berlin: Bondi, 1900–1901); Der Stufenbau und die Gesetze der Weltgeschichte (Berlin: Bondi, 1905); Die Entstehung des Gottesgedankens und der Heilbringer (Berlin: Bondi, 1905); Die Völker ewiger Urzeit (Berlin: Bondi, 1907); Von Gegenwart und von Zukunft des deutschen Menschen (Berlin: Bondi, 1912); Die Macht des Gedankens in der Geschichte, in Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel und mit Marx (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1926); Naturgeschichte und Menschheitsgeschichte (Breslau: M. u. H. Marcus, 1933); Vom Sein und Erkennen geschichtlicher Dinge, vols. 1–2 (Breslau: M. u. H. Marcus, 1935–36); Das neue Geschichts­bild im Sinn der entwickelnden Geschichtsforschung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1944); Die ­Geschichte der Menschheit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1955). secondary literature · Bernhard vom Brocke, Kurt Breysig: Geschichtswissenschaft zwischen Historismus und Soziologie (Hamburg: Matthiesen, 1971); Bernhard vom Brocke, “Kurt Breysig,” in Deutsche Historiker, vol. 5, ed. Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 581–602. main works

W

T

he sequence of the development of individual disciplines is of great interest to the history of scientific activity. In many cases, it will also be necessary to look for the regularly changing degrees of interest in various branches of research at different times. More important, however, is another consequence of the modifications and alterations in scientific life, the elements of which first have to be accounted for. That is, science in general and each discipline in particular can be conducted in very different ways. A differentiation between descriptive and constructive science has long been established, and the question arises, how may these forms of science be distinguished from one another? Finally, one has to address descriptive science, as it is the simpler, more primitive, and less ambitious of the two. It is probably not always necessarily the oldest of the two, the one that existed first, for so buoyant is the human mind that it is often inclined to take the second and third step b­ efore 32

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the first. It is easier for the thinking human being to contemplate the ultimate mysteries of the world than to focus on and describe the flower in his hand. A symptomatic case is the history of Greek science to which one will always return as a type, as it was comparatively the most original and the first to be analyzed historically: the natural sciences, which can hardly do without a foundation of exact observation, were the least cultivated by the Greeks. In the humanities, too, they let almost all those branches that require composed and devoted description lie idle. They did not develop any economics, any jurisprudence, and in historiography, therefore, they hardly cultivated the corresponding fields of economic history and the history of law, as is, incidentally, also the case with art history, the history of religion, the history of science, and the history of manners. The examination of the Germanic-Romanic period in European history leads to similar conclusions: how often has philosophy, or one of the highly unempirical observational sciences of those times that were closely related to philosophy, postulated results for which not even the slightest observations were collected. The epochs of descriptive research often followed only much later. Nevertheless, it is evident that descriptive sciences constitute the basic level of any cognition. Even the boldest metaphysics cannot be contemplated without a certain minimum of observation. None of the natural sciences, nor the humanities lack this broad basis; and even two completely formal sciences, i.e. mathematics and logic, need an—admittedly incomparably smaller—empirically grounded basis of experience. A number is the measure of all things, but it cannot be thought without the things; it has to be deduced from them. And if logic seeks to provide tools for all thinking, the name of the most basic of its tools, the concept, implies that there first has to be something tangible before it can be developed. The only peculiarity of these formal sciences is that they do not depend on reality to the same degree as all other sciences, even though their basic material, i.e. numbers and notions, has been deduced from reality. Contrary to those cases dealt with just now, some sciences remained in a purely descriptive state for centuries. For an indefinite duration, botany and zoology were conducted only by compiling observed material. Among the humanities, the most descriptive in nature, historiography was largely conducted in this way for more than two millennia. 33

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Then again, even at an early stage, the lust for description is often joined by a second one: the lust for systematic science; that is, the drive to bring order and coherence to the wealth of studied experiential material. After all, it is probably these two goals that systematically conducted science envisages. The impressions that overwhelm us from all directions are in themselves chaotic and organized for our receiving brains only through a useful, but insufficient chronological order. Only in certain circumstances does this chronology add value to our research; otherwise it is but an unusable husk of the sweet fruit that is knowledge. A seemingly instinctive desire, however, that is probably as much the result of manifold experience as any other logical need, forces us to classify the raw material transmitted to us by our senses under certain collective terms. Every classification of the reality surrounding us, even the crudest and roughest ones, are only products of this ordering drive, and thus, all the most general categories of research, such as the natural sciences and humanities, botany or history, or whatever it may be. The whole nomenclature of specific sciences already contains a system. Nonetheless, almost even more important to the notion of systematic science is the practice that research tends to pursue within every single one of its branches: to establish order within the borders of the field as well as to detect interrelationships. The basic means of which each and every science avails itself, whatever it may be called, is that of comparison. Consider for once what an astonishingly large fraction of all scholarly work is dedicated to comparison, and how much more time absolutely every single scholar devotes to this thought exercise than to all others. It is the means that even the boldest combination, the abstraction, which is furthest removed from reality, cannot do without. Simultaneously, it is the foundation of all science—in the literal sense of the word, it is the Alpha and Omega of all science. As coincidence probably caused every single step forward in natural history as well as in all human development, so the first accidental comparison, which a wandering eye observed between two different things, prompted the first investigative thought. For the first comparison may have provoked the first wondering, the first astonishment about the diversity of nature and consequently, the first question, though surely not yet the first answer to the mystery. Comparison is a tool of thinking that can be applied in two directions, in the two dimensions to which reality extends at all: space and time. Yet 34

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in both cases, it has the effect of producing collective terms insofar as at first sight, it notices the differences between the separate objects of observation, but at a second glance—and for the time being that is the point—also the similarities. Both difference and similarity are the precondition for the theoretical classification of objects of observation into groups and species. Both complement each other: an object’s boundary is determined by the communalities it comprises and the differences it excludes. The comparison of things adjoining each other leads to the most general summary of appearances in the realm of nature, to the denomination and limitation, for example, of flora and fauna, of heaven and earth, and so on. Much later, with respect to human activities and labor it indeed can express and describe the basic notions of social and spiritual life, state, and family, or arts and sciences, and many more things. At an even later stage and as a result of the progressive immersion in single elements, the same undertaking serves the goal of distinguishing and outlining varieties of plants, animal groups, constitutional forms, or art forms. Once such classifications are carried out, which are not all in a single line but rather form a hierarchical structure of super- and subordination, the system becomes even richer: classification and compilation then lead to a structure and stratification that can still be developed further. Yet, crucial for all those new arrangements in groups remains the principle of comparison; even in the lower categories, time and again it should help in separating what is dissimilar and joining what is similar. Obviously, this form of systematic classification can be used most readily by those sciences dealing with spatially or conceptually adjacent objects, which in this sense means just as much. The natural sciences use it without hesitation. It is the altogether most comfortable, easily handled means of organizing the enormous and difficult to comprehend, but spatially contiguous phenomena of heaven and earth, the realm of animals and plants, minerals and so on. Just as natural, however, is that jurisprudence and economics organize and classify the institutes of law and economy following the same principle, just as philology organizes the elements of language, and aesthetics the forms of art; in all of those cases, it involves elements that actually exist side by side. Yet, in the juxtaposition of observation, several sciences are obliged to integrate a sequence, because the phenomena do not appear spatially, but 35

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temporally consecutive. Undeniably, as one of the first sciences, historiography should have had to put up with the requirement to persistently advance systematic organization, given that it is the only science in the humanities that had to deal with a sequence of objects from the very beginning. Nevertheless, here it is obvious that the nature of the object itself did not immediately push for such a development, since every sequence of events already looks like a natural order, while conversely the spatial side-by-side of objects as well as notions appears as a tangled mess to the wandering eye and the probing mind. There, at first sight, the development of an artificial clustering—which indeed every system is—seems necessary if one desires to make even the slightest progress in knowledge. On the contrary, every sequence of events, that is, of explored objects offers a usable and seemingly sufficient guide for its scientific representation. And the instinctive drive toward pure description that, like every basic science, dominates historiography can, thus, easily lead to the deceptive idea that order has been established already, though in reality the slightest attempt has not been made. Consequently, during long periods of its development, historiography remained a primarily descriptive activity. And there was another reason: the historian also uses comparison as a means of research. This approach is required to detect each change, which after all is the foundation of all historical development. But to bring coherence to occurrences, historiography has another tool at its disposal: the assumption of causality. People have long been convinced that all our presuppositions of cause-effect chains, which we believe are provable, are merely hypotheses. Basically, the propter hoc is never more than—at its best, frequently observed—post hoc; the relationship is just a sequence of occurrences on top of each other. Yet as this most common of scientific hypotheses can hardly be absent in life or in research, so could historiography hardly do without it. Indeed, it contented itself nearly always with a very loose, very superficial use of causality. And because from the beginning historiography was provided with an external means of organization—the sequence of temporal events— and structured by its adoption of an inner bond of coherence, it was almost natural that it did not strive for further principles of organization. Yet, this also meant that for two millennia it did not become a systematic science. Only by following its neighboring branches within the humanities from which it learned has it become aware of the fact that the means of compari36

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son could not just be used for basic purposes, but also for principal aims. Now—from the eighteenth century—a systematic historiography was developed, which truly deserved that name: because it became broader; because it aimed at giving a complete picture of the, up to then, so one-sided and bounded description of history; and because it did not use the actions of the individual as a standard for its representation, but rather studied the fates of big communities as an object. Next, it proceeded systematically insofar as it not only traced this event following the principle of temporal sequence but analyzed it in substantively ordered and divided series of development. The history of peoples took the place of the history of kings and heroes. Moreover, we are in the middle of a development in which an almost entirely political history is supplanted by a whole number of equally valuable historical disciplines, i.e. constitutional history, the history of war and diplomacy, economic history, the history of law, art history, and so on. The old means of comparison and causality now enjoy much greater prestige. Nowadays it is important to compare not only single events and facts but, far more often, the conditions of whole peoples and times, and simultaneously, to establish the causal coherence of far greater dimensions; hence, comparison and causality have to be employed far more frequently and intensively.

[Translated by Mare van den Eeden]

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l o u i s d av i l l é

Comparison and the Comparative Method, Particularly in Historical Studies s o u r c e

Louis Davillé, “La comparaison et la méthode comparative, en particulier dans les études historiques,” Revue de synthèse historique 27, nos. 79–80 (1913): 4–33; no. 81 (1913): 217–57; and 28, nos. 83–84 (1914): 201–29.

Louis Davillé (1871–1933) was a French historian. He wrote mainly on the early modern period, focusing on local history, political history, and historical toponymy. His best-known work is, however, his Leibniz historien from 1909, which was an important contribution to the emerging subfield of the history

of historiography. At roughly the same time, Davillé was also engaged in a series of publications on methodological issues in Henri Berr’s innovative journal, Revue de synthèse historique. The Revue was launched in 1900 and served

as a principal forum for discussions on new methods for writing history and

also as a venue to introduce developments in other European academic cultures to the French audience.

In line with the program of the journal, Davillé’s study presented here was

an attempt to integrate the comparative method into the framework of scientific inquiry rooted in the positivist tradition. In order to go beyond the frag-

mentariness of inductive-descriptive research, he argued for the necessity of a more encompassing and generalizing approach. From this perspective,

comparison is not merely a tool of research, it is a basic operation constitutive

of any scientific work aiming toward a more synthetic result. As for historical science, Davillé argued for a synthetic approach that brings together the German tradition of historicist source criticism with the comparative method. He

located comparative operations in virtually every sphere of historical source criticism, from chronology to paleography. In this context, he also established

a complex taxonomy of comparisons, distinguishing, for instance, between in-

dividual and generic ones. The underlying assumptions of Davillé’s text indicate the emergence of a methodological sensitivity, which was to have a last-

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ing impact on the first generation of the Annales School, emerging in close intellectual dialogue with Berr’s Revue.

· Le pagus scarponensis (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1906); Les prétentions de Charles III, duc de Lorraine, à la couronne de France (Paris: F. Alcan, 1908); Leibniz historien: essai sur l’activité et la méthode historiques de Leibniz (Paris: F. Alcan, 1909); La Jeunesse d’un bourgeois de Bar-le-Duc au milieu du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Impr. nationale, 1929).

main works

W

S

cience, that is the assembly of most irrefutable knowledge, encompasses two stages: first it attempts to describe things, objects, or phenomena; second, it engages in explaining the above through their causes and through their connections. Thus, in its superior form, science is a system of relations.1 By whatever pace one advances in one’s research, however, the results can enter the scientific world safely only if they are verified. This is what gives science its characteristic reliability. As the best method is the one that uncovers the largest number of truths, the method merges with science. Every scientific method has to bear in mind scientific material, the revelation of truths, as well as proving and systematically arranging these truths. The method, therefore, has to be objective as well as analytical, critical, and generalizing. Comparison plays a key role in all these points. Sciences have to be objective at all times, which means approaching such realities that are foreign to the individual mindset that implements them. Their materials have to be not only real but also of a similar nature: the more units of comparison are alike and the more features they share, the better.2 This is why there is no science without a fixed nomenclature; the entire scientific vocabulary is filled with notions that are unambiguous to the world, which come from excellent materials for comparison. Actually, these materials should be as numerous as possible to reduce risks, and, preferably, they need to be grouped together in order to gain more value and provide better results.

1 Johann Adolf Goldfriedrich, Die historische Ideenlehre in Deutschland (Berlin, 1902), vi. 2 Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’ imitation, 4th ed. (Paris, 1903), 112.

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Each method is analytical at first, which means proceeding from the known towards the unknown in order of increasing difficulty, sometimes taking the simple as a starting point, and at other times the complex, following what is provided in advance. In the different branches of science, analysis is such a fundamental process, technicality penetrates it to such an extent, and it is such an important principle to uncover, that we need to study it in a more profound manner, examining it in detail. There are two kinds of analysis: whether the given material is known or unknown and whether the object of research is known or unknown. In case the material is something clear or certain from which one has to proceed towards something new, one faces the question or the problem. If, however, the matter is something obscure or uncertain from which one should arrive at something certain or something thoroughly original, one faces explication or deciphering, meaning two different kinds of clarification. In the former case, one moves more or less directly from the known towards the unknown; in the latter, the process is more complicated. Nevertheless one proceeds from an element of something known, certain, or is supposed to arrive, either directly or through trial and error, at a satisfactory solution. Therefore, in both cases one clarifies the unknown through the known; the only difference is that in the former case the starting point is from the grounds of certainty, whereas in the latter case certainty is rather distant. That is why, in the latter case, the movement of the mind is only seemingly progressing: all analysis is in fact regression, since it reassembles the elements, principles, causes, or characteristics of its subjects; it divides different scientific materials into directly comparable parts. Still, analysis is capable of uniting and not only of dividing its subject. It takes individual comparison as a starting point and completes its course through extensive comparison. This method is used for investigation as well as for clarification. It attempts to reduce the territory of the unknown and, at the same time, filter the complex into the simpler as a result of finding similarity in what seems to be different, and adapting previous results to newly discovered facts. Furthermore, scientific discoveries derive from the connection of two thoughts that appear to be foreign, or rather from the combination of influential thoughts that existed before.3 This kind of ad3 Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’ imitation, 418; Émile Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris, 1902), 298–99; see also H. Poincaré, “Comment on invente: Le travail de l’Inconscient,” Le Matin 25 (December 24, 1908), 1.

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justment is the result of association and comparison more or less caused by chance or reflection. The human mind applies two principles of identification and analysis that are one of the functions of reason; therefore, analysis relies on synthesis. All methods need to be not only fertile but also critical, since the goal of each method is to direct thoughts in one direction where reason is submitted to some kind of control.4 Yet the purpose of comparison is not only finding, but also proving, and repeated comparisons that are conducted in the same or different order become points of control themselves; whether they limit or control themselves reciprocally, and whether they take as their starting point the reality or the ideal, unity or the chosen limitation in each science. The examination of evidence should elevate the mind into being able to neatly distinguish between what is established and what is presumed or unknown. One must apply the first law of Descartes in all its complexity, not simply with regard to clarity but also with regard to haste and to prevention; this means all the personal elements that are likely to bring inaccurate results. The truly positive and realistic mind is nothing but the neglect of itself and the courage of patient efforts.5 Thus, one can accomplish the study by reuniting the materials and eliminating all subjective elements from science. Finally, the method needs to be of a generalizing nature. It needs to continue the work that began with analysis and went down the road towards adaptation and the simplification of phenomena by embracing that the laws of science need to be constituted by as much data as possible. Therefore, it needs to be inspired by other branches of science in its processes as well as in its results; not limited in its territory to one single object, it should ensure the existence of an indefinite expansion by spreading the comparison to all levels. This is how the descriptive scientific facts of the first stage, provided by the individual comparison, may become the material for the laws of science that were constructed by generic comparison. This is how ordinary anatomy relates to comparative anatomy, and similarly grammar to linguistics. This systematization, which constitutes the synthesis, is of an entirely organic nature, surpassing, by far, the fragmented or lifeless findings that 4 Émile Durkheim, in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 18 (January 1910): Supplement, 25–35, here 30. 5 D. Mornet, in Revue universitaire 21 (December 15, 1912): 391.

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were provided by analysis. Thus, it is applied with regard to the objective sources by the mind and is essentially subjective: the personal touch that one sought to suppress necessarily reappears at this point. Therefore, comparison plays a role in each section of the scientific method; this role is most present in the analytic section of the different disciplines. The logical order of the development of sciences as established by Auguste Comte rhymes strikingly with the order in which the effects of the comparison described above grow in their complexity: to mathematics, this is concordance and identity; to physics causality and induction; to biology classification and evolution; to moral sciences, notions of progress or value. Hence it seems that each science, besides the particular conclusions that it draws from comparison, uses earlier, simpler, and more general findings as well; this is what one will encounter most often in history. […] History is the study of humanity’s past. Since it does not deal with the present we live in, it is an indirect and regressive knowledge, which proceeds on the path of reconstruction by solving issues, setting off from familiar matters towards the unknown and the distant. Each problem of history boils down to the study of an inaccessible fact that appears in the form of a problem to study, where one has to measure indirectly the distance between a directly known starting point and one that is separated from it by an insurmountable obstacle. In this case, once more, comparison serves the purpose of discovering and establishing a hypothesis. Since, however, one does not have access to a direct observation of the past, and, consequently, to the experimentation that isolates the essential elements and discloses their characteristics, the verification of the hypothesis cannot be complete. It will be rougher and more provisional as befits the historical phenomena, coarser, more extensive, and easier to establish than those of a physical nature.6 […] Like each science, history also incorporates a sequence of analytic and synthetic operations. First, facts need to be established; second, relations are examined; and third, separate pieces of truth need to be found and reconstructed into a whole. The first of these operations are in the field of erudition, the second ones in art and science. Everywhere, comparison in all its forms plays a role7 in analysis, especially in the shape of individual and 6 Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris, 1898), 157. 7 “Die Vergleichung findet ein besonders weitgehende Anwendung in der Geschichtsforschung. . . . Wir werden der in dieser Weise angewandten Vergleichung überall in der Kritik und Auffassung ­begegnen”;

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extensive comparison, in synthesis in the form of analogy, and of generic comparison. […] As one tackles the questions and periods one’s subject matter proposes, one comes to possess a particular knowledge of historical literature, languages, and branches of science that are auxiliary to history. The first two types of knowledge are closely linked to one’s research, as historical works on a certain subject are not necessarily composed in our language, and it is not only the original language of compositions that we should be familiar with, but also those scientific languages that allow us to study the different aspects of a question. The sciences auxiliary to history, or rather the auxiliary historical sciences8 that make up the preparatory part of the criticism of sources,9 are collected from the processes serving to provide the most efficient usage of documents. Thus, they allow us to operate in a systematic way with regard to extensive comparisons. Moreover, they all proceed from the known towards the unknown, moving from fixed points or well-known landmarks that serve as a point or reference to all other aspects. Comparison leads to more certain results in this case, as most of these branches of science, which rely on solid objects such as the material part of documents, are, to a certain extent, subjected to the conditions of scientific observation. Among these branches of science some are rather general, indispensable to all historical work, like chronology, geography and ethnography, bibliography, philology, and literary history; whereas others are more particular to different types of sources: for instance, archeology with its different branches, numismatics, sigillography, iconography and heraldry for figurative memorabilia, paleontology and epigraphy for ancient documents, and diplomatics and genealogy for the Middle Ages. Among the first group, only chronology and literary history are truly historical, and in the present work we shall tackle only the former of the two; in the latter group we E. Bernheim, Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode (Leipzig, 1908), 189. “The comparative method ... has a role in all levels of historical investigation.” Gabriel Monod, “Histoire,” De la méthode dans les sciences, vol. 1 (Paris, 1909), 1:337. Fustel de Coulanges seems to have guessed this when he writes: “The foundation of all human reasoning is comparison.... When one observes a historical fact, there is always a term of comparison in our minds and even in our unconscious.” “Fragments inédits,” Revue de synthèse historique 2 (1901): 262. However, he never formulated a clear theory about this. 8 Victor Mortet, “Histoire,” in La Grande Encyclopédie, vol. 20 (Paris, 1886–1902), 127. 9 Monod, “Histoire,” 1:328.

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consider only the deciphering branches of science, especially paleography and diplomatics. Chronology relies entirely on the comparison of different elements of history arranged by duration and located in time according to the way they correlate. This localization is obtained through different processes: growing precision, convenience, connection or synchronization, and compatibility. Convenience results in the rapprochement of facts of the same kind or at least of the same geographic region; synchronization in the parallelism of facts of different orders or geographical regions; compatibility in the encounter; and the partial superimposition of related and topographically similar facts. The two former processes are used mostly in relative chronology, the two latter ones in absolute chronology. Relative chronology is, strictly speaking, outside of the domain of history, somehow preceding and preparing the ground for it: it belongs to geology and prehistory at the same time. In geology it is, in fact, taking into account the relative precedence of facts or materials that allow the distinction of the great eras, the subdivision of these into periods, ages, and eras according to whether certain fossils can or cannot be found. The three latter groups are the ones that are taken into account in prehistory: the classification of human antiquities provides the fundamental divisions of the great ages of the quaternary man; no fixed date or certain duration can be given, however, to any of them. Yet since the different metals have appeared in Europe, namely since the Bronze Age, precise dates can be established through synchronization, thanks to the referential points assigned to history by some of the Oriental peoples. Furthermore, since the Iron Age and entering historical time per se, one is guided by and follows written documents: relative chronology is substituted by absolute chronology.10 […] Like relative chronology, absolute chronology relies on the existence of certain eras that are of a precisely determined duration, and no longer undetermined periods of time. They rely on dates that are considered to be starting points, often fixed approximately, but still within which certain political or material events happened: accession dates, the death of a prince, battles or cataclysms that establish a framework of relative continuity; and 10 Joseph Déchelette, Manuel d’archéologie préhistorique celtique et gallo-romaine (Paris, 1908), 1:12, 16; 2:4, 103; Sigismond Zaborowski, “Chronologie,” La Grande Encyclopédie, vol. 11 (Paris, 1886–1902), 11:301b.

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astronomic or meteorological phenomena such as eclipses and comets that serve as fixed points of reference since their dates can often be determined mathematically. Technical chronology, one of the auxiliary sciences of history, analyzes the systems that are used to date various times of different peoples and the methods used to coordinate these given dates according to our way of calculating time. This is a rather dry branch of science using complicated mathematical calculations and is referred to as the mathematical framework of history.11 Nevertheless, it has a markedly historical character; it takes texts as a starting point, examines their critical value and has to respect if they have historical value. Changing any of the data is only permitted if one can prove that there is an error in it. The scholar establishes a date as an ordinary man pins down a memory. When we want to find or fix an uncertain date we depart from a date that we are certain of and mount or descend towards the date in question. We place it between two other known dates that serve as milestones; in other words, to locate an event in time, we connect them to other events that have already been dated. Sometimes it is enough to simply connect two documents of the same nature, one with a fixed date, to establish the date of the other one. It is more common, however, that one needs to connect two documents of different orders; the compatibility of the given elements provides a firm date. The combination of documents or diverse pieces of information also allows one to acquire the dates on the extremities between which the event is placed without establishing its exact date. The discovery of new fixed points, nevertheless, allows one to narrow the date between its older neighbors. Thus, convenience permits chronology to be based on a more complicated and less precise method than compatibility: when certain events enter a sequence easily and they get harmonized with one another to form a whole, one might establish the dates in relation to other events, the dates of which are certain. These two principles of compatibility and convenience, which are separated in most cases, may reunite and strengthen one another. On the one hand, the former is easier to apply and is more certain in its results; compatibility tables between different calendars have been drawn up that permit the discernment of any date and a date from another era. On the other hand, the discovery of convenience 11 Zaborowski, “Chronologie,” 301b and 303a.

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has to result in a meticulous study of events and the conditions in which they appear. This localization in time is similar to the way topography works; by aiming at situating a position in space; it departs from certain fixed points, cardinal points and imagined landmarks, to serve as a base for longitude and latitude. The precise localization happens by coordinating a meridian and a parallel. In case this compatibility of given values fails to work, one needs to use the tool of convenience. One inserts certain points, the exact location of which is unimportant, between two meridians and two parallels, upon which one obtains a relative and approximate topography that becomes more and more absolute and exact thanks to successive adjustments. Analogous procedures are used by the deciphering branches of science that set off from a firm basis towards the unknown. The discovery of this basis is easier if one is familiar with the language, if only the characters are unknown, and if one believes that these characters correspond to an ordinary alphabet, which means the letters are neither syllabic nor ideographic. The surest process to achieve this is to take a document of certain length, to draw up a table of the predominant characters and to compare the most frequently used letters of the language in relation to the table. This incomplete alphabet can establish the letters by which they are verified by starting with the shortest, most frequently repeated words; this is completed by a hypothesis following the convenience of characters,12 and success is guaranteed if the entire translation completely agrees with the text, and it has no underlying contradictions. This is how mathematicians manage to easily decipher enigmas. […] Paleography is followed naturally by the auxiliary sciences that make use of it: epigraphy for Antiquity and diplomatics for the Middle Ages. Moreover, the methods used by epigraphy resemble those of paleography: it also restores acronyms by comparing them to similar inscriptions containing intact words, or alternatively, by studying the rules the inscription’s engraver followed in his or her usage of abbreviations. Epigraphy dates inscriptions based on well-known facts, proper names, the forms of the letters used, the orthography of the words, the nature of patterns or abbreviations, and even

12 See E. A. Poe, The Gold-Bug and Other Tales and Poems (New York, 1930).

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certain external signs the text shows13 of the theory of restitution based on complete words. […] Diplomatics complements medieval paleography, for, if paleography studies the body of charters, diplomatics studies their soul.14 Comparison has played and is still playing a key role in the establishment of this branch of science. It was the individual and extensive comparison of a false charter of Dagobert the First and the authentic charters of the Saint-Maximin Abbey of Trier that allowed D. Paperbroch to formulate the first rules of diplomatics that are, admittedly, somewhat too skeptical. It was the generic comparison of original charters from the abbeys of Saint-Denis and Saint-Germain-des-Prés and other Benedictine abbeys in Champagne and Lotharingia, documents of similar origin, that made it possible for Dom Mabillon to indisputably clarify the principles and to transform diplomatics into a real branch of science.15 Even today the comparisons of scripts and the determination of scribes are the very foundation on which the critical diplomatic method, advocated by Sickel, rests. This method not only considers the contents, but also the material layout of the document, taking into account the difference between the characters as well as the types of ink. One manages, thus, not only to distinguish a false charter from an authentic one, but also to determine if the document in question is the original or a copy, and in some cases may even establish the hand that wrote it.16 Similarly, it is by comparing styles that one might distinguish the different authors of charters and to group them into schools, which allows an obscure document to be rendered more intelligible by another document written by the same author.17 As soon as one has assembled all the documents and has taken all the precautions to harvest the best parts, the critical operations begin. Criti13 R. Cagnat, “Épigraphie,” Grande Encyclopédie, vol. 16 (Paris, 1886–1902), 65. 14 Léon Gautier, cited in M. Prou, Manuel de paléographie latine et française, du VIe au XVIIe siècle, suivi d’un Dictionnaire des abréviations (Paris, 1890), 3. 15 A. Giry, Manuel de diplomatique (Paris, 1894), 61; A. Giry, “Études de critique historique: Histoire de la diplomatique,” Revue historique 48 (1892): 225–56, here 243. 16 M. Prou, review of E. Mühlbacher, “Die Urkunden der Karolinger,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 70 (September–December 1909), 523–27. 17 E. E. Stengel, Die Immunität in Deutschland …, vol. 1: Diplomatik des deutschen Immunitäts-Privilegien von 9. bis zum Ende des 11. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck, 1910).

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cism is, in the more general sense, a control, a confrontation of thoughts with themselves and with reality,18 meaning the suppression of all internal or external contradiction,19 which relies, once more, on comparison.20 This is a sequence of reasoning based on analogy and the association of ideas, which, together with the analogies that result from these comparisons, constitute the spirit of criticism.21 Whatever the form or the material of this comparison may be, it is the same to history as experimentation is to the natural sciences: the method of preparing or clarifying the truth. This is why the ancients, who were not familiar with verification methods, did not practice historical criticism nor experimental sciences, and why modern scholars got a glimpse of both at the same time.22 This is also the reason why the history of more distant periods, such as Antiquity or the Middle Ages, where the language and the nature of the sources are different from that of contemporary history, is most likely to form a critical spirit: it enriches our comparative experiences and allows us to apply them even better to the facts closer to us. The sources somehow represent extreme cases that are more characteristic yet simpler and less numerous, as documents from these periods are far less numerous than modern ones. The method started to develop along these lines, since this aspect was indispensable, and it was applied to following periods only considerably later.23 Since comparison is the basis of historical analysis, without performing it, for lack of time or information, one can never be certain of having revealed the truth. One must, therefore, suspend one’s judgment, to 18 A. Croiset, Revue internationale de l’enseignement (Paris, 1909), 397. 19 F. Paulhan, “La Logique de la Contradiction,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 69 (March 1910): 275–303, here 287–88. 20 This is what A. Molinier argued in “France,” Revue internationale de l’Enseignement 53 (May 15, 1893), partly reproduced in Les sources de l’ histoire de France: Des origines aux guerres d’Italie (1494), vol. 5 (New York, 1904), introduction, 155, section 223 beginning, and 158, section 226 end, which calls it the comparative method. 21 Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris, 1898), 276 and note 40. 22 At the beginning of the seventeenth century Galileo founded physics. During the course of the century, historical criticism launched itself with the Bollandists, the Benedictines, and especially Leibniz who had a perfect insight into the role of comparison. See L. Davillé, Leibniz historien: Essai sur l’activité et la méthode historiques de Leibniz (Paris, 1909), 480, note 4, and who wrote, in connection with the critical art he dreamt of: “The best method that exists concerns making as many comparisons as one can and clues as exact, as specific, and as diverse as possible.” Letter to Nicaise, 169; quoted by L. Couturat, La Logique de Leibniz (Paris, 1903), 161. 23 See Revue de synthèse historique, ed. Henri Berr (February 1905), 111.

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doubt,24 which appears to result in a kind of normative comparison of what is with whatever should be. Likewise, the starting point of historical criticism is critical or methodical doubt. It is a provisional doubt subject to comparative examination, a relative doubt that serves as a means to reach the truth; it opposes skeptical doubt, which is an aim in itself, and therefore it is definitive and absolute. To dispel this primitive doubt and replace it with an assertion, historical criticism is to operate through multiple comparisons, comparing either the documents themselves, which can control, confirm, complete, or correct one another reciprocally, or comparing the documents with their modern historical interpretations to accept or to reject them. […] There are two great groups of historical facts: single facts or events that are produced only once and are studied through the circumstances of their creation in a given time and place, and facts of a general nature or institutions; in this case, not only the particular creation but the general significance of a fact is considered. From a strictly historical point of origin and production, the latter as well as the former ones are subjected to individual comparison, whereas from a general perspective, the latter are opposed to generic comparison. The institutions are the object of particular branches of science, while events are proper historical facts. Documents, however, mention both, and comparison is used to establish each; sometimes it reaches its aim in a material fashion, by a veritable use of the method of differences. […] Usually the criticism of documents provides isolated confirmation of these different documents that are connected to clarify the facts. This comparison might well work in different ways, bringing different results. Sometimes the mere connection of several documents of the same kind is enough to establish the fact. Often, however, one must bear in mind documents of different nature and origin, encompassing many independent statements. Thus, documents of different orders and ranges control, limit, and clarify one another, like texts and inscriptions or antique coins, chronicles, and charters in the Middle Ages, histories and archived documents in the modern era, and newspapers, memoirs, and official papers in contem24 Doubt being in itself the suspension of judgment by the non-perception of the truth, after Georges Dwelshauvers, “La Philosophie de Jules Lagneau,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale (November 1909): 759–807, here 796.

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porary times. If it concerns broad or general facts, the operation is more complicated and requires the study of a sequence of successive documents of similar natures, clearly evolving in a certain direction; to study institutions, one often needs to connect documents from markedly different times and places, that is to say to proceed not only towards an extensive comparison but almost to generic comparison. The results of these operations may be negative if there is a contradiction between the documents or doubtful, if they are insufficient. Consulting all existing documents to become as certain as possible is a fine strategy; it is, however, practically impossible, especially when approaching contemporary times. To remedy this, one should consult documents of diverse origins, of different complementary natures, and ones in which subjective or inexact utterances neutralize one another. It is also beneficial to confront one’s own results with previous findings and those found after their own research. In this as in everything, compatibility between independent directions is the best way to reveal the truth. The great principle of history can be applied here to the example of other branches of science: scientific facts are those in which different observations converge, since the most probable reason is that observers saw the same reality and they all described it accurately. Thus, one compares statements to see if they are compatible and if their compatibility comes from independent observations as much as possible, that is to say from documents of different genres and by different authors, all of which have been subjected to criticism. We cannot always attain this compatibility, however, and must sometimes be contented with convenience: certain facts fit with what we know otherwise to be true from facts or general knowledge of an era; they agree with one another and confirm each other with other facts. Convenience provides only probability; together with compatibility, however, the former fortifies the latter and succeeds in establishing facts better and foreseeing their connections. A key part of establishing facts is identification, which entails the establishment of a certain individual fact or the peculiarity of this fact; it also usually works by the rapprochement of documents of similar or of different natures if their given conditions coincide. This is how to achieve the identification of the names of individuals, peoples, and places. These, then, are used to individualize and to localize the events and, when added 51

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to chronology, provide its skeleton. In some cases, hasty comparisons that result in superficial analogies or unexpected coincidences contribute to the confusion of two different peoples. Profound comparison, relying on meticulous analysis, can expose inaccuracy and succeeds in separating matters that were mistakenly associated and superimposed; the same operation may succeed, though, in reuniting in one person two personages separated until now. […] Part Two: Comparison in History

These analytical operations are indispensable for the preparation of history; they, however, do not form it. History is a work of synthesis that seeks connections between clarified facts and aims for the reconstruction of units of analysis. The achievement of synthesis—the attempt to construct a whole from isolated pieces of knowledge—is a problem not only for the sciences but also art, since it selects from these elements in order to create an organic unity. Certainly, it draws these elements from outside of our mind; still, in order to assemble this work, it needs to appeal to the human mind: science is the common work of things and the mind… The mind plays a truly active and creative role in the formation of science, and what is true in connection with science in general is even more so in case of the moral sciences and especially history, which are sciences of the human being and therefore, humanities.25 Similarly, it is the human mind from which art borrows its life, which allows the resuscitation of the past.26 Therefore, whereas the problem of analysis revolved around eliminating all subjective elements that might appear or slip into historical consciousness, the problem of synthesis appears to be the introduction of a human element. After having separated historical facts from the personality of the observer, one seeks to provide them with a human character. This means that this subjective element, without which these facts would be lacking 25 E. Boutroux, “Observations sur la communication de M. Xénopol,” Séances et travaux de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques (January 6, 1912), 327. See also the observations of Bergson in his speech held on occasion of the centenary of Claude Bernard on December 31, 1913. 26 See E. Boutroux, Introduction, quoted in Édouard Zeller, La Philosophie des Grecs considérée dans son développement historique (Paris, 1882), 1:50.

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life, does not have to be a personal element without which one could achieve nothing but a work of art lacking reality; it also has to be impersonal, as objective as possible. In one word it needs to be general everywhere, always emitting the same meaning no matter who the historian is who places it in a work or whatever history to which he applies it. As in all moral sciences, this element comes from a general psychology that is based on the premise of the fundamental identity of the human mind through time and space, that is to say, on the belief in the consistency of nature’s laws transferred from the field of material to the field of the spirit.27 This belief, which is itself the basis of history and of all sciences, penetrates historical operations in the shape of an analogy between past and present. It is with the help of analogy in an analysis that one can extract facts from the documents; it is also with its help that through synthesis, one can reconstruct the whole by imagination, performing an analogy with what we know directly from the present with whatever we foresee otherwise in documents. This principle of analogy can be formulated this way in a general fashion: the human factors usually pass through analogous circumstances, always in the same way. Consequently, other people resemble us in the past as in the present: men always remain fundamentally the same in time and in space, having the same interests and passions, the same profound inclinations, the same levels of maturity, and we may observe what the practices in politics and history are on a small scale in everyday life as these are the most faithfully reported to us. A romantic inclination leads us to believe that people in the past had ideas distant from our own, and that the morality of other times differed fundamentally from our own today.28 This is an absolutely antiscientific opinion entirely without basis; it reminds one of the belief in global cataclysms, inasmuch as the premise of the identity of human nature resembles the belief in the persistence of currently valid and eminently determinist causes that alone can be constitutive of science through the ages.

27 Talk by Xenopol at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Le postulat psychologique (January 6, 1912), especially 320 and 325. 28 C. Enlart, Manuel d’archéologie française depuis les temps mérovingiens jusqu’ à la renaissance (Paris, 1904), 2:10.

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The role of analogy between present and past has always been perceived by historians.29 Nowadays it is claimed by theorists of history,30 one of whom recently pronounced this brilliantly, in the most general fashion, as follows: “The image of the past that we create for ourselves is shaped by analogy with the present; either we are struck by similarities that connect the two, or we notice such differentiating factors that separate or oppose past and present.”31 Consequently, it is indisputable that the feeling of difference, of diversity, encompasses what is conventionally called historical sense.32 It is no less true that the genuine historical mind, in all its glory, encompasses the sense of resemblance and identity; differences and diversities are nothing but types and varieties. The great historian, as the wise genius, seizes the distant analogies in different shapes and clarifies the identity and the continuity of the human mind in diverse guises, just as the physician groups the most diverse phenomena in the world and in matter into distinct units. History, thus, uses psychological analogy, that is human consciousness, as its basis.33 However, as we have seen, this consciousness is a principle and end in itself. Analogy is the subconscious basis of the reasoning we use in our everyday life and that which we transpose into history, something that, nevertheless, we have to be wary of when it affects our own personality without us being able to control its exactitude, as if we all naively tried to model each individual on ourselves.34 The first duty of a historian is therefore to suppose that all men are reasonable, to try to get to know himself to achieve the study of others, since the incapacity

29 For an example from the Antiquity, see Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, vol. 1 (London, 1910), sections 5–6; from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, L. Davillé, Leibniz historien, 604–5, and Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Paris, 1734), chap. 1, section 2; for the nineteenth century from Chateaubriand to Fustel de Coulanges, see the sections in Revue universitaire (June 15, 1912): 78–79. 30 Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der Historischen Methode, 5th and 6th ed. (Leipzig, 1908), 189–94. 31 Concerning its role and its usage, see Monod, “Histoire,” 1:336–37. 32 Historical sense is the sense of differences, see G. Lanson, Histoire littéraire: Méthode des Sciences (Paris, 1919), 2:228. 33 Christoph von Sigwart, Logik (Tübingen, 1889), 2:613–14. 34 It is true that often we believe others to be similar to what we really are, whereas we believe ourselves to be better than we really are; this is the natural, egoistical way of thinking. It is therefore not based on one’s own opinion on oneself but that of others that one might get to know oneself. One might call this kind of assimilation of our own ego to others projection.

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to judge others is inevitable if one is incapable of judging oneself, because one does not know oneself.35 Learn to know yourself and descend into yourself, one must repeat after the poet.36 One gets to know oneself and to judge oneself little by little, trying to learn and understand those similar to one and by comparing oneself to them. One gets to know oneself better the broader and more often repeated these comparisons are. This is precisely the general usage of history,37 that one may get to know oneself and become wiser at the cost of those who have already died.38 Analogy is, in fact, the only principle that can reunite the past and the present to explain the former; by connecting them, comparison is ceaselessly clarifying these two moments of time by way of each other. As the present is directly accessible through daily observation and it can be verified instantly, with regard to history it forms the necessary basis found on the threshold of all science. It is the starting point that allows the understanding of past in general and, sometimes, when it comes to an absolutely analogous fact, to surely comprehend the way it might have happened, in other words, to verify it directly. This perpetual connection between past and present seems necessary, especially for more distant periods of time when the particular differences as well as the general resemblances between the facts of long ago and today seem to expand to their greatest extent.39 Moreover, the necessity of this comparison is recognized by the great historians whose field of research is Antiquity;40 this is where the practical usage of ancient history is seen,41 since not only does it allow us to know ourselves better, but also uses the 35 E. Lavisse, Revue internationale de l’enseignement 36 (November 15, 1898): 450. 36 Pierre Corneille, Cinna ou La clémence d’Auguste (Paris, 1643), act V, scene 1. 37 Monod, “Histoire,” 1:351. 38 Rousseau, Émile: ou, De l’éducation, vol. 4 (Paris, 1913); already Leibniz said that, thanks to history, nothing is more convenient than to learn at the expense of others; see L. Davillé, Leibniz historien, (Paris, 1909), 367, note 1. 39 According to André Bouché-Leclerq, L’ intolérance religieuse et la politique (Paris, 1911), 84, we resemble the Greeks and Romans far more than our ancestors in the Middle Ages. 40 T. Mommsen, Histoire romaine (Paris, 1863); and E. Renan, Histoire des origines du christianisme (Paris, 1879); quoted by G. Boissier, Revue des questions historiques 40 (Oct. 1908): 569; see also R. Pichon, “La vie et l’œuvre de M. Gaston,” Revue des Deux Mondes (July 15, 1908): 208–9. 41 P. Guiraud, Études économiques sur l’antiquité (Paris, 1905), 292; A. Bouché-Leclercq, L’ intolérance religieuse, xii.

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experiences of our ancestors to our own benefit.42 In any case, its usage is so well-known that it has been employed by historians who occupy themselves with more modern periods: Augustin Thierry already remarked that the revolution of 1789 allowed a better understanding of the political revolutions of the Middle Ages, and the revolution of 1830 shed light on the whole history of France.43 It has recently been stated that the current workers’ movements gives us insight into the true character of the economic and social struggles of the Middle Ages,44 and if an understanding of the French Revolution made such progress in the last century, it is mainly because it never stopped producing new consequences that help us understand the nature of these causes.45 This way the present somewhat broadens and underlines the importance of the past. Whereas the study of the past gives us broader insight into the nature of the present46 and, if we wish, allows us to direct ourselves towards the seemingly most advantageous direction: the examples with the clearest conclusions in contemporary studies of the Athenian or Roman republics, of imperial or Muslim Africa or of the rural life of old France illustrate this. The well-known past clarifies the present and prepares one for the future.47 History therefore becomes the connection between three moments in time. […] Meanwhile, no matter how significant for history in general, this sentiment of identity and the principle of analogy dominate rather than penetrate it, except for the science of history, that is synthesis par excellence. History as it is usually regarded, composed of particular facts, is attracted to differences between eras and individuals rather than to their resemblances. 42 Alfred Croiset, Les Démocraties antiques (Paris, 1909); A. Bouché-Leclercq, Leçons d’ histoire romaine: République et Empire (Paris, 1909), introduction and 85. 43 Augustin Thierry, Lettres sur l’ histoire de France pour server d’ introduction á l’étude de cette histoire (Paris, 1827). 44 See G. Renard, in Revue pédagogique (March 15, 1908): 270–71. 45 F. Brunetière, Évolution de la poésie lyrique en France au dix-neuvième siècle (Paris, 1905), 1:20–21. 46 On the subject of the role of geography and history, see H. Hauser’s review of J. Sion, “Les paysans de la Normandie orientale,” Revue historique (Nov–Dec. 1909): 401–406, here 404. 47 These are the words of G. Boissier, see J. Toutain, “Antiquités Romains,” Revue historique (Nov.–Dec. 1909): 352–63, here 363: “It belongs to archeologists, educating us on the past, preparing to the future.”; see G. Glotz, “L’histoire ancienne doit devenir, pour les investigations sociales, un terrain de prédilection,” Revue de synthèse historique 11 (1905): 124; on the application of these very ideas to contemporary history, see the letter of E. Lavisse to students from Alsace-Lorraine in Revue internationale de l’enseignement (January 15, 1912): 83–84.

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Consequently, historical sense is first and foremost the sense of difference and the sense of relativity. Historical knowledge is essentially relative, as the concept of history is narrowly connected to the era we live in,48 so that our knowledge of facts depends on the sources that remain; that historical effort, the work of specialization claiming a division of labor, depends on the capacity of each scholar. That means that each part of history is doubly subjected to chance, since the historical importance of a past event depends greatly on other ones with which it is associated.49 This is why achieving likelihood in history is more frequent than achieving the truth: furthermore, historical knowledge is sensitive to progress. This progress may proceed from the whole towards the details and from the details towards the whole, moving from uncertainty to likelihood and to certainty, from superficial uniformity to profound differentiation.50 From the fact that history is an indirect knowledge not based on immediate observation, it does not follow that it can never arrive at experimentation: its results are susceptible to indirect or direct verification. In the first case, through extensive comparison one seeks to know if the discovered facts are compatible with one another and with those that are known from other sources, for example with results obtained by other historians. However, one does not achieve facts from these, but rather a kind of internal compatibility resulting mainly from the lack of contradiction between them and from external compatibility, since this originates from current historians rather than ancient documents. In the second case, one has more decisive evidence: it consists of compatibility obtained through extensive comparison, with the possibility of even extending generic comparison to one that operates either in time between present and past, visualizing different eras, or in space between different societies; this is the equivalent of experimentation. What is more, when one is able to obtain sudden verification, discovering, for instance, documents that completely confirm their

48 “M. E. Millard et sa ‘loi historique,’” Revue de synthèse historique (June 1906): 337; and the article by R. Doucet, “Les oeuvres historiques sont-elles susceptible de vieillir?” Revue de synthèse historique (December 1912). 49 Mortet, “Histoire,” 133a. 50 On the characteristics of progress in history see G. Monod, “Histoire,” 1:361–62; also see A. AlbertPetit, “Deux conceptions de l’histoire de la revolution,” Revue des Deux Mondes (September 1, 1910): 77–98, here 96–97.

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hypotheses, compatibility makes room for a coincidence that leaves no place for doubt.51 Such are the principles dominating historical synthesis. This synthesis or construction is created by certain operations that complete the analysis and can be found already in the criticism of facts. These operations, which are somewhat intermediaries between the fields of analysis and synthesis, are reasoning, posing questions, hypothesis, and causal research; these all, more or less, belong to comparison. […] In order to reach synthesis, the historian still uses the same means he did throughout the analysis. It was believed he could proceed, firstly, towards an absolutely different process, intuition, a spontaneous act, nearly unreflected upon in the mind, that suddenly foresees or thinks it foresees things observed for a long while, which is shaken and still resistant to classification.52 This is partly true if it concerns a temporary and hypothetical synthesis and not a complete and scientific one, since intuition is the premonition needed by divination not by the actual knowledge of the truth; it is a useful starting point, not a sufficient goal. This mysterious-looking intuition is perhaps only the basis of an implied comparison, a subconscious connection of the parts with the whole and their reciprocated organization. At least comparison has the advantage of being a more conscious process and, consequently, more methodical and perhaps more fertile. Synthetic operations offer, in effect, every form of comparison that we have clarified: individual and embryologic, extensive and generic—even normative—comparison, based on the questions that are dealt with and the operations they are submitted to. The main concerns of synthetic operations are: the classification and regrouping of facts, the creation of collections, the disposition, display, and establishment of these results and conclusions. The role of comparison is as considerable as in the case of analytic operations. Because this role is more abstract, however, it is more difficult to seize and, consequently, appears less 51 “When a historian established a position using certain documents, if the documents that remain unknown to him lead to the same conclusions, the conclusion becomes more probable, since it was found to fit the reality by chance, something that could not have been foreseen by the historian.” Revue de synthèse historique 10 (February 1905): 109; see also C. Seignobos, “Conditions psychologiques de la connaissance en histoire,” Revue philosophique 24 (August 1887): 168–79, here 178. 52 Intuition in history, as in the physical sciences, allows coordination and subordination of one fact to another, to seize the harmony in everything at a given time; see A. Fontaine, “Chronique: Le besoin religieux,” La Revue du mois 11 (January 19, 1911): 102.

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clearly. From the point of view of the evidence and clarity of the comparison, between analysis and synthesis in general there is, roughly, the same difference as between the criticism of documents and the criticism of facts. The classification of facts, encompassing the rapprochement of facts of the same kind, works through comparison, as all classifications do. However, it is sometimes difficult to establish because of the complex nature of certain facts. That is why the best and surest way to achieve a complex classification is to adopt the framework in advance, creating a general questionnaire that is filled in little by little; one operates, therefore, a kind of normative comparison. This classification of facts based on their characteristics may achieve the creation of particular branches of science that we can explore further, when the discussion is about the comparative method. Because they are the same genre, these facts are naturally subjected to the same processes. The regrouping of facts naturally depends on these facts as they depart from nature, on the state of the known documents, and on the goal one sets; in other words, the general disposition of a subject is subordinated to the subject itself. This regrouping can operate following chronological, geographical, or logical order. The most usual order of this regrouping is monographic, since it is issued directly from the criticism of facts. It can be combined with the logical, chronological, or geographical orders. To complete a monograph and come up with as broad results as possible, one needs to use a comparison of the era or the country with neighboring times and places; this is what one must do notably in local history, where all work, as special as it may be, has to be connected to general history,53 as general and local history explain and complement each other reciprocally.54 General history is indispensable to anyone who wishes to undertake the task of writing a local monograph. It is, however, constructed by the reunion of elements that are nourished by specific histories. General history and local, provincial, or regional history react to each other, lend one another support, and progress toward one another. These different elements need to be well proportioned, meaning that neither 53 M. Dumoulin, “Choses à faire,” Revue de synthèse historique 3 (December 1901): 296–307, here 307. 54 Well-understood provincial history should serve as controlling and proof-providing factor in general history to lend it its sense of clarity, its milestones without which general history drifts and fumbles. In return, general history provides provincial history proven and categorical pieces of information, reviewing its impressions, and in some cases, reforming its judgments. L. Vitet, Journal des Savants (1855): 753; see also E. Bouchet, “Le réveil des études historiques en province, région du Nord,” Revue des études historiques (November–December 1913): 659–92, especially 661.

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one of them should be more developed than the other or at the expense of the other. For instance, in a biography, general history should not suffocate the history of particulars, and the protagonist needs to be situated in his own context without exaggerating his own merits. Similarly, certain subjects on which there are few sources require analogous documents of the same date and same origin to be treated together; this is how individual comparison is complemented by external comparison and goes as far as generic comparison. […] All historical works need to incorporate a conclusion in order to be complete in both its sections and as a whole. It is advisable to close each chapter with a particular conclusion that summarizes it and serves as a starting point for the following chapter. It is necessary to provide the work with a general conclusion that represents its key ideas, giving them a new perspective and, if necessary, it brings up the main periods in a more orderly fashion than in the body of the text, allowing for the measurement of the results attained. These conclusions outline the ideas more clearly when they can be translated in a representative fashion through maps, diagrams, or graphics, for instance. Through the conclusion, one might also provide a study with a general outlook by connecting more extensive questions and by drawing some sort of philosophy from history. If the historical work consists of a synthesis, the conclusion, resulting from science and art at the same time, is synthesis par excellence, crowning the work with dignity and in some cases marking it with an original imprint.55 The conclusion of all historical works needs to clearly organize the results. These results are always the expressions of notions of evolution and relation: that is to say, they originate from comparison. As all events of humanity are subjected to the great law of changing, it seldom happens that a historical study does not engage with a certain evolution, being more or less marked by a sense of progress whether the period in question is further or closer to us 55 For instance, in the E. Lavisse, Histoire de France: course élémentaire (Paris, 1913), the conclusion is paramount. It is history thought-through, distilled into a synthesis that only great historians can allow themselves, which is also their distinctive feature. It is the single day of synthesis, described by Fustel, that counts, giving both the flower and the fruit; A. Albert-Petit, “Une histoire de France—L’histoire de la France depuis les origins jusqu’à la Révolution, de M. Ernest Lavisse,” Revue des Deux Mondes 2 (April 15, 1911): 866–79, here 871; one finds among these thirty, dense and, at the same time, luminous pages, the rare qualities of the historian and the writer: the greatness of the scope, the penetration, the gift of life, united with the ability of analysis and psychological refinement; H. Hauser, “Histoire de France: Époque moderne,” Revue historique (May–August 1911): 377–88, here 386.

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in time. Beyond superficial changes, this evolution often shows a rather welldefined underlying continuity. But one should exaggerate neither the revolutionary agitation, that is the sudden differences, nor the continuity, that is the persistent resemblance, as some great contemporary historians did: Fustel de Coulanges for Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Tocqueville, Taine, and Albert Sorel for the ancien régime and the French Revolution externally and internally. These excesses were committed by powerful and systematic minds that submitted facts to the logic of their mind either by rendering secondary facts significant or by distorting the meaning of key facts. Their attempts at generalization, which relied on too broad periods or ones too crowded with events, have become outdated, whereas more limited and more thoroughly explored studies have shown genuine continuity in the persistence of the imperial thought of the Middle Ages,56 between the Carolingian and Capetian kingdoms,57 and between revolutionary and imperial politics,58 if we limit ourselves to political history, where this continuity is perhaps the least apparent. We shall see that it emerges much better in different branches of the history of civilization when they are subjected to the comparative method. After having envisaged a question in its evolution, a historical work should make us aware of the connection between this question and the whole of history: this is the only way to distinguish this question completely and to understand its exact meaning.59 Facts need to be connected to the past as well as to the future and need to place the authors in the middle,60 that is to say, to proceed incessantly by comparison. This is exactly why an isolated fact does not get its true meaning until it is connected with other facts of the same genre and why only holistic studies resulting from a generic comparison are truly enduring.61 A. Kleinclausz, L’Empire carolingien: ses origins et ses transformations (Paris, 1902). A. Luchaire, Histoire des institutions monarchiques de la France, 987–1180 (Paris, 1891). R. Guyot, Le Directoire et la paix de l’Europe (Paris, 1911). “Everything is linked by nature. All things isolated from others are therefore imperfect and inexact in their composition. To see clearly, everything must be seen through its connection with the whole.” E. Boutroux, Science et culture (Paris, 1914). 60 “To study an era is to determine where it evolved from and what it will turn into in the following years. To study a man is to try to establish how he sustained the influence of the milieu and the tension of the surrounding events, and how, from his side, he acted on them in order to modify them.” L. Gallouédec, Revue universitaire (Dec. 15, 1913): 381. 61 Even without revealing any new details, a holistic study of the remains of a habitation in the same region may have its reason for existence and its use. The plans of a villa, the details of its construction, the 56 57 58 59

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The significance of facts is what might be called, in the simplest sense of the word, the value of facts, that is to say, their importance in the chain of effects and causes. This importance is measured by the degree of their influence on evolution, in other terms, by their direct or indirect, immediate or distant consequences, not by their offered interests, nor by the mode by which they touch us.62 To say it a different way, the value of facts is measured by their effect on reality, not by the repercussions they have for our sensitivity. It is this importance or this relativity of facts, clarified by a constant comparison that is itself the guiding principle of the choice of essential facts and their subordination to secondary facts. It is thus clear that, if a subjective element actually enters into this relativity, one can considerably reduce this element through a profound analysis and an embryologic comparison, not by limiting knowledge to the restricted period one wishes to study, but marching forward and reaching backwards, constantly connecting one’s own results to those of other historians. Judgments of value are issued from these operations, which may rely on facts, people, or their work. Isolated and especially regrouped facts are judged by revealing their meaning, their role, and their place through an internal and external comparison, in other terms, by clarifying their value. People are judged either by replacing them in their milieu and by comparing them to their contemporaries or by connecting them to other people who are similar to them in some way. Even works are judged by bringing their relation to other works of the same genre to the surface, their value and their originality is determined by establishing what qualities they have that are not shared by other works. […] In a cold and complete fashion, not only with regard to success but also to immanent morality, one must persevere in determining one’s judgment thoroughly, impartially, and fully aware of the cause, controlling, and, if patterns of its decoration, even the ones described most thoroughly by the most conscientious monographs, acquire their true significance only by comparison to the examples of other villas of the same kind. It is impossible to explain the different characteristics of constructional techniques, to see the purpose of the different parts of buildings without eternally referring to similar ruins discovered previously… Mostly, however, a holistic study of different villas of the same block may help in clarifying the particular characteristics of each villa, as well as the details that give it its own physiognomy, the general idea behind the construction of habitations, and the different modifications to which they were subjected. A. Grenier, Habitations gauloises et villas latines dans la cité des Médomatrices (Paris, 1906), 9–10. 62 La Révolution française: Revue d’ histoire moderne et contemporaine, ed. A. Aulard (Paris, 1899), 478; J. Toutain, in Revue pédagogique (May 15, 1906): 412.

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needed, rectifying one’s results by those of other historians or by conclusions drawn from experience. In case an era is the matter in question, one needs to take into account not only the ruling milieu but also current ideas. In case it is a person, he must neither be belittled nor magnified at will, nor considered as created from whole cloth. Furthermore, one should be able to make a distinction between his individual value and the historical consequences of his actions,63 all the more so as these actions are often better known in history than their authors. In case the question concerns works, one must persevere in approaching them with sympathy and in judging them according to the standards of their own time rather than ours. In this way, a decisive, or perhaps a definitive judgment can be made, whatever the question may be, and that is the judgment of history. This, apparently, is the role of comparison in history; we do not believe we are exaggerating. We know nothing in itself, absolutely and completely, and this is the case with history, where it is impossible to know anything on the basis of the individual. Whether it concerns a person or a fact, we can extend our knowledge only through successive approaches, by never exhausting it: history is to reality what an asymptote is to a curve. Thus, in this entirely relative approach, comparison could be the great instrument of approximation. We have seen, however, that this role of comparison is more clearly apparent in analytical operations than in synthetic ones. One might, we believe, return to the basis of the problem and bear in mind that, in each case where comparison appears to be evident and easily realizable, historical operations are simple and easy, whereas the moment comparison becomes indirect and difficult, these operations become complicated too, and their results are doubtful. This connection can be found between the varieties of comparison and the more and more obscure, complicated and difficult historical operations also with regard to the relationship of the comparative method and historical studies, which is our forthcoming task to examine.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

63 See Toutain’s discussion of Varus in his “Antiquités romaines,” Revue historique 112 (January–April 1913).

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On the Comparative Method in History s o u r c e

Henri Pirenne, “De la méthode comparative en histoire,” in Compte rendu du Ve Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Bruxelles, 1923, ed. Guillaume Des Marez and François-Louis Ganshoff (Bruxelles: Weissenbruch, 1923), 19–32.

Henri Pirenne (1862–1935) was a Belgian historian. He studied at the Universi-

ty of Liège and from 1886 taught at the University of Ghent until his retirement in 1930. He was a student of the medievalist Godefroid Kurth, and was also in-

fluenced by the German historiographical developments of the last decades of the nineteenth century, particularly by the works of the economic historian

Gustav von Schmoller and the cultural and socioeconomic historian Karl Lamprecht, whom he also befriended. During the occupation of Belgium by the

German troops in World War I, Pirenne was involved in the resistance and was

subsequently interned in Germany. It was in Jena where he started to write his History of Europe, which proved to be a pioneering work of modern historiography, albeit published posthumously by his son. In this book, Pirenne aban-

doned the nation-centered political history dominating the scene at the turn of the century. His innovative ideas on the shift from late antiquity to the Middle Ages (which he linked to the Arab invasion), as well as the rise of the mer-

chant class in the eleventh century posing a challenge to the feudal order, were widely debated already in the 1910–20s, and have remained important points

of reference for European historiography ever since. Pirenne’s interest in exploring the underlying socioeconomic causes of transformation proved also an important source of inspiration for the emerging Annales School.

After the Great War, Pirenne became an exponent of a moral engage-

ment among European historians eager to overcome national exclusivism and

work towards a common understanding of the past. Along these lines, he became a proponent of the comparative approach and of international cooperation, being one of the protagonists of the interwar World Congresses of

History. At the same time, he remained a Belgian patriot and his liberal nation-

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building narrative aimed at legitimizing a Belgian historical heritage in opposition to Flemish nationalists who argued for a common historical framework

of the Low Countries that was “artificially” disrupted in the nineteenth century. Pirenne’s “De la méthode comparative en histoire,” first presented as an ad-

dress to the Fifth International Congress of Historical Sciences held in Brussels

in 1923, was one of the most eloquent programmatic statements of the importance of the comparative method. He reflected on the immense destruction caused by the national hatred culminating in the World War and held it to be the task of historians to contribute to the consolidation of Europe by

overcoming “racial” bias. In Pirenne’s understanding the comparative method was capable of indicating differences and also similarities between nations and also registering influences between the compared entities. In this sense,

his conceptualization cut across the two positions that came to be contrasted

in the methodological debates of the 1990s, namely: strict comparison (presuming that the two compared entities are not related to each other); and entangled or transfer history, focusing precisely on these linkages and abandoning the comparative agenda altogether.

· Histoire de Belgique, 7 vols. (Brussels: Henri Lamertin, 1899–1932); Belgian Democracy. Its Early History (Manchester, London, New York and Bombay: Manchester UP; Longman, Green and Co., 1910, 1915); Les villes du Moyen-Age, essai d’ histoire économique et sociale (Brussels: Henri Lamertin, 1927); Histoire de l’Europe des Invasions au XVIe siècle (Paris and Brussels: Alcan; Nouvelle Société d’éditions, 1936); Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris and Brussels: Alcan; Nouvelle Société d’éditions, 1937). secondary literature · Alfred F. Havighurst, ed., The Pirenne Thesis: Analysis, Criticism, and Revision (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1958); Bryce Lyon, Henri Pirenne: A Biographical and Intellectual Study (Leiden: Brill, 1974); Geneviève Warland, “L’Histoire de l’Europe de Henri Pirenne: Genèse de l’oeuvre et représentation en miroir de l’Allemagne et de la Belgique,” in “Une Europe en miniature?,” ed. H.-J. Lope and H. Roland, special issue, Textyles: Revue des Lettres belges de langue française, no. 24 (2004): 38–51; Jo Tollebeek, “At the Crossroads of Nationalism: Huizinga, Pirenne and the Low Countries in Europe,” European Review of History 17, no. 2 (2010): 187–215. main works

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t has been ten years, almost to the day, since the Fourth International Historical Congress gathered in London. Many of you were there. Those who were guard, without doubt, the living memory of these beautiful days that were made unforgettable by the scientific interest as well as the great66

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est charm and hospitality, even though the political atmosphere was heavy, as though a storm was gathering. One might catch the expression of anxiety in the last words of the late James Bryce’s fine speech read at the opening session. It was a moving appeal for harmony among people: a possible harmony, since it is based on the recognition of their historical solidarity; an essential harmony, if it is true that war is the greatest plague of humanity. But who could have expected the imminence of a catastrophe at that moment? We did not part before agreeing to gather again in Saint Petersburg in 1917. Alas, in 1917 it had already been three years since the most terrible crisis our civilization had ever had to endure swept through the world. All energies were concentrated on the fight. It was said that a new world was born from the heroism, from the horror, and from the tears. All predictions were evaded, all hopes shattered, all customs, all traditions disrupted. Russia, where we should have sat, was shaken by a tremendous revolution; Saint Petersburg became Petrograd. This palace, where we have gathered today, and which sheltered the peaceful labor of an academy, was occupied by a German hospital. You yourselves, removed from your studies, took up arms or, militarized for the service of your fatherlands, assisted them with your scientific contributions and your talents unless, like the person speaking to you, you were imprisoned or deported. Peace has been made, though it has granted the world neither security nor tranquility. What problems remain to be solved! What moral dismay for the conscience! What disturbance of the social and economic equilibrium! In the midst of such lamentable circumstances, the revival of the scientific world is an encouraging symptom. Destroyed by war, impoverished by the rise of prices, vexed by insufficient resources the governments often forced on laboratories and libraries, and even more often with hearts broken by unbearable grief, researchers and professors nevertheless resumed their work without fail. In all sciences and in all countries, the activity of scholars bears witness to an energy supported by the highest ideal. The gathering of this Congress provides further, significant evidence of this. The International Historical Congresses are, no doubt, the most characteristic signs of the universal nature of science, since they demonstrate, in a particularly striking manner, the detachment from all the different contingencies necessary for the research of the truth. For the mathematician, for 67

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the astronomer, for the physician, or the chemist, this detachment is taken for granted. This is far more difficult for the historian. The historian actually never faces the subject of his studies the same way the natural scientist faces nature. His personality is at stake, so to speak. How could he, while studying his own country, forget that this country is his homeland; in case it is the history of his religion, what the source of his belief is; in case it is the history of his party, that he owes his loyalty to it? To achieve objectivity, impartiality, without which there is no science, he needs to constrict himself and overcome his dearest prejudices, his deepest convictions, his most natural and most respectable sentiments. Perhaps it is impossible to achieve such renunciation. He tries nevertheless, for he knows that this is the price for the merits of science. Whatever the costs, he may, or at least he should, repeat together with Pasteur: “Here neither religion, nor philosophy, nor atheism, nor materialism, nor spiritualism counts. I could even add: as a scholar, I do not mind. It is a question of fact, and I address it without any preconceived ideas; I can only bow to experience, whatever its answer may be.” Well, this concept of science, is this not what gave us the International Historical Congresses? Do they not respond to this concept entirely, they who gather to study in the same spirit, following the same method, searching for nothing but the truth, as all historians do whatever their country, their nationality, their religion may be? Do they not confirm this truth, albeit banal, the application of which, however, is so difficult: that science has no party? Are they not the brightest homage to this necessary disengagement that I spoke about earlier? This is why such gatherings are beneficial, and this is also why, in London in 1921 when the Royal Historical Society offered Belgian historians an opportunity to gather in Brussels for the Fifth International Congress of Historical Sciences, they accepted this fine mission gladly. They accepted it gladly but also with the recognition that the proposition could be explained mainly by the sympathy that their country received, which they knew well, having seen it proved time and again since the end of the war. But first please allow me, gentlemen, to thank you in their name with utmost gratefulness. You will not be able to find the lavishness of the previous congresses this time. Neither the time we live in nor the situation of Belgium at the moment—not to speak of its exchange rate—could allow this. What you will 68

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find, however, is the friendliest of accommodations and also, undoubtedly, the state of mind I am sure you all wish to find. To be regarded as worthy of the trust placed in them, Belgian historians were forced to renew the glorious tradition of which they momentarily found themselves to be the depositaries. They wanted this postwar Congress to be the successor of its predecessors in Paris, Rome, Berlin, and London as much as possible. In all the strength of this term, they wished to make it international; they invited, without intending to exclude anyone, all the states admitted to the League of Nations. The thought presiding over their organization was that of scientific impartiality, something I mentioned earlier. They did not neglect anything in order for the air that you breathe here to be that of the heights, the only kind that suits science. You shall not find here, as I said, any traces of the postwar spirit. You might expect, however, that a glimpse of certain consequences, certain lessons that historians can draw from the war may be useful. Such an occupation might undoubtedly seem superfluous if one of the characteristics of our science were not the continuous expansion of the duration of its object. As time flows, its field grows accordingly. Yesterday it was less wide than it is today, and all new facts that the uninterrupted succession of events brings in our way is analogous to what the discovery of a new phenomenon means to the experimenter. Yet the importance of facts is rather varied. There are some that are so considerable, so charged, if we may say this, with significance, so contradictory our expectations, so incompatible with our predictions or our hypotheses, that they force us to start criticizing the theories or the methods that disoriented us. For the historian, the convulsion that the world has just passed though is what a cosmic cataclysm must be for the geologist. Society was so fundamentally shaken that it revealed brand new aspects, posed unexpected problems, and showed the deficiency of many solutions. Even from the technical point of our science, what questions it raised! Suffice it to mention here those that concern the authenticity, the interpretation, and the preservation of this multitude of written and figurative documents that different archives and museums of war collect. We have devoted a special section at the Congress to these issues, and I see no point in preempting its work here. I would only like to propose some reflections of a completely general nature touching on certain studies that, to me, seem to result from the events we have witnessed. 69

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During the whole course of the war, the belligerents requisitioned two sciences most: history and chemistry. The latter supplied them with explosives and gas, the former one with pretexts, justifications, and excuses. These were, however, of quite a different stock. The necessity imposed on chemistry did not contradict the nature of this science: precious discoveries could be made while serving the army. History, on the other hand, lost two of its essential elements when jumping into the arena too often: criticism and impartiality. It let itself be carried away by the passion to defend preconceptions, made no effort to understand, and permitted itself to be subjected to military and political influences.1 There is nothing surprising in this. In all eras, princes have pretended to use history to further their own ambition or advantage. There is nothing that had not happened already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when history supplied kings, for instance Louis XIV or Frederick II, with enough reasons to attack their neighbors. Our national states, however, gave it a different onerous task than the one accorded to it by the absolutist states of the ancien régime. It was not about influencing a few diplomats anymore: it had to convince masses of citizens, who were to vote and to fight for it, of the justice of its cause. Unlike before, it was not enough to interpret princely genealogies and to discuss treaties. History had to support the courage and conviction of people by evoking all their past for the benefit of the war; it had to depict their adversaries as their natural and traditional enemies; make them believe their enemies had been attacking them since time immemorial, as if the greatness of one nation necessarily involved the enslavement of the others, and as if, finally, their culture belonged solely to them, that it expressed the exclusivity of their genius and the originality of their spirit, and that their existence itself was at stake in the fight. This exasperation cannot be explained merely by enthusiasm or patriotic anxiety. The cause also needs to be sought in a theory especially prone to excite national sentiment by justifying it, namely the theory of races. 1 I do not need to mention here that I am only speaking in general terms. There were admirable exceptions. Here, as well as further on, I merely wish to characterize the dominant tendencies of history during the war. I am otherwise convinced that the deformations it underwent are only the unconscious reflexes provoked by emotional excitement. When I speak of lack of impartiality, I never mean a voluntary lack of impartiality. Certain people, it is true, can be blamed for intentionally altering the truth, these people, however, do not deserve to be called historians, this is not the issue at hand.

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Did it not actually provide the scientific foundation for the exaggerations of nationalism? Did it not find in the physical differentiation the origin of moral and intellectual differentiation? Did it not provide evidence of the qualitative diversity of peoples, and did it not deduct from this diversity, designed by nature, the necessity, the fatality of the war that had to subject the weaker to the stronger party? Yet the war itself seems to have proved the inanity of this doctrine. It actually showed people of the same race standing against each other. It provided evidence that the factor uniting people is neither the commonality of ethnographic characters nor the family of languages, but the collective will to sacrifice oneself for the defense of the same ideal or identical interest. We said that governments and forms of politics result from race, and that absolutism, for instance, is planted in the hearts of the subjects. At the same time, we have also seen nations where it was supposedly innate, but they rejected it with horror. In short, in all fields, the facts refute the theory, which is undoubtedly a source of joy, since it was as harmful as it was erroneous. It was harmful from the intellectual point of view not less than from the moral, since it stood in striking opposition to the principle of scientific research. Instead of patiently gathering facts to discover their significance, they were arbitrarily subjected to its declared dogma. It has solutions in advance of the problems it wishes to solve. Nothing is more convenient than the shibboleth of race: it allows everything to be explained without understanding anything. Would the real method not be to proceed in exactly the other direction? I mean to say, to resort to the racial factor when all other attempts to interpret a certain fact fail; only then could we be forced to turn to this solution. Then we could see how deceiving it is. Not one of the known peoples is actually pure in its race; all are the products of the mix of different populations, the proportions, even the exact compositions of which remain obscure. How can one find oneself, thus, within such complexity? How can one manage in the midst of such chaos? It is even more obvious that one pleases oneself too often with recognizing the influence of race in simple social phenomena. Geographical conditions, economic conditions, a multitude of other circumstances also influence the development of peoples, accelerate the development in certain lands and hold them up elsewhere. This results in different peoples belonging to different eras of general develop71

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ment on the same date, since, if we may say so, time does not flow with equal speed everywhere. Did the period we call the Middle Ages not last considerably longer in certain nations than in others? Therefore, would it not be advisable before judging the originality of an institution, for instance, or of a custom, to ask oneself if, instead of hastily giving the honor of sham national genius, one should rather consider it a vestige or an archaism? Great progress has been made in this sense. We now know, thanks to comparative ethnography, that the political constitution and the laws of primitive societies represent, in general, the same display. It is not possible anymore to claim a distinct and privileged part for the Greeks as well as for the Romans, the Celtic, Germanic, or Slavic peoples, which is outside the common history of humankind. In its essential features, the general development is of the same nature and goes through analogous phases everywhere. Clearly, this resemblance does not go so far as becoming identical. When going into details, we note innumerable differences. The majority of these result from the environment. A barbaric people neighboring advanced peoples shall not bear the same physiognomy as a barbaric people surrounded by other barbaric peoples. The climate, the relief of the ground, its fertility, its closeness or distance to the sea also had their effect and little by little clarified and defined national types more and more. Is this what needs to be attributed to race eventually; is it then what remains otherwise inexplicable? This brings us back to the suggestion that evoking race is a way to confirm our ignorance, and that it would be wiser to admit this rather than to pretend to solve the unknown by the unknown. I do not ignore the objections that could be raised at this point. Many historians pretend to call races what are, in fact, exactly these national types that slowly emerged from a common origin, which, however, once formed, are endowed with their own individual characteristics, continue their development conforming only to themselves and following the rules of their own particular nature. What should one think of identifying race with nationality? The war literature in the field of history accepted this with hardly any exceptions. Please allow me to stop here for a moment. It would be childish to deny, even for those who observe it merely superficially, that the modern nations manifest such remarkable differences that in some cases they are almost the opposites of each other. Their art, their literature, their institutions, their social constitutions offer the great72

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est variety of nuances, and thus we speak about the spirit, the genius, the individualism of peoples as if they actually were individuals. What is the reality that hides behind these metaphors, and in what sense can a group of people be compared to an individual? If the historian is indeed a man of science, he will surely pose one of these principal questions. I stated just now the distinguished services that the comparative method brought to the understanding of primitive cultures. Yet this method is rejected when one turns to the study of more advanced civilizations. Why is this so? I have looked for the reason without success. We could perhaps say that sociology offers itself to the historian and allows him to unravel the common characteristics of the general development from underneath the diversity of national developments. Certainly no one can deny that sociology brings valuable results to the historian. It should be noted, however, that until now it offered us mere hypotheses—useful, powerful and fertile hypotheses, I agree—though too fleeting, too temporary to be considered reliable. Sociology is a science that is related to history; however, they do not intermingle more than economic history mingles with, for instance, political economics or legal history with law. It may direct the historian to certain points of view; it may not, however, force its method on him. It seems, thus, that if we wish to understand original features and national individualities, one procedure remains and that is comparison. Through this procedure, and this procedure only, may we rise to scientific understanding. We shall never be able to achieve it if we confine ourselves to the limits of national history. It goes without saying that I do not mean here the work of erudition. Paleography, diplomatics, epigraphy, numismatics, editing and criticism of sources, in short the practices of this delicate and passionate profession, thanks to which history discovers, refines, and elaborates its materials, require a technique that is, in every sense of the word, a scientific technique without which history would actually be merely a literary genre. When I speak about scientific understanding, I only mean historical construction; I do not refer to the criticism of elaboration, but to the criticism of synthesis.2 It is for this reason, and this reason only, that I cannot refrain from 2 It is well known that it is to this criticism of synthesis that Henri Berr’s excellent Revue de synthèse has devoted itself for many years.

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pointing out the inadequacy and the danger of the method that consists of treating the history of a people from the point of view of this people itself, of structuring and organizing it as though it existed only for itself, as though it were something more than simply a local phenomenon in universal history. Would it be disrespectful to say that historians take the point of view of their nation too often, similarly to the way architects take the view of their clients? First of all, they wish to provide themselves with a history that is formed according to their taste, their morals, in short, a livable history. History, however, as much as it claims the mantle of science, does not apply to practice; it applies merely to truth. How is it possible, then, to discover the truth if not by turning one’s eyes toward it? There is only general science and in order to understand the history of a group of people, it needs not only to be situated in the place it occupies in the whole of other peoples but also to keep them in mind during the whole period that the given people is studied. This is the only means to escape the daydreams and illusions of sensitivity, the drive of patriotism. Authors of old biographies saw in their hero only himself and attributed his actions to his character or genius. We have returned from that to today’s practice to try to discern what a great man owes to his environment. We must admit that history still often makes the same mistake as these old biographers. It regards peoples as isolated individuals. It often describes them as though each one of them were the only one of its kind in the world and as though its culture was a phenomenon of spontaneous creation. It makes a great effort to reduce the amount of influence its neighbors provided, as though belonging to humanity were somewhat shameful. Is it not obvious that this point of view, which I called for want of something better, an “ethnocentric” point of view, is most opposed to science? Here natural sciences lead the way. Their object is the whole of nature. Why is the historian’s object not the whole of history? It would be useless to object by saying that it is impossible for one man to know the whole of history. Is it possible for a physician or a chemist to know, not even the whole of nature, only the whole of physics or the whole of chemistry? They are all obliged to explore a corner of their immense field and, as we say, to specialize. But each one of them knows well that his specialization is only worth anything if it has a function in the whole, and that the whole of science resonates and is implicated by his humble labor. 74

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In short, its point of view is, in the whole sense of the term, universal. Why is this not the same with history? Why does it nearly always prefer the national, I would even say the local, point of view as opposed to the universal? Let us observe that this preference is relatively recent. Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century were free from this. From Herodotus to Voltaire and to Herder we have seen syntheses reinforce the representation or the explanation of the entire human race’s past several times. It does not really matter that the Discours sur l’ histoire universelle and the Essai sur les moeurs were inspired by rather different thoughts: on the object of history itself they agree. Whether the Christian recognizes it as the will of Providence or the philosopher submits it to his rationalism, they both see its totality, or rather its unity. The romanticism and nationalism of the nineteenth century contrasted their idea of diversity to this unity. Just as they drove artists towards the search for couleur locale, they oriented historians towards the study of characteristics that differentiate peoples. History has become livelier, more original, more exciting than ever. Meanwhile, it has also become richer and more precise. The criticism of sources allowed marvelous progress and impressive discoveries that revealed unknown civilizations; no single expression of social activity: law, morals, economy, was neglected. The name “the century of history” was justly given to the century that has just ended. Nevertheless, its vast oeuvre seems more erudite than scientific. It is unrivalled in the abundance of materials that were discovered and for the care they were prepared with. But can one also say this of the syntheses it produced? Rather, it seems that the more the field of history grew, the more the historical vision narrowed, and the narrower it became, the closer we got to nowadays: that is to say, let us admit, it narrowed to the benefit of nationalism and imperialism. It is striking to see to what extent the national past attracts and absorbs researchers’ attention in each country. This, in itself, is not a bad thing. The bad crops up in the exclusivist spirit that influences the view of this past. One locks oneself up in this, one sees nothing but this; one, thus, renders oneself incapable of understanding this. In reality, one needs to realize that the element that our national histories lack most, however brilliant they otherwise may be, is scientific objectivity and, let us say it, impartiality. And this lack of impartiality, which I may be tempted to label intentional, I claim to be fatal. Racial prejudices, political prejudices, 75

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national prejudices have too strong an influence on a man for him to be able to escape them unless he is outside of their scope. In order to break away from them, he needs to rise above them, until reaching the height where the whole of history appears in the majesty of its development and momentary passions calm and settle in front of the sublimity of the spectacle. How to achieve this through means other than the comparative method? This is the only way a historian can avoid the traps that surround him, the only way he can appreciate the true value, the precise degree of the scientific truth of the facts he is studying. Through comparison, and comparison only, can history become a science and break itself away from the idols of sentiment. This shall be when it adopts the point of view of universal history instead of national history. From then on, history shall not only be more exact, it will also be more humane. Scientific benefit will go hand in hand with moral benefit, and no one will regret if it inspires people at once, showing them the solidarity of their destinies and a more fraternal, more conscientious, and more pure patriotism.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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Historical Science and Philosophy of History s o u r c e

Henri Sée, Science et philosophie de l’ histoire (Paris: Alcan, 1928), Chapter 6, “La méthode comparative en histoire,” 157–79.

Henri Sée (1864–1936) was a French historian. A student of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and Ernest Lavisse, he became a professor at the University of Rennes in 1893, where he taught until 1920. His early works focused on

French social and economic history, especially the history of the peasantry and the rise of capitalism. In the first phase of his career, he published mostly case studies pertaining to the history of the lower classes, using especially Breton

sources he could access in Rennes. In the 1920s, he also became involved in

politics, adhering to liberalism and the doctrine of “human rights.” Simultane-

ously, he turned to the history of political thought and wrote on the history of

political ideas in France, seeking to grasp the origins of liberalism in the eighteenth century. It is from this liberal perspective, focusing on the importance of ideas in shaping social and economic realities, that he wrote his theoretical

synthesis on historical science as well. He rejected the Marxist vision of economic determinism and sought instead to develop a model of mutual conditioning between the ideological and social spheres.

It is in this context that the problem of comparison became central to

his theoretical work, as the comparative method seemed to offer a frame-

work that could transcend the opposition of the political and socioeconomic approaches. Taking inspiration from Pirenne’s writings, Sée stressed that the

task of the historian was to explain historical change. The principal comparative operations he identified (temporal and spatial) thus served to understand

evolutionary dynamics, posing questions such as “How a given later phase differs from an earlier one?” or “What are the factors of the divergence of development between two societies?” In this framework, he also devised a tentative regional comparison, contrasting the Eastern and Western European patterns of development.

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· Les Classes rurales et le régime domanial en France au moyen âge (Paris: F. Alcan, 1901); Les Classes rurales en Bretagne du XVI siècle à la révolution (Paris: Giard, 1906); Les idées politiques en France au XVII siècle (Paris: Giard, 1923); Évolution de la pensée politique en France au XVIII siècle (Paris: Giard, 1925); La France économique et sociale au XVIII siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1925); Histoire de la Ligue des droits de l’ homme (1893–1926) (Paris: LDH, 1927); Esquisse d’une histoire économique et sociale de la France depuis les orgines jusqu’ à la guerre mondiale (Paris: F. Alcan, 1929). secondary literature · Mark Potter, “Henri Sée,” in French Historians 1900–2000: New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Philip Daileader and Philip Whalen (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 564–72. main works

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efore we start our demonstration, we think it might be useful to emphasize the method that allows history to be something more than a collection of facts, presented with more or less talent, or strung together in a more or less eloquent narration: we mean the comparative method. Let us note that the comparative method, strictly speaking, is mostly used in those branches of science that have a connection with evolution, such as the natural sciences (physiology, biology, etc.) and the human sciences. Both of these foresee a history encompassing essentially time and space. In linguistics, as Mr. A. Meillet1 demonstrated so well, the comparative method plays a primary role. History also needs to use comparison to its greatest advantage. Let us note that, in effect, generalization in history would not have the same characteristics as in physics or chemistry. It consists mainly of the regrouping and sequencing of facts; however, it does not lead to actual laws, for laws are none other than the mathematical relations between facts. Formulas of this kind are not applicable for such complex phenomena that are, to such an extent, dominated by contingencies. History, as we have seen, is essentially an explicative science. Yet, it is precisely the comparative method that allows history to provide these explanations—not by particular facts that strongly depend on accident and chance, where finding the narrow connection between antecedent and consequence 1 Antoine Meillet, La méthode comparative en linguistique historique (Oslo, 1925).

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is hardly possible—through general and permanent phenomena that will also allow the explanation of changes and transformations, or if one wishes, of evolution. In the beautiful opening speech of the Congress of Historical Sciences in Brussels, Mr. Henri Pirenne demonstrated the benefits of the comparative method in history. He explained in excellent terms that only this method allows history to rise above narrow national—if not nationalist—views; that only this method can explain the meaning of the evolution of our society, thereby making history one of the true sciences. A method that provided such service to natural sciences has to apply to humanities as well. Mr. Pirenne also rightly confirms that the romanticism and nationalism of the nineteenth century, although rendering history livelier through the search for a couleur locale as well as by finding the particular characteristics that differentiate various peoples, have also marked a detachment from the previous centuries by abandoning the universal point of view. It is by erudition, the criticism of sources, and documentary publications that the nineteenth century achieved the title of the century of history. The syntheses that were attempted, however, are far from being especially valuable. The issue here is treating history as a science. Keeping in mind the experimental ideas in this discourse, Mr. Henri Berr replies in an article of the Revue de synthèse historique (from June 1923) that whatever its value may be, the comparative method should be used with caution, and that it is merely a step that may lead the way to a true historical synthesis. What is also true, we believe, is that it does not apply perfectly to all fields of history. It is wholly effective only if one considers the study of general historical phenomena, those that are less burdened with particular events. In this sense, it is economic and social history that profits most from applying this method. We shall attempt to demonstrate this briefly. II

Let us first consider that the comparative method may be applied in two ways: in space and in time. We may, in a given era, compare the political, economic, and social state of different lands around the world. We may also compare the institutions of two different eras. The first process is certainly 79

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the more certain and more precise. The second one should, however, also not be neglected when taking into account the evolution of the human societies. Thus, we may try to compare the main types of agrarian regimes found in Europe either in the Middle Ages or in the modern era. Nothing would be more enlightening than, for example, to show which features of French and English economic organization of landed property were alike and different; what is the English manor and the French seigneury; or to compare the rights of usage as they were defined in our country and the open field of the English countryside. One can state that the social evolution of the rural classes in the two countries was strongly analogous; there was the progressive emancipation of serfdom, which occurred even faster in England. One may see, meanwhile, that the instability of peasant tenure was greater in England than in France; that the laborers, deprived of all property, were more numerous there.2 The differences become more marked by the end of the Middle Ages. Tenant farming had been established in both countries. In England, however, it had a somewhat more significant role. The development of the textile industry elevated the importance of sheep breeding, which, in turn, affected the process of enclosure allowing the landowning nobility to fence in their fields at the expense of the tenants and the open fields. Already the concentration of landed property began to appear, which was something that did not exist in France at all. The secularization of English ecclesiastic possessions in the sixteenth century contributed to the intensification of the differences between the two regimes.3 I tried to compare the main agrarian regimes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe myself. I managed to distinguish the Western agrarian regime, characterized by the existence of peasant property shaped by the predominance of small and medium size farmlands; and the Eastern agrarian regime where the instability of the peasant tenures had become increasingly stronger with the rise of great noble domains, the owners of which exploited these lands themselves using the services of their subjects 2 See H. Sée, Les classes rurales et le régime domanial en France au moyen âge (Paris, 1901); F. Seebohm, English Village Communities (London, 1883); P. Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England (Oxford, 1892), and The Growth of the Manor (London, 1905); W. Ashley, Surveys, Historic and Economic (London, 1900) and L’évolution économique de l’Angleterre (Paris, 1925). 3 Ashley, L’évolution économique de l’Angleterre, and L’Histoire et les théories économiques en Angleterre au moyen âge, vol. 2 (Paris, 1900); see H. Sée, “L’évolution du régime agraire en Angleterre, depuis le fin du moyen-àge,” Revue de synthèse historique 38 (1924).

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and placing agricultural laborers directly under their economic authority. We have now clarified the essential causes of the regime dominating the whole of Eastern Europe: the political power of the aristocracy and the progress of wheat exportation, which made production more intensive.4 As another example, one can fruitfully compare the commercial and industrial evolution of various European countries since the Middle Ages. One may state that the progress of commerce everywhere is the catalyst for industrial transformations until the eighteenth century. This progress is responsible for the economic prosperity of the Italian republics and Dutch towns; thanks to this progress, industry was no longer satisfied by working for local markets: export to distant markets began. The merchants employed artisans, providing them with raw materials and submitting them to economic dependence, sometimes even the masters. This phenomenon, so well described by Mr. Pirenne for the Low Countries, can also be found in England: from the fifteenth century onwards, the textile merchants often transformed into entrepreneurs.5 Thus, one may grasp the origins of capitalism, which first took a commercial shape. In England it was the development of the maritime trade that would permit the accumulation of capital, which, in return, would become a paramount factor in the birth of large-scale industry. Rural domestic industry also went through an important evolutionary phase; having approximately the same character everywhere; its products were most often centralized by merchants who were the ancestors of the industrial entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century. Overall, these new economic forms are merely an exception; before the nineteenth century, the small professions were still dominant everywhere.6 The comparative method allows us to understand the evolution that substituted the industrial ancien régime with great capitalist industry. It is 4 See H. Sée, Esquisse d’une histoire de régime agraire en Europe aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris, 1921). 5 See H. Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, vols. 1–2 (Brussels, 1902–3); Les démocraties urbaines aux Pays-Bas (Paris, 1910); and Les périodes de l’ histoire sociale du capitalisme (Paris, 1912); W. Ashley, L’évolution économique de l’Angleterre (Paris, 1925) and Histoire et théorie économique de l’Angleterre (Paris, 1900) 6 On domestic and rural industry in France and in England see E. Tarlé, L’ industrie rurale en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1910); R. Musset, Le Bas-Maine, étude géographique (Paris, 1917); H. Sée, “Le caractère et l’extension de l’industrie rurale au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue historique 142 (January–April 1923): 47–53; E. Lipson, History of the Woollen and Worsted Industries (London, 1921); H. Heaton, Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industry (Oxford, 1920).

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in England that the industrial revolution accomplished this first. The accumulation of capital in England, furnished by trade and technical progress, provided the country with a means of outstripping all the other European countries. One may state that in France on the eve of the Revolution, capitalist industry was just beginning to develop, and capitalism manifested itself merely as an extension of rural industry: mechanization only began to emerge; industrial concentration was initiated only in some manufactures and some establishments. In both countries, it was colonial industry rather than the new organization that made its appearance.7 One may compare the industrial regulations issued by various European states in the era of national economy with equal success. In England, this regulation, consisting mainly of setting salaries, determining the conditions of apprentices, and supervising textile manufacturing, was nearly achieved already in the Tudor era.8 In France, it was not until the Colbert era that the regulation reached its peak. It may also be noted that the organization of privileged manufactures was a particularly French phenomenon. In England, the state monopolies the Stuarts wished to establish fell with them.9 One might also come to interesting conclusions comparing, as Mr. Clapham did,10 the economic evolution of France and Germany in the nineteenth century. One can see why France remains an essentially agricultural country, whereas since 1870, Germany has become the first industrial country in Europe after England. It may not be useless to note that we can explore the economic history of different countries in a given era without necessarily following the comparative method. Such is the case of Mr. Boisonnade’s work, Le travail dans 7 See P. Mantoux, La révolution industrielle au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1905); W. Cunningham, The Growth of the English Industry and Commerce (Cambridge, 1905); A. Choulguine, “L’industrie capitaliste á la veille de la Révolution,” Revue d’ histoire économique et sociale 10, no. 2 (1922): 184–218; H. Sée, “Les origins de l’industrie capitaliste en France á la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” Revue historique 144 (Septembre–Décembre 1923): 187–200; and his Les origines du capitalisme moderne (Paris, 1926). 8 Ashley, L’évolution économique de l’Angleterre and Cunningham, The Growth of the English Industry and Commerce; W. A. S. Hewins, English Trade and Finance Chiefly in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1892); F. List, National System of Political Economy (London, 1904). 9 See G. Martin, La grande industrie en France au XVIIe siècle and La grande industrie du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1899); E. Levasseur, Histoire des classes ouvrières et de l’ industrie en France avant 1789 (Paris, 1900). 10 J. H. Clapham, Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815–1914 (Cambridge, 1921).

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l’Europe chrétienne au moyen âge (Paris, 1921), so interesting and written with such erudition that it provides an important scholarly contribution. He, however, juxtaposes rather than compares the economic phenomena produced in various European countries in such a way that the evolution seems quite identical in all the different European lands; differences are smoothed, which is why his display seems descriptive rather than explicative. His book is indeed useful for all those who wish to create a comparative history; however, it provides more source material than guiding ideas.11 Furthermore, in this respect, certain monographs, such as Mr. Pirenne’s, are more suggestive than this synthesis, since they are inspired by the comparative method, and by this mere fact, are evidence of the depth of economic history. Let us add that every comparison in space requires the existence of a true synchronism between the phenomena of the various countries submitted to this comparison. In case it concerns, for example, common property, one should not assimilate forms that not only belong to different lands but also to different eras without understanding the considerable risk of erring. III

Comparisons based on different eras, less precise and less certain, are also instructive. Therefore, one understands contemporary capitalism better when comparing it to capitalism in the Roman Empire. In this respect, Salvioli’s study is thoroughly interesting. One may observe that the accumulation of capital proceeded less from commerce and more from conquest (land grabbing, robbery, fiscal operations). This capital was then used for usury (loans for interest) and for the purchase of rural lands. The latifundia themselves did not practice great capitalist production, not even agrarian; they mostly preferred domestic industry. In the Roman Empire as in Greece, the small professions were the most widespread and exercised by artisans.12 They worked only for local markets. As there were no machines, this industry did not need expensive materials. Industrial 11 Such is the case of numerous other volumes of the universal history of work, of which Mr. Boissonnade’s book is part. 12 See H. Francotte, L’ industrie dans la Grèce ancienne (1900); P. Guiraud, La main-d’oeuvre industrielle dans l’ancienne Grèce (Brussels, 1900).

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capitalism, thus, was unknown then. Capital was made from tax farming, credit operations, and military supplies. Furthermore, it was employed almost uniquely for usury and for commercial operations. Moreover, there was no “large and powerful trading class” to speak of. The tradesmen were mostly travelling merchants similar to those still visible in Russia. The real capital, that is capital money, vanished quickly, especially in a society where the wealthy class was composed essentially of idle great landowners whose luxurious life hindered them from accumulating capital. What further differentiates Roman capitalism from ours is that in their society one searches for a class of salaried workmen in vain. Their function was replaced mostly by the labor of slaves. Thus, the “natural economy” continued to play a great role, whereas the urban economy remained relatively weak. When the Roman Empire fell, only landed property remained alive. One might understand the nature of modern capitalism better if one considers the words of Salvioli: “What distinguishes the modern era from antiquity is the form of capitalist industrial production, that is to say, the divorce between capital and work, the monopolization of the means of production, therefore imprinting a direction on contemporary history that could not have characterized Antiquity.”13 The study of landed property in Antiquity offers some interesting points of comparison for modern historians as well. One might see that in Greece, property, first and foremost domestic, became private only gradually. One can state that landed property is the true source of wealth: it was concentrated in many Greek towns without small property ever actually having disappeared. Even in the Roman Empire the latifundia could not crush them. In Greece, one finds various ways to cultivate lands known in modern Europe: tenant farming and sharecropping. Based on the works of Guiraud, Francotte, and Salvioli, one might conclude that people in Antiquity could hardly escape poverty unless they possessed land, since they needed to endure the competition of a slave workforce everywhere: “They had merely one resource,” says Paul Guiraud, “which was to remove a part of the goods of the wealthy, especially land, which was the most essential element of their 13 G. Salvioli, Le capitalisme dans le monde antique, trans. A. Bonnet (Paris, 1906), 314–15; see also Max Weber, “Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Tübingen, 1924), 1–288.

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fortunes; the question of agriculture emerged from that and the extreme harshness of the struggles.”14 Thus, we may see that when speaking about rural property, about trade, about industry these words describe rather different economic forms, depending on whether one deals with Antiquity or with modern societies. Nevertheless, it cannot be overstressed that the comparison between different eras should only be conducted with utmost caution. It belongs less to the field of scientific history than to sociology or philosophy of history, which may risk more hazardous explorations. Furthermore, in any case, even the sociologist or the historian-philosopher using this method needs to know the eras between which he conducts comparisons of this genre thoroughly. There is nothing more dangerous than drawing up synchronic tables, as Spengler15 did, in which he compares such incomparable matters as Doric and Gothic art, Corinthian art and Beethoven; to consider that Themistocles and Pericles are “contemporaries” of Louis XIV or Frederick II, that Alexander is that of Napoleon, is purely the work of imagination, a true mind game that has no connection with reality. These analogies are as false as others that otherwise Spengler denounces rather vigorously. IV

The comparative method is also the one that might reveal the influence of political events on economic and social evolution. Therefore, without doubt, the enclosure movement in England was as powerful as it was in the eighteenth century only because the landowning aristocracy, which dominated Parliament, exerted its political power to this effect. The wars that ravaged Eastern and Northeast Europe at the dawn of the modern era considerably contributed to the ruin of peasant property and to the increase of the exploitative power of the great landowning nobility. In France at the time of the Revolution, one might perceive the influence that political and economic facts had on each other. The Revolution emancipated the peasants from the seigniorial regime for good; its triumph was only possible, however, because 14 P. Guiraud, La propriété foncière en Grèce jusqu’ á la conquête Romaine (Paris, 1893). 15 O. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich, 1923); see also A. Fauconnet, Oswald Spengler (Paris, 1925).

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of the rigor and the abuse this seigniorial domination aroused in the peasants against the entire ancien régime, and because the bourgeoisie managed to use, more or less consciously, their revolutionary force.16 Political doctrines themselves sometimes exercise an influence on the evolution of social economy. Thus, in England, Locke’s theory allowed the partisans of economic freedom to attack the legislative restrictions of the Tudors concerning salaries and training; these, actually, were abolished for good by the laws of 1813–1814.17 Nevertheless, when one studies questions of origin, one should only use the comparative method by taking significant precautions.18 In this case, documents enlighten us only in an indirect fashion. It is indeed quite probable that common property preceded domestic property and individual property. The sources used to prove this point, however, are hardly conclusive.19 Furthermore, nothing proves that communal properties, found everywhere in history, all derive from common or individual property.20 Here a great amount of caution is needed. V

Finally, it is thanks to this method, allowing the comparison of the economic and social state of the present and the past, that economic history seems to be the one branch of history that has the most practical applications. It is this method that connects history with other sciences, such as sociology, political economy, or geography. 16 Sée, Esquisse d’une histoire de régime agraire; A. Aulard, La Révolution et le régime féodal (Paris, 1919). 17 See W. J. Ashley, L’évolution économique de l’Angleterre (Paris, 1925), 155. 18 On the precautions to take in order to manage the comparative method, see what Fustel de Coulanges says in his “Origines de la propriété foncière,” in Questions historiques (Paris, 1893), 193. “The comparative method does not consist of searching for five small facts in five different peoples, which create a system if interpreted in a certain fashion; it consists of studying several peoples in their own right, in their own thoughts, in all their social facts and of clarifying which ones are common and which ones different.” 19 See Fustel de Coulanges, “Le problème des origines de la propriété foncière,” Revue des questions historiques 45 (April 1889): 349–440; E. Laveleye, La propriété et les formes primitives (Paris, 1874); let us note that Fustel used the comparative method in a strongly heuristic manner in his La Cité antique (Paris, 1864) 20 It seems rather that communal properties derive from the rights of use.

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Sociology assigns space and time merely secondary importance; it proposes mostly to describe the organization of societies in abstracto. Regarding economic and social organization or political organization, it largely attempts to observe contemporary society, providing more certain data (mainly statistical), than history does. On the other hand, comparison is a precious method for sociology, which is why it is forced to consider the past.21 It thus, cannot do without economic history, which, in return, may make use of the data established by sociology, and by posing new questions might inspire new research.22 One may say as much about political economy. It proposes to study the laws of production, distribution, and the consumption of wealth. The bulk of the materials are provided by contemporary society; it needs to borrow, however, a lot from economic history. The latter, on the other hand, profits greatly from the inquiries of the problems tackled by political economy.23 Human geography has an even closer relationship with economic history. It needs to take into account not only the soil, but also the transformations achieved by men. Furthermore, one may claim that the marvelous monographs of human geography are the ones lending the most features to historical documents.24 Economic history, for its part, enlarges its point of view if it takes its inspiration from the geographical spirit; geography might provide explanations to certain historical phenomena. The connections with sciences that rely more on observation than on documents contributes more powerfully to the scientific nature of economic and social history than anything else. Without a doubt, economic history 21 See L. Lévy-Bruhl, La morale et la science des moeurs (Paris, 1904), 177: “The comparative historical method becomes a powerful instrument in the hands of the sociologist, the weight of which has probably not been measured.” 22 For instance, the thesis of Mr. Halbwachs on the living standards of the working class does borrow historical data. In the meantime, however, it may suggest interesting methods to historians in order to study the history of the incomes of the working classes and their way of living—the notion of class struggle in Marxist sociology drew historians’ attention to the nature of the different social classes in the past. Furthermore, we know that Marx utilized historical research. See also my study, “La notion de la classe sociale chez Turgot,” in La vie économique et les classes sociales en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1924); see also E. Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris, 1904). 23 See for example Mr. Anslaux, Traité d’économie politique (Paris, 1920–1926). The author relies entirely on the observation of economic facts in contemporary society, but often refers to economic history. 24 See for example J. Sion, Les paysans de la Normandie Orientale (Paris, 1909); R. Musset, Le Bas-Maine (Paris, 1917); Lucien Febvre, La terre et l’évolution humaine (Paris, 1922); P. Vidal de la Blache, Principes de géographie humaine (Paris, 1921).

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or, for even better reason, history as such shall never be a science on the same level as the natural sciences, since it is rather difficult to determine the laws of historical evolution. Too many individual events may have exercised great influence or may have contributed to providing a set physiognomy to evolution. Comparison permits, however, a distinction between what is actually an accidental individual event in the evolution and what, on the contrary, is the consequence of permanent phenomena of a general nature. History ceases to be descriptive in order to become comparative. Let us add that the benefits of this method shall have their effect on erudition, in the writing of monographs. Less time will be devoted to the study of less interesting questions; the questions we pose in view of the whole of the comparison will mark a research program greatly serving the organization of still imperfect historical work. A long time ago, scholars and historians were separated from one another. Their relationship was established little by little; it shall be completely intimate when they both have their eyes on what Mr. Pirenne called the understanding of “the universal.”

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies s o u r c e

Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes,” Revue de synthèse historique 46 (1928): 15–50. English translation: “A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” in Marc Bloch, Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe, translated by J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1967), 44–81. © Routledge, 1967, reproduced by arrangement with Taylor & Francis Group.

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (1886–1944) was a French historian of Alsatian Jewish background, who, together with Lucien Febvre, co-founded the

journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale: revue trimestrielle in 1929.

The journal served as the nucleus of the leading Annales School of French social history. Bloch studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and also in

Berlin and Leipzig (1908–1909). In 1919, he became a lecturer in medieval history at Strasbourg University, and in 1936, he became a professor in econom-

ic history at the Sorbonne, Paris. During World War II, he was captured by the Gestapo and executed for his participation in the French Resistance.

In this pioneering essay, Bloch provides a comprehensive evaluation of the

advantages and limitations of the comparative method for historical research. In his view, comparisons allow historians to identify new, innovative research questions, to test research hypotheses, and to identify both the common and

the original features of their particular object of study. Bloch recommended that historians compare, first and foremost, contemporary and neighboring societies, which are able to influence each other. In so doing, Bloch implicitly emphasized the advantages of combining the comparative method with

the history of transfers. He also highlighted the paramount importance of the

comparative method for providing a new integrative view on European history. His methodological insights have opened up new avenues of research for

the exploration of European history, influencing successive generations of historians in France and abroad.

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main works · Les rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale parti-

culièrement en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Istra, 1924); in English: The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1928); Les caractères originaux de l’ histoire rurale française (Oslo: H. Aschehoug, 1931). English ed.: French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics, trans. Janet Sondheimer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); Apologie pour l’ histoire; ou, Métier d’ historien (Paris: A. Colin, 1949). English ed.: The Historian’s Craft (New York: Knopf, 1953); Memoirs of War: 1914–1915 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). secondary literature · William Sewell, “Marc Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History,” History and Theory 6 (1967): 208–18; Alette Olin Hill and Boyd H. Hill, Jr, “Marc Bloch and Comparative History,” The American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (October, 1980): 828–46; Daniel Chirot, “The Social and Historical Landscape of Marc Bloch,” in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, ed. Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 22–46; Bryce Lyon, “Marc Bloch: Historian,” French Historical Studies 15, no. 2 (1987): 195–207; Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 13–35; Hartmut Atsma and André Burguière, eds., Marc Bloch aujourd’ hui: Histoire comparée (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 1990); S. R. Epstein, “Marc Bloch: The Identity of a Historian,” Journal of Medieval History 19 (1993): 273–83; Susan W. Friedman, Marc Bloch, Sociology and Geography: Encountering Changing Disciplines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Katherine Stirling, “Rereading Marc Bloch: The Life and Works of a Visionary Modernist,” History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007): 525–38.

W I

I

should like first of all to forestall a possible misunderstanding and spare myself unnecessary ridicule. I am not a “discoverer” of a new panacea. The comparative method has great possibilities; I consider that an improved and more general use of this method in historical study is one of the most urgent tasks for the present day. But the method has its limitations, for there is no such thing as a talisman of knowledge. But it is already a well-tried method, which has long since proved its value. There have already been many voices to recommend its application to the history of political, economic and legal institutions.1 Nevertheless it is obvious that the majority of historians are not

1 Without making any pretension to drawing up a general bibliography, which would be out of place here, I would just mention the address given by Henri Pirenne to the Fifth International Congress of Historical Sciences (Report, 17–32), which is all the more significant because it embodies the thoughts of a historian whose fame rests upon a national work; see also Louis Davillé, “La comparaison et la mé-

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yet fundamentally converted to it. They make polite gestures of assent, then go back to their work without effecting the slightest change in their habits. Why is this? It is no doubt because they have been too easily persuaded that “comparative history” is a chapter of the philosophy of history or of general sociology, and these are disciplines which the historian—according to his cast of mind—either reveres or greets with a skeptical smile, but in general takes good care not to practise; for what he requires of a method is that it should be a tool, in ordinary use, easy to manipulate, and yielding positive results. Now that is exactly what the comparative method is—but I doubt whether up till now it has been sufficiently shown to be such. It can and it should enter the world of detailed research. Its future—perhaps even the future of our discipline—depends on it doing so. At this point I should like to define the nature and the possible applications of this excellent tool, to show by means of some examples the chief services that it may be expected to render, and finally to suggest some practical methods of making it easier to use. Addressing a group of mediaevalists, I shall take my examples preferably from the period usually called—whether rightly or wrongly—the Middle Ages. But it goes without saying that—mutatis mutandis—the observations I am about to make would apply equally well to the European societies that we call modern. And I shall also allow myself sometimes to refer to the latter. II

The term “comparative history,” common enough today, has undergone the fate of almost all common words: it has changed its meaning. Even if we leave aside all obviously wrong usages, an ambiguity still remains. People studying the humanities are constantly grouping together under the expresthode comparative, en particulier dans les études historiques, I et II,” Revue de synthèse historique 27 (December 1913): 217–57, conceived in a different spirit from the present work, and an article by Henri Sée, “Remarques sur l’application de la méthode comparative à l’Histoire économique et sociale,” Revue de synthèse historique 36 (December 1923): 37–46; reprinted in his Science et philosophie de l’ histoire (Paris, 1928); also Henri Berr, “Le Ve Congrès international des sciences historiques (Bruxelles, 8–15 avril) et la Synthèse en Histoire,” Revue de Synthèse historique 35 (1923): 5–14, here 11. As positive contributions to comparative history let us recall, in the field of political history, the remarkable article by C. Langlois, “The Comparative History of England and France during the Middle Ages,” The English Historical Review 5 (1890): 259–63; and on a rather different topic some very revealing pages in H. Pirenne, Les Villes du Moyen Age: Essai d’ histoire économique et sociale. (Brussels, 1927).

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sion “the comparative method” two widely different intellectual processes. The linguists seem to have been the only ones to have concerned themselves with making a careful distinction between them.2 Let us attempt an accurate definition from the historian’s own point of view. First, what do we mean in our field of study by comparison? No doubt about it, we mean this: to choose from one or several social situations, two or more phenomena which appear at first sight to offer certain analogies between them; then to trace their line of evolution, to note the likenesses and the differences, and as far as possible explain them. Thus, two conditions are necessary to make a comparison, historically speaking, possible: there must be a certain similarity between the facts observed—an obvious point—and a certain dissimilarity between the situations in which they have arisen. For example, if I am studying the manorial system in the Limousin, I shall be continually impelled to consider setting side by side information drawn from other manors; in common or garden language, I shall be comparing them. But I shall not consider myself to be engaged in what is technically called “comparative” history, for I shall be taking the different objects studied from a cross-section of a single society in which, looked at as a whole, there is a considerable degree of unity. In practice, it has become customary to reserve the term “comparative history” almost entirely for the comparative examination of phenomena that have taken place on different sides of a State, or national, frontier. Political or national contrasts are, indeed, always the ones that strike the mind most immediately. But, as we shall see, this is really a gross simplification. Let us confine ourselves to the idea of differences in environment—an idea that is both more flexible and more accurate. Thus understood, the process of comparison is common to all aspects of the method. But it is capable of two completely different uses—different in principle and in result according to the field of study envisaged. Let us now consider the first case. The historian selects some societies so widely separated in time and space that any analogies observed between them with respect to such and such phenomena can obviously not be explained either by mutual influence or by a common origin. The commonest type of example, since the distant days when Father Lafitau S. J. invited 2 See especially A. Meillet, La méthode comparative en linguistique historique (Oslo, 1925), to which I owe the general idea of development in the two kinds of approach.

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his readers to compare “the customs of the American savages” with those of “primitive times,”3 consists of an examination of Mediterranean civilisations—Hellenic or Roman—alongside contemporary “primitive” societies. In the early days of the Roman Empire, only a short distance from Rome and on the delightful shores of Lake Nemi, a rite was enacted which stands out by reason of its strange cruelty in the midst of the customs of a relatively wellpoliced society. Whoever aspired to become the priest of the little temple of Diana could do so under one condition only—he must kill the officiant whose place he coveted. “If we can show that a barbarous custom like that of the priesthood of Nemi has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led to its institution; and if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives were at work in classical antiquity; then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi.”4 This was the starting-point for the immense enquiry undertaken by Frazer in The Golden Bough, a pre-eminent example of a wellillustrated and instructive piece of research entirely based on the collection of facts from the four corners of the world. The comparative method as thus interpreted has rendered immense services of every kind, more particularly to the ancient history of the Mediterranean region. A humanist education had accustomed us to picture Rome and Greece as too like ourselves; but the comparative method in the hands of ethnographers has restored to us with a kind of mental shock this sense of the difference, the exotic element, which is the indispensable condition for a balanced understanding of the past. The other benefits have been rather more general ones, such as the possibility of filling in certain gaps in documentation by means of hypotheses based upon analogy; the opening up of new avenues of research suggested by the comparative method; above all, the explanation of a great many survivals that have up to now been incomprehensible. I am thinking here of customs which have survived and become crystallised after the original psychological 3 P. Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages américains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris, 1724); on the work itself see Gilbert Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans le littérature française au ­X VIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1913), 315. 4 J. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., vol. 1: 10. The example chosen by Meillet is different, drawn from researches on animal stories.

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environment that gave them birth has disappeared, customs which would seem inexplicably strange if the examination of other similar cases in other civilizations did not make it possible to reconstruct precisely this vanished situation, as in the ritual murder at Lake Nemi.5 In short, this long-range comparative method is essentially a matter of interpolating a graph. It postulates, and always reverts in conclusion to the fundamental unity of the human mind, or, alternatively, the monotony and astonishing poverty of the intellectual resources at man’s disposal throughout the course of history. This was particularly true of primitive times, when, as Sir James Frazer puts it, “the human race in all its early crudity was building up its philosophy of life.” But there is another use for the comparative method. This is to make a parallel study of societies that are at once neighbouring and contemporary, exercising a constant mutual influence, exposed throughout their development to the action of the same broad causes just because they are close and contemporaneous, and owing their existence in part at least to a common origin. In history proper, this is the equivalent of the historical study of languages (for example, Indo-European languages); whereas comparative history in the broad sense would more or less correspond to linguistics in general. In both history and language, it appears true that of these two comparative methods the one with the more limited horizon is also the richer in results. Because it is more capable of rigorous classification, and more critical about the objects it compares, it may hope to reach conclusions of fact that are less hypothetical and much more precise?6 This at any rate is 5 But naturally the mere fact of “survival” is not enough; other things have to be taken into account. An interesting fact, which must be explained, is why the rite or institution survived despite its apparent failure to fit into its new environment. 6 The study of primitive civilizations is today turning quite clearly towards a more exact classification of the societies to be compared. There is no reason at all why the second type of method I am trying to classify here should not apply to these societies just as much as to others. Moreover, it is obvious that certain of the advantages of a comparative history with limited horizons, as outlined below—where I discuss suggestions for research, and caution in attributing everything to pseudo or local causes—are equally applicable to the other method. The two aspects of the method have certain features in common; but this does not mean that they do not need to be carefully distinguished. The study of sacred kingship in Europe provides a very clear example both of the immense value and of the limitations of comparative ethnography. Though it alone is able to put us on the right road to the correct psychological explanation of the phenomenon, it has been shown by experience to be altogether unfitted for the task of drawing out its real meaning. That at any rate is what I attempted to show in Les rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Strasbourg, 1924), 53, 59.

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what I hope to be able to show; for it is certainly this method that I intend to elaborate. I propose to compare the various European societies—especially in Eastern and Central Europe—societies that are contemporary, that live close to one another, and that go back if not to one common origin, at any rate to several. III

But before phenomena can be interpreted, they must be discovered. And this preliminary step will reveal in the first place the usefulness of the comparative method. But—it may be asked—is it really necessary to go to such trouble to “discover” historical facts? They are and can only be known through documents: in order to bring them to light, isn’t it enough to read texts and monuments? Yes, but one must know how to read them. A document is a witness; and like most witnesses, it does not say much except under cross-examination. The real difficulty lies in putting the right questions. That is where comparisons can be of such valuable help to the historian, who is always in the position of the magistrate hearing the case. This is what frequently happens. In a given society, a phenomenon has occurred over such a wide field and has had so many and such obvious consequences that the historian—short of being blind—can hardly fail to be struck by it. This is particularly so in the political sphere, where extended effects are ordinarily the easiest to detect in our source-material. Let us now consider a neighbouring society. It may well be that analogous events have arisen in it, and that the effects have been just about the same in extent and power. But either because of inadequate documents, or because the political and social structure of that society is different, the result of these events is less immediately perceptible. Not that they have been any less serious: but their effect has been produced in depth, like those obscure bodily diseases which do not immediately reveal a series of well-defined symptoms, and therefore go on undiscovered for years. When at last they do show up, they are still almost impossible to recognise because the observer cannot connect the superficial effects with an original cause that arose such a long time ago. Is that simply a theoretical hypothesis? To show that it is nothing of the kind, I am led to take an example from my own researches. I am sorry to 95

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have to take the stage in person; but research-workers do not normally take the trouble to record their tentative efforts, and literature does not supply any case which I could substitute for my own personal experience.7 If in the agrarian history of Europe there is one really striking transformation, it is the one that took place in the greater part of England, from about the beginning of the 15th century up to the early years of the 19th—namely the great enclosure movement, which in its twofold form (enclosure of the commons, and enclosure of the arable) may be defined basically as a movement leading to the disappearance of communal obligations and the growth of individualism in agriculture. Let us here consider only the enclosures of arable. We start out with a system by which the arable land, as soon as the harvest was finished, was turned over to common grazing. Then it would be sown again and bear another harvest, repeating the rhythm of cultivation and obeying the rules laid down in the interests of the community. We find, at the end of the transformation, all land held strictly in severalty. Everything about this great metamorphosis catches and holds our attention: the polemics to which it gave rise in the course of its history; the relative ease of access to most of the documents (Acts of Parliament and official enquiries) bearing upon them; its links with political history, in which the growing influence of Parliament, where the great landowners were predominant, had the counter-effect of entrenching the gentry more firmly in power; its possible relationships with the two most immediately obvious facts of English Economic History—I mean colonial expansion and the industrial revolution, for both of which it probably prepared the way. (This has been doubted, but for our purpose it is enough that it should be a matter of discussion); and finally the way in which it not only extended its influence into the field of social development, always a difficult subject to uncover, but also affected the most obvious features of the landscape, causing hedges to spring up throughout the English countryside where it was formerly open as far as the eye could see. And so no history of England, however elementary, will fail to include some account of the enclosures. 7 In what follows—and later on in dealing with the theories of Meitzen—I am anticipating the results of a work on agrarian systems in which I have been for long engaged, whose conclusions were presented to another section of the congress; see my Les Caractères originaux de l’ histoire rurale française (Paris, 1951), 262.

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But on turning to a history of France—even, alas, an economic history—we shall not find the slightest allusion to movements of this kind. And yet there certainly have been such movements. We are beginning nowadays, thanks particularly to the labours of Henri Sée, to be aware of their existence, though we are very far from being able to appreciate their extent, and further still from any clear perception of the points of similarity and of divergence between these developments in French and in English society. But let us leave on one side this last topic, for when the comparative method is properly used, our first task is not to discuss the significance of contrasts but to discover the facts. It is most remarkable that up to the present the disappearance of communal obligations in France has hardly been noted except at periods and in places where—as in England the phenomenon was recorded in official documents, and where it was thus readily noticeable—namely in the “enclosure awards” of the 18th century and the preceding or subsequent official enquiries. The same transformation, however, took place in another part of France, where it has not so far—to the best of my knowledge—been noticed, namely in Provence: and it began in a relatively remote period, the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. In Provence, it was most probably a much more profound and thorough-going change than in most of the more northerly regions where the same facts have been studied again and again; but it had the misfortune to occur at a time when economic life—especially rural life—was hardly of any interest to writers or administrators. Moreover, the change did not bring about any visible modification of the countryside, since the disappearance of communal obligations did not entail the construction of hedges, and it was therefore easy for it to pass unnoticed. Were the repercussions in Provence the same as those in England? For the moment, I must confess ignorance on this point. Moreover, I am very far from believing that all the characteristics of the English movement were reproduced on the shores of the Mediterranean. On the contrary, I am struck by the fact that conditions in the south were peculiar owing to the very different system of land tenure when compared with the north. (It did not, as in England, give rise to a redistribution of the “strips,” to “consolidation.” Special customs such as transhumance account for social conditions that are without parallel in the English countryside. I am thinking particularly of the antagonism between the big graziers, the large-scale breeders of stock and the other classes of the population.) 97

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It is none the less extremely interesting to note in a Mediterranean country a phenomenon, with its own special characteristics, which might have seemed, up till now, to be found mainly in higher latitudes. Moreover, it is not very difficult to see the process at work in Provence; a closer examination reveals the existence of a fair number of documents enabling its course to be followed, such as county orders, communal discussions, and lawsuits whose lengthy and roundabout proceedings bear eloquent testimony to the seriousness of the interests at stake. But there is a real need to search out these documents and compare them with each other. If I have been able to do this, it is certainly not because I am particularly familiar with these local documents, far from it—I know them, and always shall; much less well than the scholars whose ordinary field of study has been the history of Provence. They are the only people who can really work the vein: all I can do here is to point out its existence. I have only one advantage over them, a quite impersonal one; I happen to have read works on English enclosures or on similar rural revolutions in other European countries, and I have tried to draw some inspiration from them. In short, I have used that most effective of all magician’s wands—the comparative method. IV

Now let us pass on to interpretation. The most obvious service we can hope for from a careful comparison between facts drawn from different and neighbouring societies is to enable us to discern the mutual influences exercised by these groups. Careful enquiry would no doubt reveal among mediaeval societies the direction of some borrowings which have so far been insufficiently investigated. Here is one example, which I put forward simply as a working hypothesis. The Carolingian monarchy, when compared with that of the Merovingians which immediately preceded it, shows some completely original characteristics. The Merovingians in their relations with the Church had never been anything but simple laymen. But Pepin and his descendants were anointed with holy oil at their coronation and so marked with its sacred character. The Merovingians, sharing the beliefs of their contemporaries, had in turn dominated, enriched, and exploited the Church; they had never 98

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been much concerned with backing its precepts with the force at the disposal of the State. But the Carolingians behaved quite differently. Although they did not in their times of power fail to domineer over the clergy and use their property for the benefit of their own policies, they nevertheless clearly considered themselves in duty bound to establish the law of God. Their legislation was essentially religious and tinged with morality. When I read in a newspaper some time ago a decree promulgated by the Wahabite emir of the Nejd, I was struck by its points of resemblance to the pietist literature of the Capitularies. There is not much difference between the great courts assembled round the king or the emperor and the assembly of the Councils. And lastly, the protective relationships under the Merovingians, already such a prominent force in society, had only occupied a marginal position in the law, which traditionally took no cognisance of them. The Carolingians, on the other hand, recognised these links and gave them sanction. They defined and set limits to the cases in which commended man might be allowed to leave his lord. They tried to use these personal relationships to consolidate the public peace, which was at once the most cherished and the most fleeting object of their dogged ambition. “Let each overlord exercise a coercive action upon those who are set under him, so that they may become more and more obedient and submissive to the imperial mandates and precepts.”8 This phrase from a Capitulary of 810 is an expressive short summary of the imperial social policy. No doubt a thorough search in the Gaul of the Merovingians would reveal the germs of any one of these features. It is none the less true that, when one considers Gaul only, the Carolingian state seems to have come into being ex nihilo. But let us look beyond the Pyrenees. In barbarian Europe from the 7th century onwards kings could be observed receiving “most holy unction,”9 as one of them, Ervig, calls it. This was among the Visigoth kings; a monarchy that was entirely religious, preoccupied with ensuring by State action that the orders of the Church were carried out. Or consider Spain, where Councils were almost indistinguishable from political assemblies; or the laws of the Visigoth sovereigns, 8 Capitularia regum Francorum, Monumenta Germaniae historica. Legum sectio II; T. 1–2, ed. A. Boretius (Hannover, 1883–1897), no. 64, cl. 17: “Ut unusquisque suos iuniores distringat ut melius ac melius oboediant et consentiant mandatis et praeceptis imperialibus.” 9 The twelfth Council of Toledo (681), in a letter from King Ervig; see G. D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova Amplissima Collectio, vol. 11, col. 1025.

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which had been replaced very early on, in order to assure some measure of control, by the ties of feudal lord and vassal10 upon which personalities the military organisation tended to be founded.11 Naturally, it is not difficult to discover, along with these analogies, a number of differences. The chief one is that the first Carolingians governed the Church, instead of being governed by the Church like the Gothic princes of the 7th century. The likenesses remain however extremely striking. Is it only a matter of seeing them simply as the product of similar causes, acting on both sides in the same direction—causes which one would then have to define? Or—remembering that the facts about the Visigoths are of course earlier than those about the Franks—are we to believe that a certain conception of royalty and its proper role, certain ideas concerning the constitution of a feudal society, and of its use by the State, appearing first in Spain and having become embodied in its legislative documents, were later consciously taken up by the entourage of the Frankish kings and the kings themselves? To win the right to answer this question, a detailed enquiry would clearly be required, which I could not enter upon here. Its principal object would be to discover by what channels the influence of the Visigoths was able to penetrate into Gaul. There are some universally recognised facts which seem to be of the kind that would make this hypothesis fairly probable. It is indisputable that there was during the century following the Arabic conquest a Spanish diaspora in the Frankish kingdom. The fugitives de partibus Hispaniae, whom Charlemagne and Louis the Pious settled in Septimania (i.e. southern Gaul), were to a large extent people of humble station; but they also included some from the upper classes (majores et potentiores) and some priests, that is to say, people who were familiar with the political and religious customs of the country they had been forced to leave.12 Some of the Spaniards who took refuge in 10 In the collection of documents of Sanchez-Albornoz, “Las Behetrias,” in Anuario de historia del derecho español, vol. 1 (1924), notes on 183, 184, 185; M. Sanchez-Albornoz’s study gives the most reliable and complete explanation of the Visigoth patrocinium. Particularly to be noted is the passage in the Codex Euricianus, CCX, which originally applied to the buccellarius (private soldier), and reappears in the Lex Reccessvindiana, V, 3, 1, with the word buccellarius substituted for a rather looser term: et quem in patrocinio habuerit. 11 The laws of Ervig (680–687), in the collection Lex Visig., 9, 2, 9, ed. Zeumer, 378. See Sanchez-Albornoz, “Las Behetrias,” 194. 12 Maiores et potentiores: Capitularia regum Francorum, vol. 1, no. 133 (263, 1.26); Prêtres: Diplomata Karolin., vol. 1, no. 217; Histoire générale de Languedoc, vol. 2, col. 228; see also E. Cauvet, Étude historique sur l’établissement des Espagnols dans la Septimanie (Montpellier, 1898); Imbart de la Tour, “Les

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Gaul had brilliant careers in the Church: such men as Claude of Turin and Agobard of Lyons, who preached on the unified legislation which he had seen in his native country; and especially Theodulfe of Orleans, who was the first to arrive and without doubt the most influential of them all. Finally, there was the Spanish collection of conciliar documents, which exerted an undeniable effect on Carolingian canon law, though its extent has not so far been accurately estimated. Let us again stress the point that I am not claiming to reach any decisions. But I hope you will admit that this is a problem deserving attention. And it is not the only one of its kind.13 V

“Historical resemblances,” said Renan with regard to Jesus and the Essenes, “do not always imply connections.” This is certainly true. Many similarities, when closely examined, prove not to be explicable in terms of imitation. I would freely admit that these are the most interesting ones to observe, for they allow us to take a real step forward in the exciting search for causes. This is where the comparative method seems capable of rendering the most conspicuous service to historians by setting them on the road that may lead to the discovery of real causes. Moreover—and perhaps most important of all—it can benefit them in a more modest but very necessary way by preventing them from following certain paths that are merely blind alleys. Everyone knows what is meant by the Estates General or Provincial in 14th and 15th century France. (I use these epithets in their ordinary and approximate sense as a matter of convenience, without of course failing to be aware that the Estates General and Provincial were somewhat indeterminate bodies, that a truly “general” Estates was practically never summoned, and finally that provincial representation was by no means fixed over a consider-

colonies agricoles et l’occupation des terres désertes à l’epoque carolingienne,” in Questions d’ histoire sociale et religieuse (Paris, 1907). 13 Sustained as it was by borrowings from elsewhere, the Carolingian monarchy in its turn was copied by others. Its influence on the Anglo-Saxon monarchies does not seem to have been sufficiently studied. Helen Cam’s useful essay, Local Government in Francia and England: A Comparison of the Local Administration and Jurisdiction of the Carolingian Empire with that of the West Saxon Kingdom (London, 1912), is far from exhausting the subject.

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able period.) In the course of the last few years14 a number of monographs have been written on the Estates Provincial, especially those of the great feudal principalities. They represent an effort on the part of scholars that is all the more praiseworthy, seeing that almost everywhere, especially for the earlier period, the documents are appallingly scanty and barren of information. These monographs have cleared up a number of important points in a most interesting manner. But from the very start almost all their authors have come up against a difficulty they had no means of overcoming, the nature of which they sometimes did not even recognise—I mean the problem of “origins.” I am quite ready to use this expression as ordinarily employed by historians; but though current, it is ambiguous. It tends to confuse two intellectual operations that are different in essence and unequal in scope. On the one hand there is research into the oldest institutions (ducal or hundred courts, for example), out of which the Estates seem simply to have developed. This is a perfectly legitimate and necessary enquiry. But there remains the second procedure—namely research into the reasons that could explain why, at a given moment, these traditional institutions took on a new lease of life and a new significance, why they became transformed into Estates; that is into assemblies endowed with political and financial duties, who were conscious of possessing, over against the sovereign and his council, a certain power, subordinate perhaps, yet none the less distinct, which was the ultimate expression, through infinitely variable means, of the different social forces in the country. To bring the seed to light is not the same thing as to show the causes for its germination. Might we then hope to discover these causes if for instance we live in Artois (so far as the estates of Artois are concerned) or in Brittany (if it is a question of the Breton Estates), or even if we are content to take a general look at the kingdom of France? Certainly not. This procedure would simply land us in a maze of little local facts, to which we should be inclined to attribute a value that they certainly never possessed; and we should inevitably miss the essential point. For a general phenomenon can only be produced by equally general causes; and if there is such a thing as a phenomenon occurring throughout Europe, this—which I have called by its French name, the formation of the Estates—is undoubtedly a case in point. 14 See H. Prentout, “Les États provinciaux en France,” in Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, July 1928 (Scientific Reports Presented to the Sixth International Congress of Historical Sciences).

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At varying moments—all, however, very close to one another in time— Estates may be observed springing up throughout France; but in Germany too, in the territorial principalities, there were the Stände (the two words are curiously alike in meaning), in Spain the Cortes, in Italy the Parliamenti. Even in the English Parliament, which was born in a vastly different political environment, development was often subject to a trend of ideas and a series of needs analogous to those which led to the formation of what the Germans call the Ständestaat. Please do not misunderstand me. I fully recognise the immense value of local monographs, and I do not in the least suggest that their authors should step outside the framework of their proper studies and follow one another in a search for the solution to this large-scale European problem that I have just referred to. On the contrary, we beg them to realise that they could not, each one working on his own, find a solution to it. The chief service they can do us is to uncover the different political and social phenomena in their respective provinces which preceded or accompanied the appearance of the Estates or the Stände, and which would therefore seem to have some provisional claim to be numbered among its possible causes. In this enquiry, they would do well to pay some attention to the results obtained in other regions—to engage in fact in a little comparative history. The overall comparison would have to come later. Without preliminary local research it would be useless; but it alone will be able to select from the tangle of conceivable causes those which exercised a general effect—the only real ones. It would not, I feel sure, be difficult to give further examples. To select one among many, I should say without a doubt that when the German historians studied the formation of the imperial “territories” (the little States that were formed in the course of the 12th and 13th centuries in the interior of the Empire and gradually acquired, to their own advantage, the lions’ share of public power), they too often allowed themselves to slip into a habit of looking upon this phenomenon as specifically Germanic. But how can it really be separated from the consolidation of the feudal principalities in France? Here is another illustration of the circumspection which the comparative method ought to engender in historians who are too inclined to see the causes of local social transformations as exclusively local: the development of the manor in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages and at the beginning of modern times. The lords of the manor, when their revenue 103

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was threatened by the fall in the value of their money rents, became for the first time sharply aware of the impoverishment which had for a long while been eating piecemeal into their fortunes.15 In every country they were concerned to ward off this danger. With this end in view they used various means in various places, which proved more or less effective. They increased certain casual profits where the amount was not rigorously fixed by custom (the English “fines”); they substituted, wherever the law allowed it, a rent in kind for a money rent, proportional to the harvest (hence the great extension of the métayage16 system in France); they brutally dispossessed their tenants, incidentally using methods that differed greatly according to the locality (England, Eastern Germany). This was in principle a general effort; but there were extreme variations in the methods used, and their success. Here then comparison invites us to note extremely marked divergences as between one national setting and another—which we shall see below to be one of its chief points of interest. But it forces us at the same time to see in the original impulse that gave birth to such a variety of results a European phenomenon, for which only European causes could be responsible. To try to explain the formation of the Gutsherrschaft in Mecklenburg or Pomerania, or the accumulation of land by the English squire, solely with the help of facts gathered from Mecklenburg, Pomerania and England, and not found elsewhere, would be to waste one’s time in a rather futile intellectual pursuit.17 15 Alain Chartier, in his Quadriloge invectif, composed in 1422, puts into the mouth of the knight the following words: “the common people have this advantage, that their purse is like a cistern that has collected and continues to collect all the waters and showers provided by all the wealth of this kingdom . . . for the fall in the value of money has lessened the amount that they have to pay us in dues and rents, and the monstrous rise in the price of food and of labour for which they are responsible has enabled them to collect and build up their substance by reason of what they collect and amass day by day.” In Les Classiques français du Moyen Age, ed. E. Droz (Paris, 1923), 30. I do not think I have come across an older passage where this observation is as clearly stated. But it would be well worth while pursuing this line of research. For—though this is too often forgotten—the important point here is not so much the moment when the phenomenon began to exist (one would have to go a long way back to find the starting-point), but rather the moment when it began to be noticed. As long as the seigneurs did not realise that their dues were diminishing, they obviously would not seek for the means of repairing their loss. We have good reason to know at the present time that the depreciation of a currency while the nominal value remains the same can easily remain unnoticed for quite a long time by the people affected. Once again, we see that an economic problem turns out to be a psychological problem. 16 Métayage, the system of leasing land in return for a rent in kind. 17 The necessity for comparative studies, which are alone capable of dispelling the mirage of mistaken local causes, has been well demonstrated in a book, remarkable in spite of some deficiencies; A. Brun,

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VI

But let us beware of a misunderstanding from which the comparative method has only too frequently suffered. Too often people have believed or affected to believe that its only aim is to search for similarities. They are only too ready to accuse it of being satisfied with forced analogies, and even of inventing them on occasion by arbitrarily postulating some necessary parallelism between the various developments. There is no point in examining whether these reproaches have sometimes seemed justified, for it is only too certain that the method, if practised thus, would be no more than a sorry caricature. On the contrary, the comparative method, rightly conceived, should involve especially lively interest in the perception of differences, whether original or resulting from divergent developments from the same starting-point. Not long ago, at the beginning of a work intended to “mark the specific elements in the development of the Germanic languages as compared with the other Indo-Germanic languages,” Meillet put forward as one of the essential tasks for comparative linguistics a sustained attempt to “show the originality of the different languages.”18 In the same way comparative history has a duty to bring out the “originality” of the different societies. Is it superfluous to remark that there is hardly any more delicate operation than this, or any that more imperatively calls for methodical comRecherches historiques sur l’ introduction du français dans les provinces du Midi (Paris, 1923); see L. Febvre, “Politique royale ou Civilisation française? Remarques sur un problème d’Histoire linguistique,” Revue de synthése historique 38 (December 1924): 37–53, here 37ff; Brun, as is well known, has proved that French did not begin to win its way in the south of France before the middle of the 15th century. Here in his own words are the reasons why, having first decided to restrict himself to a summary examination or the relevant documents, he then decided to extend his researches over the whole or southern France, instead of exploring one region only with extreme thoroughness, as so many scholars would no doubt have advised him to do. “It would perhaps have been preferable to restrict the problem to a single province and to exhaust the mass or documents available there. Yes—from the point of view of strict method this would have been the preferable course; but in fact this could have led to serious errors of interpretation. For example, having chosen Provence, and noting that French was in this region an innovation of the 16th century, one would have jumped to the conclusion that it had followed upon the reunion of 1481–1486—which is approximately correct. But would one have noticed that the deeper cause of this event was not the reunion itself, but the special circumstances in which it took place in the 15th century, at a turning-point in our history, and that Provence was sharing in a common and simultaneous development taking place in all the regions of southern France? A local enquiry would have suggested a local explanation, and the general characteristics of the phenomenon—the only important ones—would have escaped notice” (xii). The point could not be better expressed. The results of Brun’s researches are in themselves an emphatic plea for the method I am here concerned to defend. 18 A. Meillet, Caractères généraux des langues germaniques (Paris, 1917), vii.

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parisons? If one is to determine, not only in a general way, that two objects are not alike, but also—an infinitely more difficult but much more interesting task—by what precise characteristics they are distinguishable, the first step must obviously be to examine them one by one. First of all, it is essential to clear the ground of false similarities, which are often merely homonymous. And some of them can be very insidious. How often has English villeinage been treated as the equivalent of the French servage in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. No doubt a rather cursory examination of them both could easily produce some points of resemblance. Both serfs and villeins were considered by jurists and by public opinion to be without “freedom,” and were described in certain Latin documents as servi. (English writers, when expressing themselves in French, did not hesitate to use serf as synonymous with villein.) Because of this absence of “freedom” and this servile name, learned persons have been very ready to equate them with the Roman slaves. But this is a superficial analogy: the concept of “unfreedom” has varied greatly in content according to the period and the environment. Villeinage is in fact a specifically English institution. As Vinogradoff has shown in a work that has become a classic,19 it drew its original characteristics from the very special political circumstances in which it was born. As early as the second half of the 12th century, much earlier, that is, than their neighbours in France, the kings of England succeeded in getting the authority of their courts of justice recognised over the whole country. But this precocious development had its disadvantages. The state of society as then constituted meant that the judges came up against a frontier which they were not able to cross until the very end of the Middle Ages. They had to make sure never to intervene between feudal lords and those who held land from them in “villeinage,” i.e. on payment of certain dues and especially labour services, both fixed by custom of the “manor.” The status of these tenants varied considerably according to their origins. Some—the villeins properly speaking—were reckoned free, because they were simply 19 P. Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England (Oxford, 1892); naturally the literature is considerable. To tell the truth, there are few works dealing with the subject as a whole, even in English; see Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I, 2nd ed., (Cambridge, 1898), 1:356ff, 412ff; there are fewer still in French. I hope this will provide some excuse for the schematic way in which I have had to develop my argument.

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dependent upon their lord by reason of their tenure, by the fact that they belonged to the villa; the others—servi, nativi—were tied to their master by personal and hereditary bonds, considered at this period to be a mark of servitude. But all of them, whatever their traditional status, were passed by when it was a question of royal jurisdiction. In their relationship with their lords (and only in these) they were completely outside the scope of the king’s courts, and so of the law applied and elaborated by them, the Common Law of the realm. The result was that in the course of the 13th century they amalgamated, on the basis of this common incapacity—the most glaring and disadvantageous one conceivable—in spite of the original differences between them, and formed themselves into a single class. The lawyers had some difficulty in defining this new group, composed as it was of such diverse elements. But they very soon reached agreement, and they agreed on a formula which reserved the name of “freeman” for those alone among the king’s subjects whom his courts were willing to protect against all others. This was a new notion of liberty.20 The one-time villein, that is, the tenant pure and simple—if I may so call him—ceased to be numbered among the liberi homines and was confused with the hereditary servus or nativus, because like him he was without access to royal justice. These two words servus and villein came to be treated as synonymous. This had taken place by about the year 1300. At the same time certain obligations of an essentially servile nature—notably marriage dues—which should in principle have fallen only upon the descendants of the former servi, were gradually extended—at least in many of the manors—to all villeins (in the new sense of the word). This kind of contagion, common enough in mediaeval societies, was here able to spread with particular ease. The assimilation of one class to the other was no doubt quite wrong: but how could its victims have made any effective protest, since by definition they were unable to take their grievance before 20 New—or perhaps renewed. In the days when slavery proper existed, the slave had clearly had no other court of appeal against his master than the master himself. The free man depended on the law-courts of the tribe, either popular or royal. The progress of seignorial jurisdiction—less complete in England than on the continent—the development of a new form of personal and heritable attachment, which placed the individual among the unfree, had blurred the old conception and deprived it of its legal value, though probably without removing it altogether from men’s minds. The renaissance of a national judicial system revived it. Mediaeval law, adapting its forms to the evolution of the facts, thus often found itself dipping into an ancient fund of popular representative institutions belonging to the more or less distant and forgotten past. We shall come across a striking example of this later on, when discussing the villein’s services.

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any other body but the lord’s court, that is to say before the very person who profited by the abuse? And before long it was admitted that villeinage, like the former servitude, was hereditary. This was a movement in keeping with the general tendencies of the time. But here, it was still further accentuated by a special circumstance. From time to time it happened that a person of high standing acquired a holding in villeinage. Of course the land, although it had changed hands, remained subject to all the charges and disabilities that had formerly adhered to it, and which the new tenant must have been aware of—in particular the lack of protection of his possessory rights by the royal courts vis-à-vis his lord. But the holder himself—a great man in society, maybe—could not possibly have been reduced unceremoniously to the ranks of the unfree. The way out was to reintroduce a distinction between the condition of the land and the condition of the man, and to agree that no one but the descendants—all the descendants—of the original tenants should be classed as villeins. A new and lowly caste had been created. It was defined in law in terms of a principle readily formulated by the legal theorists, namely that the villein is a serf or slave (servus) in relation to his lord; that is to say no man, not even the king, may come between him and his lord. But there was nothing like this in France. There, royal justice was much slower in developing, and its progress took a quite different course. There were no great legislative enactments like those of Henry II in England. There was no strict classification of the means of action open to plaintiffs before the royal courts (like the English “writs”). It was by a series of incursions, often hardly premeditated, taking place earlier at one place, many years later at another, strengthened now by one precedent, then by another, that the king’s men gained power over the country step by step. But their victories, just because of their leisureliness, and—to start with at any rate—because they were not guided by any theoretical plan, were more far-reaching in their effect. In France as in England, the lord’s jurisdiction, which was an amalgam of powers with very diverse origins, covered widely differing groups of dependants—military vassals, citizens, freeholders and serfs. But the French monarchy treated the lord’s jurisdiction as an indivisible whole. The royal courts allowed the seigneur to continue to try such and such a kind of case, or took it away from him; they either insisted, or did not insist, on the right of appeal; but in so doing they made no kind of distinction between the dependants of the lord. So it came to pass that gradually 108

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the royal judge began to slip in between the seigneur and his tenant. Hence no reason arose for assimilating the freeholder to the serf, who was called a villein in France, too. The two classes of men would go on existing side by side up to the end. The French serf at the beginning of the 12th century, the servus or nativus, and the English theow of the same period, had belonged to very similar legal classes, which it is quite permissible to treat as two branches of one single institution. Then villeinage came into existence. There was no longer any parallel. The French serf of the 14th century and the English serf or villein of the same period belonged to two totally dissimilar classes. Is it worth even comparing them? It certainly is: but the point will now be to mark the contrasts between them, which will bring out a striking antithesis between the respective developments of the two nations.21 Let us pursue this comparison in still greater detail. It was not always easy in the English manor of the 13th and 14th centuries to distinguish with certainty, amidst the manifold variety of property rights, which holdings should be classed as tenancies in villeinage, and so carefully put in a class apart from the equally large medley of tenures for which the epithet “free” was reserved. Yet it was absolutely necessary to agree upon certain more or less fixed criteria; for it was necessary to be able to determine which were the lands—and hence, at least in origin, the tenants—whom royal justice could not protect, because rights of jurisdiction had been conferred upon the lord of the manor. In their efforts to discover these criteria, the lawyers sometimes reckoned to find them in the nature of the services attached to the land. They worked out a concept of servile labour.22 It was agreed to treat as symptomatic of this all compulsory labour on the land whenever it 21 There is another and more subtle kind of misleading similarity when two institutions in two different societies seem to be designed for similar ends; but analysis shows these ends to be completely antithetical, and reveals that these institutions have arisen in response to absolutely opposite needs. An example of this would be the mediaeval and modern testamentary will on the one hand and the Roman will on the other. The former represents the “triumph” of individualism over “old family communism,” the latter represents the exact opposite—it is an instrument designed to favour the omnipotence of the pater familias, taking its origin therefore not from any “tendency towards individualization” but on the contrary from a tremendous “concentration of the family.” I take this example from a review by E. Durkheim in L’Année sociologique 5 (1900): 375, one of the most finished pieces of methodology that he has produced. 22 There was moreover some ambiguity about the expression of “servitium” in English legal language— or rather, in mediaeval language in general—used as the equivalent of “due” as well as of service properly speaking. I am here using the term only in the restricted sense.

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implied the obligation to perform a large number of days’ work, and above all whenever there was any element of uncertainty—either in the number of days due or the kind of work to be done, both of these being left to the arbitrary will of the lord. And it was generally admitted that the obligation to serve as the headman of the village (the reeve, not unlike the starosta with whom Russian novels have familiarised us) should likewise be considered as a taint upon the freedom of those who were forced by their terms of tenure, willy-nilly, to undertake this heavy burden. In establishing these norms the English lawyers and judges were not inventing anything. They were simply drawing upon a fund of collective experience which had been worked out in a more or less confused fashion for a long time by mediaeval society, on the continent as well as in England. The idea that agricultural work in itself was in some way incompatible with freedom is in keeping with very ancient tendencies of the human mind. In the barbarian age it was embodied in the expression opera servilia often used to designate this kind of work. The idea that the servus differed from the freeholder because of the indeterminate character of the compulsory labour demanded of him, arising from the original contrast between the slave and the Roman colonus, was a very powerful one in Gaul and Italy during Carolingian days. It never completely disappeared. In France under the Capetian kings, was it not quite customary to give the label “franchises” to the privileges which, while not removing the peasants’ obligations, set limits to them and especially fixed them? As for the obligation to perform for the lord some particular specialised service that he might see fit to impose, in addition to the general burden of compulsory labour, a burden which in England consisted in filling the office of reeve, this was considered in many places in Germany to fall always upon unfree persons. In France, this notion, although less generally admitted, has nevertheless left some traces, particularly in the documents of the 12th century.23 But in France—to which I confine myself here—these ideas as a whole were never embodied in any precise legal formulations, though one of them by itself—the emphasis on the degrading character of agricultural occupations—was, it is true, used in the 13th century to trace a clearer line of 23 I have referred to certain documents in “Un problème d’histoire comparée: la ministérialité en France et en Allemagne,” Revue historique du droit français et étranger (1928): 46–91, here 49–50.

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demarcation between the classes than had existed in the past. But it did not, as in England, serve to fix the frontier between the free and the non-free; it was rather used as one of the distinguishing features between the nobleman, who was allowed to “demean himself”—manual work being considered as, in a sense, derogatory—and the great multitude of non-nobles, which always—and now increasingly—included people whom no one would have dreamt of excluding from the category of the “free.” But was there never any temptation in France, too, to define the unfree in terms of the particular services that they were bound to render? There are certainly some indications that people were not averse to making this kind of claim. At Gonesse, near Paris, about the beginning of the 13th century, certain tenants were considered by their neighbours as serfs because of the special forced labour incumbent upon them, particularly the task of escorting prisoners, which was thought to be a base service. But the tenants had no difficulty in getting the king to recognise that, legally speaking, there was no question but what they were free.24 In their efforts to define a serf no lawyer or French lawcourt had recourse to any criterion based upon services rendered. Here then we come face to face with one of the most suggestive aspects of this contrast between two related societies. Both of them exhibited analogous tendencies; but in one of them these remained vague and amorphous, and had no official backing, disappearing among the medley of ideas and feelings that constitute public opinion. In the other, they blossomed forth and were embodied in legal institutions of a very hard-and-fast kind. It will be as well to dwell a little longer on the history of classes in mediaeval society. There is no study better calculated to disclose deep disharmonies within such societies—so deep, in truth, that we can hardly explain them at all and must, for the moment at any rate, be content to note them. First, let us go back to Western and Central Europe about the 10th and 11th centuries. The idea that birth sets an immeasurable gulf between one man and another, a notion common to almost all periods, was certainly not absent from men’s minds. In 987, in order to justify the exclusion of Charles 24 On this matter see my article “Les transformations du servage: à propos de deux documents du XIIIe siècle relatifs à la région parisienne,” in Mélanges d’ histoire du Moyen Âge offerts à M. Ferdinand Lot par ses amis et ses élèves (Paris, 1925), 55–74, here 55ff, where I was incidentally at fault in neglecting to compare the facts with those in England.

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of Lorraine, candidate for the throne of France and the legitimate heir of the Carolingians, Archbishop Auberon—or, if you prefer it, the historian Richer, attributing to the prelate a speech that was perhaps a composite work, but was certainly in keeping with the ideas of the time—invoked the marriage contracted by the claimant to the throne with someone beneath his rank belonging to the vassal class.25 And what son of a knight would have allowed himself to be considered on a par with the son of a serf or even a villein? But we must not deceive ourselves; rights, based upon inheritance, had little power at this period. Society was not so much a gradation of castes distinguished from one another by blood, but rather a somewhat confused tangle of groups based upon relationships of dependence. These ties of protection and obedience were the strongest that could be conceived. Even in the case of Charles of Lorraine, let us carefully note the turn taken spontaneously by Auberon’s argument. There is no doubt that the bishop first reproaches the Carolingian prince with having contracted a misalliance in the strict sense of the word: “He has married a woman not his equal from the ranks of the vassals.” But he immediately adds—remembering that this person’s father had saved the dukes of France: “How the great duke [Hugh Capet] would suffer to know that the Queen had been chosen from among his own vassals!” This at once shifts the matter on to the personal plane. The servile condition itself was the only thing considered strictly hereditary: but even so it was not in practice strictly incompatible with the status of knighthood. As for the rights of freemen, they were dependent upon differences of locality, varieties of contractual relationships, the individual’s social rank, as such, and not upon birth. Then came the 12th and 13th centuries. A silent but decisive modification took place in the ideas and legal outlook of the time. The strength of the personal bond was relaxed: homage tended, though very slowly, to become a solemn but rather empty form; the French serf, the “homme de corps,” was from now on thought of much less as his lord’s “man” than as the member of a despised class. On all sides classes based upon heredity were forming, each with its own legal rules. But what differences there were in the richness of this development!26 In England, villeinage was firmly 25 Richeri historiarum libri IIII, ed. G. H. Pertz (Hanover, 1839), Ch. 11. 26 Marc Bloch, “Un problème d’histoire comparée: la ministerialité en France et en Allernagne,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger (1928): 46–91 especially 86, and infra, 503–28, and particularly 525–26.

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established; but this was almost the only real class. Between free men, the law made no distinctions at all. In France, the lowest degree was serfdom, the members of which class would not henceforward be eligible for knighthood; at the top came the nobility, gradually differentiated from the rest of society by a series of special rights (sometimes simply survivals of ancient custom) relating to private law, criminal law and fiscal law. And lastly in Germany, from the 13th century onwards, the hierarchical idea developed with unparalleled vigour. The serf-knights, who had been eliminated in France by the crystallisation of class feeling, became in Germany the nucleus of a very well-defined social category. In the south of Germany there were even two such classes. The nobility on the one side, and the servile masses on the other, became broken up into a series of ranks graded one above the other; the nobles were not all equal in birth (ebenbürtig) or possessed the connubium. And jurists, working things out as they went, constructed the celebrated theory of the Heerschild in order to regulate the classification of the upper levels of society. They pictured a kind of ladder, each class having its own fixed place on one of the rungs. No one belonging to any one of these groups could, without loss of caste, accept a fief from a man lower down the scale. Neighbouring and contemporary societies; in all cases a development in the same direction, stressing the hierarchical and the hereditary tendencies; but the progress and results of this development reveal such pronounced differences of degree that they are almost equivalent to a difference in kind, and in any case are marked by antitheses characteristic of their respective environments: this is the situation as revealed by the example I have briefly outlined to you. There were other contradictions, simpler to grasp if not to explain, flowing from another kind of divergence between these societies: in one society, the persistence, and in the neighbouring one the extinction, of institutions originally common to them both. In the Carolingian period, over the territory that was later to be France, and over what was destined to become Germany, by far the larger share of that portion of the soil reserved for tenants was divided into tenements (as they were usually called in Romance countries), or Hufen (which was the Germanic term, usually rendered by the Latin mansus). Quite often there were several families of farmers settled on the same tenement. But in the eyes of the lord it did not therefore cease to be viewed as a unity. There were dues and services that bore upon the whole tenement in its entirety—or 113

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rather, on its fragmented parts—on the plots of ground or buildings which it comprised. In principle, it was not permissible ever to subdivide any of these agrarian units. Now let us turn to France round about the year 1200. Hardly anywhere is there any further mention of the peasant tenement as a unit of assessment; where the word does survive in the Romance form of meix or mas, it is in the quite different sense of a house or centre from which the surrounding country is worked.27 Those who drew up charters no longer assessed the extent of seigneuries in terms of the number of tenements they contained. The censiers, or lists of dues levied by the lord, were no longer content, as before, with enumerating the holdings: they set about it either by considering each separate piece aground in great detail, or at least each tenant. There were no more holdings composed of a fixed amount of land. Fields, vineyards and gardens could all be split up quite independently of one another between hereditary holders and various newcomers who had acquired them. In Germany on the other hand the Hufe, which was still not allowed to be subdivided, continued in the majority of manors to form the basis for the levying of rents or services. It, too, was destined in the end to disappear, though only slowly, and often earlier in name than in fact; for up to the end of the feudal period, the German lords sought to preserve by various means the principle of indivisibility of holdings. No parallel efforts were made, it would seem, by their French counterparts. The contrast certainly appears to be an extremely ancient one, seeing that the gradual crumbling away of the peasant tenement in the western part of the Frankish Empire is observable as early as the reign of Charles the Bald.28 I am not even going to attempt to examine the reasons for this here. But I think you will admit that any French or German agrarian history omitting to consider this 27 This was moreover the original meaning (the relationship between mansus and manese is obvious). The tenure had been called after the house, “mother of the field,” as the Scandinavian documents express it. The derived sense had taken on a technical meaning, which disappeared along with the institution that it designated. The first sense of the word survived or was resuscitated. Naturally one can discover here and there some survivals of the “manse” in the ancient sense of the word, as a unit of taxation, late examples which bear witness both to the past state of affairs and to the general revolution which only a few seigneuries, here and there, managed to escape. 28 Capitularia regum Francorum, vol. 2, no. 273, ch. 30, 323. One is tempted to put alongside this document the information already provided by Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, X, 7, about the splitting up of possessiones, the basis of the general Romano-Frankish system of taxation; but this is not the place to go into the relationships between the Frankish manse and the Roman caput—an extremely intricate question.

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question would be neglecting an essential part of its task. If we took into account one country only, the demise of the peasant tenement here and its survival in the other country would appear to be one of those quite natural phenomena that did not need to be explained. Only comparison shows that there is a real problem here, and this in itself is a step forward: for is there a greater danger in any branch of science than the temptation to think that everything happens “quite naturally”? VII

Although one of the essential tasks in comparative linguistics today is the tracing of the original characteristics of the various languages, it is nonetheless true that its first efforts have been directed rather towards another objective—the determination of kinship among the languages, and the search for mother-tongues. One of the most impressive successes of the comparative method has been the delimitation of the Indo-European group, the reconstruction—no doubt hypothetical, yet based on well-founded conjecture—of the basic forms of the original “Indo-European” language. The history of social organisation is in this respect a much more difficult problem. The fact is that a language presents a much more unified and easily definable framework than any system of institutions: hence the relative simplicity of the problem of linguistic affiliations. “Up to now,” writes Meillet, “no case has been discovered giving cause for the belief that the morphological system of a given language is the result of the intermingling of the morphologies of two distinct languages. In all cases so far observed, a language presents a continuous tradition,” whether this tradition be “of the current type—the transmission of the language from the adults to the children”—or whether it arises “from a change of language.” But let us suppose that at a given moment examples are discovered of this phenomenon so far unknown—“real mixtures” between languages. When that happens (I am still quoting M. Meillet) “linguistics will have to devise new methods.”29 Now the historian of societies finds that the facts themselves impose upon him this formidable hypothesis of “mixtures,” which, if realised in the linguistic field, would be such a disturbing in29 A. Meillet, La méthode comparative en linguistique historique (Oslo, 1925), 82, 83.

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fluence in that humane science which is rightly most self-confident. The fact that French has been deeply influenced in its vocabulary and no doubt also in its phonetics by the Germanic languages is of little consequence: there was also some transformation, involuntary and as often as not unconscious, in the Latin language as spoken in Roman Gaul. The descendants of the Teutons who adopted the Romance dialects virtually changed over from one language to the other. But who would venture to represent French mediaeval society as a transformation pure and simple of Gallo-Roman society? Comparative history can reveal to us interactions between human societies which were previously unknown; but, when confronted with societies so far considered as lacking any ancestry in common, it would be foolish to expect to discover detached fragments, broken off long ago from the original mother-society whose existence was previously unsuspected; to seek for them would be to nurse a hope destined almost always to be disappointed. In certain exceptional cases, however, comparison may reveal among societies with very different histories a series of extremely ancient relationships. It would obviously be absurdly rash to jump to the conclusion that these were directly interrelated; but it would seem reasonable to take them as evidence that in a very remote past there was a certain community of make-up in civilization as a whole. The idea of making use of the study of agrarian customs to reconstruct the ethnic map of Europe before the time of written documents is one that occurred long ago to a variety of research workers. No one can fail to recognise Meitzen’s great contribution, but it is generally admitted today that it ended in bankruptcy. Without entering into the details of this failure, we may perhaps indicate the essential faults in method which must be held responsible for it: (1) Meitzen confused the study of different categories of fact, when a more correct method would have begun to distinguish such things as the pattern of settlement and the lay-out; (2) he postulated a “primitive” character for a number of phenomena observed in historical times, and often quite recent times, forgetting that they might well have been the result of relatively recent changes; (3) be paid too exclusive attention to examining facts of a material nature, at the expense of social customs which were reflected in the facts; (4) he only took for his ethnic elements those groups that were historically attested Celts, Teutons, Slavs, etc.—who were all newcomers to their habitats, thus refusing a priori to admit that any part had been played by the nameless mass of people previously established on the land—the “sub116

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stratum,” to use the linguist’s term—though there is no indication that they were destroyed by the invaders, nor that they had been obliged to abandon the whole of their previous customs and way of life. There is an important lesson to be learned from these mistakes: it is not that one should give up the enquiry, but rather pursue it in a more critical spirit and by more prudent methods. Straight away, it is essential to note certain facts. Land in fragmented parcels, in long narrow fields without enclosures, covered enormous tracts of Europe: England, Northern and Central France, almost the whole of Germany, and no doubt also a large part of Poland and Russia. This was in contradistinction to other very different forms of land arrangement: the almost square fields of Southern France, and the enclosed eastern parts of France and England. In short, the agrarian map of Europe is completely at variance with its political and linguistic map. It is perhaps earlier than either of these last two. This is at least a possible conjecture. For the moment, our task is to collect the facts rather than to explain them. To confine ourselves for the moment to the very striking extension, across societies apparently separated in every other way, of the first type of land-system referred to above (long open strips in scattered ownership) it is only too clear a priori that it will be our duty to try out a variety of explanations one after the other. We must consider as possible ones not only a kinship among primitive civilizations, but also the hypothesis of borrowings, and the spread of certain technical processes about a primitive centre. But one thing is certain: we shall never arrive at a complete understanding of the English open-field system, the German Gewanndorf, or the French champs ouverts, by examining England, Germany or France alone. It becomes equally clear moreover—and this is perhaps the clearest and most cogent lesson to be drawn from comparative history—that it is high time to set about breaking down the outmoded topographical compartments within which we seek to confine social realities, for they are not large enough to hold the material we try to cram into them. A certain worthy scholar some time ago wrote a whole book on Les Templiers en Eure-etLoir.30 We can but smile at such ingenuousness. But can any of us who are 30 Ch. Métais, La Templiers en Eure-et-Loir (Chartres, 1896); examples of this kind of anachronism are less rare than one would imagine. In the same département I could refer to: H. Lehr, La Réforme et les églises réformées dans le département actuel d’Eure-et-Loir (1523–1911) (Chartres, 1912); in a neighboring region: Abbé Denis, Lectures sur l’ histoire de l’agriculture dans le département de Seine-et-Marne (Meaux, 1881); the greater part of the volume deals with the period before the Revolution.

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historians be quite sure that we are not constantly guilty of the same failing? To be sure, it is hardly correct practice to transpose the départements into the Middle Ages. But how often have the frontiers of existing States not been treated as a convenient framework for such and such a study of the legal or economic institutions of the past? There are two errors here. First, anachronism, and that of the most obvious kind. It must be some sort of blind faith in a vague historical predestination that has led people to attribute to these mere lines on a map some definite meaning, some prenatal existence—if I may so call it—before the precise moment when the complicated interplay of wars and treaties actually fixed them. Then there is a more fundamental error too, which still persists even when one uses what appears to be a more exact method of selecting the facts for research according to contemporary political, administrative, or national divisions; for where has it ever happened that social phenomena, in any period, have obligingly and with one accord stopped their development at the same boundaries, these being precisely the same as those of political rule or nationality? It is a universally acknowledged fact that the line of demarcation, or, if you prefer it, the marginal zone between those who spoke the langue d’oil and those who spoke the langue d’oc, or the boundary of the langue d’oil on the Germanic side, does not correspond to any State frontier or great feudal estate. The same is true of many other facts in the history of civilization. If you study the French towns of the Middle Ages when the urban renaissance is taking place, you will be trying to comprehend in one sweep two objects almost totally dissimilar in every way, except in name. The ancient Mediterranean towns on the one hand, the traditional centres of the life of the plains, the oppida inhabited from time immemorial by the great men, the lords, the “knights”; on the other, the towns in the rest of France, inhabited above all by merchants, who re-created them. What arbitrary cut with the scissors would justify us in separating this latter urban type from the analogous types of the German Rhineland? Or when the historian has begun by studying the seigneurie to the north of the Loire, and then turns to the documents of Languedoc, does he not often feel further removed from his own country than when he is looking at documents from Hainault or even the Moselle? Whatever particular aspect of European social life is being studied, and at whatever period, the student must find his own geographical framework, 118

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fixed not from outside but from within, if he wishes to escape from a world of artificiality. This will be a difficult piece of research, needing a great deal of circumspection and much feeling of one’s way; but to refuse to undertake it would be an open admission of mental laziness. VIII

How are we to set about this in practical terms? It goes without saying that the comparison will be valueless unless based on the study of facts gleaned from detailed, critical, and reliable documentary research. It is no less evident that human frailty makes it useless to dream of firsthand research in geographical or chronological fields that are too vast. Moreover, it seems inevitable that comparative history properly speaking should always be reserved for a small section of historians. It would perhaps seem to be time to think of organising it and in particular giving it some place in the teaching of the universities.31 All the same, we must not hide from ourselves the fact that since research in many fields is still at a rather backward stage, comparative study can itself only expect to make slow progress. It is always the same old story: it requires years of analysis before there is material for one day’s synthesis.32 This maxim is too often quoted without adding the necessary corrective; “analysis” can only be 31 I think I should here add a further problem peculiar to the French universities, and therefore not suitable for enlarging upon at Oslo. Our higher education is hamstrung by the requirements of the licence, and still more so, in the main faculties, by the syllabus for the agrégation, which reaches the teachers ready made from the hands of the responsible authority, namely the jury. Neither of these, it is true, is limited to the history of France; they almost always include some questions on foreign history; but, for reasons of practical convenience, and quite legitimate ones, these questions are regularly presented in a national framework. The result is that the teacher may well be inclined to give his lessons or direct his pupils’ studies along the lines of English or German institutions, for example; if he is not to neglect the infinitely important interests of the pupils committed to his charge, he can only under very exceptional circumstances reserve a place in his teaching for certain problems that positively demand to be treated today along comparative lines, such as the system of lord and vassal in Western Europe, the development of urban societies, and the agrarian revolution. Teaching and research being in the nature of the case closely bound up with one another, and both having much to gain by mutual support, one can sec how damaging this situation is to our studies. 32 The exact wording is: “Pour un jour de synthèse il faut des années d’analyse”; see Fustel de Coulanges, La Gaule romaine, ed. C. Jullian (Paris, 1875), xiii. Compare with the reflections of Henri Berr, “Projets d’articles du vocabulaire historique,” Bulletin du centre international de Synthèse (June 1928): 22– 49, here 28.

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transformed into “synthesis” if it has had the latter in view from the beginning and has been deliberately designed to serve that purpose. The authors of monographs must be once again reminded that it is their duty to read the literature previously published on subjects analogous to theirs, and not only that bearing upon their own region—which they all do read—not only that concerning immediately neighbouring regions—which they nearly all do read—but also (something too often neglected) that dealing with more distant societies, separated by differences of political constitution or nationality from those they are studying. I will even venture to add: not only general text-books, but also if possible detailed monographs, of a parallel kind to the ones they are themselves undertaking, which will generally be found much more lively and satisfying than extensive summaries. In the course of reading they will find material for their questionnaires, and, maybe, some guiding hypotheses suitable for directing their researches until such time as their own progress will clearly show them as they go whether these provisional guides need correcting or abandoning. They will learn not to attach too much importance to local pseudo-causes; at the same time they will learn to become sensitive to specific differences. This invitation to scholars to pursue this preliminary enquiry by means of books does not mean that they are being invited to follow an easy path. I will not go into the details of the material inconveniences that confront them, but there is no harm in recalling the fact that they are by no means inconsiderable. Bibliographical information is difficult to collect, and the books themselves more difficult still to come by. A good international library loan system, developed and extended to certain great countries who have up till now jealously kept their riches to themselves, would do more for the future of comparative history than a great deal of good advice. But the principal obstacle is an intellectual one; it concerns fixed habits of work; but even these, no doubt, are not impossible to reform. The linguist who has made a special study of a particular language and wants to gather some information about the general characteristics of another language does not usually meet with much difficulty. The grammar he consults sets out the facts classified in a manner not very different from the one he himself uses and explains them in formulae more or less parallel with the ones he is familiar with. But how much less happily placed the historian is! If, for example, he is familiar with French society and wishes to place 120

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one aspect of it side by side with something analogous that a neighbouring society—let us say Germany—has to offer, he turns over the pages of some works devoted to the latter, only to find himself—even if they are the most elementary text-books—having to grope his way all of a sudden in what seems to be a new world. Is it simply the difference of language? Not precisely, for in principle there is no reason why two scientific vocabularies should not correspond pretty exactly as between one language and another. The natural sciences provide many examples of such agreement. The difficulty is that as between the German and the French work most of the words simply do not correspond. How is one to translate into French the German Hörige, or into German the French tenancier? One can see some possible translations, but these are mostly periphrases (one might translate Hörigen as those who depended on the seigneurie) or approximations (Zinsleute would only do for tenanciers en censive, a particular case of a more general idea);33 and very often—as in the translation suggested for Hörigen—these expressions are only moderately common, and do not occur in the books. It would be understandable if this absence of parallelism could be explained by a too obstinate faithfulness to popular mediaeval usage preserved by both languages, whose divergences were a historical fact that had simply to be accepted. But this is far from being the case. The majority of these dissonant terms are entirely the creation of the historians; or at any rate they are the people who have given both precision and extension to the sense in which these terms are used. Rightly or wrongly, and more or less unconsciously, we have elaborated technical vocabularies. Each national school has constructed its own without taking any notice of its neighbor. European history has thus become a veritable Babel. Hence the formidable dangers that lie in wait for inexperienced research-workers—and after all, do not all experts deserve this epithet once they are outside their own domain? I was once in touch with a worker who was studying, in a one-time Teutonic country, some common land used by several villages together, that is to say what the German books, at any rate of a certain period, call a Mark.34 I had the greatest difficulty 33 Naturally one could put something like “Inhaber der Leihegüter”—but who would use an expression like that? Hörige, moreover, does not quite represent tenancier: the meaning is more general. In Spanish, as I was able to satisfy myself when working on a translation, there is literally no word equivalent to “tenure.” 34 Today there can be absolutely no doubt that the word never really bore this narrowly specialised mean-

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in persuading him that analogous practices existed—and sometimes still exist—outside Germany, in numberless countries, and notably in France; for French books have no special word for this kind of common land. But this discordance in vocabulary is hardly more than the expression of a deeper disharmony. On all sides we have French, German, Italian, English studies going on; but hardly ever are they asking the same questions. I quoted just now an example of these perpetual cross-purposes on the subject of agrarian changes. It would not be very difficult to produce others equally eloquent of the situation: the administrative class, for example, has been up to now a completely neglected subject, in France and in England, in descriptions of mediaeval society; or legal rights, which have been discussed in the various countries under completely different schemes of classification. A historian may well be led to wonder whether a certain institution or fact in his own national past is to be found elsewhere too, and if so, with what modifications due to checks in development or greater expansion; but it is more often than not impossible for him to satisfy this legitimate curiosity. When he finds nothing on the subject in the books he consults, he may well wonder whether their silence is to be explained by the silence of the facts themselves, or by the state of oblivion into which a great problem has been allowed to fall. This congress will, I think, be much concerned with reconciliation between nations by means of history. Do not be alarmed: I am not going to attempt any impromptu treatment of this most delicate of all themes. Comparative history as I see it is a purely scientific discipline, orientated towards knowledge and not towards practical results. But what would you say about attempting a reconciliation of our terminologies and our questionnaires? Let us address ourselves in the first place to the authors of general text-books, for they hold the first place of importance as informers and guides. We will not ask them for the moment to abandon the national framework in which their work is ordinarily done. It is clearly an artificial one, but it is still imposed by practical needs. Only gradually will the pursuit of knowledge adapt itself on this point to a position more in keeping with the true facts. But we appeal to them here and now not to forget that they will be read beyond their ing, but should be considered, like Allmende, as equivalent to communal; see G. v. Below, “Allmende und Markgenossenschaft,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1 (1903): 120–23.

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national frontiers. We beg them, as we have already besought the authors of monographs, to base their plan, the treatment of the problems they raise, even the terms they use, on the knowledge gleaned from work carried out in other countries. In this way, through mutual good will, a common scientific language in the highest sense—a collection of symbols and a system of classification—will progressively come into being. Comparative history will thus become easier to understand and to serve, and will inspire local studies with its own spirit—those local studies without which it is powerless, but which can themselves only come to fruition with its help. In a word, let us stop talking about the history of one nation and then of another without attempting to understand them—a course which leads to no understanding. A dialogue between deaf men, in which each one answers the other’s questions all wrong, is an ancient comic device on the stage, getting an easy laugh from an audience which is always ready to be amused; but it is not really to be recommended as a serious intellectual exercise.

[Translated by J. E. Anderson]

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2 Structures and Institutions

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The Preconditions of Representative Government in the Context of World History s o u r c e

Otto Hintze, “Weltgeschichtliche Bedingungen der Repräsentativverfassung,” in Historische Zeitschrift 143, no. 1 (1931): 1–47; english translation: “The Preconditions of Representative Government in the Context of World History,” in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, edited and translated with an introduction by Felix Gilbert, with the assistance of Robert M. Berdahl (Oxford University Press, 1975), 302–53. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

Otto Hintze (1861–1940) was a German historian from Pomerania. He earned

his doctorate in 1884 from the University of Berlin with a dissertation on medieval history. In 1902, he became a professor of political, constitutional, administrative and economic history in Berlin. In his early work, Hintze focused

on the Prussian silk industry in the eighteenth century, while his later studies explored the Prussian administration between 1740 and 1756. Together

with Gustav von Schmoller, Otto Hintze played a leading role in the publication of the book series Acta Borussica. He also served as editor-in-chief

of the For­schungen zur brandenburgischen und preussischen Geschichte. After

World War I, Hintze pursued a comprehensive comparative project on the es-

tate constitutions of Europe, focusing on aspects such as administrative his-

tory, the origins and nature of feudalism, and constitutional history. Accord-

ing to Reinhard ­Bendix, Hintze’s comparative writings “reveal the institutional preconditions that shaped the Western system of constitutional states,” and as

such, they “do for the study of political institutions what Max Weber’s sociology of religion did for the study of religious beliefs.”1

This essay is Hintze’s last major study in the field of comparative history, fol-

lowing up on his previous research on feudalism. Hintze addresses two broad

questions, which reflect the difference in approaches between sociology and

1 Reinhard Bendix, “Hintze, Otto,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2008), available at http://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/hintze-otto.

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history: 1) the role that the system of estates played in the development of modern constitutionalism, and its relation to the larger process of European institutional and constitutional development; and 2) the extent to which the assumption of historical individuality and singularity is compatible with the pur-

suit of comparative historical studies. The study reveals that Hintze was deeply influenced by recent developments in sociology, especially the writings of Franz Oppenheimer and Max Weber. Hintze tests the validity of these authors’ sociological propositions on the medieval system of estates.

· Das Königtums Wilhelms von Holland (Leipzig, 1885); Die Preußische Seidenindustrie im 18. Jahrhundert und ihre Begründung durch Friedrich den Großen, 3 vols. (Berlin: P. Parey, 1892); Einleitende Darstellung der Behördenorganisation und allgemeinen Verwaltung in Preussen beim Regierungsantritt Friedrichs II. (Berlin: Parey, 1901); Staatsverfassung und Heeresverfassung: Vortrag gehalten in der Gehe-Stiftung zu Dresden am 17. Februar 1906 (Dresden: V. Zahn und Jaensch, 1906); Historische und politische Aufsätze, 10 vols. (Berlin: Verl. Dt. Bücherei, 1908); “Das Monarchisches Prinzip und die konstitutionelle Verfassung,” Preußische Jahrbücher 144, no. 3 (1911): 381–412; Die englischen Weltherrschaftspläne und der gegenwärtige Krieg (Berlin: Verl. Kameradschaft, 1914); Die Hohenzollern und ihr Werk (Solingen: A. Steiger, 1915); Deutschland und der Weltkrieg, 2 vols. (Leipzig, Berlin: Verlag von B. G. Teubner, 1916); Geist und Epochen der preussischen Geschichte: ­Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1943); The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). secondary literature · Dietrich Gerhard, “Otto Hintze: His Work and His Significance in Historiography,” Central European History 3, nos. 1–2 (1970): 17–48; Otto Büsch and Michael Erbe, eds., Otto Hintze und die moderne Geschichtswissenschaft: ein Tagungsbericht (Berlin: Colloquium, 1983); Reinhard Bendix, “Hintze, Otto,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2008), available at http://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/hintze-otto. main works

W I

T

he representative system of government that today gives the political life of the whole civilized world its distinctive character traces its historical origins to the system of Estates of the Middle Ages. This system in turn has its roots—if not everywhere nor exclusively, at least in the most important countries—largely in the political and social environment of the feudal system. In principle there are of course many differences between the medieval system of Estates and the representative system of today; never128

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theless, they are links in the same continuous historical chain. The doubts recently expressed about this2—from a focus, significantly, on the system of Estates of the German provinces—must pale before the example of the constitutional development of, say, England. There it is hard to determine the line where the system of Estates passes over into a system of representative government. The French Revolution threw into sharp relief both the historical continuity and the difference in principle between the system of Estates and the modern representative system, in that the Third Estate burst apart the newly revived Estates system and constituted itself as a modern popular assembly, the “National Assembly.” Nowadays the representative system is concomitant with the republican form of government. It originally arose, however, in monarchies, wherever the monarch, representing the unity of the state, opposed the Estates, representing the manifold private interests that had to be repeatedly woven anew into a unified front. This dualism is basic for the system of representative government. In modern political life it appears in the polarity of state versus society, of the unity of interest versus the diversity of interests within a people. In the constitutional history of France, Germany, and England, we commonly assume a periodization in which the era of Estates follows right after the era of the feudal state, and is then followed, with or without an intermediate stage of absolutism, by the modern constitutional era of the representative state. For a long time comparative history did not advance beyond this limited view. Eastern Europe was merely occasionally drawn into the existing scheme, which by and large seemed to fit Eastern Europe only in a qualified fashion.3 Of late, however, sociologists have begun to apply this same scheme, again with some qualifications, to the political development of all peoples, without regard for the various cultural groupings. This attempt at sociological construction demands a reply. I am thinking here particularly of two modern German authors, Wilhelm Wundt and Franz Oppenheimer. Wundt, in Volume VIII of his great work on social psychology, employs the era of feudalism and the era of Estates as regular stages for all peoples on the way to modern political organization. Oppenheimer, in 2 See Friedrich Tezner, “Technik und Geist des ständisch-monarchischen Staatsrechts,” in G. Schmoller’s Staats- und sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungen 19 (1901). 3 Otto Hoetzsch, “Adel und Lehnswesen in Russland und Polen und ihr Verhältnis zur deutschen Entwicklung,” Historische Zeitschrift 108 (1912): 541–92, here 541ff.

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his comprehensive System of Sociology, whose volume on the State has appeared in a new edition, takes the same line at least with regard to what he calls the in-land states in contrast to the maritime states, by which he means chiefly the states of the ancient, Mediterranean culture. I have examined the arguments for this thesis and have found them untenable for such a general application.4 Max Weber himself was a long way from accepting evidence like this; and yet his various explications betray noticeable gaps regarding this very problem of the system of Estates and require complementation. . . One has to concede that feudalism did appear outside the European realm, although with the concept in its present undefined condition we must set out the various types of feudalism in a much clearer way than has hitherto been the case.5 As for the system of Estates, on the other hand, it remains my conviction that they are limited to the cultural realm of the Christian West. Even those countries outside the world of Western culture which did undergo a feudalistic stage—such as Japan, the Islamic states, perhaps also ancient Egypt in the transition from the Old to the Middle Kingdom, and Mycenaean Greece—show no trace of a real system of Estates. With the polis the ancients traveled a completely different road in the development of their states and institutions. In the Christian West, however, the phenomenon of Estates was rather common not only among the Latin-Teutonic peoples but also in the purely Germanic Scandinavian North, as well as among the Slavs and the Magyars. In the West they lacked full development only in those regions where the municipal structure of the states of the ancient world still exercised considerable influence, particularly in Italy but also in other parts of Southern Europe. In southern Italy feudalism and the system of Estates were not indigenous but had been introduced through the Norman Conquest. Without the invasion the municipal form of organization would certainly have predominated there, just as in northern and central Italy. The ancient city-state, constituted, as Jellinek says, “on monistic, purely corporative principles, on the social basis of a sharp differentiation between free men and slaves,” was no more compatible with a feudal Estates organization than was universal empire at the opposite end 4 Otto Hintze, “Soziologische und geschichtliche Staatsauffassung,” Zeitschrift für die gesamten Staats­ wissenschaften 86, no. 1 (1929): 35–106. 5 Otto Hintze, “Wesen und Verbreitung des Feudalismus,” Sitzungsberichte, Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin (1929): 321–47.

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of the spectrum, where the corporative element was completely suppressed by the monarchical. The feudal and Estates system had its real origin in the Latin-Teutonic heart of modern Europe, as represented by the building of the great Frankish empire. From here it radiated in various directions, but it was directly transmitted only in part. As a rule, certain beginnings and rudiments were already in existence that needed only to be recast or brought to fuller development. England, for example, which in Anglo-Saxon times showed possibilities for development of this kind, became through the Norman Conquest the classical exponent of a particularly strong and promising feudal and Estates system, distinguished by its early amalgamation of feudal law with common law. The northern states and Poland and Hungary were absorbed into the same development. I would only stress in passing the remarkable Aragonese influences on Hungary recently demonstrated by Professor Marczali.6 In fact the system of Estates extended beyond the narrow circle of the Christian West and of the Roman Catholic Church. Konstantin Jireček has detected rudiments of it among the Serbs and other South Slav peoples.7 As for Russia, Maxim Kovalevsky’s illuminating study has established beyond doubt the existence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of not simply an Upper House of Magnates—the Boyar Duma—but also of a Lower House of service nobility and urban merchant patricians, mainly from Moscow and its environs. This body was frequently convoked under the name Zemsky Sobor and enjoyed important advisory functions. One recognizes, of course, as Russian historians such as Klyuchevsky and Milyukov have emphasized more heavily than Kovalevsky,8 that we are dealing here with a much weaker form of representation in Estates than in the West. In Russia the Estates were princely organizations and lacked the inner strength and corporate independence of the Estates in the West. 6 Henrik Marczali, Ungarische Verfassungsgeschichte (Tübingen, 1910), 23; in like manner to the basic ideas of the 1222 “Golden Bull,” the tradition of the Hungarian “Original Treaty” of 890, whose remarkable similarity to the legendary Aragonese Fuero of Sobrarbe has already been stressed by Fritz Kern, Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im frühen Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1914), 370, may also have been influenced by the Aragonese model. 7 Konstantin Josef Jireček, “Staat und Gesellschaft im mittelalterlichen Serbien,” in Wiener Akademie, Denkschriften der philosophisch-historischen Klasse, vols. 55–56 (1912). 8 Maxim Kovalevsky, Russian Political Institutions (Chicago, 1902); see Karl Stählin’s recent work, Geschichte Russlands (Stuttgart, 1923), 1, 379ff.

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The question now arises, how is this remarkable fact to be explained— that the system of representative Estates appears regularly as an indigenous phenomenon in the Christian West but does not appear in the rest of the world? Naturally, the two comprehensive systems that ruled and typified the political and social life of the West in the Middle Ages offer themselves immediately as means of explanation: feudalism and the Christian Church, specifically in the form of the Roman Catholic hierocracy. It is a fact that we can detect in both important motives that lent assistance to the development of the system of Estates. A third factor, however, closely connected to the other two, enters in: the peculiar form of nation-building in the West. This produced a constant competition between the individual states for power and prestige, without ever leading to a general unification in a universal empire. Because of this competition the states were prompted toward increasing rationalization and consolidation of their political machine (partly with instruments inherited from ancient civilization and transmitted by the Church). On the other hand, this process triggered its opposite: a corporate reaction. We are presented, then, with two closely related phenomena of worldhistorical nature: the European state system and the modern sovereign state, both of which are confined to and peculiarly indigenous to the Christian West, as is the representative system of Estates. We might even go so far as to claim that without this state system and its tendency toward constant rivalry, without the modernization that went with it—that is to say, the consolidation and rationalization of state operations—even the representative system of Estates would not have appeared. It did not exist in a vacuum; and it can be completely understood only in relation to the structure of European political life that had been gradually developing since the later Middle Ages, achieving fruition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the background, more or less hidden, was the omnipresent influence, on Modern Western history, of the ancient world, particularly of the Roman Empire, making itself felt through the agency of the Christian Church. Of course, the Roman Empire itself could not provide any direct model for the medieval Estates, because of its municipal structure and especially because of its absolute monarchical mode of government. It is true that the diarchy of Emperor and Senate, as it existed under Augustus, showed a certain 132

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similarity with the dualism of the system of Estates, but still its significance was fleeting and influenced the modern world of states not as a matter of immediate historical continuity but only as a humanist echo of the past. Still, it was this kind of thinking that prompted countries like Poland and Sweden in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to call their Upper Houses “Senates,” and it is the reason that even today nations like the United States and the French Republic use the same term for their upper chambers. Much more important was the indirect influence previously underrated in this context, that the Roman provincial Diets—the concilia—exercised on the development of the representative system in the Christian West as the presumed model for the Christian Councils. The work of Konrad Lübeck9 shows at least in all probability that first in the East and then in the West of the Empire these concilia provided the stimulus and the model for Diets primarily intended to foster the cult of the divine Emperor but which in connection with this task possessed some representative functions.10 It also shows that first in the East and later in the West they provide the stimulus and model for the periodic convocation of synods of the Christian parishes of a region. This significantly enhances our basic perception that the organization of the Christian Church followed to a large extent the model given it by the Roman Empire. I would also like to emphasize the fact that the word repraesentatio is used for the first time in its modern meaning by Tertullian, who is often cited as our earliest source on the old Christian Councils.11 As for the significance of these Councils for the development of the medieval representative assemblies, we shall discuss them later. For the moment it may suffice to point to the testimony of Nicholas of Cusa, who regarded the internal historical connection between the German Diets and the ecclesiastical Councils as obvious, treating these Diets simply as the secular counterpart of the Councils.12 9 Konrad Lübeck, “Reichseinteilnug und kirchliche Hierarchie des Orients bis zum Ausgange des 4. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Rechts- und Verfassungsgeschichte der Kirche,” in Kirchengeschichtliche Studien 5, no. 4 (Münster, 1901). 10 Joachim Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung (Leipzig, 1873), 1:503ff; Handbuch der Römischen Altertümer, vol. 4 (Leipzig, 1873). 11 Tertullian, De ieiunio adversus psychicos 13: “Aguntur per Graecias illa certis in locis concilia ex universis ecclesiis, per quae et altiora quaeque in commune tractantur et ipsa repraesentatio totius nominis Christiani magna veneratione celebrantur.” (Hintze’s italics). 12 Nicolaus de Cusa, De Concordantia catholica (Basel, 1433), vol. 3.

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Feudalism is a concept that still needs to be clarified and is rather complex. One must, as von Below13 taught, distinguish it from the genuine system of fiefs. The system of fiefs is a clearly definable legal concept, whereas feudalism is more a sociological type or the collective term for such a type. The system of fiefs is the narrower, feudalism the broader, concept. But what one wants to embrace under feudalism beyond the system of fiefs is still subject to debate. In this regard I part company with von Below. These questions, however, are a problem unto themselves that I have dealt with specifically elsewhere.14 Their solution is in any case not of vital importance to our present topic. After all, there is no general and necessary connection between the feudal system and the system of Estates. There are feudal systems that never led to a system of Estates, as in Turkey and Japan. On the other hand, a system of Estates arose in certain countries that had no system of fiefs, such as Hungary and Poland. What we are dealing with here, as we shall see, is variation among types, both within the feudal system and within the system of Estates.15 In any case the factors growing out of feudalism or affecting the development of Estates through feudalism can be rather clearly ascertained without broaching any further the problem of feudalism itself. There are two factors of this kind. In the first place there is the special, peculiar character, conditioned socially and psychologically, of the bond existing between monarchical sovereignty and subjects and lying at the foundation of the Western feudal state. The basic idea was that dominion, which rested originally on leadership rather than on repression, was exercised in the name of and with the consent of the people, whether expressly given or tacitly assumed. It meant that the ruler also behaved as the representative of a whole people who were duty-bound to obey but to whom he himself was in some way responsible so that it was a matter of reciprocal obligation between ruler and subject, of a linking of the two, if not in formal law, at least in custom and tradition. This idea received its strongest expression among the Germanic peoples and gained among them, in time, real juridical validity. In the second place there was the exemption of certain persons or groups from the direct effects of public authority, and the transfer of public, legal powers to these very persons or groups, the upshot being isolated local 13 Georg von Below, Der deutsche Staat des Mittelalters (Leipzig, 1914), 243ff. 14 See Hintze, “Wesen und Verbreitung des Feudalismus.” 15 See my essay, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen,” Historische Zeitschrift 141 (1930): 229–48.

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self-government. This was mainly the result of that legal institution known as “immunity,” a term that, as an aspect of the real system of fiefs and of manorial lordship, is usually associated with the concept of feudalism. As we know, it is an institution that grew originally out of the privileged legal status of the Imperial domains in the Roman Empire and was subsequently accorded to the extensive holdings of the Church, and finally extended to secular local authorities with a feudal Estates-like character. All the privileges that made up the peculiar legal foundation of the Estates government depended on this institution. In a certain sense one can call these privileges the forerunner and pace-setter for modern personal civil rights, usually argued for only on the grounds of natural law, because they delineated the positive, personal, and civil rights of individual groups of subjects. These rights depended on being either granted or usurped and on subsequently being expressly or tacitly recognized. Tied to these elements of a primitive notion of a state based on law and of a rudimentary form of individual civil rights of individual privileged groups of subjects was the peculiar form of nation-building in the West owing to the fundamental and universally important dualism of Church and State, which ultimately produced a state system based on international law. These states were forced by competition and rivalry progressively to consolidate and to rationalize their respective government operations, a process unrivaled in world history and of important, wide-ranging consequences. In this work the standard-bearer of the process of modern nation-building— the princely power—naturally availed itself primarily of those elements of the population whose possessions and whose authority on the local level made them especially capable of financial and military contributions and therefore capable of assisting the princely power in the new type of state. These elements were the so-called Estates. They were to begin with the born and sworn councilors of the sovereign, with whom he treated the ardua negotia regni in periodic court assemblies often held as an adjunct to some high Church feast day. To the degree, however, that the sovereign increased his claim to financial and military contributions for his policies and at the same time occasionally still tried to avoid the increasingly irksome participation of the notables, the Estates, as though by way of compensation, demanded for each increase in the contributions an increase or reinforcement of their privileges. To the degree that the consolidation and 135

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rationalization of the new state operations reinforced the purely ruling organs and functions at the court and throughout the land, those privileged groups of subjects felt themselves equally compelled to combine and to form a united front to maintain their liberties and privileges within the consolidating state. In the end they received most of what they demanded. This process can be most clearly seen in their reaction to higher and more regular taxation, the most important aspect of the consolidation of state operations and the driving force in the development of the system of Estates. This kind of consolidation and rationalization of state operations we find only in the West. In order to grasp the contrast between modern state operations and those of the ancient Oriental culture, we need only to think of the justice dispensed by the Turkish Kadi, which was based on considerations of economy and expediency according to principles provided in the Koran, but is worlds apart from the spirit of a rational administration of justice. Or one need only think of the administrative methods of the Chinese Mandarins, with their literary, humanistic education, exercising their office on the basis of Confucian teaching, without any real administrative or economic expertise. It was apparently the Church, especially the Roman Catholic, steeped as it was in the spirit of rational jurisprudence, which was of crucial influence for the Western political world. Behind the Church lay the civilization of antiquity, particularly the administrative and legal order of the Roman Empire. Roman law became a powerful lever for modern state operations. It was therefore the creative synthesis of two intertwined worldhistorical civilizations that produced the peculiar political development of the West. II

Let us now consider more closely various aspects of this outline. I shall begin with what I like to call the germ of a primitive notion of the state based on law. It is the idea, particularly strong and clearly developed in Germanic law, of the reciprocal obligations of the ruler and his subjects instead of the one-way street of the ruler’s prerogatives and the subjects’ duty to obey. It is the idea that the relation of ruler to ruled is restricted to the confinements of law or tradition. That was the idea of liberty that Montesquieu 136

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found in Tacitus’ Germania,16 and to it he tried to trace the parliamentary constitution of England—an interpretation, by the way, which had a long history before Montesquieu, as a recent special study has shown.17 The idea was later taken up by Guizot and Eichhorn, and even recently Spangenberg, in his work Vom Lehnsstaat zum Ständestaat, has expressly endorsed it— although, in the form in which this thesis has been generally presented to us—insofar as it offers a specifically German and racial predilection—it is hardly tenable. We find a similar basic idea among the Slavic peoples, and Schrader18 goes so far as to claim that it is a common Indo-Germanic idea. Among all of them, he discovers, the twin pillars of the political order are, as in Tacitus, the princes and the assembly of the inhabitants of the land. Even this, however, seems too strict a geographical limitation. There is much the same basic idea in Hungarian tradition and elsewhere. A German missionary19 has even undertaken to demonstrate that it existed among the West Africa tribe of the Eve in Togoland. Alfred Vierkandt20 describes the constitution of all primitive peoples in the same vein. We are dealing not with a special racial predilection but with a general and typical phenomenon among peoples who have reached the level of a primitive tribal constitution. Montesquieu himself was far removed from any narrow racial-psychological interpretation. He preferred to use the influence of his beloved “climatic” factors, by which he meant the natural basis of what Karl Marx later termed “the economic structure of society.” It seemed to him that the birthplace of Germanic freedom was the primitive life and culture of the forest. He was thinking in this context chiefly of the contrast with ancient Mediterranean civilization with its city-state, or with the great ancient river civilization in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and. China, with their great patrimonial 16 C. d S. Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, vol. 11, chap. 6. (Paris, 1748) 17 Erwin Hölzle, “Die Idee einer altgermanischen Freiheit von Montesquieu,” Historische Zeitschrift 5 (1925): 1–116. 18 Otto Schrader, Reallexikon der indogermanischen Alterturmskunde: Grundzüge einer kultur- und völkergeschichte Alteuropas (Strasbourg, 1901). 19 Jacob Spieth, Die Ewe-Stämme (Berlin, 1906), 102ff; quoted in Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie: eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, vol. 8 (Leipzig, 1904), 298; see also Richard Thurnwald, “Social Systems in Africa,” Africa; Journal of International Institute of African Languages and Civilization, vol. 2, 204ff, under “Touareg Tribes.” 20 Die Kultur der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1905); in the section Allgemeine Verfassungs und Verwaltungsgeschichte, 3ff.

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empires tending toward bureaucratic administration. Differences in conditions of settlement and other material bases of culture are certainly of great significance for our problem; yet, as we shall see, other and more important factors were involved. We might even speak of a general socio-psychological predisposition that emerges almost everywhere in typical forms on the cultural level of a primitive tribal or clan constitution but which, with the progress of civilization, has been able to develop freely to higher forms only in certain places. The problem, then, requires this formulation: What are the circumstances that have determined that this original germ of a primitive idea of state ruled by law came to full development not in the larger part of the world but only in the Western cultural realm? Here, as we have already said, the conditions of settlement played a part. In the ancient city-state, bound as it was to the sea and to the coastal civilization of the Mediterranean, this germ of an idea developed quite differently than it did in the great inland regions of rivers and forests. But beyond this there was another decisive circumstance that often completely stunted its growth. This was the excessively strong development of the office of ruler through its alliance with religion and the social tendencies to which religion gave rise. The whole of Oriental civilization, ancient and modern, is permeated with this. The ruler is either a god walking on earth, as in ancient Egypt or among the Accadian Assyrians or in China and Japan; or he is at least the special protégé and agent of the gods, as the Kings of Babylon protected by the Marduk, as the Achemenids by the Ahura Mazda, or by the other local gods of the regions they had conquered, or as the Caliphs of the Islamic states were as successors to the Prophet; or he is deified through the ancient process of apotheosis, as were Alexander and the Roman Emperors. The result everywhere is enormous strengthening of the temporal authority by the spiritual, or even the idea of the unity of Church and State, as in the Roman Empire after Constantine and in the Islamic empires. Easily allied to this was the trend toward universal monarchy and toward the unlimited absolutism of the ruling power. In all the cases mentioned both occurred, and the germ of the idea of state based on law became stunted. This trend is not absent in the West either, particularly among the Germans. The Anglo-Saxon kings all traced their lineage to Wotan, and even the Merovingians boasted of a divine origin which, even after their conversion to Christianity, conferred on them a very effective magical and sacral 138

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consecration, now supplemented and reinforced by the legendary anointing of Clovis from the ampulla brought from heaven. The fact that the Carolingians, unable to establish for themselves a sacral tradition of this type, found it to their interest to create intimate links with the Roman Catholic Church in order to make up for what they lacked in legitimacy by spiritual anointment, and to legitimize their usurpation of the Crown, is an historic turning point. But consecration by the Church limited from the outset the character of the ruler, by committing him to divine law. The title Dei gratia, which became more and more common with rulers in the entire West after Charlemagne and whose meaning has been subject to considerable debate, does entail this commitment above everything, and thus a weakening of the heathen magical and sacral character of the ruler’s office, and security against perversion of the office into tyrannical arbitrariness or universal omnipotence. Church doctrine therefore assimilated the German idea of the state based on law, preserved it, protected it from ruin. At the same time, however, it combined the idea with ecclesiastical ideas of the jus divinum and its reminiscences of ancient ideas of natural law and particularly of Stoicism. In this way Christian doctrine created a theory of Christian social organization that was later developed in the thirteenth century, after the rediscovery of Aristotle and his absorption by way of Thomas Aquinas into the teachings of the Church, into a comprehensive system that dominated the medieval world. It became the spiritual soil in which the system of Estates in the West was nourished. In order to achieve fruition this development required the fulfillment of certain conditions. It could happen only after the Church, with the help of the Cluniac movement, had freed itself from patrimonial and feudal dependency on the protective secular power which, because churches were regarded as property, threatened to rule the Church throughout the West, particularly in the empire of the Saxons and Salians. The investiture struggle had to be ended, and the Church had to become an autonomous institution under the strong leadership of a papacy arrogating to itself hierocratic claims that soon brought about conflicts with the emperors and later also with other secular powers. This long-lasting conflict, reaching from the eleventh century to the close of the Middle Ages, was one of the most important factors in world history and was of the utmost significance in the rise of the system of Estates. The political and social theory of the Church 139

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was in large part an accompaniment of this struggle between sacerdotium and imperium. It was a weapon forged and used with great success in the intramural ecclesiastical combat of the eleventh century. One need mention only the names of Manegold of Lauterbach or John of Salisbury. The admixture of natural law from the ancient world introduced into Germanic law the alien idea of a kind of popular sovereignty, of a delegation of the Crown by the people. This ingredient lent new and strong support to the old German right of resistance against illegal power. I shall not go farther into this, for it has been clearly and accurately outlined by Gierke and also, recently, by Fritz Kern21 and Kurt Wolzendorff.22 I would only like to stress that the Roman Church, by virtue of the factors defined above, came to have a clear and decisive preference for the principle of election in the appointment of secular rulers. The early Middle Ages witnessed in Germanic law and elsewhere a competition or combination of the two principles—hereditary right and election—whereby election really had a magical and ritual origin; it was not based on the idea that among the claimants to the Crown one would arbitrarily become the ruler, but it assumed that election would find the man who had the true right to the Crown. Through the influence of the Church hereditary right was forced into retreat. The principle of election was favored; the magical character of the act of election transformed it into a church ritual so that participation of the Church became a necessary part of the procedure. As a rule, it was the great ecclesiastical lords who took the lead among the electors of Kings and it became general conviction that after the election the Kings in their government would chiefly rely on those who had elected them. In general, the high Church dignitaries were advocates of the Church’s conception of a limitation of secular power by divine law and of a form of Christian society based on this law. This meant that something of the basic Germanic ideas of law that had been implanted in the Church’s teachings could be carried over to non-Germanic peoples insofar as they had developed similar conceptions although in a weaker, even obscure, form; 21 Fritz Kern, Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im frühem Mittelalter (Leipzig, 1914). 22 Kurt Wolzendorff, “Staatsrecht und Naturrecht in der Lehre vom Widerstandsrecht des Volkes gegen rechtswidrige Ausübung der Staatsgewalt: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des modernen Staatsgedankens,” Untersuchungen zur Deutschen Staats- und Rechtsgeschichte, vol. 126 (Wrocław, 1916).

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the Poles seem to be an example of this. One has to realize in this context that the chancelleries forming the center of the whole primitive machinery of state were in the hands of ecclesiastics, that the procedures and ideas of these chancelleries passed from country to country, from court to court, and that in this way a certain uniformity of thinking about polities and administration was established which gave way only much later to the advancing differentiation of national characters. Just as with Dei gratia, countless other formulas traveled throughout the West, and with them went the Church’s doctrine of a Christian society, which became the seedbed of the system of Estates. The example of Church Councils in the Middle Ages was also of great importance in the development of assemblies of the Estates into regular institutions. In the Frankish kingdom the court Diets which the King held with the notables and which in part developed into formal Diets of the Empire, had their beginnings, on one hand, in the old military review—the March-field, a re-casting of the old Germanic local community gatherings, and on the other, in the national Councils or Synods of the Church. The latter exercise a decisive influence. A Synod of the Church held under King Pippin in 755 at Verneuil23 resolved that two Synods should be held a year, the first in March, in the presence of the King, to be held wherever he convoked it (thus, by old established custom coinciding with the March-field; in this particular year the March-field was postponed until May, and this forced the Church, too, to postpone its assembly), the second at the beginning of October at a place to be agreed upon by the bishops in March. “Presumably in imitation of the two synods decided upon then,” Brunner says, “the custom arose of holding two court Diets every year.”24 These are the two assemblies Hincmar of Reims speaks of in his work De ordine palatii. The spring assembly was held in May and coincided with the May-field. It was a formal Diet of the realm, made up of the temporal and ecclesiastical notables of the realm, and, in the background, the horsemen, to whom all the resolutions were customarily communicated. The autumn assembly was a smaller one of specially trusted ecclesiastical and temporal advisers and great lords for the purpose only of discharging important business and of 23 Capitularia I. 34, Concilium Vernense, c. 4. 24 Heinrich Brunner, Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte (1st ed., Leipzig. 1887; 2nd ed., Leipzig, 1906), 2 (i); 231– 32 (ii); 178.

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preparing with this smaller group the agenda for the next spring assembly. Thus, although the Council and the Diet were in theory separate, they in fact came down to the same thing. Alongside the designations placitum generale or conventus generalis as applied to the greater assembly, there were also concilium and synodus. The assembly, according to Hincmar’s description, split into two curiae, one ecclesiastical and one temporal, which sometimes met apart and sometimes met together. The spiritual curia was separated from time to time into a special assembly of bishops and a special assembly of abbots. That the King convoked and dissolved the assembly derived from temporal usage; that the assembly was limited to the questions put before it by the King and possessed no initiative of its own corresponded to the conciliar tradition. The formulation of the agenda and of the resolutions of the body certainly lay in the hands of clergymen. We have here, therefore, an institution that derives from two sources: Germanic tradition and ecclesiastical statute. We may assume also that the model of Church Councils was a heavy influence in consolidating the position of these representative bodies as institutions and in lending them their corporative structure. From the standpoint of legal history the Carolingian placitum generale or concilium must be regarded, as Brunner says, as the seed of the Estates and parliaments we find later in Western and Central Europe. Here, too, there was no unbroken continuity, but the tradition remained alive, and the same forces and the same tendencies were at work which later under different conditions shaped the Diets and Estates. The influence of Church Councils on the court Diets and local assemblies made itself felt even more strongly than in the Frankish state in the Visigothic realm, which, indeed, had a half-ecclesiastical quality. Even after the collapse of Arab rule this influence was so important in the new Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula that Marina, the father of Castilian legal history, chose to trace the origin of the Cortes directly to the Councils of the Church.25 25 F. Martínez Marina, Teoria de las Cortes o grandes Juntas nacionales de los Reinos de Leon y Castilla, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1813); there is unfortunately nothing about this in Eduardo de Hinojosa, Documentos para la historia de las institutiones de Leon y de Castilla, vol. 10–14 (Madrid, 1919); nor in Ernst Mayer’s Historia de las instituciones sociales y politicos de España y Portugal (Madrid, 1925); on Aragon, where the relation was the same, see V. De la Fuente, Estudios criticos sobre la historia y el derecho de Aragon, 3 vols. (Madrid. 1884–1886) 3:42ff, 63; and Tourtoulon, Jaime I le Conquérant, roi d’Aragon, vol. 2 (Montpellier, 1867), 175.

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Similar to what occurred in the Frankish realm, a blending of ecclesiastical and temporal elements took place in the local assemblies of the AngloSaxon realm. In the Witenagemote the bishops stood beside the Witan, and here too there developed division between a spiritual and a secular curia.26 In the Anglo-Norman realm—which after all was established with the help of the Curia—the bishops (who were soon all Normans) continued to exert decisive influence in the court assemblies out of which the original parliament of prelates and barons arose. Before the Commons, the real representatives of the towns and the shires, had been added to this great Royal Council and it had become the parliamentum, in England representative assemblies of the Church in which not simply bishops and other prelates appeared, but also representatives of the Cathedral chapters and of the founders of ecclesiastical institutions (Kollegiatstifter) as well as of the lower diocesan clergy in the form of procurators (proctors) of the diaconates and the archdiaconates. These assemblies were known as convocations.27 They were summoned after the beginning of the thirteenth century, no longer exclusively and directly by the King and no longer for the whole country but separately, by the archbishops, at times at the behest of the King, for the two Church sees of York and Canterbury, to work on Church legislation. These convocations acquired great political importance after the conflict between Pope Boniface VIII and the French King Philip IV over the taxation of the clergy by the state. The Bull Clericis laicos of 1296 extended to the clergy of England the ban on paying taxes demanded by the King; but then followed the compromise on the basis of the Bull Romana mater of 1297, which included England in the permission to pay these taxes if the payment was voluntary. Thus, the clergy’s privilege to approve taxes was clearer and more extensive than that given the secular Parliament by the confirmatio chartarum of 1297,28 and the clergy did not fail to make use of it in its convocations, little to the satisfaction of Edward I. The King tried, in consequence, to draw the representatives of the clergy away from these assemblies and into the secular Parliament by charging the bishops in the so-called praemunientes clause of their summons to Parliament, to bring along the heads of the 26 Felix Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (Halle, 1916), subject index, under “Bischöfe.” 27 Julius Hatschek, Englische Verfassungsgeschichte (Munich, 1913), 308ff; also see A. F. Pollard, The Evolution of Parliament, 2nd ed. (London, 1926). 28 Against Riess, G. W. Prothero, in English Historical Review, vol. 5, 148ff.

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Chapters, the archdeacons, one representative for the lay clergy for each cathedral, and two representatives of the diocesan clergy.29 But this attempt failed. The representatives of the clergy never appeared numerous enough in parliament, and finally after 1332 stayed away altogether. They preferred to make their appropriation for themselves in the convocations, which maintained this function until 1664. Nonetheless, the proctors of the clergy were summoned regularly in the fourteenth and even in the fifteenth centuries. The treatise concerning the modus tenendi parliamentum,30 which dates from the mid-fourteenth century and deliberately emphasizes the representative character of the lower House compared to the ecclesiastical and temporal lords, lists among the three gradus sive genera of which the communitas parliamenti consisted, in first place the procuratores cleri, in second place the knights of the shires, and in third place the cives et burgenses. These three groups of representatives, in opposition to the lords, are characterized as men qui repraesentant totam communitatem Angliae. The procurates cleri, who were chosen by order of the bishops in the diaconates and archdiaconates of their dioceses, had been active in the convocations before the Commons was added to Parliament, and may well have provided the model for the secular representation of local units in the assemblies of the land. The representative idea had already been realized in the convocations long before the knights of the shires were summoned to Parliament by King John in 1213, and the representatives of the civitates et burgi in 1265. It was apparently imparted by the conciliar tradition, and did not require first a juridical framework made up of specifically Germanic legal ideas. Hatschek, who tries to show that this is the case, denies—wrongly, as it seems to me—the representative character of the convocations.31 He is obviously thinking in terms of the modern concept of popular representation, as it has existed since the French Revolution, rather than of the specific medieval concept of representation of Estates. His derivation of the representative principle from the old Germanic legal principle of the separation of guilt and liability32 I find neither clear nor convincing. This principle, a consequence of the associative idea, provides only the formal possibility for 29 Hatschek, Englische Verfassungsgeschichte, 192 and 314ff. 30 William Stubbs, Select Charters (Oxford, 1913), 512ff. 31 Hatschek, Englische Verfassungsgeschichte, 315. 32 Hatschek, Englische Verfassungsgeschichte, 209ff.

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the legal construction of a representative relation but does not suggest a sufficient reason for its development. In the course of his argument Hatschek does correctly stress that the peculiar character of representation in England, in the beginning a duty and not a privilege, is to be explained by the severe pressure of the state which turned the old cooperative associations into passive and duty-bound service associations and imposed joint liability on them for whatever their legal representatives had granted, more or less under heavy pressure, to the King in the way of contributions and services. Those who appeared in the county court passed as the representatives of the shire, and those who had failed to answer the summons were regarded as having given their consent, by virtue of an arbitrary legal fiction. In the general assemblies, the Parliaments, however, representation of the towns and shires by delegate burghers and knights was based on no different principle than the representation of the diocesan clergy by the proctors. If we, like Stubbs, conceive of the rise of Parliament as a concentration of local administrative machinery, this process could well have been stimulated by the older example of representation in the Church, even if later the process was reversed and the convocations were influenced in many particulars by the fully-developed secular Parliament (for example, in the division into two Houses). Thus, the argument would run, the assemblies of the Church would have provided the hidden historical connection between the old Witenagemote and the Parliament which Freeman and other English legal historians assumed to exist, though on the basis of inadequate knowledge of sources and in an untenable form. Therefore the substantial influence of the conciliar institutions of the Church on the development of representative assemblies is at least very probable not only in the successor states of the Carolingian Empire, but also in Spain, and above all in England. In any case it was everywhere very significant that the members of the ecclesiastical councils were simultaneously eminent, and often leading, members of secular provincial or Imperial assemblies: We can assume, as a general rule, that the high clergy were also the leaders of Estates movements of the Middle Ages. The fact that in the German territories the ecclesiastical curias were less important and were partly even lacking—a fact von Below gives great weight33—proves noth33 Georg von Below, Territorium und Stadt (München, 1900), 163ff; 2nd ed. (1923), 53ff.

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ing against the general importance of the influence of the clergy so widely attested to in earlier times and in larger political surroundings. The German territories were, after all, small and abnormal formations and cannot be made the basis for generalizations in constitutional history. Consonant with this, we find the Roman Curia striving in many places to create Estates and constitutions. What in general was at stake here was the limitation of secular power and the gaining of leverage for the permanent influence of Church policy. This point will be developed farther on. In the teachings of Thomas Aquinas no real theory of a system of Estates is to be found or to be expected.34 In my view, no such interpretation should be given to the famous passage in the Summa Theologiae, in which, dealing with mixed constitutions, the monarchy is complemented by principes representing the aristocratic principle, and by the people, who elect or are entitled to elect them, representing the democratic principle. What is at issue here is a constitution for the entire Christian West as a great comprehensive unity. Monarchy is the universal rule of the Pope supported by the Emperor, or the Emperor himself as bearer of the secular sword. The princes are the individual kings of Christendom, who are largely elective monarchs. Here too we see the Church’s preference for the electoral principle. It provides the soil for a system of Estates, not the system itself. Not until after the conciliar period when the Church of the Popes, having ascended to absolutism, passed through a great constitutional crisis in which the conciliar principle opposed Papal supremacy do we find a general theory of Estates among ecclesiastical writers. Thus that famous passage in Nicholas of Cusa’s work35 to which Gierke so often refers.36 This passage concerns Imperial and provincial estates in all European states. It is no accident that the century of the great reforming councils was also an age of advance for the secular system of representative estates, particularly in the Holy Roman Empire. The constitutional counter-movement, so-to-speak, against the rule of Popes who had ascended to absolute power in the thirteenth century unleashed similar efforts in the secular world, and high ecclesiastics often took the lead in them. The Concordantia Catholica of Nicholas of Cusa presses home forcefully the parallelism of these ecclesiastical and secular movements, which affected the entire West. 34 Gottfried Friedrich Hermann Rehm, Geschichte der Staatsrechtswissenschaft (Leipzig, 1896), 179. 35 De Concordantia catholica, vol. 1, III, c. 18; I, 48–122 on ephors. 36 See, in particular, Althusius, 29ff.

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The doctrine of corporations, created by canon lawyers from a mixture of German and Roman legal ideas, came too late to enable us to ascribe to it any really significant influence on the rise and early development of the system of Estates. The corporate body as a legal reality is of course a great deal older than the theory of corporations; yet the theory was still very important for the later development of the law of Estates. And it had still another important and far-reaching effect. The older and more genuine corporative structure retained a pronounced polar tension as a result of the dualistic notion of prince and people, of the princely authoritative institutions and the corporative territorial representation, so that the prince and his subjects often confronted each other as two compromising or quarreling parties. The newer doctrine of corporations, by contrast, brought to the state a new conception of an organic entity, a kind of secular corpus mysticum, with the image of head and limbs that belong together and form an organic unity. We need only cite Marsilius of Padua and, once again, Nicholas of Cusa. It is interesting to see how this doctrine altered the conception of the role of Estates in government as early as the fourteenth, fifteenth, and especially the sixteenth century, and how it changed into the more modern constitutional and representative form. The famous doctrine of the Holy Crown of Hungary37 was based on the influence of these factors, which can be detected as early as the end of the fourteenth century. Rudiments of a similar conception are occasionally to be found elsewhere, as for example, in France and in Sweden. Even in Elizabethan England a contemporary theorist advocated the idea that King and Parliament belong together like head and limbs, and must work together as a unit.38 III

The second aspect under which the uniqueness of the Western system of Estates can be explained derives from the fact that the Estates do not indicate simply an economic and social differentiation of the population such as we 37 Ákos Timon, Ungarische Verfassungs- und Rechtsgeschichte (Berlin, 1909). 38 George Walter Prothero, Select Statutes and Other Constitutional Documents Illustrative of the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (Oxford, 1913), 178; from Thomas Smith, Commonwealth of England (1583); see also Introduction, cxxiv.

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find in every highly developed civilization, but privileged—i.e., legally and politically privileged—groups of the population. We are dealing, that is, not simply with priests, knights, peasants, artisans, merchants, as can be encountered in various forms everywhere also in the East, but with the peculiar creations of a clergy and of a prelature—which is unique to the Roman Catholic Church—of a more or less highly privileged, corporatively united aristocracy of great lords and knights, and of a growing homogeneous bourgeois class in privileged urban communities. Now we find—apparently in contradiction to our thesis—at an early stage in Indian history a structure of Estates which agrees rather exactly with the Western scheme of “fighter, feeder, teacher” as it was developed in the political theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in accordance with Scholastic and humanistic formulations and even with really existing conditions. We find this in the teachings of the oldest Indian law books, those of Manu and Yajnavalka, which mention four varnas—the Brahmins, Kshattriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras—of which the first three were privileged classes of the Aryan conquering people and the fourth was a servant class of subjugated dark-skinned indigenous inhabitants including all other foreign non-Aryan elements.39 This three-fold division of the Aryans into priests, warriors, and producers corresponds fairly closely to the Western scheme of clergy, nobility, and Third Estate (teacher, fighter, feeder). It, too, is for ancient India a scholarly sociological construction which reduces the real circumstance of numerous classes to an ideal typology. Perhaps this very plausibility theory of estates in ancient India might have influenced Western social doctrines in one of those great global historical connections of which there are several examples. What really lay at the basis of the Indian system was the development of a priestly and a warrior aristocracy within an already highly civilized Aryan master-race which many centuries before Christ had invaded India from the northwest and had established its rule in a multitude of small kingdoms only brought together into a great empire in the fourth century B.C. The Aryan people was not able to preserve its own peculiar culture and civilization in its genuine form. Despite all restrictions of taboo, some mix39 R. Pischel and H. Lüders, “Kasten,” in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaft, 3rd ed., (Leipzig: 1910), 5:798ff.

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ing of races was inevitable between the Aryans and the indigenous races, which were at a much lower cultural level, with a primitive system of tribes and clans. This altered the structure of the population fundamentally and brought about the replacement of the old Aryan class structure by the new caste differentiation so characteristic of India. The model of a primitive clan society, together with ethnic differences, hereditary professional specialization, magical and ritual prescriptions for marriage, food, and avoidance of the unclean, combined to make a system of social differentiation embodying the whole sacral law, which by its very rigidity excluded class structure on Western lines. The constant rivalry between the two upper classes—the Brahmins and the warrior-aristocracy—in which at first the warriors had the advantage despite the teachings of the priests, ended in the complete disappearance of the warriors so that the Brahmins were the only old class that was transferred to the later order of castes. However, Chandragupta, the ruler who completed the extension of the Magadha Empire in the time of the Diadochi of Alexander the Great, was far from being a scion of the Aryan master-race, but belonged to the Sudra caste. His successors favored Buddhism, and this caused the old Hindu beliefs to retreat and made its individual doctrine of redemption independent of the caste system. But the caste system itself lived on in undiminished strength. The main facts that concern us in this development—and it frees the present thesis of any apparent contradiction—are not only that the original Aryan structure of Estates disappeared in the face of the Indian caste structure, but that even the old Indian Estates structure, whether we regard its theory or its practice, completely lacked any connection with political representation. Moreover, the status of the higher Estates rested not on legally recognized privileges but merely on custom and tradition of a magical and ritual nature. That is to say, we have before us no true political and social legal order through which certain claims might be asserted against the power of the state (which did not yet exist in India anyway), but only an order of rank regulated by religious custom and tradition and maintained and interpreted by the priesthood in its own interests. It is characteristic of the whole system that there is much talk of the giving and taking of gifts but not of specified contributions like duties and taxes. This really is something essentially different from the system of corporate privileges in the West. It has the rudiments of the Western system, but they did not develop. 149

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Castes exist only in India; but a similar impact on the social structure, in the sense of excluding the formation of legally and politically privileged classes, results also from the maintenance of the old clan system with its cult of ancestry and its manifold functions that create a kind of self-government outside the state—proof of the differentiation of the Orient from the West. For instance, the lack of real, privileged classes in China is apparently related to the retention of such a clan system spanning the whole range of Chinese culture with a net of strong family bonds. The clan system performed the service of a kind of local but also more far-reaching self-government in a patriarchal spirit of community, so that the development of special privileged classes ran into great obstacles—not to mention the fact that the subjective claims of individual groups to rights against the authority of the Emperor and his organs of government would have seemed an offense against piety. It is striking that China failed altogether to develop any knightly warrioraristocracy, the heart of the Estates system in the West. Even the literati, the aspirants to office out of whom the Mandarins developed and who took special examinations and were filled with the spirit of Confucian piety, were anything but a privileged class that might serve to represent the people and, in certain circumstances, form an opposition to the government. In China, instead of control and opposition by representative Estates, we have periodic uprisings of unorganized masses against misgovernment and oppression, uprisings to which the Mandarins involved had often to be sacrificed. Such movements were based not on any doctrines of natural right but rather on custom and tradition, and their real power lay in that very fact. Of course, China did not totally lack the associative union of particular occupational classes. Here, too, the merchants and especially the artisans had their guilds and corporations, which were of great importance. But we really have no exact knowledge of the structure and spirit of these associations. We have no right to assume that they are sociologically identical with their Western counterparts. We gather that the principle of a paternal, authoritarian leadership and of cooperation in fraternal solidarity asserted itself in them in a way similar to what we know of the more familiar Russian Artell.40 But this principle stems from the spirit and the habits of a community of families or clans and is fundamentally different from 40 W. Stieda, “Artelle,” in Handwörterbuch der Staatstwissenschaft, 3rd ed., (Leipzig, 1909), 2:196ff.

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the Western and especially the Germanic “voluntary union” that sprang from an already strongly individualist social order and presupposed a fully developed sphere of personal rights for the individual members of these associations. With this we come to the fundamental problem of the social-psychological difference between East and West—that is to say, to the difference in personality structure. In the East, personality remained trapped in the traditional bonds of family and clan, while in the West it developed into full individual liberty, independence, and activity within the framework of a greater social circle. What is relevant here is the distinction between community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft) which Toennies has taught us and which even before the differentiation had been made was used by jurists when they distinguished a relation based on status and a relation based on contract. While the East remained frozen in the status relationship of family and clan of a primitive community, the privileged classes in the West, and thereby the whole system of Estates, rested on an evolving though by no means fully or finally established modern social order that at first strengthened the authority of the head of the household in a single family in place of the old clan unit and then produced with the privilegium an enhancement and enrichment of the sphere of personal rights. This led to claims of subjective rights against the state and created, through the transition from a status relationship to a contract relationship, the possibility of an alliance among the individual privileged legal units which constitutes the basis for the formation of recognized units and of the actual political system of Estates. Such a development as the West displayed was possible only in a relatively modern political and social order that no longer depended on the traditions of the tribal. and clan system but on the rational spirit of positive legal statutes that came not only from the Roman commercial law of the ancient Mediterranean basin but also from old Germanic Law and from the Canon Law of the Roman Church, nourished in the Teutonic and Latin spirit. It was an order depending on a legal and political theory which, owing much to Aristotle and the cosmopolitan doctrines of the Stoics, had worked Christian and Latin-Teutonic views of law and morality together into a normative system of natural and divine law that stood behind the positive law of individual peoples, completing it and regulating it. 151

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How different the spiritual assumptions of the non-Christian and nonWestern peoples were from this is perhaps most clearly shown by the example of Chinese high culture, with its Confucian political and social order. It was based not on rational law but on traditional mores, not on personality but on family bonds, not on an individualistically oriented society but on a clan-like spirit of community. Because of this it knew of no public subjective rights accorded to the individual, but only of sub-ordination to tradition and, above all, reverence for paternal authority in every form, and for the older generation in general. In this soil, naturally, no system of Estates could grow, even disregarding the theoretically unlimited power of the state exercised by the Son of Heaven. This unlimited state power itself grew out of the age-old patriarchal forms of the tribal and clan system, where there was no division between spiritual and secular authority and where the head of the clan or tribe was at once priest and protector of the cult of ancestry and the leader in temporal matters. If in China—as we have already noted—there was no separate privileged warrior class like the knighthood in Western states, this is also connected to the early incidence of hired or pressed armies, maintained and equipped at state expense, since this precluded self-equipment or self-training of single warriors or private bands of warriors. This phenomenon, widespread in the ancient Orient, of the bureaucratic administration of armies wherein even slaves were trained and equipped as warriors has afforded Max Weber the basis for his attempt, sketchy as it is, to explain the absence of a system of Estates in the East.41 It is an attempt that does not cover the problem in all its scope and depth, but it is still worth our attention and deserves closer consideration. According to Weber’s analysis, the necessity in the ancient river cultures—Egypt, Mesopotamia, China—for supervising masses of workers in a unified and systematic way in great hydraulic projects, to regulate the rivers and to irrigate the land over wide areas, called into being bureaucratic state administrations functioning within a system of natural economy. This administration then entered upon the area of military affairs and stifled or prevented from the outset the self-equipment and self-training 41 Max Weber, “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,” in Grundriss der Sozialökonomie (Tübingen, 1925), 3:543ff.

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of single warriors prevailing everywhere in the West. It was on this very principle, however, that feudalism in the West was based; in fact, feudalism originally was an attempt to bring under state control the proliferating private military enterprises. But when the self-arming and self-training class of knights that had been formed as a result of this attempt encountered increasing demands dictated by the political interests of the princely overlord, the knights united in an effective coalition through which they secured privileges for their class. These privileges gave the knights a favored legal and political position and frequently some kind of participation in the government of the developing state. This possibility for highly-trained and self-equipped warriors to combine among themselves and to wrest privileges from the sovereign, was especially successful where there was no real feudal law, as in Poland.42 Here the nobility’s privileges as a class were all acquired, both before and after the General Privilege of Košice in 1374, through the pressure a coalition of self-arming knightly warriors were able to apply on the sovereign war lord when he was in critical straits.43 On the other hand, we see that everywhere in the West the development of a standing army created and maintained, outfitted and trained according to the system of bureaucratic administration at state expense, spelled the death of the feudal political and social order of Estates. We may thus probably assume that the absence of a privileged warriorclass, and thus of the chief motivating force in the Estates movement, was related in the East to the early incidence of a military administration that was centralized and bureaucratic. But this is not a fully satisfactory explanation. It is contradicted by the fact that a system of fiefs and a feudalistic political order did develop in the East—not of course in China, but elsewhere in the Near and the Far East, despite the bureaucratic military administration, and even partly because of it. Particularly in Japan and the Islamic states this feudalistic order closely paralleled the Western system. But the fact is that here it failed to develop into a system of Estates but rather compromised with an absolutist monarchical political order so that neither the 42 If we are to regard the Polish jus militare as something like feudalism, then we should have to see it as feudalism without either benefice or vassalage. In reality it represented a ministerial service relation, and even then, existed only for a short period of time, for it was speedily absorbed into the more general privileges during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 43 S. Kutrzeba, Grundriss der polnischen Verfassungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1912), 31.

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warrior-class nor any other outstanding group possessed legal and political privileges that would have enabled them to coerce the central authority or to play the role of representatives of the subjects. Japanese feudalism, in many respects similar to the Western form, differed from it essentially through the legal nature of the feudal contract.44 The Latin-Teutonic contract was based in principle on the equality of rights and the reciprocity of both parties. The Japanese was based on a much more severe dependence of the vassal on this liege-lord than was usual in the West. This was consistent with the Confucian doctrines that had also become standard in Japan and led to the liege-lord’s being granted a kind of paternal authority over his vassal. This is ultimately explicable by the fact that the Japanese vassal relation of the kenin had been originally a client relation within the larger units of the clan, which often took in strangers as younger sons or brothers in the earliest stages even through the symbolic act of blood-brotherhood, and, especially in times of family feuds or internal unrest, used them as armed retainers. How different this is from the German retainership which was the point of departure for the later vassal relation is obvious. According to, the testimony of Tacitus, this was based on the declaration of a free man to his peers in a public assembly whenever one of the chiefs asked in that company for volunteers to assist him in one of his wars or raids. In Japan, by contrast, a patriarchal relation from the outset was at the basis of the relation; and even later, when it had weakened, it still never became a relation between two equal contracting parties. Everywhere the feudal contract was a status contract, a synthesis of a contractual and a status relationship: it was a contract aimed at a fixed typical status relationship. In Germanic law, the status relationship was that of a free man, whose status, through voluntary subordination to a military chief, who looked out for his livelihood, was not lowered but rather raised, particularly when the chief was a prince or a king. In Japanese custom, however, the status relationship was that of younger son or brother in a family whose head was the liege-lord. This involved a much greater dependence, to which the common reverence of ancestors lent sacral reinforcement. It is in this context that we can explain why later, when these 44 K. Asakawa, The Documents of Iriki; Illustrative of the Development of the Feudal Institutions of Japan (New Haven, 1929), 37–79.

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origins were long forgotten, liege-lords allowed their vassals, as an honor, to assume the lord’s family name and to wear the family crest on their helmets. The whole entourage of vassals of a great lord were called his han, a word meaning roughly “fence,” recalling the hag that played a role in the German feudal system (one thinks of the Hagestalden—unmarried retainers—placed and fed in the hag of the liege-lord, as against those vassals who with their families were settled on special landed properties). The Japanese han was often translated by the English word “clan.” Professor Asakawa,45 a great expert on Japanese constitutional history, inveighs against this translation as an anachronism. It is certainly true that in the Tokugawa era, which he particularly has in mind, in the seventeenth century, the era of the real clan state lay a thousand years in the past. However, even if from the seventeenth century onward the word han meant no more than the mere extent or realm of a feudal principality, this still does not exclude the fact that in earlier centuries, when the extensive subinfeudation and the territorial consolidation of feudal principalities were still largely incomplete, it probably meant more the personal relation of the entourage of vassals to the lord, which can be conceived of as an extension of the lord’s household. That is the interpretation advocated by Karl Rathgen46 and by Tokuzo Fukuda.47 For the purpose of the present study it is of primary importance that the feudal contract in Japanese law involved an extensive subordination of the vassal to his lord, and a considerable patriarchal authority for the lord; therefore, the legal dualism so basic to the system of Estates in the West could not develop. The priestly class in Japan qualified even less for Estates representation than the warrior-class, the less so as there were two different, competing religious systems. The Shinto priests had to care for the ancestral cult of the Imperial house. From them could emanate an impulse toward a later restoration of Imperial power, but not toward the organization of local authorities nor toward the limitation of the central authority. Such a tendency toward Estates squared with the Buddhist spirit just as little. It was absorbed in the 45 Ibid.: index, “Han.” 46 Karl Rathgen, “Japans Volkswirschaft und Staatshaushalt,” in Schmoller’s Staats-v. Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungen, vol. 10 (Leipzig, 1891). 47 Tokuzo Fukuda, “Die gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung in Japan,” Münchener Volks­ wirtschaftliche Studien, vol. 42 (1900).

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care of individual souls; and where it was politically active it could establish and govern a theocratic community in the isolation of the high Tibetan mountains but was not capable of any constitutional participation in a secular state government. Buddhism as well as Shintoism thoroughly lacked the rational and legal Christian spirit that the Christian Church, particularly the Roman Catholic Church had appropriated as an inheritance from the Roman Empire, and which enabled it to play such a significant role in the political life of the West. The dualist spirit that produced the Estates system in the West was also lacking in the feudalism of the Islamic states.48 Here, fiefs were originally a reward for distinguished Arab warriors, and later a substitute for mercenary payment to Turkish soldiers and their commanders. There was no personal relation of vassalage; it was replaced by the religious obligation of fighting for the faith. The Sipahi did form a privileged class of mounted warriors, but it was not able to gain the same political significance as the Western knighthood, because its particular class-feeling was never more than a not very effective reinforcement of the much stronger common feeling of joint responsibility that animated the entire community of faithful Moslems and bound the faithful in principle to the ruler in a relation of loyalty that precluded the dualistic principle of Estates as in the West. The Islamic state was above all a religious community, and the spirit animating it was heavily influenced by the traditions of the systems of clan and tribe. They were still very much alive when it was founded, and they lived on for a long time. The entire aggregate of priests and teachers, the ulema, did form with its numerous divisions and grades a privileged class, though more in fact than in law. Yet this group could not exercise the political function of representation of the people or the country, because it was itself an essential and important part of the machinery of state government. Church and State formed here a complete unity animated by a patriarchal spirit and allowed no dualistic principle of Estates to arise as it did in the West. A formation of a wholly different type was the ancient city-state of the Mediterranean countries, but even this rested to a large extent on the clan system and thus provided no favorable possibilities for the development of 48 P. O. von Tischendorf, Über das System der Leben in den moslemischen Staaten, besonders im osmanischen Staate (Leipzig, 1871); Carl Heinrich Becker, Islamstudien 1 (Leipzig, 1924), particularly no. 9, Steuerpacht und Lehnswesen, 234ff.

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privileged classes and for a representative constitution based on them. In fact, the clan system of these city-states had its special features. Max Weber pointed out with great emphasis that the nature of the Western city, especially of the polis of ancient Mediterranean civilization, rested on an act of fraternization among citizens, and that this was possible only where the original clan system did not display so great a degree of exclusiveness resulting from ritualistic taboos and restrictions on the individual as was the case among the Indian and equatorial peoples.49 Where, however, the possibility for the sacral union of different clan units existed, then this became, in conjunction with a union for defense and settlement, a firm basis for the building of the state. The ancient city-state was, in its original germ, a confederation of clans within a tribe or a group of tribes possessing a common shrine and the basic institutions for a common political life, and it clung tenaciously to its basic tribal structure. It even formed the basis for its organization of Estates, which was quite different from that on which the system of Estates among the Latin-Teutonic peoples was founded. Members of the old clans were originally the only citizens to possess full political rights, forming the patriciate. Class struggles were directed toward the extension of these rights to the unpedigreed or immigrant plebeian population. In the homogeneous closed community which thus developed, and which had got rid of an earlier monarchical leadership, there was no duality that would have favored the rise of representation of the citizenry by privileged classes. The institution of slavery reinforced this tendency toward the legal and political homogeneity of the citizenry. There were, certainly, differences of interest and party, but no privileged classes in the medieval sense. The clan system tends to disappear in proportion to the development of feudalism. Feudalism is based on the household authority that dissociates itself from the clan and breaks it up. On the other hand, associations like the curias of Rome or the Attic Phratriae or the Spartan Obae are more suited to maintain and strengthen a clan system, on which they are modeled. These artificial new forms, which originally seem to have been connected with the system of military organization, are generally found wherever a tribe or group of tribes has become a state without passing through the in49 Ibid., 528ff.

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termediate stage of a large feudalistic kingdom. This is the case in the West, as, for example, in Poland and Hungary. The Polish szlachta seem to have been put together out of such defensive associations of traditionally free clansmen, the nobiles.50 A formation corresponding to the Greek Phratriae, the bratstvo, is attested to among the South Slav tribes. In such communities, which are not really feudal, the nobility is the totality of all clansmen fit for military service, not really a special class. The old territorial and ethnic units hold together tenaciously, and by virtue of their semi-autonomous constitutions give the state an aristocratic and federalist character that favors the local position of lordship of the nobility. This nobility of course was differentiated into higher and lower levels, but the higher nobility was distinguished only by its special titles and dignities and as well by its large holdings. What finally did give the nobility even here the stamp of a. privileged class was the successful attempt, mentioned above, of these self-armed and self-trained warriors at wresting legal and political privileges from the monarch and chief commander at a favorable moment. The form of the state favored such an endeavor, since it had nothing of the concentrated form of a city-state in which the monarchical head could easily be disposed of, but was a state extensive in area, with a composite, almost federal character whose unity was only realized in the monarchical leadership. Because of this the monarchy remained indispensable, even if it was always weak as compared with the nobility in their local units. These states whose people made a direct transition from the life of the tribe to the life of the state, without passing through a stage of feudalist empire, could be called simply “privilege-states” as opposed to “feudal states.” They contained the preconditions for the rise of a system of Estates in this very system of privileges. Otherwise, the nature of the constitution in these states was essentially different from that developing out of feudalism.51 In the feudal West, which had given birth to the typical Franco-Germanic system of Estates characteristic for the Continent, the system of clans generally no longer played a role. It had disappeared almost entirely. The chief reason for this lies apparently in the long, bellicose migrations of the 50 This is borne out by the importance of heraldry and of war cries, and the emergence of the banderye rodowe; see S. Kutrzeba, Grundriss der polnischen Verfassungsgeschichte, 31ff, 144. 51 See my essay “Typologie der Ständischen Verfassungen des Abendlandes,” Historische Zeitschrift 141 (1930): 229–48.

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Germanic tribes, who settled down on the soil of the Roman Empire, with its long-standing civilization. The cooperation of the Church and the rising monarchical central power went a long way toward completely eliminating the remains of the clan system. It was not monarchy alone that was at work here. In China a great comprehensive monarchical state had been able to come into being without the clan system’s ever having been eliminated. Thus, it may be assumed that in the West it was chiefly the Christian Church which had forced the elimination of the remains of the clan system. The Church had very weighty reasons for opposing the clan system. In the first place, the system had ingrained heathen vestiges in its ancestor worship. In the second place, it clung to the idea of blood vengeance, or managed the system of atonement that took its place, in an irrational way inimical to the spirit of ecclesiastical law. In the third place, it possessed exclusive control over family law, which the Church itself aspired to control, and it preserved above all the communal property of the clan by forbidding the freedom to make a will—which was of greatest interest to the Church, because of bequests to ecclesiastical foundations. The united effort of the Church and its ally, the Kings, succeeded in eliminating the clan system everywhere in the West, and this meant a powerful expansion of the possibility for developing representative Estates. Of similar importance was the fact that the Church in the West promoted the mixing of the races in a wholly different sense than the religions of the East with their tabooistic and ritual restrictions and bonds. The Christian Church, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, eliminated magic more and more from the regulation of social relations in favor of a rational configuration of social law. Max Weber has indicated the far-reaching consequences, for social history, of the Christian principle of common meals which St. Paul introduced when he did not shrink from eating with the uncircumcised at Antioch, thus abandoning the ritual separation of Jew and Gentile and asserting the common life of Christians of both traditions.52 This was the basis of the Christian community; in regions with no ancient municipal tradition this Christian community in turn was of fundamental importance for the origin of urban communities such as the East never saw. 52 Max Weber, “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft,” in Grundriss der Sozialökonomie (Tübingen, 1925), 3:528ff.

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In this context we must also mention the gradual abolition of slavery in the Christian world. This took place largely for economic reasons and was related to the transition from the money economy of the ancient Mediterranean city-states to the natural economy of the inland medieval communities; but this material factor was still very fundamentally supported by ideal motives emanating from the morals and law of the Christian Church. What was at issue here was less the generally oppressive social condition that was the lot of the slaves in ancient times or of the bondsmen in the Middle Ages than the question whether these people could be legally classified as persons. For on this depended the possibility of representation, which was basic to the system of Estates. One can only represent persons, not objects. The medieval lord of the manor could be regarded as the natural representative of his bondsmen, but the Roman possessor could not be regarded as the representative of his slaves. If at its apogee ancient civilization failed altogether to produce the category of popular representation, then the institution of slavery surely had a large share in this. After all, it was only because a large part of the population consisted of men without legal status that the system of direct democracy, embracing all citizens with rights, could develop and maintain itself without popular representation, the need for which was neither felt nor satisfied. In the great urban centers of the later Roman Republic and of the Empire there was a mass of proletarians but there was no citizen class depending on free labor. The slave economy not only ruined the peasant class but also prevented the rise of a commercial middle class. It bears the burden of blame for the social disintegration of the ancient world. The ultimate victory of Christianity rested in no small measure on the fact that in the communities of the faithful a new spirit of social community was called to life which bridged the gap between free man and slave and proved itself indispensable as a strong and durable cement in the building of a new political society. Thus, the Christian Church as a community of believers contributed widely to establishing the preconditions for the Western system of Estates. Beyond this, however, the priesthood of the Christian Church, which was distinguished from the priesthood of all other religions by its hierarchical organization, nurtured in the Roman Empire and based on natural law, became the model of all privileged classes in the West. Because of its sacral character, and as a repository of what remained of ancient education and 160

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culture, the clergy occupied a highly privileged position vis-à-vis the barbarian state authorities that succeeded the Roman Empire. So long as this position was purely personal in nature, and attached only to the clerical office as such, it could not of course serve as a model for the secular Estates. The clergy had or acquired large land holdings and received immunity by virtue of their position as manorial lords. This privilege continued the tradition of the exceptional position accorded to the Imperial domains in the Roman Empire; it afforded the clergy freedom from interference by state authorities, and with that soon even their own jurisdiction. That is to say, they secured a transfer of the state’s sovereign rights, the nucleus of all subsequent granting of privileges in the West. Following the Church’s example, this immunity was sought after and secured by the secular notables. It was the basis for the whole system of privileges that everywhere characterized the state based on Estates. Where there was a system of fiefs, immunity was attached to it; but even where no real system of fiefs existed, immunity generated the conditions for the rise of privileged classes and for a system of Estates as, for example in Scandinavia, Poland, and Hungary. In Sweden53 nobility was constituted by freedom from taxation and from the other burdens and impositions of the state, granted to those landholders who provided military service on horseback ( frälse is equivalent to immunity). In Poland54 and Hungary55 the system of immunity of the Church operated as a model for the system of privilege of the nobility regarding both local sovereignty and self-government and the limiting of services to the King. The position of the nobility here rested on privileges and not on feudal law. Only late in the game did these privileges come to approximate to some degree a feudal system, by way of the so-called banderiatus and avitacitas system under the Angevin Kings.56 In Russia,57 where a peculiar feudalism of a more ministerial character developed, it was the very lack of such privileges that gave the nobility—from the highest boyars to the lowest retainers—the characteristic coloration differentiating it from Western nobility. A reason for this is the 53 Emil Hildebrand, Svenska Statsförfattningens historiska utveckling (Stockholm, 1896), 162ff. 54 Kutrzeba, Grundriss der polnischen Verfassungsgeschichte, 26ff. 55 Timon, Ungarische Verfassungs- und Rechtsgeschichte, 159, 227ff. 56 Marczali, Ungarische Verfassungsgeschichte, 35ff. 57 Milyukov, Skizzen russischer Kulturgeschichte, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1898–1901).

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fact that the Church had not been endowed with privileges of immunity to the same extent as it had been in the West and that the immunities it possessed were curtailed or withdrawn after the Church was converted in the sixteenth century into a national state Church under the protection of the Muscovite Tsars. Thereafter the privileges of the Russian clergy were more of a personal kind. After the ascendancy of the Muscovite Tsars the power of the state was too strong to yield its sovereign rights easily. The attempt of Patriarch Nikon to open the way to something like an Eastern counterpart to the Papacy in Russia collapsed pitiably in 1666. When in the seventeenth century serfdom was introduced under the patrimonial authority of the manorial lords, it occurred in a way that did not free the nobility from the threat of government intervention in their estates. On the contrary, it meant the determination of the noblemen’s relations with their serfs through police regulation, an additional elaborate regulation of their service obligations, on which of course their whole position depended. Milyukov emphasizes that the Russian nobility in the time of the zemsky sabor—that is, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—was not by any means a privileged class. It became that only in the eighteenth century under Catherine the Great, when representation by Estates had long since vanished. That explains the weakness in Russia of the system of Estates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The importance of immunity for the constitution and autonomy of the towns in the West is already familiar to us. It set the town apart from the mass of subjects as a region with a special law and administration. As a corollary to this, the town was still identified with the concept of community, of a corporative association of free and equal citizens. The ideal type for such an association of citizens was originally a conjuratio, a sworn union. It was an association bound together by oath for mutual protection and support. This origin cannot be vouched for everywhere in the Middle Ages, since in more recent foundations of towns we often enough have no knowledge of an act of conjuratio. Wherever the model of an urban community existed, its spirit and essence could be transferred or appropriated without such an explicit act. Nevertheless, the construction of an ideal type must be based on the assumption of the existence of a sworn union. But towns like these exist only in the Christian West. Certainly there are extended settlements at the great centers of commerce near princely residences or around 162

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the centers of administration and defense outside the Christian West. But although they might carry the name of town, they were not really town in the Western sense, not the residence of a privileged middle class, and therefore not inclined to serve as one element in a system of Estates. Even in the Christian West, urban communities in this strict legal sense were really indigenous only to the realm of the Latin-Teutonic peoples. They were carried over to Poland and Hungary by German colonization and always remained there a weak and not fully valid branch of the representation by Estates. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia there were no towns at all in the Western sense. This, too, is one of the reasons for the weakness of the system of Estates in Russia. The importance that the aspect of association held in the Estates system also rested on the character of Estates as politically privileged groups. It was not in itself the sole basis for the system—this had already been provided by the cohesive bond of the state—but it was at least an indispensable component in a genuine and powerful Estates system. Association was often the lever for acquiring privileges. On the other hand, equality of privilege furthered in turn the unity of an Estate and its corporative exclusiveness. The alliance of different Estates among themselves served to maintain the privileges of each individual Estate and bred that solidarity in defense of the liberties of the land that emerged in times of conflict. For this reason, I prefer to rate the factor of association in the Estates much higher than does von Below, who, of course, had only the German territorial Estates in mind. He is quite right that the cohesive bond of the state was the main foundation for the Estates system; but the system of association was also of fundamental importance. The system of association was strikingly absent in Russia, and that is apparently connected to the lack of real privileges. Neither the Estates as a whole had a sense of solidarity, as testified by Kovalevsky’s extracts from the richly informative documents of the Sabor of 1842,58 nor did the individual Estates. The Russian clergy lacked that imposing exclusiveness and discipline displayed by the celibate clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. The higher clergy, monastic in origin, stood in sharp contrast to the married, and generally uneducated, lay clergy who formed a kind of hereditary caste 58 Kovalevsky, Russian Political Institutions, 65ff.

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and enjoyed little prestige. Even the bishops and abbots, who owed their positions largely to the Tsar’s favor, were scarcely fit to be an important factor in representing the people or region. It is true that they were called in to the great assemblies of the land from time to time, as in 1642; but they did not really belong to the magnum consilium of the Boyar Duma, and did not, as a body, entertain any political ambitions, even if individuals did at times exert significant influence. In 1642 they expressly stressed their readiness to give the Tsar’s policies their loyal support, but they preferred, as hitherto, to limit themselves to their spiritual functions. The boyar class was deprived of this sense of solidarity in the course of the jealously fought battle of its members over the ordering of families by rank, determined only by past and present service and as manifested in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the so-called mestnichestvo. Their attitude was that of a dependent servant group, not of a proud privileged class. Had the Estates system really been merely an organization forced into being by the state, as von Below suggests, then Russia would display its ideal type. In truth, however, Russia displays only an incomplete deviant variety of the system, and it is for this reason very instructive, because it shows where the real motive power of the Estates lay. The system of association in itself, without the fundamental cohesive bonds of the state, naturally did not create the system of Estates; but within the bonds which the state had more or less sharply established, it represented an essential condition for the creation of strong, politically capable Estates. IV

As I have shown elsewhere, the feudal system is not a universal stage that all human societies must pass through in their social and political development. Similarly, the Estates system cannot be regarded as a universal and necessary extension of the feudal system. As we have seen, there existed in the East feudal systems that could not by their nature develop into an Estates system. On the other hand, we find systems of Estates in the West that did not evolve from a real feudal system. This does not rule out the fact that in the rest of the Western states the feudal system and the system of Estates were closely allied, or even that Estates can be regarded as a continuation or 164

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final phase of feudalism. But it does seem clear that factors besides feudalism were at work in the rise of the Estates system. We have already indicated repeatedly the historic importance of the constitution of the Christian Church in this context. Connected to this, at least partially and indirectly, is the phenomenon we must now examine closely. This phenomenon, which is characteristic of the modern age, is the progressive consolidation and rationalization of state operations. Where feudalism dominated uncurbed as in the German empire, the political organization, already loose enough, disintegrated easily and more or less completely. On the other hand, we find lasting systems of Estates capable of development only where to a certain degree the strength of political bonds has been preserved or restored and where, within this framework, a political life of some intensity, guided by rational calculations, developed. The main reason for the uniqueness of the Estates system of the West is the fact that it was a phenomenon accompanying the peculiar form in which states originated in Western history. Outside the Christian West the formation of states tended, as a consequence of the bond between secular and ecclesiastical power, toward universal monarchy, which in the interior encouraged absolutism. The peculiar constitution and politics of the Church, with its opposition to the state, was the fundamental cause for the failure of such a universal monarchy to develop in the West. It caused nation-building to develop in the direction of a diversity of coordinated state structures that recognized each other’s independence. It promoted what later after the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was called the European state system. This later stage in Western nation-building was preceded by an earlier stage whose main outlines begin to show after the twelfth century. It partly still carries an aura of the more loosely structured small territorial state in comparison to the later stage of greater national states, but it can nonetheless also be regarded as a nascent system of states, for which the Roman Catholic Church provided the coherent framework. On the whole the community of faith institutionalized in the Church later transposed itself into a society of states based on treaties and natural law. International law was merely the medieval religious cultural community in secularized garb resting on the jus divinum. The driving forces that produced this peculiar form of political life were twofold. There was on the one hand the constant rivalry among the states, 165

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the constant competition for increased power and prestige; on the other, the moral necessity for these conflicting states perpetually to come to terms again and to find a modus vivendi in order not to go beyond the scope of the ecclesiastical and religious cultural community, and later beyond the scope of the civilized society of states sustained by international law. On this overarching psychological and political structure rested the general disposition for creating a system of Estates. In the constant battles, which were not battles to the death but only for the extension of power and for a variety of advantages, the rulers found themselves thoroughly dependent on the good will of those strata of the population capable of military and financial contributions. This good will naturally had to be rewarded or even bought by giving full consideration to their economic and social interests but also by giving concessions and liberties of a political nature like those enshrined in the privileges of the Estates—the basis of the Estates system. The active elements of the population who helped to build the state also gained a share in its government. That was a direct consequence of this kind of nation-building and politics. Thus, the French and English Estates systems developed most particularly during the protracted war to settle the boundaries of their spheres of power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Similarly the Estates system of the Nordic states developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries during the wars that followed on the dissolution of the Union of Kalmar; that of Poland, in the struggle with the Teutonic Knights and Russia; that of Hungary, in the struggle with her South Slav neighbors; that of the German territories, in the internal strife of the Empire in the fifteenth century in which their boundaries were by and large definitely set for the first time. It is characteristic that Hungary’s wars with the Turks, or the Spanish kingdom’s conflict with the Moors, did not have the same effect of endowing the Estates with extensive privileges: these were wars against the infidels, which Christian duty and self-preservation simply compelled one to enter. Otherwise it was fully possible for a country that was not well disposed toward its ruler simply to place itself under another lord somewhat in the way that the Prussian Estates deserted the Teutonic Knights for Poland or the Sicilians forsook the House of Anjou for that of Aragon. The right of resistance, to which Estates everywhere more or less explicitly laid claim, covered the possibility under certain circumstances of “placing oneself under another lord.” 166

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A significant exception is the state of affairs in Renaissance Italy, which has been regarded as the prototype for the European state system. Here the constant rivalry among the individual states did not yield any system of Estates within the rival states. The explanation for this is not hard to come by: almost all these states were city-states, or at least states with a thoroughly municipal structure. The municipal structure, as we have seen, precludes the development of a system of Estates. There is another, though only apparent, exception to which we must devote some attention. I am referring to the later epoch of the European state system, when, in connection with the struggles that brought about the transformation of a conglomeration of small states into a centralized larger state, absolutism appeared and curtailed the functioning of the Estates system. This, however, was only a transitional state resting on the fact that the Estates system had in many places become a hindrance to the development of greater states. As soon as this development dictated by political necessity had been completed, we find a revival of the representative principle, together with the awakening of a national political consciousness within these centralized great states, in the new form of a constitutional system. But, we cannot go into this any further here. It is a complicated process that is a story in itself. What mainly interests us here is the earlier era, when the developing national states, still divided into small states, coexisted in the coherent framework of the community of the Church. We must point out in this context the fact that in the course of the bellicose rivalries of this time the Roman Church, sometimes by conscious policy, sometimes by its mere existence and by the conflicts of its hierocratic ambitions, lent everywhere visible encouragement to the process of nation-building and the related process of the development of an Estates system. Even though canonical theory always maintained the idea of a universal empire, the Curia still contributed much to preventing the rise of any real universal hegemony of the Emperor. This we see in the Popes’ successful efforts to take such states as Poland and Hungary out of the protective sphere of the Emperor and into their own, and later particularly in the time of Innocent III, in the development of a systematic policy to make as many states of Christendom as directly dependent on the Papal throne as possible, like the Normans in Southern Italy, Aragon, and Portugal, and England un167

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der King John. That the Curia also directly favored and even required the establishment of a system of Estates, is proved by its behavior in Hungary between 1222 and 1232, and again in the fourteenth century, as well as from its policy in the Naples of Charles I and Charles II. In Hungary the occasion was the conflict that led to King Andrew II’s promulgation of the Golden Bull. The King was in the process of making the great nobility real masters of the realm, by granting them disproportionately large crown lands. The servientes—the middle and lesser nobility—rose up against this. The Curia likewise came out against the overly powerful higher nobility and did much to ensure the King’s promulgation of the magna carta of Hungary, the socalled Golden Bull, which especially benefited the lesser nobility. Of course, the machinery of the right of resistance which it created was in the long run not convenient to the Curia. When the law was renewed in 1232 the Curia tried to alter its provisions so that in the event of the king’s breaking his promises, he was to be directed and held to the fulfillment of his promises by the ecclesiastical authority. When in the fourteenth century the first two Angevin Kings of Hungary, Carobert and Louis the Great, attempted once again to rule without the participation of the Estates, it was chiefly the bishops who lodged a complaint to the Curia in Rome to bring about Papal intervention to restore the system of Estates. In the Kingdom of Naples the Curia deliberately exerted pressure on Charles of Anjou to hold parliament. The assemblies of the notables that the Emperor Frederick II on occasion convoked cannot really be regarded as parliaments. But Charles of Anjou attempted to carry on without any such assemblies and resisted the Pope’s imprecations. Under his successors, however, after Sicily had fallen to Aragon in 1282 and 1283, things changed under a steady stream of Papal admonitions, and an Estates system was established in Naples too.59 Most important of all, the Curia was involved in more or less all the great rivalries between the states, and we can prove its part in almost all the great crises that led to the development of a system of Estates. Still, the po59 Léon Cadier, Essai sur l’administration du royaume de Sicile sous Charles I et Charles II d’Anjou (Paris, 1891); I should also point out that in Aragon the great General Privilege of Saragossa of October 1283, which gave a firm basis to the Estates’ liberties, was a consequence of the union of the Estates against King Pedro III, who had taken over Sicily without asking the Estates’ advice and had thus also come into conflict with the Pope—which led to Aragon’s being placed under interdict; L. Klüpfel, Verwaltungsgeschichte des Königreichs Aragon (Stuttgart, 1915), 192ff.

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litical constellation was changeable. In the German Empire the investiture contest provided an occasion for the strengthening of the princes’ opposition to the Emperor which we must regard as the basis for the liberties of the princes and the Estates. The famous privileges accorded to the spiritual and temporal princes by Frederick II, in 1220 and 1231 likewise have for their background the opposition between Emperor and Pope. To the privilege of 1231 was attached the Imperial statute that, though it had no immediate legal consequences, can still with justification be regarded as the signal for the coming territorial system of Estates. In the battle with the Curia in 1338 the electors agreed to a demonstrative common action which was an important step on the way to a formal constitution of the Imperial Estates. In France, Philip IV had assembled the Estates-General of his realm in the Church of Notre Dame in 1302 for a similar demonstrative act in his conflict with Pope Boniface VIII. This likewise marked a new age in the history of the system of Estates in France. In England the Magna Charta of 1215 resulted from the political situation which arose from the subordination of the anathematized King John to the Pope as liege-lord in 1213 and from the victory of the Papal cause in the battle of Bouvines in 1214. The result was a double squeeze from Pope and King, whose immediate and palpable result was the common exploitation of the English Church by both these powers, who eliminated the claims of the spiritual and temporal magnates for control over the churches in their lands. Thus, the prelates and barons united under the leadership of Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, over whose appointment Pope and King had earlier fought, and obtained the famous charter of liberties which opened with a guarantee of free canonical elections in England. Thus, not only the conscious policy but the whole hierocratic constitution of the Roman Church manifestly aided and abetted the rise of the Estates system in the West. Where there was no such Church, as in most of the East, or where it was politically weak as in Russia, there was no such powerful impetus. If we now look at this connection between the formation of states and the Estates system from the point of view of domestic politics, we shall be led to the fundamental difference between the older, more extensive state organization that was characteristic of the Carolingian Empire and the whole early Middle Ages, and the later, more intensive organization that made itself felt in the small territorial states, not only in Germany but also 169

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in France (particularly Normandy) or smaller national states such as early England, which closely resembled the territorial states. The extensive state organization, which rested on a disproportion between the size of the state and the instruments available at this cultural level, led to a fragmentation of rule and with it to a feudalism that carried within itself disintegrating tendencies. The more intensive state organization overcame this kind of feudalism through rational and functional institutions that at first strengthened the authoritarian element in political life, and led—partly under preservation of feudal forms—to a veritable feudal absolutism. By the same token, however, it evoked a reaction by corporate elements and thus encouraged the development of Estates systems. In the beginning the ruler consulted from time to time his magnum consilium of prelates and barons. Eventually, however, he created for himself permanent organs of his ruling will in the typical three central agencies: the Council, the High Court of Justice, and the Exchequer. From this arose the concilium continuum, confronted by the parliament of prelates and barons as a separate body. A corresponding local administration was organized under the central administration. A more intensive and rational management of legislation, finances, and general administration got underway. The strong influence of the Church on the development and functioning of this whole organization has to be especially emphasized. Bracton, the father of English jurisprudence, was a priest, as was the author of the Dialogus de Scaccario; the administration of the treasury in France was conducted and organized in the beginning by the Templars. Even the transformation of local administration from a feudal to a bureaucratic form could use the officium of the Church as a model. The important institution of commissaries had been worked out in canonical practice according to the spiritual and temporal model of the Carolingian missi. The canonists had followed the legists; Roman law had the most powerful influence on the rationalization of state operations. All these were influences possible only in the West and in the final analysis rested on a cultural synthesis of the Latin and Teutonic strains, in which the Church played mediator. These impulses were altogether lacking in the non-Christian world. In Russia they were—at the very least—highly attenuated by the Byzantine spirit of Caesaro-Papism, which asserted itself, after some vacillation, in the seventeenth century. 170

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This increasing intensification of state organization and the strengthening of authoritarian and institutional aspects in political life led, wherever the old original idea of law had survived and the beginnings of privileged groups existed, to a more or less marked reaction of the corporate spirit against the one-sided reinforcement of the institutions of control. The result was the evolution of a regular system of Estates. In details these developments took various forms. In England feudal absolutism succeeded in saving the counties from feudal disintegration, they remained in the service of the state as associations for the fulfillment of obligations and the discharge of burdens, and the powerful privileged elements were persuaded to take their share in the growing tasks of a more intensive local administration. Accordingly, the principles of rulership and of association became fruitfully reconciled in the area of local administration; and the growth of the parliamentary system here appears as the progressive concentration of the local administrative machinery. In Poland and Hungary, where there was a powerless, often foreign, elected king, the more or less highly privileged nobility made the old territorial units—Voivods and the Comitats—into the domains of their class influence, and the Estates system became the foundation of a kind of republic of nobles, with a monarch at its head. Wherever, as in France and Germany, local administration was restructured after the dissolution of the old county and regional units in a patrimonial spirit and the prince’s bureaucratic authority gained the upper hand, the corporate reaction of the nobility in the development of the Estates system emerged most clearly. Out of the primitive right of resistance, and its rough and ready reprisals, there developed the subtler preventive methods of cooperation by the Estates in legislation, of the granting and administering of taxes by the Estates and its agencies, of a system of grievances and petitions against abuses of the princely authorities. Thus arose the representative system of Estates, in its various types. It was the prototype of the modern constitutional system, which has conquered the whole civilized world, and which has culminated nowadays in parliamentarism, which seems to have entered into a serious crisis in view of the great changes in the world’s political and social structure that have emerged from the Great War. If, however, the representative system has by now spread over the whole world, partly even in the Soviet and Fascist systems, it is still not a universal invention of mankind, 171

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but developed as an indigenous phenomenon only in the Christian West in the prototype of the Estates system. This process was, however, dependent on conditions so closely tied to the whole course of world history that we must not speak here of a general sociological law but of a singular historical process, extending throughout the entire West, whose results were subsequently carried over to other lands.

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The Balkan Peninsula s o u r c e

Jovan Cvijić, La péninsule balkanique (Paris: J. Gamber, 1918). Chapter XVIII, “Différenciation sociale et psychique,” 254–60.

Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927) was a Serbian geographer. He studied natural sciences and mathematics in Belgrade, and physical geography and geology

with Albrecht Penck at the University of Vienna (1889–1893). Moving beyond the natural sciences perspective from the 1890s onwards, he emerged as one of the main experts of the Balkans, combining geology, geography, and an-

thropology. Devising a “total” anthropogeographical approach, he sought to

link natural and social factors to each other. Cvijić became well-known and received various nominations and distinctions, including his appointment as the rector of Belgrade University and as president of the Academy of Sciences in

1921. As an internationally recognized scholarly authority, he was involved in

the peace negotiations after World War I, supporting the political and territorial aims of the Serbian government which sought to unify the South Slavs in

a common state under Serbian leadership. While his theory focusing on the

Dinaric anthropological type was originally meant to sustain the Serbian na-

tional project, after 1918 he adjusted rather smoothly to the new Yugoslavist ideology and provided a framework of references for various research projects mapping the new state. Among others, his construction of the heroic Di-

naric type was central to most of the projects seeking to devise a Yugoslav ethno-psychology.

His major anthropogeographic work, La péninsule balkanique, was based

on his public lectures at the Sorbonne and combined geological, geographical, ethnographical and sociological levels of analysis. It exemplifies the complex entanglement of national, regional, and transnational perspectives present in interwar East and Southeast European historical culture. In this excerpt,

Cvijić provides a comparative analysis of the psychological and sociocultural features of the various ethnic communities of the Balkans. In this way, he

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contributed to the development of a perspective transgressing the national narrative framework, and thus can be considered a precursor of Balkan

Studies, which experienced a considerable boom in the 1930s. At the same time, he was also unable (and unwilling) to avoid the reification of the national framework when choosing as his units of comparison the national communities, which were in many cases rather fuzzy and contested. In this sense, he

is simultaneously considered to be an advocate of the comparative perspective and a promoter of the nationalization of sciences in Southeast Europe.

· Morphologische und glaciale Studien aus Bosnien, der Herzegovina und Montenegro 3 vols. (Vienna: Lechner, 1900–1901); La péninsule balkanique, geographie humaine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1918); Geomorfologija (Knjiga druga) (Belgrade: Državna štamparija Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca, 1926). secondary literature · Derek Ford, “Jovan Cvijić and the Founding of Karst Geomorphology,” Environmental Geology 51 (2007): 675–84; Andrew B. Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Zoran Milutinović, Getting Over Europe: The Construction of Europe in Serbian Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011); Vedran Duančić, “Geographical Narration of Interwar Yugoslavia: Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian Perspective, 1918 to the mid-1920s,” East Central Europe 43, nos. 1–2 (2016): 188–214. main works

W Balkan Society in the Turkish Era

The evolution of the peoples of Balkan Peninsula at the end of the Middle Ages and afterwards was different from that of Western and Central European populations. The Turkish occupation interrupted this evolution by erasing existing institutions and the upper classes of society. The Spahis and the Ottoman or Islamized beys replaced princes and the local nobility, thus becoming the great landowners. The Church’s goods were often confiscated to benefit the vakuf, the property of the Muslim denomination. The clergy, which had been independent and nationalized before Turkish occupation, was then forced under the supervision of the Greek patriarchate of Constantinople. The only exceptions were those regions that belonged to the Serbian patriarchate of Peć for two centuries (1557–1768). The common people, who were only partially free even before the Turkish occupation, became the raya, a class of serfs who were forced to withstand the humili174

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ations of the beys living in the villages, and were controlled by a Turkish administration that was especially despotic since it was alien. There is, therefore, hardly more continuity in the social development of the Peninsula than with regard to civilizational influences. The popular masses were materially preserved; they perpetuated themselves as a living creature grows, multiplies, and conveys its physical and psychological characteristics from generation to generation. It is, however, only in the Dinaric and Moravo-Vardarian regions where the spiritual ties linking the masses to the society of the Middle Ages were preserved. The folksongs, monasteries, and churches kept national traditions intact, reminding the Serbs of their historical past. Christian society was neatly divided during the Turkish times. The phanariotes of Constantinople and Thracia were above the Greek popular masses. These wealthy families, who like the Ottomans owned čifliks, entered the Turkish administration in their own right. They were profoundly attached to the Greek patriarchate of Constantinople and came close to governing it, as it was from their ranks that the bishops of the Peninsula were recruited. The phanariotes were the most skillful exploiters of the Balkan peoples in Turkish times. Their influence was great: it expanded throughout the whole of the Peninsula up to Romania, where even today they constitute a number of rich families. We must mention the Greek and Armenian tradesmen who were in charge of trading on the Peninsula. More skilful and flexible than the Slavs, they were often able to avoid the violence of the Turkish oppressors and managed to attain great respect even in Ottoman circles. In the Turkish era in the Marica basin and on the Lower Danubian lowland, in addition to the phanariotes and the Greek tradesmen, the number of Bulgarian čorbadži, in other words usurers, was multiplying. These were men without law and order. Owners of vast čifliks, they were closely linked to the Turks, and in some cases were almost assimilated to them. While the phanariotes, even the more corrupt ones, harbored some patriotic sentiments, the Bulgarian čorbadži were often spies who disclosed plans of Christian rebellions to the Turks. Below the čorbadži there existed a class of artisans and small tradesmen, often Bulgarian in origin, that developed under the influence of the old Balkan civilization, and whose members were numerous and diligent. They were still apparent fifteen to twenty years ago 175

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and even more recently in Gabrovo, Tarnovo, Loveč, etc., although they were quite transformed by modern civilization. The inferior class consisted of the čifči, the real rayah. The organization of the Christian societies of the Dinaric and Moravian regions and of the westernmost part of the Peninsula were somewhat different, especially in case of the Serbs. Instead of great landowners and Ottoman or other oppressors, a local oligarchy was in charge, formed by the Islamized ancient nobility who dominated mostly Bosnia and Albania. The čiflik system was less vastly spread and less harsh than in the more eastern parts of the Peninsula. One could hardly encounter phanariotes, rich and corrupt Greek clergymen, similar to the čorbadži. The peasants were freer, and the society had a more national and singular nature. One can distinguish the tribal ethnic groups of Montenegro, Herzegovina, and Northern and central Albania up to the Škumba River. The territories of these zones have shrunk by now. This was a militant society, each tribe constituted a quasi-permanent army in which the warriors obeyed their chief or vojvoda, alternatively the chief of the brastvo, the “fraternity,” or glavar, who, in Albania, is called by a name, barjaktar, derived from Turkish (bearer of the banner, the barjak). These tribes were autonomous in almost each case, and the Turks succeeded in introducing the appearance of sovereignty only for brief periods. During Turkish times, the principality of Montenegro was merely a confederation of Serbian tribes that were sometimes joined by the neighboring Albanian tribes in the common cause. In Epirus, the Western parts of Greece, and on the Peloponnese, the same tribal organization existed, although somewhat less markedly. The other populations of the Dinaric and Moravian regions, such as the Šopi, were organized in great zadrugas; the nuclear family, inokoština, hardly existed there. Many regions populated by these zadruga communities corresponded to geographic units, the župa, and they sometimes achieved a certain autonomy. These were called knežina, or principalities. They were ruled by the knez, an elected chief who imposed himself on the population and on the Turkish authorities based on his independent conduct, wisdom, and courage. Often, when they belonged to a distinguished family, they succeeded in becoming hereditary. They collected taxes and paid the Turkish authorities from these. The mayors of these villages also aimed at transforming their functions to hereditary positions. The 176

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Šumadija region, especially around the end of the eighteenth century, intended to achieve such autonomy, and so it did, before and after Šumadija, Stari Vlah south of Užice, the Krajina between the Danube and Timok, as well as some knežinas in Herzegovina and in Bosnia, etc. Even outside the knežina, in regions that did not benefit from such autonomy, these villages were more or less independent. The families of the knez and the vojvods were above ordinary people in these regions. They played a key role in the wars of independence that broke out in the beginning of the nineteenth century in the Dinaric regions. Below these families in the social hierarchy were the priests and monks of national origin, some of whom were reputed military leaders who gained the role of vojvoda during the wars of independence. On the east side of the Peninsula in the Srednja Gora region and in some villages in the centre of the Peninsula, the population that subjected themselves to the sultan were rewarded with more or less complete autonomy. These villages formed the vojniška sela, the soldiers’ villages. Their autonomy lasted for over three hundred years and continued until the nineteenth century. The citizens and peasants living in the regions (Koprivshtitsa, Panadzhurishte, Kotel, Zheravna, etc.) had the right to carry arms. They had a high reputation amongst the Bulgarian population. The existence of bands (četa) of hajduk and klephts was one of the characteristics of Christian society under Turkish domination. They lived in the forest-covered mountains of the Peninsula, especially in the Dinaric region and in the western parts of Greece. The uskok (deserters) of Dalmatia living in Senj and Klis (Clissa), as well as in other Yugoslavian countries subdued by Austria or Venice, came to join these groups. The hajduks preferred to form groups of thirty. They attacked the beys in their kula (fortified houses), Turkish government officials, and even the Ottoman army to avenge the humiliations their kinsmen were suffering. This was a cruel battle without mercy that sometimes deteriorated into looting and pillaging. The hajduk chiefs, the harambaša, dreaded and pursued by the Turks were, by contrast, beloved and protected by the peasants; with the peasants’ help they could thwart the threatening plans of their enemies, and in their houses they found shelter for the winter. The more gallant ones, true to the heroic traditions of the Middle Ages, challenged the most famous Turkish warriors, while taking care of their wives and children as if they 177

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were Christians. The hajduks, just like the militant tribes of Montenegro and Herzegovina, prepared the way to the great Independence Movement through their ceaseless struggle. Formation of New Societies by Migration

We have indicated the successive shifts of the political and religious center of the Serbian people: under Turkish pressure they moved towards the North, from Skopje towards Prizen, then from there through Kruševac to Belgrade and Smederevo on the Danube. Finally, by the great migration of the seventeenth century, they moved to the left side of the rivers Sava and Danube. The Serb patriarchate of Peć was transferred to Karlovci, Novi Sad (Neusatz) became the centre of intellectual and literary circles, whereas Temišvar became the capital of a Serbian Duchy, the Vojvodina. This Serbian society of the Bačka, Banat, and Srem regions was composed of the ancient indigenous population mixed with newcomers from the Balkans. From then on, the basic components of the urban masses have been, besides the ancient inhabitants, Kosovar and Metohian immigrants. These immigrant tradesmen and artisans quickly formed a bourgeois class, which became a rich and powerful element of society, especially during the eighteenth century. Their church, almost completely independent and national in its roots, encouraged intellectual and national development. Enriched by endowments from the Serbian Despots, or the nobility, they extended their already vast estates by purchasing further lands. Numerous Serbian monasteries were built mostly in Srem in Fruška Gora, where the remains of the Serbian kings of the Balkan Peninsula were transported. Thus, Fruška Gora became a national sanctuary. The Serbian church and the tradesmen founded several schools there; education expanded. A class of intellectuals was forming who would serve as middlemen between the Balkanic world and Western Europe. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, they provided independent Serbia with educated personnel. A great part of Serbo-Croatian-populated areas was organized into military zones by the Austrian authorities, where the recruitment of soldiers was taking place and where a unique mentality had developed, which is apparent even today. Meanwhile another political and intellectual center was 178

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formed by Serbo-Croatians in Zagreb, outside of the historical territory of the ancient Croatian state. This center could develop more continuously and intensely thanks to the political autonomy it acquired. Zagreb rapidly became a highly influential cultural center engaged in defining and spreading the idea of a unified Yugoslavia. The evolution of Zagreb and CroatiaSlavonia was, however, influenced to a lesser extent by immigrants from the Balkans than was the region situated more to the East. Bulgarian émigrés did not succeed in creating a national society. Later, during the nineteenth century, propaganda committees were founded in Odessa, Bucharest, Belgrade, and other cities. The first intellectuals who gathered in these associations would later form the educated classes. They would play an important role in Bulgaria after it gained independence in 1878. It was also from beyond the borders of Balkanic Greece that the ruling class who emerged to dominate liberated Greece had come. Composed of the educated gentry and rich tradesmen, this elite was born in Greek colonies scattered all over the Mediterranean region and all over Europe and came from groups of phanariotes from Constantinople and from among the hetairias, the secret societies founded mostly in Romania and in Odessa that propagated nationalist ideas. It is interesting to note that only Albania failed to form a national class of intellectuals. There were fellow countrymen abroad who became rich through trade, but they were indifferent to the ideas of independence and did not contribute in any way to the foundation of a national culture. Nearly all of them were employed by the conquering extra-Balkanic states, and they felt attached to their homeland neither by emotion nor by thought.   The Slavonization of Towns

The Yugoslavs had no particular fondness for urban life in the Middle Ages and did not found any significant towns. It is commonly acknowledged that they dealt with stockbreeding and agriculture, as well as built pretty and spacious villages. Their taste for urban life started to develop only two centuries ago, except on the Adriatic coast, specifically in Dalmatia. The Yugoslavs came to settle in the towns of the Balkan Peninsula and AustroHungarian cities en masse, often quickly Slavonizing them. 179

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In the eighteenth century, the towns on the continental parts of the Peninsula were still inhabited by an—often overwhelming—Turkish and Greek-Aromanian majority. In the countryside, however, all the way to the outskirts of the towns, Yugoslavs dominated. By the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth centuries, their desire for well-being and a higher social status resulted in new trends. Their numbers grew considerably in the countryside, and furthermore, as a consequence of the general economic boom that affected Europe, towns needed a substantially larger workforce than before. This was the reason they decided to move there. In the continental parts of the Peninsula, a rather specific cause was added to the above-mentioned general ones: goods and people were safer in towns than in the countryside. In the Yugoslav-inhabited lands outside the Peninsula, communication became easier, and towns grew rapidly and even began to industrialize. The Yugoslav workforce, which became a necessity by that time, was cheaper than the German or Italian. The Yugoslavs, who arrived in great numbers, stopped assimilating to the Germans or to the Italians. They became conscious of their own rights, especially after the national awakenings of the beginning of the nineteenth century. They became artisans, tradesmen, even bankers, or businessmen. The size of their educated class was growing as well. Yugoslav economic, educational, and scientific institutions were founded everywhere. Thus, a more or less complete Slavonization of the towns took place. The ethnographic evolution of the towns on the Adriatic coast, especially in Dalmatia, was of a different kind, since these towns had already been more or less Slavonized by the end of the Middle Ages. The population of Roman origin, the Romani, Latini, or Dalmati assimilated almost completely to the Yugoslavs who flocked to the towns. The Dalmatian coast never fell under Turkish rule but was dominated by Venice. The Dalmatian Hinterland, the Zagora, was used as a military frontier. Therefore, a great part of the population was spared from the tormented and miserable fate of the Balkanic peoples and could participate in the civilized life of Western Europeans. There was constant progress in the development of the urban population, though this population assimilated to the Italians to a certain extent: in its public life it adopted a Venetian dialect, and it even allied with the Italian Party. As a consequence of the above-described causes, however, the towns of the Adriatic coastline regained their Slavic national consciousness by the nineteenth century. 180

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Meanwhile, one Southern Dalmatian town underwent a rather special sort of progress: Ragusa (Dubrovnik). It was independent, or rather completely autonomous until the end of the eighteenth century. In the midst of the dark shadows cast by the Ottomans on the entire Peninsula, Ragusa became the glowing hearth of culture. The town continued to develop its commercial ties with the Balkanic states, which were established during the Middle Ages and continued during the Turkish times as well. Although Ragusa had been of Roman origin, a large number of Serbian settlers and fugitives were drawn to the town, and thus it shed its exclusively Latin-style primitive looks. “Serbian, which had until then been merely a dialect of the lower classes and of women, penetrated the aristocratic circles and became the colloquial language of rich tradesmen, the nobility, and the counts who spoke naški, our tongue, amongst themselves. Even though they managed Italian just as well as their mother language, even if they tasted the divine majesty and the supreme grace of a language softened and ennobled by Dante and by Petrarch, they preferred Serbian, which they harvested from their mothers’ lips.”1 The continuous waves of Serbian immigrants from Herzegovina, Bosnia, and from the historical Raška region completed this transformation during Turkish times. Thus, Ragusa became more Slavic than any other town on the Peninsula or the Yugoslav lands in Austria-Hungary. Ragusa was a republic of aristocrats governed by a patriciate with whom the rich merchants and ship-owners, who often became members of the nobility themselves, cooperated. Literature, art, and science were highly esteemed there. Even the lower classes made up of the people, the pučani, were under the influence of this advanced culture. There was a particular “Ragusan” mentality that is noticeable even today, despite the significant social and political changes that took place. Beside the more or less Latinstyle culture there exists a uniquely Ragusan pride, the pride of the historic republic of aristocrats. As a result of its peripheral position and the gap between Ragusa and the other Yugoslav lands still under Turkish domination, it could influence the other Serbo-Croatian nations on a significant level only after the early nineteenth century, when it had already ceased to be a republic. It was not 1 Louis de Voïnovitch, La Monarchie française dans l’Adriatique (Paris, 1919), preface by Ernest Denis.

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until new intellectual centers were established in Yugoslavia that they began to support the diffusion of Ragusan literature. It was studied in depth in Zagreb and later in Belgrade. Democratic Societies in the Free Balkanic States

When the Balkanic peoples gained independence, they liberated themselves from the feudal regime and from the oppression of the Spahis and of other foreign masters, be they secular or religious. The patriotic revolution caused an economic and social revolution. In the newly formed states the population consisted almost solely of peasants: the insignificant minority of the vojvods, the Serbian knez, the Bulgarian čorbadži, the phanariotes, and the Greek and Armenian tradesmen disappeared among them. A homogeneous and egalitarian society was constructed, a society where the peasants were the owners of the land. After a long time under unjust and tormenting rule, the yearning for justice inspired the democratic spirit of the people. It was more a natural democracy than a democracy in the conventional sense of the term: the institutions, ideas, and democratic government were missing. This society was unique, among other reasons, because of its acceptance of and regard for the authority of its leaders, in some cases manifesting in voluntary submission to such leaders, the habit of which was a remnant of Turkish rule. In each Balkanic state, therefore, an autocratic regime could be established, at least temporarily. Usually a powerful and adroit autocrat ruled, often supported by a National Assembly. Most of these men of the people were actually hardly more than demagogues and disguised tyrants. Even today autocracy is powerful in Bulgaria. Nevertheless, the evolution moves towards democracy, especially in Serbia and in Greece where it is further enhanced by economic and social equality. The liberation of individuals worked wonders. Everyone felt secure in their personal dignity. The result was a considerable effort to achieve a better and more modern life. The standard of life quickly improved. The society in the making was shaken in its customs, in its points of view, and in its most profound psychological characteristics. The consequence of this was the renewal of the liberated Balkanic states. The homogenous societies consisting largely of peasants began to change. Courts, political parties, in182

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tellectual circles, and economic, social, and scientific organizations emerged as a result. Various new sprouts saw the light, for which the psychological characteristics of the Balkanic peoples and the tendencies of their previous history might account.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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The Common Character of Southeast European Institutions s o u r c e

Nicolae Iorga, “Formes de la vie sociale,” in Le caractère commun des institutions du sud-est de l’Europe (Paris: J. Gamber, 1929), 110–38.

Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940) was a prominent Romanian historian and politician, as well as a literary critic, poet, playwright, and memoirist. He graduated from the University of Iași and then studied in Paris and Berlin, earn-

ing his doctorate at the University of Leipzig at the young age of 23. At the turn of the century, Iorga became the catalyst for the influential literary magazine Sămănătorul, and a leader of the League for the Cultural Unity of All Ro-

manians. He also transformed his residence at Vălenii de Munte into a cul-

tural center and popular university, where he lectured starting in 1908. Iorga was active in politics: in 1910 he co-founded the Democratic-Nationalist Party (Partidul Naționalist-Democrat), together with A. C. Cuza, on a nationalist

and anti-Semitic platform. He served as a member of the Romanian parlia-

ment, President of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, cabinet minister,

and Prime Minister of Romania (1931–32). Iorga was an editor and contributor

to numerous journals, newspapers, and magazines such as Neamul românesc,

Revista istorică, and the Revue Historique du Sud-Est-Européen. He also found-

ed the International Congress of Byzantine Studies, the Institute of Southeast

European Studies, and the Institute of World History in Bucharest. While he re-

mained a fervent nationalist, in the 1930s he became increasingly critical of the extreme right and openly criticized the Iron Guard. As a result, he was as-

sassinated by an Iron Guard death squad on November 17, 1940.

Although Iorga was a promoter and defender of national history as a pri-

mary field of historical enquiry, he warned against the shortcomings of writing

national histories in isolation. In line with his doctoral supervisor and erstwhile

mentor Karl Lamprecht, Iorga argued that historians should insert their research

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within the framework of universal history. This broader perspective would expose “absurd” nationalist exaggerations and would highlight cross-national encounters and exchanges. Although Iorga was not a comparative historian per se, in his own work he promoted a relational perspective of world history, with

a focus on the regional history of Southeast Europe. He explored the interrelated development of the Balkan nations both synchronically and diachronical-

ly. As the present article shows, he was particularly interested in the morphology of institutions and practices linked to the popular classes of these societies,

which converged with his ethno-populist political vision. Combining transna-

tionalism with nationalism in a peculiar manner, his analysis of the common regional framework also asserted the continuous presence of a Romanized (i.e. Western) component in Southeast Europe. This implied the relativization of the

Greco-Byzantine legacy as constitutive of the region, and thus also the elevation of the symbolic historical importance of the Romanians.

main works · Istoria literaturii române în secolul al XVIII-lea, 2 vols. (Bucharest: Institutul de Arte Grafice şi Minerva, 1901); Geschichte des rumänischen Volkes im Rahmen seiner Staatsbildungen, 2 vols. (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1905); Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches, 5 vols. (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1908); Essai de synthèse de l’ histoire de l’ humanité, 4 vols. (Paris: J. Gamber, 1926–1928); Histoire de la vie byzantine, 3 vols. (Bucharest: Edition de l’auteur, 1934); Istoria literaturii româneşti contemporane, 2 vols. (Bucharest: Adevĕrul, 1934); Byzance après Byzance: Continuation de l’ histoire de la vie byzantine (Bucharest: Institut d’études byzantines, 1935); La place des Roumains dans l’ histoire universelle (Bucharest: Institut d’études byzantines, 1935); Istoria Românilor, 11 vols. (Bucharest: s.n. 1936); secondary literature · William O. Oldson, The Historical and Nationalistic Thought of Nicolae Iorga (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs; distributed by New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Nicholas M. Nagy-Talavera, Nicolae Iorga: A Biography (Iaşi: Center for Romanian Studies, 1998); Alexandru Zub, N. Iorga: Studii şi note istoriografice (Brăila: Istros, 2012).

W Forms of Social Life

In order to be able to analyze the manner in which the social classes of the Balkan Peninsula and the Carpathian regions are represented with the greatest possible profit, a hierarchic order seems to me the most convenient. One tends to believe too easily that the clergy derives uniquely from Byzantium. This is supposed to be a simple Byzantine or post-Byzantine form. 186

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One should limit oneself to study what the orthodoxy of Constantinople represented in order to understand what the religion was and what the clergy was in these different countries. Yet, this is a mistake. There exists something more ancient than Byzantium, more intimate and more original than what emerged afterwards from this imposing and pompous capital of the Eastern Empire. There was something popular at first. And if in Serbia itself the patriarch of [the Serbian King Stefan] Dušan is elected by the “Serbian and Greek assembly [sobor],”1 this popular Church can be observed through the centuries until our era, until the beginning of the nineteenth century in the Romanian provinces. The rural, peasant Church stems from a foreign influence that is not the influence of Byzantium. It is an ancient missionary foundation of Latin missionaries traveling from the West. Nearly every time one tackles the religious and hierarchical history of the Balkan Peninsula, one finds that there is a neglected part, for one cannot see further than the great Church organized into a hierarchy with pre-defined categories. But this one comes later; it replaces, only in certain domains—and it can never completely eliminate—this ancient pastoral traditional Church. If one takes up the study of the religious life of the Romanian provinces, one may observe at any given moment, without any distinction between Wallachia and Moldavia, that the bishop’s influence, the hierarchical influence from the top, is rather feeble on the rural clergy. This clergy recognizes the bishop’s authority; its way of existence and its behavior, however, does not come from the orders and regulations of this official leader. The village, autonomous in a number of relations, is also autonomous concerning its religion. This priest, whom we call preot in Romanian, stemming from presbyter and connected to the Albanian preft, whom we also call popa, an ancient pagan Latin term describing the priest of the Romans, is one of the village’s leaders. To a certain degree, he is elected by the village. When later, in the nineteenth century, the Transylvanian Church led by one of the major Romanian chiefs from beyond the mountains, the or1 On the election of patriarch Joachim at Seres, see K. Jireček, “Geschichte der Bulgaren,” Archiv für slavische Philologie, vol. 2 (1877): 168–77, here 170; on the Greek terminology of monastic life, coming from Mount Athos where the Serbs had the Chilandar convent, see K. Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft im mittelalterlichen Serbien: Studien zur Kulturgeschichte des 13.–15. Jahrhunderts (Wien, 1912– 19), 3:42–43.

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thodox archbishop Șaguna, introduced in its “statute” this village priestelection, the feature could have been the imitation of Protestantism; but it was, at the same time, a preserved element of the ancient tradition. The priest is wanted by the village; he passes, so to speak, a challenge in front of the “elders,” and by this fact he already exercises great influence. From the perspective of the religious leader, he is, at the same time, partially a judge, partially a “superintendent” of this small village community. He can command the village in combat, and he can take part in war. There are, during the whole of Romanian history, priests who played a military role. There are some who became legends. Amongst the generals of Michael the Brave there was a priest whose name became inseparable from that of the great Wallachian warrior. Furthermore, in 1848, when the Parisian Revolution of February passed through the Romanian provinces, the proclamation of a new state of affairs, lasting for a few months as an ephemeral Republic, was created in a village by inferior officers, by Heliade, a grammar professor of Bucharest who was, at the same time one of the main representatives of Romanian literature of the period, and by a priest. There was, thus, a benediction of a village priest on the movement that was meant to give Romania a modern shape. We have, on the other hand, the bishop, a Greek and Serbian canonical creation in the two principalities, who, at least in the case of Wallachia from the beginning of the sixteenth century, has been influenced by the Byzantine tradition. The prince who reigned in this era, Radu, a great founder of sacred constructions and, in the meantime, the organizer of the Church as an institution, invited a Serbian from Constantinople who had been the patriarch of this ecumenical Church. Nifon descended into the country and designated the canonical seats of the Wallachian Church henceforth: the Metropolitans at Argeș and Târgoviște and finally one in Bucharest, a bishop in Râmnic, and another in Buzău. In this canonical episcopal order, however, nothing changed with regard to the situation of the priests. When the new order was introduced by a representative from the Church of the East, who had directed this ecumenical Church for some time, the system remained the ancient, traditional Church that lived in the sixteenth century the same way as it did in the fourth or fifth centuries when the first missionaries arrived to solidify Christianity in the region. 188

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If we traverse the Balkan Peninsula, and we remember the conditions in which the Bulgarian Church was created under the leadership of one who first called himself Boris as a pagan prince, and who was, after his conversion, called Michael, the name of the Emperor of Constantinople, and who was essential for the imperial attribution of a new Christian formation, we may state that at that moment, before the establishment of the Byzantine religious order, there had existed another form. The Latin Church relied on this other form, at least in trying to settle in the Bulgarian territory. If the Popes’ desire to conquer a new province for Catholicism on the Balkan Peninsula had been realized, there would have been a church of missionaries, since the clergy could not have been improvised in any other manner. In the ninth century, thus, missionaries would have been sent to these Bulgarian regions, similar to those who formed rural churches, even at the beginning of the Middle Ages, passing from one district to another, from one village to another, from one group of peasants to another. Because, in this case, Byzantium won the struggle against Rome as Orthodoxy superseded the foundation of the Latin Church, there were precise forms of hierarchy imported without gaps from Constantinople from the very beginning. In Serbia the conditions were rather different from those in Bulgaria, and they converged with essentially what could be observed in the Romanian provinces. First, what concerns ancient Serbia, forming primarily on the Adriatic coast, this Dalmatian Serbia had, it seems quite certain, a Church of missionaries that, at the beginning, was Catholic, used the Latin language, had a rural clergy, and corresponded on each point to what could be observed on the Danube banks and in the Carpathians. As to the other Serbia, Central Serbia, this succeeded with the arrival of its dynasty, the long-ruling and glorious Nemanjids, in realizing national unity and creating an Empire in the fourteenth century under Stefan Dušan. In its Church, one may observe the difference between a superior clergy—created by Byzantium and becoming Byzantinized if not Hellenized, although it remained Slavic because of Saint Sava, a prince of the royal family, who was the founder of the Serbian Church and Serbian civilization in the thirteenth century—and another, inferior clergy. Thus under the Church of Saint Sava, under this Church of monks who used distinctly Greek terms for all dignities, there is still the ancient 189

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Church, the ancient patriarchal Church, the Church of origins, and as proof one merely has to think—since there are no surviving documents from the Middle Ages and we do not know what the inferior clergy was like from 1200 and 1300 to the fifteenth century—of the role the Serbian clergy played during the revolution of Karađorđe who founded the new Serbian state of the modern era. At the head of those who fought for national independence, we find the priests. On the side of the ancient noncommissioned officers who had served under the neighboring Habsburg emperor; on the side of the Hajduks, or bandit chiefs—something essentially national, representing the type of rebellion that was not against Turkish domination as such, but against the abuses of the Ottomans’ imperial domination—we find priests. In fact, the memoirs of one of the leaders of the popular Serbian clergy, Matija Nenadović, translated to French by Mr. Haumant, contains one of the most interesting, most truthful, and most authentic testimonies of an actual national spirit, and an actual warrior spirit of this Serbian revolt against the abuses of the Ottoman domination. Furthermore, since I have been speaking about a Serbian protopope (protopresbyter), this actual institution of protopopes is rather interesting and could be worth studying, not only in Serbia, but in all the countries of the Balkan Peninsula and its neighboring regions. In the fifteenth century, when the two Churches, the Eastern and the Western, were to be reunited at the Council of Florence, thereby reaching the formula of the union, Moldavia was also represented by a protopope. The protopope is the leader of priests, although he is not a bishop; he is someone between a priest and a bishop, someone who does not proceed from above, from the bishop, but rather from the priest, therefore proceeding from below towards a higher position. I doubt that the situation of these protopopes was ever entirely recognized legally or that there was anything canonical involved in this popular institution; at the same time, however, Constantin protopope spoke in Moldavia’s name at the Council of Florence. Later, in the nineteenth century, when the hierarchical forms were perfected, the protopope’s place was still next to that of the bishop or the archbishop. In Jassy, there was a protopope around 1810–1820, an inspector of “popas,” who was under the metropolitan orders of the archbishop. Modern legislation has preserved this, creating protopopes for district or regional groupings. 190

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At the beginning, however, there certainly was a connection between the protopopes of the Balkan Peninsula and the neighboring regions and the chorbishop of the West, specifically that of the Gauls, who was a country bishop established in a canonical fashion. Next to this clergy as the dominant class, a clergy of popular origins, there was also a Catholic infiltration in this entire Southeast European region. These two hierarchies attempted to eliminate the far simpler order, that of the traditional, popular, national Churches of these regions. The entire Catholic hierarchy in Serbia along the Adriatic coast was supervised by the Archbishop of Bar (Antivari), whose activity and whose bishops’ activities may be followed throughout centuries. As for the Romanians, the Catholic infiltration was conducted from various sides; it came from Hungary and Poland, and later on Italians represented the Catholic Church—even in the fifteenth century at Moncastro [Akkerman or Cetatea Albă], the “White City” of the Dniester’s mouth. In Wallachia there was an ancient bishopric (from the thirteenth century) at Severin on the Danube and another one in Argeș in the mountains, not taking into account the autonomous Franciscan monks of Târgoviște. Furthermore, in Moldavia there was, proceeding from the South towards the North, (not presented in chronological order) a Catholic bishopric in Bacău by the mountains and a bishopric influenced by the Franciscans of Csík (Ciuc) county in Transylvania. Moreover, there was another one on the Baia side due to Polish influence, and a third one, also owing its existence to the powerful influence of the Polish Kingdom, the bishopric of Siret. These bishoprics were called by a name borrowed from a foreign language: biscup, whereas the orthodox bishops were the vlădici (singular form: vlădică), or for men of letters, episcopi. These bishops seldom achieved the enforcement of Catholic forms, which could have corresponded far better with Romanian origins and the Romanian way of approaching matters, even religion. We may even ask ourselves the question: why could this long sequence of missionaries, all this development of Catholic episcopal hierarchy in Moldavia and Wallachia not manage to create an accepted Church? A Church accepted not only by the prince for passing political objectives, but by the nation itself. Why was there still such an aversion towards this Western form of Christianity, which, as I mentioned, corresponded better to the language spoken by the people and the origins of this nation? 191

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I believe that the explanation of Catholicism’s failure, nevertheless coming back to charge several times and in spite of preserving certain positions, though rather modest ones—a Catholic archbishop in Bucharest and a Catholic bishop in Jassy, not counting the strong Uniate Church reunified with Rome and boasting hundreds of thousands of adherents in Transylvania, dated from the eighteenth century, imposed mostly by Austrian domination,—is entirely based on the following fact: the Latin form of the Church has a rather strong hierarchy, a perpetual discipline in which there is an element of the Roman legion. Catholicism cannot make concessions easily. One should not forget that the Romanian Orthodox Church is a Church in the Romanian language, and that it has been so at least since the seventeenth century, and that even the liturgy was translated into Romanian around 1700. The Roman Church never agreed, at least at this stage, to make such sacrifices. Furthermore, it was not only the possibility of using the popular language so that every last peasant may understand what is said at church and also learns the literary language by listening to this ancient translation of the Scriptures and of the liturgy, but also something else that explains Catholicism’s failure: there was no village priest in Catholicism. This priest would have been under the direct control of his bishop. Each movement would have been directed and executed according to his orders. Village autonomy regarding religion would have disappeared. The priest would have been far more learned; he would have known matters that the Romanian seminarians did not; he would have had ties with forms far superior to the traditional ones. Meanwhile, however, regarding traditions, it would have been an abdication, a renunciation. The whole past of the peasants’ way of religious life, an extremely powerful way of life, escaping all constraints and discipline, would have been buried. ***

For the nobility, one question poses itself at the beginning: is this nobility truly ancient? And if it is not, if, at the beginning there were, what I wished to show before, the fundamental institutions of the people in the common meaning of the word, and all that goes beyond them is imported, then we may ask ourselves: where does this nobility come from? Does it come from 192

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a different region in case of each country? Or do we need to admit, as in other fields, that this nobility comes from the same side, is presented in the same way from the beginning, by the same means, and represents the same essence? I must admit that this nobility, in Bulgaria, in Serbia, in Romania—the legendary Romanian boyars who, in order to squander their money, tore the country apart by their schemes, and who meanwhile played, however, an extremely important national role and kept the centuries-old peasant way of life going—is an imported or a belated creation. The source of this is triple. Either it results from the evolution of an ancient popular leader, or it comes as a direct import from abroad, from Byzantium or from the West, since influences flow from both sides in this field as in others. Or this nobility is a unique institution, a creation of history, a result of struggles, a set of prizes granted to the prince’s good companions, to soldiers faithful to the country, to the defenders of territorial integrity, or to conquerors beyond the nation’s borders and the bounds of the country. As for the first category of these new noblemen, as we have seen from the evolution of the voivods, by the duality of the title somewhere between the judge and the knez, which became the meaning of the Hungarian voivod turning into a monarch, the saint apostolic king, or even the Transylvanian voivod with his royal competence, the great voivod of Wallachia and of Moldavia or “domn” according to the imperial attribution of his subjects, and the voivods of Bosnia—an entire map of this position’s scope could be created based on this institution of voivods achieving a supreme degree of development, encompassing the whole Western region: Transylvania and the two Romanian provinces, Bosnia with some faint infiltration from the Serbian side. It is quite certain that these evolved from ancient popular institutions. Thus, those who did not become leaders of states, those who had no entire regions under their command, still distinguished themselves from others. Among the judges elected, probably by the community or appointed by general consent among the “good and elder men” who governed the community, there was one, whose qualities and whose ascendance qualified him for leadership in this republican village order. After some time, there is no doubt that we have arrived at the hereditary nobility. There were certain families who established themselves, and the heredity of tendencies, the heredity of qualities is indisputable; one inherits certain flaws, but one is 193

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born with certain abilities: popular instinct recognized this a long time ago, when it sensed something divine passing from one generation to another. As for the second category, in Romania there were numerous boyars of foreign origin. When the Turks conquered the Balkan Peninsula, a whole exodus began towards the Danube. Among the first Wallachian boyars there were numerous Greeks, several Bulgarians, and quite a few Serbs who found a last refuge there. As for the rest, the entire Balkanic civilization and hierarchy found its last refuge and shelter on Romanian soil, to the point that sometimes when the land was flooded with people, the power of absorption and assimilation was so great that the following generation was as Romanian as the milieu into which the new group found themselves settling. In the case of Moldavia, we can also clearly distinguish among the first boyars, the milites, Angevin-style knights who came with the founder of the Maramureș principality. These were the great knights of the West, the vitéz in the style of the great Hunyadi. But, at the same time, there were, without doubt, Ruthenians, if not people from the Balkans, since in Northern Romania there was no possibility of transmission with gates open towards migrations from the South. As for the third category, individual merits, a bulk of documents is ready to show, at the very least, how military virtue led to the possession of lands, and as a public responsibility this led to the formation of nobility. In these two provinces, however, the nobleman could just as well be the fallen leader of an autonomous region, a quasi-prince eliminated by the evolution of the province. Around the middle of the thirteenth century, a Hungarian privilege allows us to see that there were at least three leaders in Oltenia, one of which was a knez bearing the title voivod and two others were knez and nothing else but knez, whereas on the eastern side of the Olt, an autonomous voivod governed, in this respect, independently from the Hungarian Kingdom. Since there was only one voivod in Argeș, the other ones had to emigrate or subject themselves to the one voivod. We know the names of those who emigrated, as they had more or less identifiable names found in Hungarian documents from the time. Furthermore, from time to time in the Hungarian kings’ campaigns against Wallachian autonomy, one may see interesting people with Romanian names who seem to have been available for replacing the governing prince. This was another branch of the same dynasty, or the 194

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representative of a dynasty from the valleys, a rival dynasty wishing to be established instead of the one who was attacked. Others, however, had to yield, and they became the counselors to the man who proved to be stronger than them. Nobility was heritable. If one did not take part in political discussions, however, if one did not counsel the prince for a generation, if one did not maintain one’s rank in the army, deposition or degradation was the result; one could become a simple peasant with privileges, and later the privileged peasant could become a peasant without privileges. Dimitrie Cantemir, the historian of the Ottoman Empire who was twice Prince of Moldavia and who knew the political mechanisms of his country perfectly, once stated this formula, which is absolutely true: the son of a great logothete may become a peasant, and the son of a peasant may become a great logothete. The hierarchical structure of the Romanian boyardom as it existed in the fourteenth century was already completely set in Wallachia as well as in Moldavia; in Moldavia it was even more established than in Wallachia by the fifteenth century. ***

Were there corresponding matters, such as more ancient origins or the character of the nobility in other countries of the Balkan Peninsula? It has to be said that the Bulgarian boyardom that actually created the name cannot be described in a well-informed fashion, let alone the type of nobility that lay beyond the Romanian provinces until reaching Kievan Rus, because the documents are so scarce. We may, however, speak about the Serbian nobility, based on the documents at our disposal, which are not as plentiful as those concerning Romania but are still quite numerous. One may claim that in Serbia there was a similar kind of evolution, regarding certain voivods and certain knez who were the descendants of ancient masters of the valley, ancient tribal chiefs, so when one encounters in Bosnia all the great permanent chiefs of the nation, their presence can be explained by drawing a parallel with the Romanian countries, that can be studied thoroughly from the very beginning. Next to this aristocracy of dignitaries, who are, at the same time, noblemen in the Western sense of the world—since in this European region there 195

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were no distinctions: to be noble meant the right and the obligation to be a public official and army chief; being an army chief and public official already meant entering the pre-existing nobility—this is another category of noblemen, the noblemen of foreign imitation. The foreign imitation came much less from Italy than from Hungary. Serbia’s contact with Italy was conducted through the Adriatic coast; this was Venice’s influence. Yet Venice was a republic, albeit one with great noble families, and the Ragusan nobility derives, if not in its bloodline then at least in its character, from the Venetian nobility. The Venetian influence could provide merely a species of aristocratic citizens, the “cittadinesca,” of patricians in each town on the Serbian Adriatic coastline, in Ragusa, in Spalato/Split and everywhere else, from one end to the other on this coastline of the Balkans. Aside from this influence, however, and by far surpassing it, was the Hungarian influence. In Hungary the nobility had a different character. The nobleman was called nemes which comes from “nem,” meaning “the nation.” The conquerors of the country, the “generationes” who conquered through the great “descensus,” the great “descent” of the ninth century, were the ones who formed the most ancient, most authentic, and most influential nobility in the country. The two terms were also borrowed by the Romanian language; “nemes” is nemeș and “nem” has become the Romanian neam, representing, as in Hungary, the nation and at the same time kinship. In Moldavia, there was a whole category of noblemen who had no allocated function, abandoned noblemen who lost all the privileges of nobility, who became peasants but remained noblemen without the revenues and honors belonging to the nobility, who were still called nemeși in the fifteenth century. The Hungarian influence also created these noblemen, the vlasteličići or the zentilotti,2 who were under Angevin influence even in the fourteenth century, to assume an entirely Western style throughout the whole Balkan Peninsula. There were, thus, Serbian jousts in the fourteenth century. One may find Western knights’ games, including games of chance with the zar (cf. “hazard”). One may find Western musicians called shpilmans (from the German Spielmann), employed for their distraction in Serbia in Dušan’s era; and when the shpilmans played, the company drank, which was referred to as “trinkati” (from trinken in German). There were also players of a stringed 2 Jireček, Archiv, 213–14.

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instrument, the laoutars of Bosnia, corresponding to the Romanian lăutari who gained a certain fame due to their performances and to the female public to these performances. The king of this country had zugularii, or wandering minstrels, that is jugglers, minstrels, and jesters3 as in the West. They were reading the Alexander Novel, and one may find names that recall the French epic poems. There is an Olivier, the despot, an Orland and an Orlande, and also a Tristan, a Merlin, and a Baudouin.4 Songs resembling those in the West with similar impulses and fashions stemming from them are sung by the tables of the great.5 This happened only in the part of Serbia that was under South-Italian Angevin influence, that of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which also conquered the Albanian coast, so that through this conquered land the influence of sixteenth-century chivalry, so brilliant and exciting, may have reached Serbia, which otherwise had a French queen, Queen Helen, at approximately the same time. Besides this nobility of dignitaries of noble character, however,6 there was the Byzantine influence. In the West, the nobility provided public officials; in Byzantium one needs to proceed from public officials to reach the nobility. All these sebastes, all these caesars, all these logothetes, all these cloaked ones, all these archons came from Constantinople, especially in Dušan’s era in the fourteenth century. One may even find in case of the knights among the ordinary nobility in the fifteenth century, the Byzantine pronoia and soldiers, proniares, who were the beneficiaries of certain privileges, and who in the meantime, also had to present themselves with their horses and arms the moment their king called, like the Romanian “curteni.” ***

An entire Byzantine literature reached these regions while Byzantine dignitaries exercised their influence; a whole literature stands side by side with another sort of literature, that of the Alexander Novel, which first reached 3 On a Serbian “glumac,” see K. Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft, 3:59; the Ragusan masques are called “kolende,” like the Romanian carols (colinde) on New Year’s Day; ibid., 57. 4 Ibid., 56–59, 64–65; see also 29; a royal steward of Venetian origin, ibid., 69; Italian doctors in Serbia, ibid., 73–74. 5 Ibid., 60. 6 Hungarian-style clothes, belts and hats, see K. Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft, 3:15, 20, note 5, 22; “Cerelli latini” for the ears, ibid., 23.

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the medieval Serbian, then the Romanian literature through Western sources. The Serbs as well as probably the Bulgarians read the same books that came from Byzantium. The noble class drank from the same springs of imagination, a popular one, which traveled from the East through the channel of Byzantium. Thus there were “Stephanites and Ichnelates,” “Barlaam and Joasaph,” where the whole Buddhist religious legend can be found, one of the most remarkable romances of the Middle Ages; the romance of Troy; the “Poricologos,” pretending to present a part of botany, at least the botany of kitchen gardening, in fictional form; the “rozhdaniks,” the “gromovniks,” the “trepetniks,” all those books that allowed for the prediction of the future through dreams or certain muscle movements or the interpretation of atmospheric phenomena; and some matters on cosmography. Not to speak about the translations of Manasses in Bulgaria, the chronicles of Malalas and those of Georgios Hamartolos in Serbia.7 Even in Romanian, a whole rhetorical set was borrowed directly from Slavic translations of Manasses in the sixteenth century, where only the names had to be changed in the formulas. Furthermore, an entire artistic tradition was born while these influences were present, the art that produced the beautiful frescos of Studenica Monastery in Serbia and the artistic wonders in the princely church of Argeș, the pride of Romania, from the fourteenth century; an art, which absolutely matches the mosaics of the Kariye Mosque of Constantinople, the Mone tes Choras, flourished in these regions.8 The ancient meaning of the Roman civitas disappeared. There are no more “civitates” in any other connection other than the military connection, this we have already said. This is the Slavic grad, the Hungarian vár, the Romanian cetate or cetațuie (the Romanians also use for the place of a town the word grădiște). Beside this “civitas” or fortress, however, there are urban formations of a different character. For the Romanians, as in the Balkan Peninsula, the first fundament was not independent of the fortress. The town is formed in the shelter, in the protective sphere of the hill-fort. For instance, in Bosnia there is the ancient and beautiful Visoki fortress, 7 Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft, 3:66. 8 Byzantinische Zeitschrift 16 (1907): 731–38; Commission of historic monuments of Romania, Biserica Domnească din Argeș (Bucharest, 1925); on Greek painters in Cattaro and Ragusa, see Jireček, ­Staat und Gesellschaft, 3:68.

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and Podvisoki is the town formed on the rock. In Romania in Hotin, for instance, on the Dniester, the Old Slavonic language used by the chancellery referred to “grad” and “podgrad.” In Hungary under the “vár,” which is the citadel, there is the várad (as Varadin, Nagyvárad, the Romanians created orade, oradie from the same stem), which was found in the shadow of the citadel. It must be mentioned that all these “grads,” all these “várs,” all these cetăți stem directly from the conquering Carolingian Monarchy, from the system of occupying a country and maintaining it through the castle and the burgrave, a system that proceeded to Moravia, from Moravia to Hungary, from Hungary to the Romanian provinces and, mixed with certain Byzantine forms, to the Balkan Peninsula from the Serbian side. There is, at the same time, the mercatum, the free “market,” the Serbian trg, the Romanian târg. This form proceeded across all the countries of this region; even the Turks adopted and transmitted it. The “market” is composed of a square, the market square, then the street of the merchants and the villages group all around it, each of them with its own church. New forms of urbanization were sought at this moment, which would not be easy to accept. This stone shell, which was the Western type of town, was not widespread in these countries. The names of the ancient lineages are sometimes preserved as street names; here and there, one may find boyar quarters in Romania, with a different church than that of the merchants, artisans, or former peasants. If there is fortification above, all is to be under the shadow of the great church enclosed within the walls of the citadel, formerly the house of prayer of the burgrave and the soldiers. The custom of Byzantine fairs, or panegyres, always held in connection with the celebration of a saint, spread everywhere. The Bulgarian as well as the Romanians have the form of panair9 or panagiur in Serbian. There is also a Slavic form found in other Slavic and Balkan cultures and in Romania; this is the nédélia or the Romanian nedeia, named after Sunday in Slavic. These nédélias or nedei were something far smaller, far more modest than the panair: it referred to a group of villages that gathered each Sunday to exchange products and merchandise. In Serbia, Greek names were preserved in urban life: from “perivol” for court, “kipourie” for orchard, “drum” (also 9 Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft, 2:56, note 3, 5; quotes also the Ragusan “panaiuro,” and the forms “panagiur,” “panaiurum.”

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in Romanian) for road, “akrostih” and “katastih” for tax and for registers, aksagi and mat for ἐξάγιον (saggio, a unit of weight) and μοδιος (hogshead), all the way to “amborie” corresponding to εμπόριον, whereas Romanians speak about negoț, negustor, a cumpăra, a vinde, a schimba, dobândă, capete (capital). Usury is called camăta such as the Serbian kamata.10 There are also, however, settler (hospites or gost) towns, represented, as has been mentioned, on the Balkan Peninsula by Saxon settlements around mines and in Transylvania in the Middle Ages by great Germanic towns that belonged to those Germans who are called, with no reason, Saxons in their own language and in the language of their neighbors. There is a whole Germanic Middle Ages worth studying on what is currently Romanian soil, which belonged to the Hungarian Kingdom before the most recent events. There were similar towns in Serbia and Bosnia; the Turkish conquest passing through there meant, however, that instead of traditional urban foundations11 what was established also had links to the customs of the conquerors, whereas Transylvania was guaranteed by the Wallachian and Moldavian forest border. In Kronstadt/Brașov, in Hermannstadt/Sibiu, in Schässburg/Sighișoara, in Broos/Orăștie, in Mediasch/Mediaș, in Bistritz/ Bistrița, or formerly in Klausenburg/Kolozsvár/Cluj, the entire medieval shape of the Germanic town was preserved, and there is nothing more interesting for someone studying these institutions than to see in the midst of Romanian villages preserving prehistoric Thracian customs the German town establishing itself while right next to it the Habsburgs introduced their own forms, the town of public officials and the town of the military, representing a third urban form in these regions. The peasants of these regions were divided into several groups: first, the shepherd (in Romanian: pastor; denoted also with the Turanian term: cioban). He is irreproachable since he is untouchable; he cannot be reached. He represents the primitive way of life from one end of the Balkan Peninsula to the other. The shepherd is the master of his flock, of his family, of his routes, buying his right to graze his ewe by paying something to the nobleman, to 10 Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft, 1:64; 2:41, 54–56, 62, 67, 69; Vadrile, unity of volume in Cattaro, ibid., 3:13; and Romanian vadra. 11 Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft, 1:65–66, note 4; 2:46; see also his Die Heerstrasse von Belgrad nach Constantinopel und die Balkanpässe (Prague, 1877), and his Die Handelsstrassen und Bergwerke von Serbien und Bosnien während des Mittelalters: historisch-geographische Studie (Prague, 1879).

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the church, and to the prince. From the Carpathians to the Pinde shepherds there was the same way of life. Besides the free shepherds who were sometimes colonized, there was another group on the meadows of Serbia: peasants driving caravans. They remained free at all times, as they were in a privileged position. In Serbia they were called kielators.12 This is the Romanian term călător stemming from cale, meaning road. Moreover, one of the oldest references to the Romanians on the Balkan Peninsula is that of οδιται, referring to the murderer of a Bulgarian prince around the year one thousand, a term that does not mean bandit or highwayman, but “kervandzhi” or caravan driver. In Serbian villages, and nowhere else but in Serbian villages, there was yet something else: there were specialized industrial peasants, the maistori, the magjupci (µαγκιποι).13 In Romania, until this very moment, there are peasant architects coming from the Balkan Peninsula who, when something needs to be built from stone (when something is built from wood it is always the duty of the peasant) like a church or an inn, present themselves and are accepted. The Hungarians had royal peasants, borrowed from the custom of the Moravians who were obliged to follow the monarch’s call, the udvorniks, and in Wallachia some time later there were the roșii, the “red ones” who were peasant soldiers, or those who were named after the tasks they were ascribed to (postelnicei, vistiernicei, diminutives of postelnic, vistiernic, etc.) The free peasant who is neither shepherd nor caravan chief, nor artisan, preserves his defining heritage, his paternal heritage, which is called baștină and oștină in Serbian as in Romanian.14 An entire discussion was raised a few years ago about whether the Wallachian principality was founded in an era when peasants were free or at a time when they were already serfs. A distinguished scholar, Constantin Giurescu, was convinced of the latter: the peasants achieved more acceptable circumstances later; they did not have them at the beginning. Yet, this is fundamentally wrong regarding the practical realities and the logical conditions through which a country is established. No state could have been formed in such difficult circumstances, with a group of noblemen and peas12 Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft, 1:70. 13 Ibid., 1:71. 14 Ibid., 2:61; diedina, land of donation, opposed to land of purchase.

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ants tied to the glebe between the Poles, Hungarians, and Turks, precisely where the principality of Wallachia was founded. There is no doubt that the former peasants, the peasants who are called in Romanian țărani or “those of the land,” or the furrow, were perfectly free. And here once more Romania serves to explain why there were only free peasants in the Balkan Peninsula at the beginning. Peasants becoming serfs was not only the result of Byzantine influence, but also due to economic phenomena: the peasant was the master of his land, but, mostly, he shared a common heritage; he seized the part of the land he could cultivate and the part that satisfied the needs of his family. Only from an abstract perspective he had his own part of the inheritance (in Romanian parte), which, only when it was sold, could be transposed to the land, according to the degree of lineage. If one had rights to one fortieth of a land by lineage, then the land was divided into forty straps and the peasant took one of these straps that he then could sell. At the beginning, when the economy was based on barter, there was no need to divide the land; when, however, Romanian peasants were forced into dependence on the Sultan and to submit to Constantinople’s authority, which involved the necessity of paying them tribute, the prince had to have money. He could not collect customs since the Turks were the masters of the Danube line; he could gather them only from the Christian side, from Hungary or Poland. The peasants also had to contribute money. They had herds and products, but they had no money. Thus, they had to sell their lands. I believe that on the Balkan Peninsula, especially in Serbia, a situation developed in which next to the ancient sébri, méropsi,15 who were mostly free peasants, there were also serfs, the posadniks,16 not a truly numerous group, since Serbian vigor was preserved by the majority of free peasants, remaining so despite all the vicissitudes. But there were, indeed, unfree peasants as well. This was caused by the new Byzantine institutions and by the necessity of paying money to the king or the emperor. An economic disaster must have occurred on the Peninsula like the one in the sixteenth century, bringing about the destruction of the Romanian peasants’ freedom. Henceforth 15 Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft, 1:48, 61, 71. 16 Jireček, Archiv, 205.

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they could not gather together anymore without risking the loss of their ears; they could not be litigants in judicial proceedings; their paraspor, the Byzantine name for their part of the land, was all that remained.17 Byzantine paroikoi found their counterparts in the Romanian vecin (the meaning is the same), who will be treated below. Actually, all the lands of the Balkans had slaves. In Hungary their number was rather reduced. In Serbia there were economic slaves. On could, being insolvent, fall into slavery quite easily.18 In Romania, there were never any slaves of actual Romanian origin. Furthermore, serfdom in Romania was of a rather different nature than serfdom in the West. There was only one attempt to organize serfdom according the way it appeared in Hungary. In 1595, the great Wallachian prince Michael, forced by the Turkish invasion, sent his boyars to Transylvania in order to negotiate a defense treaty with prince Sigismund Bathory, who preserved ancient Hungarian customs. The envoys took the opportunity to introduce into the convention they concluded the point that the Romanian provinces should be reunited with Transylvania in order to form a state ruled by the Hungarian prince from beyond the mountains, and thus the same legal order had to be introduced in all provinces. Thus, because there [in Transylvania] the peasants were serfs, it was decided that in order to avoid the country’s economic decline (since peasants are always on the move), farm laborers had to be tied to the land. Before that there actually were no peasants who were not free, but only those who were called rumâni, that is to say those who were only Romanian, neither boyars, nor members of an urban organization. At that time to bear the name of a nation and nothing more meant belonging to the lowest echelon of society, which might seem bizarre since we now live in an era when the name of a nation surpasses everything. In Moldavia they were called “vecini.” In the eighteenth century theoretical acts of liberation were adopted, while in the nineteenth century they gave, or actually returned the lands to the peasants. The true slaves, however, were the Bohemians, i.e. the Gypsies. This fascinating race, whose precise origin has been searched for in vain, came, no 17 Jireček, Staat und Gesellschaft, 1:42–43, 70; 2:38. 18 Ibid., 1:73; 2:57–58; see Ákos Timon, Ungarische Verfassung und Rechtsgeschichte im Bezug auf die Rechtsentwicklung der westlichen Staaten (Berlin, 1909), 48ff.

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doubt, as musicians and blacksmith farriers with the Mongolian invasion in the thirteenth century. The proof lies in Romania, since the organization of the Gypsies is precisely the same as that of Romanians in the primitive period, an era when all nations in these regions had the same characteristics. They were organized under voivods and judges, and even their names, which seem ridiculous now, were the names of Romanian princes. The child of a Gypsy is, thus, called danciu, a common name that stems from Dan—there were several Wallachian princes of that name. The voivod of the Gypsies, who is the ruler of life and death among his people, who does not register his people if he can escape the state’s registrars, pretends to be Christian and baptizes his family members, but still leads ancient secretive and obscure cults, still dresses in crimson, having long curls characterizing the Romanian princes in the churches they had founded. In this demeaning, now ridiculous form, they represent an entire organization of the state they copied upon their arrival. The very name they bear, “Bohemian”—in Swedish they are “Tatars”19—comes from the fact that they arrived in the West with their judges, their voivods, their dukes, presenting passports from the Hungarian and Bohemian king Sigismund. In Italian they are called Zingaro, in the Greek part of the Balkan Peninsula they are known as Tzigaras, which compared to the word “țigaie,” meaning frizzy sheep, and seems to have been a nickname first given to the Gypsies by Romanians because of their frizzy, black hair. Only the humanitarianism of the nineteenth century saw the end of the last remaining traces of Christian slavery in Southeast Europe.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

19 For Romanians the Mongolians were formerly known as “Little Tatars”; the suburb called Tătărași in Moldavia still preserves this name.

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jan rutkowski

The Genesis of the Corvée System in Central Europe Since the End of the Middle Ages s o u r c e

Jan Rutkowski, “La genèse du régime de la corvée dans l’Europe Centrale depuis la fin du Moyen Age,” in La Pologne au VIe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Oslo, 1928 (Warsaw, 1930), 211–17.

Jan Rutkowski (1886–1949) was a Polish social historian. Born to a rich entre-

preneur family in Warsaw, he started his studies there, but after his participation in the 1905 strike, he was expelled from secondary school. He moved to Lwów (Lemberg, Lviv), where he finished his secondary education and continued his

education at the university. After earning a doctorate, he conducted research at

the Vatican Archives in Rome and in Paris, and later obtained a job in the Galician Statistical Bureau where he dealt mainly with agrarian statistics. In 1918, he

moved to Warsaw, and a year later he took up a professorship at Poznań Univer-

sity, teaching early modern and modern economic history. He was elected to be

a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and various professional organizations and served as the editor of the Yearbook of Social and Economic History.

In the interwar period, he was one of the major representatives of the new Polish historiographical trend of social history led by the Warsaw professor Marce-

li Handelsman and the Lwów-based professor Franciszek Bujak, and he became prominent in communication with East Central and Western European scholarly

networks. During the Nazi occupation, he lived in Warsaw and tried to continue his scholarly work; his manuscripts, however, were destroyed during the Warsaw

Uprising. After the war, he returned to Poznań and initiated research on the occupation, which he did not complete because of his death in 1949.

Rutkowski’s work had a considerable impact on the emerging agrarian his-

tory in the 1930s, and in many ways, he influenced the postwar evolution of

Polish socioeconomic history as well. The key feature of his work, which is evident in the present article, was the author’s capacity to establish a comparative framework of analysis, thus highlighting certain regional trends while

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contrasting this to an ideal-typical Western European pattern of development.

This type of regional history was a result of the internationalization of history-

writing in the 1920s and 1930s, exemplified by international historiographical

conferences and historical commissions, which were most influential precise-

ly in the field of longue durée socioeconomic history, where the parochial national perspective could be effectively challenged.

· Poddaństwo włościan w XVIII wieku w Polsce i w niektórych krajach Europy (Poznań: Nakład Gebethnera i Wolfa, 1921); Historia gospodarcza Polski, t. I–II, (Poznań: Fiszer i Majewski, 1923); Badania nad podziałem dochodów w Polsce w czasach nowożytnych (Cracow: Nakł. Polskiej Akademii Umiejętności, 1938); Zagadnienie reformy rolnej w Polsce XVIII wieku (Poznań: Fiszer i Majewski, 1925); “La régime agraire en Pologne au XVIII-e siècle,” Revue d’ histoire économique et sociale 15 (1927), 69–84. secondary literature · Uczczenie pamięci śp. Prof. Jana Rutkowskiego (Poznań: Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk, 1950); Jerzy Topolski, O nowy model historii: Jan Rutkowski (1886–1949) (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1986). main works

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he fundamental bases of the European agrarian regime in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were, with few exceptions, the same in all countries. Great landed properties as well as small peasant farms burdened with the stately rents formed the common bases of the agrarian regime, which may be called censitary regime. The great landed property did not cease to play a significant role in the European agrarian regime until the end of the eighteenth century, and in many countries even until the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, in the course of time, the new uniformity of land division did not result in the uniformity of economic organization. In the majority of European countries and especially in Western Europe, the censitary regime remains the principal factor. In contrast, in Central Europe, including Eastern Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, etc., this regime begins to transform into a rather different economic organization in which the great stately farms and corvée played a paramount role. The beginning of this movement dates from the fourteenth century, becoming stronger in the fifteenth, and especially in the sixteenth century, which witnessed considerable changes in the agrarian regime in the afore206

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mentioned countries. Later, notably in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an analogous evolution took place in certain parts of Russia. The problem of the genesis of the agrarian regime’s transformation in Central Europe has been thoroughly studied. Several different causes were enumerated by various scholars who studied this problem. One might suppose that all logical possibilities have been exhausted and that it is impossible to invent at least one cause of primary importance that was left out by all these scholars. There remains nothing, thus, but to study each of these causes. Firstly, one must distinguish between the principal causes, the existence of which are absolutely necessary for the transformation from a censitary to a corvée regime to be able to take place. Secondly, the accidental causes responsible for facilitating the transformation, which are, however, powerless to affect the regimes by themselves. The special monographs on small territories are incapable of resolving this problem in a satisfactory manner. In this case, the usage of the comparative method is indispensable. By putting this method into practice, not only the facts of the economic history of the different countries where the censitary regime changed into corvée regime are used, but also those facts that concern countries where the medieval agrarian regime was not submitted to such radical changes during modern times. If one asks oneself why the censitary regime was replaced by the corvée regime in certain parts of Europe at the end of the Middle Ages, the answer to this question must also explain why in other European countries, especially in Western Europe, these same changes never happened. In all countries there existed a censitary regime of more or less numerous great landed properties that had an amount of land vast enough to establish one or more great stately farms at their free disposal. These were uncultivated lands suitable for cultivation, as well as cultivated lands given to peasants by the landlords through short-term leases. The lands belonging completely to the landlords were constantly expanded by escheated tenures and could always be further expanded through purchase. Corvée was known in all Western European countries around the end of the Middle Ages, and everywhere it was permitted to rent land, exchanging the corvée for the census. The possibility of creating great stately farms organized by the corvée, with few exceptions, was not realized by the great landlords of Western Europe. We might, thus, suppose that this form of or207

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ganizing great properties was less lucrative than tenant farming, sharecropping, or other forms of renting land that were common in Western Europe. Additionally, one might suppose special conditions existed, which made the corvée more lucrative than the census in Central Europe. The evolution of the corvée regime depended on the primary presence of two dominant conditions: on the facility of the agrarian products’ market, mostly of wheat, and on the serfdom of peasants. Selling a product is the principal aim of large-scale production. The facility of the markets creates, thus, an essential condition for the foundation of great seigneurial lands and the transformation of the censitary regime. Only the towns could ensure a satisfactory market for the great agricultural farms. Their existence, therefore, is an essential condition for the emergence of great farms. It is a well-known fact, and actually a quite remarkable one, that the great seigneurial lands, organized with the help of the corvée regime, developed in the countries where towns were relatively less advanced. Furthermore, this type of farming did not achieve the same level of importance in the close vicinity of towns for which the seigneurial production from the corvée territories was destined. It was supposed that the supply to distant cities through a commerce of wheat export must have been based on the large landed estates, since it is difficult for tradesmen to gather vast supplies of wheat by purchasing it in small quantities from peasants who could easily have supplied the neighboring towns themselves. This supposition, which at first glance provides a simple and clear explanation to the problem in question, is difficult to reconcile with the fact that, in Western Europe, there were land holdings of considerable size from which wheat was exported, but which still did not rely on the corvée regime. Northwest Germany, several French provinces, for instance Brittany, Orléans, etc., and in Italy, Sicily, Apulia, Marche, Romagna, etc. are typical examples of this. The countries cited as examples of where censitary peasant farms exporting agricultural products including wheat dominated prove that the facility of markets, however essential it was to the emergence of seigneurial exploitation and the corvée as dominant factors, is in itself incapable of creating the change we are talking about. There is one more essential factor in this case: we wish to speak of the judicial regime, which was especially favorable to great proprietors, allowing 208

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them to easily reorganize their lands. We see that, in reality, in the countries where the censitary regime has been maintained even into more recent times, the judicial situation of peasants improved dramatically. Meanwhile, in the countries where the corvée regime triumphed, a severe serfdom of the glebe was introduced; the judicial power of the landlords grew, and a considerable amount of peasants in many countries lost their hereditary rights to their tenures. There existed a narrow connection between the expansion of seigneurial exploitation based on the corvée and the judicial regime mentioned above, which might be called serfdom in the broad sense of the term. This serfdom considerably diminished the sum of money that was necessary for establishing seigneurial exploitation. Serfdom allowed landlords to reclaim lands from the peasants, who needed them for farming, without compensating them or by paying a price far below the one they would have paid had the purchase been free. Serfdom offered landlords an opportunity to have seigneurial lands cultivated by the corvée of peasants living on developed tenures. This circumstance allowed landlords to avoid purchasing the livestock and agricultural tools necessary for production. The possibility of basing the organization of seigneurial exploitation on the corvée considerably diminished the sum of circulating capital. The circulating capital of a great seigneurial land in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries was spent mostly on the payment of the laborers’ salaries. Meanwhile, the men who were performing corvée did not get their remuneration in money. Their remuneration consisted of the right to cultivate the land of their tenures. All in all, we may say that the serfdom of peasants diminished the sum of fixed capital as well as the circulating capital necessary for founding and managing a great estate. Serfdom also diminished the costs of production by reducing the remuneration of agricultural workers. When workmen doing corvée are considered, this diminution is manifested by the increase of corvée days they owed to the owner of a tenure of a certain size. When it comes to salaried workers employed for more or less time in nearly every reserve in Central Europe, their salaries could have been more easily reduced thanks to their being subjected to the glebe and due to the obligatory service of the youth and to fixed salaries. One may ask oneself, for what reasons did landlords in countries with developed serfdom prefer to fund their own farmlands and introduce cor209

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vée instead of raising peasants’ census to the level where they would bring in the same amount of revenue as these farms? The stability of these revenues pushed to this level was difficult to maintain. In effect, it was the peasant who dictated the production in the censitary regime; it was he who, after paying the census to the landlord, the tax to the state, and the tithe to the Church, decided on the part of the gross income to be sacrificed for future production and the part that would be consumed. When the increase of the seigneurial census passed a certain point, the part necessary for future production began to decrease, and the production itself began to decline. Meanwhile, under the corvée regime, it is the landlord who dictates a considerable part of the production, notably the part that formed the basis of his revenue. He exercised a strong influence on the management of dutiable peasant tenures. This influence was so strong in many cases that the tenants began to transform into simple workmen on the seigneurial reserves. The landlords in this organizational framework could lower the living standards of the peasants to a level impossible to achieve in the censitary regime without damaging the production. The limitations of peasants’ rights were essential for the transformation of the censitary regime into the corvée regime. Meanwhile, these limitations themselves were not sufficient for rendering this organization more profitable for the great landowners than the census. Many Western European countries in the Middle Ages, notably before the emancipation of peasants, were typical examples of this. In effect, the majority of peasants were enserfed and the censitary regime was dominant. The restricted development of urban life in this era explains this phenomenon. The difficulties of wheat exportation in Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and even in part of the eighteenth century explain why the corvée developed relatively late in this country, even though serfdom had been established since the sixteenth century. We can see, thus, that the coexistence of the two factors we have just examined, that is to say the facility of wheat markets ensured by frequent and considerable urban agglomerations as well as the serfdom of peasants, formed the necessary basis for the evolution of the corvée regime. Furthermore, there existed other factors that may have had a more or less significant influence on the process that we are speaking about, and especially on the facilitation of the evolution of the corvée. At this point, we must 210

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mention geographical factors, such as the fertility of the soil; access to navigable rivers that facilitate the export of wheat; the introduction of Roman law; financial regulations favorable for seigneurial exploitation; changes in military organization as well as the devastation of wars in the country; and finally psychological causes such as traditionalism, the influence of religion and the Church, national sentiments, etc. The majority of these latter causes had merely local influence, and none of them were absolutely necessary for the formation of the censitary regime. These causes can be found outside of Central Europe in the countries where the corvée did not develop. The serfdom of peasants and differences in the evolution of this institution in various European countries resulting from all the factors mentioned above might explain the genesis of the duality in the development of the agrarian regime since the end of the Middle Ages. Improvement in the judicial conditions of peasants in censitary countries and an opposing evolution in the regions of the corvée represent the manifestation of the two different systems of agricultural policy. The tendency to ameliorate the judicial conditions of the peasants was a response to the interests of the towns, and it facilitated the transformation of the feudal state into a modern state. This policy, however, was truly unfavorable for landlords. The agricultural policy of the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries in countries where the corvée regime was dominant had an entirely different nature. This policy was directed by landlords and responded to their interests. The nature of the agrarian regime depended, thus, on the tendencies of the social group that had a predominant voice in the social and economic policies of the state. The judicial forms of this predominance were of less importance. The serfdom of peasants could well have been established by the states where the great landowners were the holders of the decisive predominance, or by an absolute monarch who was forced to base his bureaucracy on a group of great landowners. Poland from the second half of the fifteenth century is a characteristic example of the first scenario; Russia from the seventeenth and especially in the eighteenth century offers us and example of the second kind of evolution. On the other hand, however, the serfdom of peasants could have been opposed by the states where the bourgeoisie, alone or together with the peasants, was quite strong, as in the Italian republics towards the end of 211

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the Middle Ages or in the Netherlands, etc. The same policy could also be implemented by an absolute state struggling against the economic tendencies of the feudal world with the help of a bureaucracy, as was the case in France under the Ancien Régime.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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Serfdom of the Glebe and Its Fiscal Regime A Romanian, Slavic, and Byzantine Comparative Historical Essay

s o u r c e

G. I. Brătianu, “Servage de la glèbe et régime fiscal: Essai d’histoire comparée roumaine, slave et byzantine,” Études Byzantines d’ histoire économique et sociale (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1938), 243–64.

Gheorghe I. Brătianu (1898–1953) was a Romanian historian and politician. He was born into a prominent family, and both his father and grandfather,

Ion I. C. Brătianu and Ion C. Brătianu, were undisputed leaders of the ­National Liberal Party and served as prime ministers of Romania several times. Ghe-

orghe Brătianu studied law at the University of Iași and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Cernăuți/Czernowitz in 1923, and a second doctorate from the University of Paris in 1929 under the supervision of

the medieval historian Ferdinand Lot. He embarked on an academic career and taught history at the universities of Iași (1924–1940) and Bucharest (1940–

1947). Brătianu was also involved in politics as a prominent leader of the Na-

tional Liberal Party and, after 1930, as the leader of a splinter Liberal Party,

which supported King Carol II and had a pro-German geopolitical orientation. Brătianu specialized in the economic and social history of Byzantium, the

history of Italian trade on the lower Danube and in the Black Sea region, and

the formation and early modern history of the Romanian Principalities. His vision of history was influenced by his mentor Nicolae Iorga, but also by the

French Annales school. His masterpiece, La mer Noire, which focused on the history of the Black Sea from a comparative and relational perspective (pub-

lished posthumously in 1969), can, in many ways, be regarded as the precursor of Braudel’s analogous work on the Mediterranean Sea, even though the

political subtext (the wartime Romanian occupation of Odessa and the imperialist temptation of expanding towards the Crimea) was entirely different. Brătianu was arrested by the communist authorities in 1950, and he died in

prison in 1953, without having stood trial.

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In this essay, first published in 1933 in the Annales, Brătianu approaches,

from a comparative perspective, the divergent historical development of Eastern and Western Europe in the early medieval period and the impact of this

divergence on the later evolution of these regions. In order to highlight the

differences between the two regions, he focuses on the origins of the economic and social structures of Eastern Europe, the nature of the agrarian question, the belated peasant emancipation movements, the reforms of property and working conditions, and the role of the state in the establishment of

the regime of forced labor and the tying of peasants to the land. Proceeding backwards from a chronological point of view, Brătianu comparatively ex-

amines the emergence of the serfdom of the glebe in Russia, Poland, and the Romanian Principalities at the end of the sixteenth century, and the colonate

(serfdom) of the Late Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire. He emphasizes the merits of comparative history, pointing out that, “connecting distant

institutions in time and in space succeeds in clarifying their origins and in explaining them, so to speak, through one another.” He also pleads for a form

of interdisciplinary history, linking economical, political and administrative factors, and tracing their influence on the existing social structure.

· Actes des Notaires Génois de Péra et de Caffa de la fin du treizième siècle, 1281–1290, publiés par G. I. Brătianu (Bucharest: Cultura Naţională, 1927); Recherches sur Vicina et Cetatea Albă: Contributions à l’ histoire de la domination byzantine et tatare et du commerce génois sur le littoral roumain de la mer Noire (Bucharest: Paul Geuthner, 1935); Privilèges et franchises municipales dans l’Empire Byzantin (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1936); Origines et formation de l’unité Roumaine (1943); La mer Noire: des origines à la conquête Ottomane (Munich: Societatea academică română, 1969); Tradiţia istorică despre întemeierea statelor româneşti (Bucharest: Eminescu, 1980); Sfatul domnesc şi Adunarea Stărilor în Principatele Române (Bucharest: Enciclopedică, 1995); L’organisation de la paix dans l’ histoire universelle: des origines à 1945 (Bucharest: Enciclopedică, 1997). secondary literature · Stelian Neagoe, Oameni politici români (Bucharest: Machiavelli, 2007), 99–102; Lucian Nastasă, Suveranii universităţilor româneşti (Cluj-Napoca: Limes, 2007), 137–38. main works

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more profound knowledge of the economic and social history of Eastern Europe has revealed to historians that the social evolution of the West and that of the East have been proceeding in opposite directions in the modern era. Mr. Seignobos wished to underline this contrast in the preface 214

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of his recently published L’Histoire de Russie, edited together with Mr. Milioukov and Mr. Eisenmann, in categorical terms: While in France… warriors who possessed vast lands spontaneously formed the nobility under a regime of private wars, the peasants, attached to the lands by serfdom for centuries, elevated themselves little by little to free possessions […]. In Russia, however, it was the absolute power of the prince that, for the sake of defense against neighboring peoples, created a class of military men who were compensated by the concession of land while in service, in a land of poverty, that was still uneducated, where the single source of wealth was land rendered valuable by the labor of the peasants. […] The peasants, tied to the land and completely exposed to the power of the nobility, descended from being free farmers to a state of serfdom scarcely better than ancient slavery.1

Already Pirenne proposed establishing the obvious differences between the social nature of the Carolingian Empire and that of Varangian Russia as a potential shortcut. He stated that the invasions of the eleventh century, which crushed the commercial development of Kiev, resulted in severing Russia’s connections to other markets and dragging it back from a commercial economy to an agricultural regime at the exact moment when Western Europe began to distance itself from this kind of regime: In order to achieve an even more significant parallelism, one may observe the formation of a landowning aristocracy in Russia as in Gaul, and its organization into a domanial system, where the impossibility to export or to sell reduces production to the needs of the land-owner and his peasants. Therefore, one way or another, the same causes brought the same results, though not at the same time. Russia lived on trade in an era when the Carolingian Empire was only familiar with the domanial regime, a regime, which was introduced in Russia at the moment that Western Europe found other opportunities and broke away from the old regime.2

1 Paul Milioukov, Louis Eisenmann, and Charles Seignobos, Histoire de la Russie (Paris, 1932), 1:13. 2 H. Pirenne, Les villes du Moyen Âge (Brussels, 1927), 52; see on this subject M. Rostovtzeff, “Les origines de la Russie Kievienne,” Revue des Études Slaves 2 (1922): 5–18, here 7.

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The interruption of trade at the Black Sea ports certainly exercised considerable influence on the economic development of Russia; did it, however, really determine the progress of serfdom? One may doubt this, since in the eighteenth century the expansion of this regime to all provinces of the empire coincided with the rather significant resumption of cereal export.3 It is actually the development of this very trade with the Baltic and White Sea ports that advanced the usage of a servile workforce and the tighter connection of Russian peasants to the land under the reign of Catherine the Great. Nevertheless, if the causes may be disputed, their effects are no less obvious: it is based on this that Mr. Sée, in his turn, stated: “serfdom is planted in North East Europe exactly at the time when Western Europe is preparing for the emancipation of peasants. … In the sixteenth century, the Polish peasants, otherwise free and subjected only to rent, become mainly serfs.”4 One could not note with more precision, departing from different points of view, the same aspect of this double evolution responsible for neatly separating Western Europe from Central and Eastern Europe at the beginning of the modern era. This contrast highlights the origins of the economic and social structures of this part of the continent; it explains the specific nature of the agrarian questions, the belated peasant emancipation movements, and the reforms that have succeeded in producing a true revolution in the property and working conditions today. As opposed to this, one could not examine this question without touching on the role of the State in the establishment of this regime of forced labor and of binding peasants to the land, which in certain characteristics bears a resemblance to the political and social structure of Late Antiquity and of Byzantium. This comparison necessarily imposes itself on research; it defines the framework of this study. There is a striking example of the results of the comparative method that by connecting distant institutions in time and in space succeeds in clarifying their origins and in explaining them, so to speak, through one another. It underlines, thus, first the analogies of Russian and Polish serfdom and that of Western European countries; and second the further development of the causes apparently more connected to the fiscal system than to actual economic reasons. A quick examination of the different regimes of serfdom in this part of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provides us with clear evidence. 3 Henri Sée, Esquisse d’une histoire du régime agraire en Europe aux XVIII-e et XIX-e siècles (Paris, 1921), 180. 4 H. Sée, Les origines du capitalisme moderne (Paris, 1926), 175.

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Serfdom of the Glebe in the Romanian Principalities in the Seventeenth Century and its Connections to the Fiscal Regime

The question of a closer connection between peasants of the land and the establishment of new bonds of serfdom in the Romanian principalities at the end of the sixteenth century has been the object of fierce controversy for a long time. The central point of this discussion has until now been the measure taken by the Wallachian chancellery after the Ottoman invasion of Sinan Pasha in 1595, a date that has not been determined with utmost precision yet; the documents describing it call it the “bond” (“legătura”) of Michael the Brave (1593–1601). In fact, there were two measures: an administrative decree, the exact date of which is unknown (the first document mentioning it is from 1613, that is twelve years after the death of Michael the Brave) and the contents of which seems to have been based on the following acts: “that everyone, whatever their place should be, is a serf for life where he is”; and the treaty of alliance signed on May 20, 1595 between the prince of Transylvania, Sigismund Báthory and the prince of Wallachia, an article of which specifies the reciprocal restitution of the serfs (coloni et iobagiones) who escaped the domination of their masters and crossed the mountains from Wallachia into Transylvania, or the other way around. The same clause is part of the treaty formalized the same year between Sigismund Báthory and the prince of Moldavia, Ștefan Răzvan. These different actions received lengthy comments. The earlier historians of the reign of Michael the Brave, Bălcescu and Xenopol,5 did not fail to condemn the memory of this prince, blaming him solely for having created the bond of serfdom of the glebe and subjugating the entire free rural population of Wallachia, subjecting them to the exactions of the lords. Mr. Iorga also supported the argument, in various works,6 that Romanian peasants were free during the era of the independent Principalities and that they were progressively subjugated as a result of a true economic revolu5 Nicolae Bălcescu, “Despre starea socială a muncitorilor plugari în principatele române în deosebite timpuri,” Magasinul istoric 2 (1846): 237; A. D. Xénopol, Istoria românilor din Dacia Traiană (Iași, 1890), 3:405. 6 See especially “Constatări istorice cu privire la viaţa agrară a romînilor,” in Studii şi documente, 18 (Bucharest, 1908); Dévéloppement de la question rurale en Roumanie (Iași, 1917); see also Geschichte des Rumänischen Volkes (Gotha, 1905), 2:88ff.

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tion that took place around the end of the sixteenth century. At the time when the Ottomans imposed tribute on the Romanian states, generating the necessity of assembling considerable sums of money each year, the great land-owners had to be placed before the small farmers at the expense of the latter ones, reducing them to a state of dependence, which had already been the case in the neighboring countries. Mr. Iorga detected foreign influence even in the actions of Michael the Brave. The prelates and the boyars who were sent to make the alliance with Sigismund Báthory would have profited from the critical situation of the prince of Wallachia by introducing the clause in the treaty that was meant to prevent the emigration of peasants to another land and to keep them on that land which had been formerly their property. … Sigismund Báthory interpreted this agreement as the need to politically connect these two principalities and then attach them to his own inheritance, and in this illusion, which Michael and Ștefan obviously did not entertain and which the former one dispensed of shortly after the shared victory against the Turks, agreed voluntarily to assuage the interests of the boyars, unifying, amongst others, the social condition of the rural class in his own Transylvania, as well as in Moldavia, and in Wallachia, which had the same Romanian population who were used to the oppression they were subjected to from the other side of the mountains for a long time.7

The thesis of Mr. Iorga can be found with small alterations in the majority of his works until the most recent ones, resulting, thus, in this conclusion, which he did not wish to alter: the complete liberty of the native rural population in the two principalities at the beginning of their political existence; the foreign origin of serfdom testified to by documents; the subjection of the class of free farmers by Michael the Brave’s action due to the influence of his ally, the prince of Transylvania; and the pressure from the Wallachian boyars eager to take full possession of the property and labor of the peasants for their own profit, just as their neighbors the Hungarian magnates had been doing for a long time on the other side of the Carpathian Mountains. 7 Nicolae Iorga, “Évolution de la question rurale en Roumanie jusqu’á la réforme agraire,” presented at the 16th International Congress of Agriculture (Bucharest, 1929), 11.

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Similarly, in Moldavia it was the influence of Polish serfdom and the connections of the Moldavians to the Polish nobility that would have determined a similar transformation of the agrarian regime in the same era. It is fairly obvious that this interpretation amounts to some sort of historical justification of the reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which in most cases would simply have returned freedom and their land to the peasants.8 This theory has not met general approval. Constantin Giurescu’s research, published between 1915 and 1918,9 already pointed out that serfdom had existed in Wallachia since the earliest history of the principality. The “bond” of Michael the Brave did not contain any innovations: he merely wished to put an end to the confusion, brought about by the Ottoman invasion of 1595, in the relation between peasants and owners through administrative and fiscal measures. The serfs were fleeing from the invading troops, and their reclaiming by their previous owners might have prolonged an endless series of complaints and trials indefinitely. Mr. Constantin C. Giurescu, the son of the historian of the same name, has recently provided new contributions to the study of this question in the volume devoted to the work of Mr. Iorga on the History of the Romanians and their Civilization.10 One actually encounters the first difficulty when one considers the name itself of the Wallachian serfs. The peasants tied to the glebe were called “neighbors” (vecini) in Moldavia, which can be explained by the analogy with the Byzantine πáρoıxoι. This is not the same in Wallachia, where the Wallachian term of rumâni (Romanians), which encompasses this category of serfs, seems to indicate a pejorative meaning of the name of the nation, used in this case only to refer to the lowest echelons of the social hierarchy. Mr. Iorga partly admits this point of view without recognizing in this name the memory of a “barbarian” domination imposed on the Romanian farmers. Furthermore, Mr. Giurescu strives to demonstrate that the institution of serfdom in Walachia encompassed, well before the reign of Michael the 8 Nicolae Iorga, Le caractère commun des institutions du Sud-Est de l’Europe (Paris, 1929), 137. 9 “Vechimea rumâniei în Ţara Românească şi legătura lui Mihai Viteazul” Analele Academiei Română, Seria II, vol. 37 (1915); “Despre rumâni,” Analele Academiei Române, Seria II, vol. 38 (1916); Despre boieri şi despre rumâni (Bucharest, 1920), posthumous edition. 10 C. C. Giurescu, “O nouă sinteză a trecutului nostru” Revista istorică română, vol. 1 (1931) and vol. 2 (1932), with summary in French; Cf. “Câteva cuvinte asupra ‘Legăturii şi aşezămîntului lui Mihai Vodă,’” Convorbiri Literare 52 (1920): 370ff.

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Brave, not only a minority of foreign elements colonized on the landlords’ properties, but also the native rural population. The clause of restitution of the fugitive coloni, introduced in the treaty of alliance of 1595, had no other purpose but to confirm a state of law and a fact that had existed for centuries both in Wallachia and in Transylvania. Mr. I. C. Filitti, to whom important works on social history and the Romanian Principalities are attributed, reprised the study of this question in a recent article, providing a new explanation for Michael the Brave’s reforms.11 The administrative order mentioned by the internal acts of the seventeenth century has, for too long, been mixed with the clause of the treaty of 1595, the nature of which is essentially different. The treaty of alliance with the prince of Transylvania, which is an international act concluded by the chiefs of two neighboring territories, briefly concerns measures of reciprocal extradition that applies, in this case, to fugitive serfs of two principalities, similar to today’s defendants, the search and pursuit of whom are conducted by the authorities of one country through the police of other states, in case the person in question managed to cross the border. There is no need to look for another meaning in the simple police measure, which, in this case, takes the form of an additional and secondary clause in a political treaty. This is entirely separate from the “bond” of Michael the Brave, which ties to the land “everyone, whatever the bond should be and wherever he finds himself.” It is an administrative and fiscal decision destined to stop the long series of claims trials once for all, which could have resulted in preventing the prince and his council from exercising justice. That, however, is an exceptional measure, a decree of a state of siege just after the invasion; it does not only apply to the fugitive serfs whom it ties to the land “where they find themselves”—keeping in mind only the actual state of affairs and abolishing the earlier rights of other land-owners—but also to the entire rural population of Wallachia; “it tied the free farmers to the glebe at the same time, and they consequently became serfs on the lands they were working on at the moment the decree was issued.” The exceptional character of this 11 “Despre ‘legătura’ lui Mihai Viteazul” (with a summary in French), Revista istorică română 2 (1932): 221ff; “Clasele sociale în trecutul românesc,” Convorbiri Literare, vol. 57 (1925); Mr. Filitti submitted a communication to the Romanian Academy on February 3, 1933 about the “Dependent men and the free farmers in the Romanian principalities from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries”; see also his book on Proprietatea solului în Principatele române până la 1864 (Bucharest, 1934), 128ff.

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measure re-emerges from the documents that mention it during the seventeenth century: it actually seems that it concerned all free farmers settled on the lands of the landlords at the moment the decree was issued, but only that very moment. According to Mr. Filitti, the free people who settled on these lands after the date in question could remain free and were not subjected to the bonds of serfdom. In Moldavia analogous measures were taken at the beginning of the seventeenth century, though they applied only to those serfs who were recognized as such. Since 1622, Prince Ștefan Tomşa forbade the citizens of Roman from pursuing the vecini, who had fled their lands before the reign of Constantin Movilă (1607–1611). On January 16, 1628, Prince Miron Barnovschi convened a great assembly of the Moldavian “estates” in Jassy and solemnly stated that all trials against serfs dating from before the expedition of the sultan to Hotin in 1621 were to be abolished. Only the serfs who left the property they depended on after this date could be tried and pursued by secular and ecclesiastical landlords.12 There is a clause in this act that clarifies the entire fiscal side of these exceptional measures. If the landowner has the right to try a serf who left the land and to bring him back by will or by force, he also has to take care of transferring his jizya, that is, his part of the tax. Thus, it seems clear that treasury requirements determined the entire agrarian evolution in this era. Since the mid-sixteenth century, the annual charge of the haraç, the tribute to the Ottomans, had become paralyzing for the fiscal and economic administration of the Romanian principalities. This charge was the determining factor in the quick passage from collecting taxes in nature to a fiscal organization based on payment by cash.13 Monetary matters prevailed over the economy. It is known that the Ottoman Empire established a monopoly of exports in order to assure the revitalization of Constantinople. Therefore, it was impossible to count on small properties to gather such considerable sums of money. In order to satisfy the exactions of the Ottoman tax office as well as to fight against the Turks, when he lifted up the battle-flag of the revolt, the prince had to address the powerful, the boyars and the monasteries, who were still in possession of quite considerable amounts of land. The monetary economy 12 Published in Arhiva istorică a României 1, 259 (1965): 175–76. 13 See above Gheorghe I. Brătianu, “O carte de judecată a lui Vasile-Vodă Lupu,” Revista istorică 5, 1 (1919).

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imposed by the state’s needs ruined the free farmers; this is what explains the fast development of the landowning nobility, those who were both rich and powerful and who took full responsibility toward the state and the prince for returning the taxes to which they committed themselves. It is this nobility that, from that moment on, guaranteed the treasury relative stability regarding the collection of taxes each year. In such circumstances it was normal to tie the workforce more tightly to the land in order to assure the most efficient exploitation, and consequently it created more certainty in paying the jizye, those parts of the tax that were settled by the population inventory, to the tax office. It becomes clear, thus, why such extraordinary events, such as Sinan Pasha’s invasion of Wallachia in 1595, the civil war in Moldavia under the reign of Constantin Movilă, or the 1621 campaign of the Sultan, hampered the regular mechanism of the fiscal and administrative apparatus. The rural population fled from the war and the looting, the serfs abandoned the lands in the invaded territories and sought refuge in neighboring countries whenever they could cross the border. The fiscal charges changed fundamentally: the distribution of the taxes did not correspond to the actual presence of the workforce on the land. Therefore, if one were to believe Mr. Filitti’s analysis, the decrees tying the peasants to the glebe, having been introduced by Michael the Brave, similarly to the case of Moldavia, were imposed on all farmers as a kind of “stabilization” of serfdom after the upheavals. It is enough to connect this regime to the contemporary expansion of serfdom in Russia and Poland to see the essentially fiscal nature of the agrarian legislation of the Romanian princes of the period. Serfdom in Russia and in Poland since the End of the Sixteenth Century: Taxation and Emancipation

Since the second half of the sixteenth century, the State of Muscovy had undergone a double transformation, the effects of which resulted in measures most similar to those the Wallachian and Moldavian princes took, which are listed above. On the one hand, a rather intense internal colonization affects the steppe boundaries toward the South and the East, while increasingly larger masses of free peasants and serfs immigrate to new regions that offer them better working conditions and more freedom. On the other 222

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hand, the “gathering” of Russian land and the more and more frequent wars against the neighboring countries quickly increase the State’s expenses, especially the military costs. As in the Romanian Principalities, the principle of united responsibility applies to the taxpayers grouped by “plows” or by “hearth,” and also to landowners of different categories, expected to supply the State with what the Middle Ages in the West called the military service of host and cavalcade. Since the end of the fifteenth century, the advance of the Swedes in the Novgorod region was beginning to threaten the constitution of the pomest’e, or lands of service.14 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the votchina, the ancient patrimonial and hereditary property, starts to be confused with the pomest’e regarding military and fiscal obligations. The charters of concession had already recognized the rights of the pomeschiks to the peasants’ labor, provided that the State has guaranteed access to its lawful taxes. The consequences this regime brought about were inevitable and the government should not have failed to realize that: “tying the individual to the land so that ‘the land would not fail to bring the taxes’ is the principle applied to the peasants, especially on the lands where the landlords are compelled to military service.”15 Already in the last years of Ivan the Terrible, it was settled that peasants could not be “transferred” from one land to the other during certain periods. It is known that Boris Godunov, answering the wishes of the landowners, signed an ukaz in 1597 that gave the landlords the right to chase the fugitive or “transferred” serfs on other lands for a period of five years. These “transfers,” which usually took place on Saint George’s Day in autumn, were becoming a source of all kinds of disorder and difficulties. “The transfer of taxable peasants deprived the government of regular revenues from taxable lands and deprived the owners of these lands of their own regular revenues, as well as the possibility to serve, since their lands became deserted.”16 Here, once more, one can see Boris Godunov’s ukaz confirmed by analogous measures in the beginning of the seventeenth century. During the raging civil war of “the time of troubles,” in 1607, a new law ties the peasants to the landown14 J. Polosin, “Le servage russe et son origine,” Revue internationale de Sociologie 36 (1928); D. Odinetz, “Les origines du servage en Russie,” Revue historique de droit française et étranger, 4-e série, 10 (1931): 235–88, here 235ff. 15 P. Milioukov, L’ histoire de Russie (Paris, 1932–1933), 1:225. 16 S. Platonov, Boris Godunov (Paris, 1929), 134.

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ers, keeping in mind the results of the 1592 census. The limit for seeking fugitive serfs is expanded successively from five to ten to fifteen years. Under the first Romanovs, the State takes common cause with the landowners and ties all peasants, registered during the census of 1646 to 1648, to the pomest’e. From the eighteenth century onward, serfdom was only aggravated and expanded. The free peasants of the Novgorod region, the Baltic lands, and the White Sea region were assimilated to the serfs of Greater Russia. Each census is an occasion to expand the boundaries of the glebe, attaching it to new territories and new categories of peasants. In Ukraine, it was in 1738 that the imperial government intervened to prevent the population of Sloboda from fleeing, seeking to escape their obligation to supply the campaigning armies. This administrative measure did not concern the relations between landowners and peasants in any way; the landlords, however, used the opportunity, as they had done before, to chase those farmers who had fled from their lands.17 The obvious conclusion is that in the Russian Empire and in the Romanian Principalities the development of serfdom is entirely similar. The parallel is confirmed if one regards the dates of the laws concerning attachment to the glebe: the bond of Michael the Brave in 1595, the edict (ukaz) of Boris Godunov in 1597, the decree of Barnovschi in 1628, the laws of Michael Fedorovich Romanov in 1621 and 1629. There can be no doubt about the reciprocal influence these different pieces of legislation exercised on each other; although the political conditions are completely different, in Russian and in the Romanian lands, the same kind of transformation is taking place at the same moment, stemming from the new necessities of the State that demands, with a strictly fiscal aim, that the taxable population pay their taxes in money, and share a common responsibility in their collection. Tying the peasants to the glebe is explained in both cases by the necessities of the fiscal system. The reasons determining the nature of the progress of serfdom, in some cases, actually may proceed in the opposite direction, limiting its influence. The only way these farmers could defend themselves from being tied to the glebe and from paying their taxes was to flee. The Romanian proverb demonstrates this by depicting one who left his home, who “paid his taxes by 17 V. Mjakotin, “Le fixation des paysans ukrainiens á la glèbe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Le Monde Slave 9 (1932): 56.

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running with the fugitives” (a dat bir cu fugiţii). It is true that in the eighteenth century, enlightened despotism becomes favorable towards the emancipation of the peasants, and that the influence of the Physiocrats shows the way toward the agrarian reform. Already in 1746, however, the prince of Wallachia, Constantin Mavrocordat, agrees with the serfs about the possibility of purchasing their own freedom, and he also promises freedom to the fugitives who return to their homes.18 We believe that, in the case of this first act of emancipation, there is no need to seek philosophical or religious consideration in the official documents, but rather reasons of fiscal and administrative interest. It is possible that this Phanariot prince, who was fairly well informed of Occidental events and matters, knew of the emancipation and the enfranchisement of serfs introduced by Leopold, Duke of Lorraine in 1719.19 This, however, would be one more reason to regard this restriction of serfdom as part of the efforts to reduce the number of taxable people fleeing and reestablish the fiscal capacity of the country. This preoccupation seems to be obvious in a rather interesting document called “the charter of emigrants” (hrisov pentru bejănari), a proper treaty made in 1756 between the prince of Moldavia, Constantin Racoviță, and the delegates of peasants from the other side of the frontier. The causes of emigration are quite clearly exposed in the document: “because of the tax and the exaction that deprive the population of its power.”20 The treaty promises them an exemption of six months after their return and allows them to settle freely on the land of their choosing, fixing the precise fee due to the tax office and the tithe to the landlord. The agreement also establishes the privilege of electing a judge charged with settling differences between emigrants; they may also appeal to the “divan,” the princely council, on significant questions. In the same era, the official documents establish absolute distinction between the vecini, the serfs of the glebe, and personal slaves who had existed in Moldavia for a long time. The serfs remain tied to their duties; they, however, are not sold together with the land. The true slaves who owe their masters unlimited service and who are regarded as human goods are the gypsies who will not be emancipated until much later, during the nineteenth century. 18 I. Minea, Reforma lui Constantin Mavrocordat (Iași, 1927), 117ff. 19 H. Sée, Esquisse d’une histoire du régime agraire, 189–90. 20 Dimitrie Sturdza-Scheianu, Acte și legiuiri privitoare la chestiunea țărănească (Bucharest, 1907), 1:23.

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As for the serfs themselves, different categories are established by appropriate concessions in order to stop them from fleeing and emigrating. It is interesting to note a special arrangement in the magzar (petition) of the Moldavian boyars of 1805, which reduces by half the obligations of the farmers settled in the districts next to the borders, and more specifically in the regions adjoining the rayas, or the territories covered by Ottoman fortresses in Southern Bessarabia and in the Danubian region.21 This privilege had no other goal but to prevent the serfs from fleeing to Turkish territory as the charges of the peasants were clearly lighter there than in the principalities where they were subjected to tribute and to the exactions of the Porte that aimed at reducing the ephemeral sovereigns, replaced and discharged at will, to the role of general administrators of tax revenue. In Bulgaria, there were, at the time, privileged “rayas” compelled only to certain military duties or to the obligations of transport or hunting, the kind of work that must have been envied in the Danubian Principalities.22 Thus the interest of the tax office, which determined the attachment of the peasants to the land in the seventeenth century, now enforced their emancipation, since serfdom did not hamper the tendency to abandon lands nor did it put an end to workforce flight. Where this deficiency was not present, the bonds of serfdom were not loosened at all. In Russia, the flight of the peasants was definitively stopped by the administration of the latifundia and the state police. That is why the assemblies called by Catherine II in order to legislate agricultural questions were limited to liberal declarations and to an entirely theoretical condemnation of the regime of slavery and restriction. The reforms of the nineteenth century and the direct intervention of Alexander II had to come before the attachment to the glebe could be eliminated and Boris Godunov’s decrees, as well as the laws of the first Romanovs and their successors, could be abolished. This interest of the tax office could also be found in the transformation of Western structures of serfdom at the end of the Middle Ages. It is enough to remember the generous preamble of the charter of enfranchisement of Louis X of France, “the Quarreler,” which, for a long time, created an illusion about the rights of “Frank men,” but it could be explained by plausible as well as practical reasons. The royal instruction that completes the order 21 Ibid., 61. 22 J. Sakazov, Bulgarische Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Berlin–Leipzig, 1929), 178ff.

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and advises the royal commissioners to impose an additional tax for those who refuse to redeem themselves reveals a fiscal interest when strictly applied.23 As it has quite rightly been remarked, in France “misery was often the generator of liberty.”24 The landlords’ tendency to raise their income contributed to the emancipation of the serfs, and this emancipation was often a genuine boon for the administration of the seigniorial fortunes. In Eastern Europe in the modern era, it is the irregular tax payments and the fiscal chaos stemming from war and from emigration that leads to the attachment to the glebe. If, however, the reinforcement of the bonds of serfdom are not enough to ensure the regular collection of taxes and to hamper the resistance of taxable elements and those required to fulfill the corvée, the needs of the tax office determine the authorities’ encouragement of emancipation and purchase. Thus, in the relative freedom it grants to farmers, the State seeks the guarantee of regular tax payments, something the serfdom of the glebe did not manage to grant. The intervention of the State is far less tangible in Poland, nevertheless the evolution of the Polish agrarian regime in the sixteenth century is perfectly similar to that of the neighboring countries in the East and the South. There, as elsewhere, the government prefers to develop latifundia and create seigneurial reserves, always expanding, necessitating the attachment of the glebe to the rural population. The State’s attitude, however, remains passive; thus, after 1518, Sigismund I refuses to summon to the royal court the cases filed by peasants against their landlords. As in Russia and in the Romanian Principalities, Polish serfs tried to escape their duties by fleeing. The laws that simplified the process in order to accelerate the pursuit of fugitives remained, however, ineffective, since the central authorities found it impossible to apply them literally. Serfdom did not cease to develop after the troubled period of the Cossack wars of 1648, reaching its climax in the first half of the eighteenth century.25 These specific conditions are linked to the completely different political regime of Poland at the beginning of the modern era. It is known that the 23 H. Sée, Equisse d’une histoire économique et sociale de la France (Paris, 1929), 50; M. Bloch, Rois et serfs (Paris, 1920), 132ff; and J. Kulischer, Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Munich, 1929), 148–49. 24 M. Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l’ histoire rurale française (Paris, 1931), 114. 25 J. Rutkowski, Histoire économique de la Pologne avant les partages (Paris, 1927), 107–9, and 122–24.

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power of the central authority was relatively weak. The aristocracy had other motives apart from the interest of the tax office in tightening the bonds of serfdom and in strengthening the ties of the farmers to the land. A direct connection needs, naturally, to be established between the progress of serfdom and the development of the export of wheat, with the Danzig port becoming the main warehouse of this trade. The owners of the latifundia engaged in wheat export, and this resulted in the need to tie the workforce to the land and keep them there with the consent of the state. In this country, however, the state was so weak and largely defenseless against the factions of an ambitious and disruptive nobility that the owners of the latifundia could establish the agrarian regime that suited them best, without requiring anything more from the royal government other than an increasing abdication of its prerogatives. The same causes seem to have determined a similar evolution in the Baltic lands. Thus, the adscriptio ad glebam was introduced in 1491 in the bishopric of Riga; in the second half of the sixteenth century, however, Polish influence encouraged the nobility to seek the recognition of serfdom by a privilege, which conceded to them the corvée of public duty and all civil and criminal jurisdiction over peasants.26 This is how different causes resulted in the same phenomenon. Tying the peasants to the land in Poland and in Livonia does not indicate a regime truly different from that introduced by the edicts of the Russian Tsars or by the contemporary decrees of the Moldavian and Wallachian princes. The economic interests that determined the evolution of serfdom turned out to be quite analogous to those imposed by the fiscal necessities of Russia and Romania. It is the role of the state that constitutes an essential difference in this case and determines a clear demarcation between Polish and Baltic serfdom on the one hand and serfdom in other Eastern European countries on the other. The frequent state intervention in Russia and in the Romanian Principalities is the opposite of the passive attitude of the central power in Poland. The contrast can be explained by the social structure as well as by the political regimes of the different countries. The government comes to favor the great property owners everywhere. The Polish nobility achieved an indisputable hegemony over the state, it acts in its own interest and consid26 See the review of A. Schwabe’s Grundriss der Agrargeschichte Lettlands (Riga, 1928), in Annales 14 (1932): 204.

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ers serfdom to be an instrument providing workforce for external trade; in Russia, the “men of service” constitute, first of all, a military reserve; while in the Danubian Principalities the boyars guarantee the collection of taxes and agree to pay regular tribute to the Ottomans. The development of the great estates and the charges imposed on the rural classes represent the direct and immediate interest of the sovereign and the revenue office. It is from this point of view that the study of Eastern European serfdom in the modern era evokes most interest. A comparison with the agrarian regimes of the previous eras requires a profound study that we cannot undertake on this very occasion. Meanwhile, it is enough to re-evoke certain analogies to see that the Russian and Romanian serfdom of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries approaches much more the “tying to the glebe” of the late imperial and early Byzantine period than the agrarian regime of the Middle Ages in Western Europe. It is there that the fundamental difference between the feudal system and the system of the Near East, where the state never entirely renounced its prerogatives to control the economic and social scene, is most clear. The Serfdom of the Glebe in Modern Times and the Colonate of the Later Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire

The idea behind this comparison is far from new. Long ago, Plekhanov stated that “the enslavement of the Russian peasant is perfectly like that of the laborers in the great Oriental empires.”27 Therefore, he compared the situation of the Russian peasant, enslaved to the pomeschik, to that of the Egyptian and Chaldean serfs and further to the Chinese farmers on the lands of the State. Although it is true that in the ancient Asian and Egyptian monarchies serfdom of the glebe existed, and that is undoubtedly the origin of the Roman institution of colonate, it is, however, certainly this latter regime that he chooses to compare to the Oriental serfdom of the modern era.28 There is no space here to return to the definition of serfdom of the glebe. Mr. Bloch established the original idea and clearly marked the dif27 G. Plekhanov, Introduction à l’ histoire sociale de la Russie (Paris, 1926), 80. 28 This connection has been made by I. N. Angelescu, Histoire économique des Roumains (Geneva, 1919), 193; meanwhile, we believe that he exaggerates the effects of Byzantine laws on the Romanian principalities at the beginning of the modern era.

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ference between the colonate and serfdom in the classical era and in feudalism, between serfs of the glebe in juridical texts and bondsmen in plain language.29 What we wish to demonstrate is that the institution of the colonate, “created by an absolute empire in order to satisfy the most ruthless tax system” does not necessarily end with the state that tied the man to the land. In the West, it is true, it survived the dissolution of the empire only in glossary texts, which preserved traces of Roman law in a perfectly artificial denomination, very distant from its original meaning. In the East, however, despite the fact that the classical name of the settler disappeared, the regime of serfdom of the glebe actually witnessed a shocking revival in the modern era. The general conditions that led Roman emperors to tie the settlers to the land for “eternity” are found again twelve centuries later in those states of Eastern Europe that did not experience the strictly personal dependence of the feudal system in the Middle Ages. It is said with reason that the Roman institution of the colonate was born “of the needs of a truly powerful state, linked to an entire juridical system that created hereditary titles of professions and ranks.”30 It is not without interest to note that, in Russia in the modern era, “if those men not belonging to the privileged classes managed to become ‘free,’ they were forced to choose a ‘type of existence,’ that is to say to enter one of the many groups that made up the whole population of Russia that was subjected to a head-tax.”31 There is no question about the direct influence of late imperial legislation on the development of Muscovy and its agrarian regime. It is certain, however, that the serfdom imposed by the State on the Russian and Romanian peasants leads to a better understanding of the influence of the fiscal needs on the evolution of the colonate and the triumph of government control in the direct economy of late Antiquity. The parallel is strikingly valid in its details: it seems clear that Constantin’s constitution of 322 was not more responsible for creating the institution of the colonate than was Boris Godunov’s edict establishing serfdom in Russia. These legislative texts merely sanction, in the interest of the State 29 M. Bloch, “Serf de la glèbe. Histoire d’une expression toute faite,” Revue Historique 138, no. 46 (1921): 220ff. 30 M. Bloch, “Les ‘Colliberti,’ étude sur la formation de la classe servile,” Revue Historique 157, no. 53 (1928): 140. 31 C. Zaitseff, “Le problème de la libération des serfs en Russie,” Le Monde Slave 9 (1932): 224.

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and the tax office, the agrarian conditions that had been established by custom long before.32 The fiscal system is organized similarly. A minimum of stability and security are guaranteed to the peasant, and in its early stages, the colonate is originally linked to head-taxes and to the property-tax; already in Diocletian’s reforms, the relationship between the iugum, a measure of the land, and the caput, the unity of men, is close. The collective responsibility for taxes, found in the texts of Philo of Alexandria, appears to be a specific Roman invention applied first in Egypt and then extended to other provinces of the Empire.33 This explains the inexorable nature of the emperor’s orders and the constant concern for populating the land; it was the goal of supporting the proprietor and the State and providing them with a workforce indispensable for their production, which they could not go without. This collective responsibility for paying taxes can be found in today’s societies, as well as in the “plows” and “hearths” of the Russian administration and in the fiscal regime of the Romanian principalities; it continues the tradition perpetuated in Byzantium by the επιβολή, establishing a mutual guarantee between parents and neighbors, even by the doubtful dispositions of the αλληλέγγυον, which expects the landowners to take responsibility in front of the tax office for the deficit of small farmers.34 But this regime encourages the creation of a new administrative layer; this is why the formation of latifundia in the seventeenth century in Russia and the Romanian lands resemble one another in a specific way, through the fiscal necessities that shaped them, evolving from the patrocinium and the autopragia of the Byzantine Egyptian administration in the fifth and sixth centuries.35 Meanwhile, the central authority began to decay, a process that can be followed through the history of the agrarian regime of Eastern Europe, until the very point when, at the height of the feudal regime, “tying the serfs and freedmen to the glebe” was rendered unrealizable. The Byzantine state, on the other hand, could react in time to this ferment of dissolu32 V. J. Brissaud, Le régime de la terre dans la société étatiste de Bas Empire (Paris, 1927), 104. 33 M. Rostovtzeff, “Roman exploitaion of Egypt in the First Century A.D.,” Journal of Economic and Business History 1 (1929): 357. 34 F. Dögler, Beiträge zur Geschichte der byzantinischen Finanzverwaltung besonders des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1927), 130. 35 G. Rouillard, L’administration civile de l’Egypte byzantine, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1928), 10ff.

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tion. It is known that the Rural Code (νόμος γεωργικός), the date of which could not be established for certain, but most probably predates the Isaurian emperors, does not make any allusions to settlers or serfs and mentions communities and free peasant property. The conclusion that the settlers attached to the glebe had entirely disappeared by this time is not proper.36 The small freeholds and the village community could have existed at the late Roman period and could have survived until the publication of the Rural Code. Nevertheless, there is no firm evidence that the colonate was completely abolished in the Byzantine Empire by the seventh or the eighth century. Mr Constantinescu’s hypothesis concerning a new fiscal reform modifying that of Diocletian, disconnecting the peasants from the glebe in exchange for the payment of the property tax for land or, for landless farmers, the payment of the personal tax, or Kapnikon, is certainly most ingenious.37 Besides that, it is clear—as Mr. Dölger’s treatise proves—that this tax, continuing, under another name, the Roman capitation, was not expected from free peasants.38 Meanwhile, it would be rash to fully endorse the argument that the “tie to the glebe” was definitively broken by this date, but what seems obvious is that the proportion of serfdom of the glebe and free peasant property was fundamentally changed to the benefit of the latter. In that case, the fiscal interest of the Byzantine state, once again, explains this transformation: we have seen the necessities of the revenue office imposing on the Phanariot princes of the eighteenth century the loosening of serfdom, as the flight of the peasants hampered the collection of taxes. The Byzantine Empire in the seventh century had to face other difficulties: it had to lean on the peasants of Anatolia to recruit an army to be able to stop the Arab invasion marching towards Constantinople and the straits.39 This organization of rural life in Asia Minor preceded the Byzantine era and even the Roman occupation. It needed to be revived in order for the local population to resist the invaders effectively. It is, thus, not impossible that the organization of the military Themes of the empire coincided with a 36 A. Vasiliev, Histoire de l’Empire byzantin (Paris, 1932), 1:324ff. 37 Constantinescu, “Réforme social ou réforme fiscale,” Bulletin de la Section: Historique de l’Académie Roumaine 11 (1924): 103ff. 38 Dögler, Beiträge zur Geschichte der byzantinischen Finanzverwaltung, 51ff. 39 W. M. Ramsay, “The attempt of the Arabs to conquer Asia Minor (641–962 A.D.) and the causes of its failure,” Bulletin de la Section Historique de l’Académie Roumaine, vol. 11, 4ff.

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social policy favoring peasant property,40 which constituted the reserve and principal basis of the recruitment of the imperial armies. The starting point of an energetic fight can be found there, pitting the central power against the δυνατοι, the “powerful ones,” reaching its climax in the imperial Novels of Basil II and the restoration of the αλληλέγγυον tax in the last years of the tenth century. Thus, around the year 1000, while the West is still torn apart by feudal anarchy, the Byzantine Empire, abolishing the regulations that allowed powerful persons to seize the lands of the peasants, pretended to assert the rights “stemming from the time of Augustus’s reign.”41 If a contrast needs to be marked between Eastern and Western Europe after the Arab invasion, this recovery of the Byzantine state, relying on small property as opposed to the encroachment of the grand seigneurs, is certainly one of the more gripping elements. Already in the eleventh century, however, the successors of Basil II Bulgaroctonos seem to be more inclined to favor the clergy and the landowning aristocracy. We arrive, thus, to what was called “the third and last phase of Byzantine agrarian history,” the phase where—becoming entangled in the wake of the feudal world, which inflicted its supremacy on Byzantium with the Crusades—the State retreats from the landlords and renounces its rights over the cultivators of the land for their benefit. The Byzantine “late imperial” period of the Palaeologus dynasty puts emphasis on the yoke of the paroikia, which resembles the serfdom of the seigniorial regime more than that of the colonate of Antiquity. This is the era when, without any inaccurate interpretation of the term, the question of a Byzantine feudalism can be posed;42 the development of the pronoia is enough to disperse all doubt.43 40 G. Ostrogorsky, “Über die vermeintliche Reformtätigkeit der Isaurier,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 30 (1930): 394. 41 Vasiliev, Histoire de l’empire byzantin, 1:459. 42 See A. A. Vasiliev, Istoria Vizantii: Latinskoe vladichestvo na Vostoke (Petrograd, 1923), chap. 11: 56– 74; English version: “On the question of Byzantine feudalism,” Byzantion vol. 8, 584–604. 43 If it is true that in the history of institutions one cannot stop at an “ideal type,” as there is always an exceptional case, and that feudalism is in itself “an unachieved, unachievable dissolution, a colloidal state of political and social matter”; see F. Lot, Histoire du Moyen Âge, 1:642; O. Hintze, Wesen und Verbreitung des Feudalismus, Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Phil.hist. Klasse, no. 20 (1929), 321–47, and Die Welt als Geschichte (1938), 4:157; it should be enough to reflect on the excellent work of F. Dögler on the Byzantine Empire, “Die Frage des Grundeigentums in Byzanz,” Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences 5 (1933): 8, 14; G. Stadtmüller, “Oströmische Bauern und Wehrpolitik,” Neue Jahrbücher 5 (1937): 432ff.

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I thought it advisable to provide a brief summary of the essential characteristics of the agrarian regime’s evolution and of the serfdom of the glebe in the Byzantine Empire in order to underline the most intriguing factors that this comparison offers to the history of serfdom in Eastern Europe in modern times. The two regimes, so distant from one another in time that it is impossible to establish their influence or direct connection,—nor can one link the “military frontier” of the Habsburg Empire to those of Byzantium—still emerge from a common cause: fiscal necessity and general conditions analogous to one another. This is the state’s need to control production and to ensure a workforce, which is indispensable for the utilization of the land. From this point, the “tying to the glebe” ceases to be a characteristic phenomenon of the economic and social history of the late Antiquity; it may co-exist with other ways of farming, and the colonate excludes neither free property nor the village communities of earlier eras. Under different names, however, serfdom of the glebe seems to be closely related to the organization of the fiscal system and to a tendency for state control, which never entirely disappeared from the concept of government in the countries of the Near East. It is logical to see the rebirth of this institution in Eastern Europe more than a millennium after the empire that provided the juridical shape of a legislative text in the first place ceased to exist. This is a new evidence for the permanence of cause-and-effect relations between the state and agriculture, even without going so far as establishing a general rule—beyond the diverse contingencies of time and space—determining the pressure of the fiscal regime on the effective use of serfdom of the glebe. This short sketch naturally could not tackle, as a whole and in detail, such a huge topic, the interesting nature of which is nevertheless worth signaling to both historians and economists. They shall acknowledge how difficult it is to explain the origin and the development of an institution belonging to the field of private economy, without keeping in mind political and administrative factors and their influence on social structure.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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On The Working Group of the Historiography of Small Nations s o u r c e

István Hajnal, “A kis nemzetek történetírásának munkaközösségéről, I–II.,” Századok 76, nos. 1–3 (1942):1–42, and 133–65. Reedited in István Hajnal, Technika, művelődés (Budapest: História, 1993), 243–98.

István Hajnal (1892–1956) was a Hungarian historian, archivist, and university professor. He came from an assimilated German middle-class family in

southern Hungary. He studied in Budapest and Leipzig. He was an important specialist of medieval writing and the pre-modern history of technology. He was deeply influenced by German and French historical and sociological

thought (Hintze, Weber, Sombart, Durkheim, Pirenne, and Bloch). In the 1920s

he worked in the Viennese state archives on the history of the Kossuth emigration, and he also served as the archivist of the Esterházy family. From 1930, he

was professor at Pázmány University, Budapest, and from 1931 to 1942 was also the editor of the main Hungarian historical periodical, Századok. Although

he was a convinced anti-fascist, after World War II he gradually became marginalized, and in 1949 he was excluded from the Academy of Sciences. He did not abandon his research, however, but instead he retreated to the archives to

work on the history of pre-modern agricultural and manufactural technology,

in addition to diplomatic history. Hajnal is considered to be one of the most original Hungarian historians of the twentieth century. His legacy became a

central point of reference for Hungarian social historians emancipating themselves from the Marxist theoretical framework in the 1980s, and he continues

to serve as an inspiration for Hungarian historians dealing with social history from a comparative and transnational perspective.

The text “On the Working Group of the Historiography of Small Nations”

documents the interest of Hungarian historians in a transnational comparative approach to history in the 1930s. Hajnal was involved in the efforts of

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Eastern and Northern European historians to create a forum of exchange of

information and eventually to develop new comparative tools of interpre-

tation within the framework of the Comité International des Sciences Historiques. In this text, Hajnal develops an ideal-typical model of medieval so-

cial and cultural development in the various peripheries of Europe. His main

argument, based on an organicist reading of social history, is that medieval

Western European society (which he constructed in terms of concentric cir-

cles around a French “core”) was marked by a complex web of customary relations, which effectively humanized the relationship between lords and

peasants. In contrast, he depicted Eastern and Northern European developments in terms of a less densely woven fabric leaving more space for the “rational” exploitation of the subjects. In this sense, he turned the usual counterposition of a rational West and an irrational East upside down and created a

normative model, which served as a starting point for various other intellectual projects to grasp the specificity of East Central European social and political developments.

· IV. Béla király kancelláriájáról (Budapest: Franklin, 1914); Írástörténet az írásbeliség felújulása korából (Budapest: Budavári Tudományos Társaság, 1921); A Kossuth emigráció Törökországban (Budapest: Magyar Történelmi Társulat, 1927); Az újkor története (Budapest: Révai, 1936). secondary literature · László Lakatos, Az élet és a formák—Hajnal István történelemszociológiája (Budapest: Új Mandátum, 1996). main works

W

I

n the years before the present war, the small nations of Europe began the publication of a common series of bulletins in world languages, acquainting the profession with the latest historical literature. The aim was to allow access to literature published in less widespread languages in order to prevent this scholarship from remaining marginal. The question arising from this endeavor, therefore, is which new results and data may be of interest for the historical science that examines the general European evolution in the first place. To what principles should we adhere when publishing abstracts of small nations’ historiography? What are the most necessary deliverables for a general study of this evolution? The bulletin raised questions about the basic methodology of the history of European evolution. One needed to identify vantage points which 236

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could help grouping and selecting the results of the historiography of small nations. Small nations approach the great central blocs from a peripheral standpoint, with each of them exhibiting their own idiosyncratic evolution. The evolutionary structures of Norway and Hungary, for instance, can hardly be compared to one another. But what is the common lesson they could nevertheless offer for the benefit of a European history of evolution? These very differences are, however, the most interesting and instructive ones, for they remain to be phenomena connected to one single common large-scale evolution. Finding common characteristics in the significant differences: this approaches the essence of general evolution itself. From this point, the history of small nations may provide results that are difficult to discern from the history of great central cultural blocs. The development of methodological possibilities in this context should be the specific task of small nations’ historiography within the framework of European historical science. This is the task with which we are concerned in the passages below. ***

The above-mentioned bulletin concerned us Hungarians as well, and its planning and destiny sheds light on the entire modern European cultural structure. Ever since the autarchism of national cultures has triumphed everywhere, we can detect the old unity of Western cultural structures less and less. Within the hugely swollen boundaries of the scientific apparatus, there are few programmed, systematic works aimed at the explanation of the common basis of our cultural evolution and the understanding of the precise grounds for its world-dominating richness. We turn to the hypothesis of individual nations’ inherent inner qualities, and national public opinions make science drift further into the stream of these mystical or biological explanations. Smaller nations suffer the most from this: their evolution remains in the dark, while their relatively unsuccessful present work renders their past an obscure appendix to the history of great nations. Even the few comprehensive foreign language editions or case studies published in foreign languages can scarcely integrate a small nation’s analytical literature into the general overviews. In these publications, the foreign scholar can only gain access to a specific writer’s own interpretation, not to 237

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the original research material. It is interesting to note how such volumes published abroad use relatively little of the Hungarian writers’ theoretical works, preferring to publish specific data or simple facts, to issue original sources, that is to say such materials that may fleetingly show an aspect of the small nation’s evolution, free of theory. To touch the original source material would be too much for the foreign scholar; he would have trouble appreciating even the published Latin texts; whereas the full interpretation would be too limited for his original perspective of research. Something between these two is needed: raw, yet selected, facts. The small nation’s scholar may be in a more advantageous position in this respect, since by knowing one or two world languages he can gain access to the data produced on the Western evolution if his circumstances allow him the usage of foreign libraries; furthermore, from the peripheral cultural spectrum he is aware at least of his own nation’s history. Therefore, it can be claimed that the historiography of small nations is more accustomed to seeking important and comprehensive connections; it is, however, under the significant influence of Western theories. Furthermore, if they continue developing these theories concerning their own local sources, their experiments will not have sufficient resonance in the global scholarly literature. The idea of a common bulletin published by small nations comes from a Swiss scholar (H. Nabholz), who raised the issue in the 1931 session of the Comité International des Sciences Historiques in Budapest. This Committee was the organ of the international historiographical organization with representatives from forty-four member states and a permanent office in Paris. Particular questions (archive issues, historical demography, feudal parliaments, constitutions, bank history, etc.) were treated by permanent committees within the organization. A committee was formed, for instance, to eliminate mutual accusations from German and French historical textbooks. The quarterly Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (10th edition, 1938) published reports on the committee’s work. The abstracts of the international historical congresses, held every five years, were published in separate volumes, offering an interesting and varied overview of the state of the research on certain problems and raising new questions worldwide. From 1926 onwards, the Committee published vast volumes of common historiographical bibliographies every few years, arranging the titles not according to nations, but according to common sub238

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jects (International Bibliography of Historical Sciences). A catalogue of historical periodicals from all over the world, 2100 to be precise, was published. Volumes on certain questions were also published (colonial history, great journeys and discoveries, etc.) beside comprehensive volumes connected to the committees’ work (feudal parliaments, medieval corporations, modern constitutions, nationality, the history of public banks, etc.). The interest in the international organization was intense, though not effective. The congresses were well attended, but the publications were not truly widespread. The quarterly Bulletin had a mere few hundred subscriptions, many of which were, certainly, official ones. The organization was living on the temporary support of the Rockefeller Foundation and on the membership fees paid by individual governments. This should come as no surprise, since all humanities exist in similar circumstances. As much as it can be surveyed, however, the scholarly literature scarcely made use of these international publications; each profession and each nation, moreover, each individual scholar preferred to develop the research apparatus for their own purposes. A. Friis, a Danish scholar, undertook, with the help of A. E. Christensen, the work of editing volumes in world languages on the historiography of nations speaking less widespread languages. According to the project, the representatives of the nations concerned would together select the list of works to be translated and published in their entirety; moreover, they would report on the literature published after 1926 in abstract format in common periodicals, regrouping them according to their subject, not their nation. The decisive factor in these works would not be their original academic value, but the international usefulness of their contents. The abstracts would not convey criticism, but the contents and methodology of the given text. The project met general approval; the difficulties connected to its delivery, however, discouraged many countries; consequently, only Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and Hungary announced their wish to join the plan. Italy joined as well, though on its own terms. Greece reported its willingness to join as soon as the country’s financial situation would permit. Soon the publication of entire translations of significant works had to be given up due to financial difficulties. The common periodical also had to give way to individual national abstracts published as vast Bulletin booklets. 239

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The first one was the Hungarian edition (no. 30, March 1936, pp. 1–185), then the Danish one (no. 38, January 1938, pp. 1–91), then the Norwegian and Swedish ones in one booklet (no. 41, October 1938, pp. 741–95; 796– 861). These booklets concerned the literature of the years between 1926 and 1932. The Scandinavians and the Hungarians continued to process the following years as well, and the Hungarian volume was ready to be published when the events of the war interrupted the project. We believe that the publication of these volumes would be quite necessary if the international situation allowed. This way, we could catch up with the nations writing in world languages. Their periodicals review all newly published works immediately. The French have roughly seven hundred historical journals, and often half of their contents is made up by reviews. Small nations, however, would indeed need to publish their periodical reviews in common volumes, since this is the only way they may become useful auxiliary materials. Besides these periodical volumes, in turn, there is a need for the ones that would allow for small nations to describe the main characteristics of their own evolutional structure, what is more, from basic, common aspects. These aspects could be regarded as the basic facts of the European evolutional structure identified from the perspective of peripheral cultures. ***

The task should not be for scholars from small nations to mutually lose themselves in the history of one another’s people. They cannot learn much from each other, since whatever may be similar in their evolution is largely a Western import. Each of them should seek how and why Western patterns and results vary in their national evolution. In the following, we cannot immerse ourselves in the history of peripheral nations either; all we could achieve was superficial outlines in order to examine methodological aspects. This survey is mostly limited to medieval times; we wish to outline the evolutional structure of specific societies with regard to the era of feudalism and the Estates. The Dutch, Flemish, Portuguese—as well as the non-“small language” Swiss—are situated among the great national blocs, creating various transitional cases between them. The Balkan peoples and the Russians belong to a separate circle of Christian civilization. The Danes, Swedes, Finns, Esto240

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nians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Croats are connected to the Latin West in every aspect, but to each other only by loose structural associations. This is a peripheral region that may provide us with sufficient insight into the high structure of Western civilization as well as into the structure of the markedly different Greek Orthodox civilization on the other side of the borderline. This region caught up with the West relatively late; however, it went through all of its significant transformations. This is what provides common characteristics to the various individual nationalities. It is obvious that Western structural changes reached each nation according to its specific variation. The same thing happened in the central cultural blocs of the West. Is this almost meaningless statement, however, sufficient for us? Could we not still reach regularities that might explain the variations from deeper common aspects? Moreover, could this not lead to the recognition of the rules of Western evolution, or indeed any kind of social evolution? It is a well-known fact that the research, which wished merely to compare social structures to one another, viewing and defining them as a whole, could not come up with truly valuable results. These structures concerned nations or peoples, for instance, and they were all treated as specific types. They modify the foreign “influences” according to their characteristics; but this in itself is no scientific law but only the description of a historic process. The same mistake is made in all other research of social evolution as well, which is perceived as a complete formula, almost as a personified, spiritual creature. There is, indeed, a common element in the notion of the “state,” from primitive hordes to Western European state forms; in order to explain significant differences, however, we must examine their structures rather than emphasize their characteristics. The notion of feudalism is rather different in Europe and beyond it, although there are common features. Yet even within the West, notions such as nation, state, or feudal structure present rather complex formulas. Even seemingly simple phenomena like nobility, peasantry, clergy, and bourgeoisie can hardly be defined without having to accompany an explanation of their differences with a description of their characteristics. Similarly, even a formula that appears as small and unambiguous in its purposes as the medieval guild slips from being homogeneously defined due to its multiple functional varieties. What remains common among all these social phenomena may be regarded as a nearly use241

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less generalization; moreover, enlisting their characteristic features could only be rendered into a regular correlation within the framework of philosophical-moral evaluation. Furthermore, all formulas perpetually change; concepts only flow through the moment of definition. Two formulas might be identical in their inner meaning; soon their ways part in evolution. One state, nobility, or city might be the source of fertile progress, for instance, while the other one is the suppressor of all progress, although they may be identical in their basic principles. The substantive interpretation of social formulas, thus, failed to work. Formulas are not living creatures with homogeneous spirits, but the organization of more or less complex methods of human cohabitation. The creation of the formula does not directly stem from any human spirit or motivation, but from the methods and structures that were left behind by the previous evolution. Human volition is free and capable of creating vast entities; yet subsequently, the changes always turn out to be the enforcements of a particular stage in the evolution of historical-social methods. Actually, revolutions are never the answer to the problems about which people were fighting, but rather to the crises arising from the evolution of the systems of social coexistence. Reviewing the endless varieties of European evolution provokes such thoughts in our minds. Evolutionary research should analyze simpler and more comparable facts, ones that do not require subjective evaluation. The other extreme seems to be a better option: that of analyzing and comparing social structures as soulless constructions. This is the reason why prehistory and archeology could become more international than any other historical science, since they were forced to use concrete, technical sources, even though these two branches are, after all, also interested in full-scale humansocial life. The “positivist” historiography of the past tried to create an inventory of specific facts and forms, but it did not believe in their consistent structural connection; it saw each configuration as an independent factor, an independent power that pushes the next one in a certain direction. Geistesgeschichte, however, was searching for a spirit, a central energy that might create and animate the construction. In our opinion, reconstructing social structures as coherent, operational formations is the only way to be acquainted with evolution and the human life experiencing and motivating this evolution. 242

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The simple and well-known facts of the peripheral region’s history may also be interpreted differently from this angle. One such fact is that peripheral nations joined the Latin Occident simultaneously, almost in the same generation. They were markedly different peoples and different political and social structures and cultures; however, their conversion to Christianity means that they permanently caught up with Latin civilization. This social-political structure for generations seemed too weak to conquer the peripheral, pagan structures, and in turn was looted and pillaged by their expansive endeavors. Now, all of a sudden, these peripheral peoples calmed down; they became “small nations,” true nations under the influence of Western cultural structures. Can the true sense of reality accept the sudden expansive reorganization of political or religious-ecclesiastical configurations in the West as the final explanation of these facts? Or can we simply acknowledge this expansion as a spiritual-ideological conquest? From where does this profound wave of conquest of the feudally divided West emerge? Other religions show similar sudden expansions; however, in this case, the West, marked by a weakness of power and organization, turns out to be victorious, while the new role of the German Empire only continues the hitherto unsuccessful attempts to unify this civilizational circle through politics. As opposed to the conquest of Islamic religious-political structures, the West remains a diverse source of independent evolutions. The simultaneous conversion of the peripheral peoples decidedly marks a new phase of Western evolution, perhaps more tangibly than any other contemporary phenomenon. Something became a mature, generally accepted, transferable, and transmissible cultural formation at the core of the evolutionary structure; expansive without being directed by power. The arms of the Western states did not appear anywhere in the course of this expansion, and even political ideas materialized only in the minds of the converting princes. This is the relatively clear expansion of cultural structures. But which structures? Obviously not the ones princes deemed desirable to adopt in order to extend their influence. Their aim was ecclesiastical and governmental centralization; it was for this that they used the methods from the West. For some time, great monarchies were formed, occasionally with significant power of expansion. This, however, was indeed only temporary; finally, the particu243

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lar methods of culture the princes wished to instrumentalize triumphed over the princes’ own conceptions. These methods were the ones that managed to truly transform the new societies by their invisible workings. The development of feudalism is, without doubt, the most fundamental process in the evolution of the first five hundred years of the Middle Ages. This is the essence of social integration; next to it all other matters organized by great rulers and their empires are superficial, artificial, temporary formations. But in the case of these new, peripheral peoples of the crystallized feudal forms played little role, not even in the course of their subsequent evolution. What is it, then, that made their structural bases Western European and so different from their neighbors who joined Greek Orthodoxy? The transformation not only occurred in their higher administration, their government, in the higher echelons of society, or in their intellectual circles, but also in the lower ranks, in their popular basis: it is impossible to ignore the more intimate connection to the West. But does this have to remain inexplicable, indistinct, or, alternatively, over-explained through various facts and factors? Does this render it impossible for the science of evolution to unveil basic regularities from this problem? The fundamental common social method must lie deep within the process of feudalism. We should, however, examine the methods that catalyze this process instead of the full scale, complete formula of feudalism. Simply put, instead of focusing on principles, or spiritual and motivational factors, we must understand which historically developed methods were used by the unchanging human spirituality in order to construct the medieval feudal society. ***

We do not wish to analyze feudalism; this has been done, and its principles have been elaborated by many before us, without being able to explain the construction of the actual social structure. This is probably the reason why Western feudalism as a structure determining the whole of society has no comprehensive description. We must take a reasonably distant position once more in order to draw simple conclusions from simple facts. Such a well-known fact is the categorical distinction of the societies joining the West from Greek Orthodoxy. Meanwhile, their more deep-going 244

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transformation can be contrasted to the more shallow social structure of the latter. This is especially remarkable in case of Hungarian evolution. This was a newly arrived people from a faraway land; its southern neighbor was the still flourishing Byzantium, which, at the time, was in one of the expansionary phases of its history. Byzantium managed to conquer the Slavic peoples of the Balkans both politically and ecclesiastically and had just ventured over Hungarian lands towards Moravia. Moreover, in Russia, it settled permanently at the same time as Hungary’s conversion. One can only wonder why Hungary did not join Byzantium, and how it could connect to the Latin West without any significant Byzantine competition. The boundaries of its young society impeded the path of Byzantine expansion towards its northern neighbors. Byzantium could, thus, only remain in contact with its newly conquered land, its vast successor, Russia, via a smaller tunnel, the road through the Romanian population, whose society would only form in later centuries. What could the reason be for the infertility of the Byzantine evolution as opposed to the Western evolution? The explanation does not require detailed analyses, but simple, concrete facts. The stiff formalism of Byzantium is not a fact, only a feature, and one that other features may sharply contradict. For life in Byzantium was so much swifter, so much more diverse than in the West; full of great decisions, new and new conscious organizations.1 It is a region of Antiquity more ancient than Italy itself, bordering other ancient Mediterranean civilizations rather than stretching to the farthest end of Eurasian civilization, the ocean, like Latin civilization. This is the very reason mentioned so often: Eastern social-cultural patterns penetrated Byzantine culture and broke it up. Yet why did this not happen the other way around? Why was it not Byzantium, the leader of human civilization that transformed the East? When subsequently the Arabian expansion reached the walls of Byzantium, that was the consequence rather than the cause of its downfall. If we wish, we can find all those features which, from a modern perspective, may be regarded as theoretical preconditions of evolution. There 1 Recently, these aspects have been emphasized by Charles Diehl, Byzance: Grandeur et décadence (Paris, 1920); on Byzantine development: Lujo Bretano, “Die byzantinische Volkswirtschaft,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 41, no. 2 (1917): 412; Friedrich Fuchs, Die höheren Schulen von Konstantinopel im Mittelalter (Leipzig–Berlin, 1926); J. Matl, “Entwicklung und Charakter der nationalen Kulturideologie bei den Südslaven,” Résumés des Communications présentées au Congrès (Warsaw, 1933), 2:222.

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was brilliant legislation, the overview and classification of Roman law, together with a detailed elaboration of the relations between the individual, the property and the state. The modern division of public administration into home affairs, foreign affairs, finance, defense, jurisdiction was already in operation here. So was the state-supported education of officials and higher education; even the thought of general compulsory education was raised. Theoretically, the bourgeoisie also took part in public affairs. This was, however, overshadowed by the almost sacred autotelism of the state, which also influenced the development of our modern constitutional theory. Nevertheless, public opinion often had decisive influence, and urban life had a leading role. There were great public corporations, storage houses, and customs policy. There was general compulsory military service. There was technology, some of the most amazing novelties of the time, applied consciously in order to amaze foreigners. There was an organized compilation of scientific results. There was an internal connection between state and church, almost bearing the characteristics of a national church. The Christian faith was subtly defined, surpassing the Western Church by far; the ecclesiastical organization itself preceded and was more perfect than the Western one. The clergy had a leading role among the people, even economically; coupled with the early domination of the vernacular language in the church. Besides, there was an undoubted internal connection between the evolution of Byzantium and that of the West; what is more, the new turning points seemed to appear in a sharper, more consistent way here. Feudalism results from the rational distribution of the administration of military-financial power for the benefit of the state. The latifundium became a basic structure organized for collective purposes, food supplies, and the taxation of workers. Likewise, the common regulation of industrial production was achieved. There was a certain similarity with the West in some phenomena of spiritual culture; a renascence corresponding to the Carolingian era, as well as common features in the reform of writing and the transformation of schools according to the trivium-quadrivium model. Furthermore, a quasi-estate system emerged, rooted in the evolution of extensive families, constantly and expediently refreshed by the rise and promotion of state servants. Even the Renaissance at the end of the Middle Ages was a phenomenon in common with the West. 246

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Thus, how could the significant divergence between Byzantine and Western evolution be defined? A strong spiritual difference perhaps; we may refer to the former as rational and to the latter as an irrational evolutionary pattern. This, however, could not lead us to any conclusions concerning the reason for the difference in their types. From where do these different spiritualities stem? We must not approach evolutionary matters using spiritual, philosophical, or psychological terms, with a definition that acts like a magic key revealing all secrets and making us understand all aspects. We must focus our research on the specific facts connected to the matters at hand. In case we regard the construction methods of the two civilizations, we will be confronted with the practical, rational usage of social relations in Byzantium. All minute tasks and developments are gathered into common organizations; there are separate ones for military affairs, for industry, etc. In this way, the general aspects overshadow the other facts of human life relegated to the area of “private life.” Most sources we inherited from this civilization may be regarded as “literature”: legal, political, tactical, religious, philosophical theses, adaptations, besides the fiction created for pleasure. Natural sciences record from all actual phenomena only whatever seems useful, harmful, or that which has a spiritual effect on mankind. Otherwise these phenomena and materials of nature are deemed useless by the sciences of the time. The same goes for social matters. The latifundium or the life of peasants or craftsmen can be of interest only as dimensions of social motivational factors, except perhaps their poetic value. As opposed to this, Western medieval source materials are strikingly primitive. Writing in itself, let alone true “literature,” is scarce in this region. Deducting backwards, however, from these relatively few traces and from the multitude of written material created in the second half of the Middle Ages, one may understand what people considered worthy of recording and why. They register events without political motivations, wars without tactical conclusions, but simply because they happened, and floods, droughts, and tempests just because they considered them interesting. Borders of landed property are registered in order to know where they were located, without noting size, profit, or revenue. The names of peasants are enlisted with a note referring to their social status, and craftsmen with a record of their occupation. The inner structure of manorial and urban social formulas are not evaluated, only confirmed, ensuring them with “all 247

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their rights and customs.” Everything is acknowledged in its own specific evolution, not adjusted to practical aspects; the people have to adjust to the diverse phenomena. Irrespective of the spiritual orientation of the modern analyst of social evolution, he must admit that these significant differences between the sources of the two civilizations are striking at first glance. Furthermore, the Western methods do not stem from the primitive nature of the early Middle Ages, since the high Middle Ages continued it in the same manner while the concepts were merely growing in number and complexity: the organization is still not based on general, practical aspects, but on regrouping similar phenomena and social structures. For instance, natural science, which had just begun its world-conquering journey, enlisted a multitude of phenomena and materials merely for their own sake. Even by the end of the Middle Ages, the numerous existing technical terms were not used to express and evaluate the whole internal operation of a social formula. In order not to harm the peculiarities of the given formation, these concepts carefully describe or otherwise refer to the “customs,” which are known and respected within the given society; the outsider, however has to use his empathy in order to understand them. This method, therefore, is not due to the primitive nature of written composition, but to the method of social formation itself. Written composition merely develops the ancient methods that defined social transformations, and which continue to define them until they slowly wither away in modern times. They define the various modes of human communication, not wishing to treat individual phenomena from the perspective of specific individual aspects or motivations but to acknowledge them in their entire reality. Collectively these ways of communication may be summarized under the terminology of customariness, as an acknowledgement of custom rather than of rational expression. Early medieval society was formed by this method; customary behavior forced out even what little practical literacy remained from Antiquity, so much so that the tenth century may be dubbed the age of “reaction against literacy” in the West. Byzantine evolution is, no doubt, the continuation of Antiquity; there is no truly profound friction, no new thesis as in the West. The overripe ancient structure became mechanical here and pursued its own internal rules until the very end. The “most suitable one” was elevated to the em248

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peror’s throne, into abstract heights and dazzling forms, surrounding him with ceremony. Officials were trained by a system of examinations and their ambitions were directed by defined titles and ranks; otherwise, public administration was largely in the hands of those favored by the court. The teachers at colleges also had their share of titles and ranks; education, nevertheless, remained focused on the formal and theoretical analysis of ancient literature. The same goes for science; Byzantine scientists visiting the West were amazed to see that it was possible to create new literature there, with new results from old books. Theologians were amazed that in order to prepare the students for this science, secular sciences were part of the syllabus in the West. The national language became the literary-clerical language in the course of time; however, this language became obsolete and obscure for laymen. In twelfth-century Byzantium, the Italians began to force the local professionals, working according to inflexible rules, out of industry and trade. There was dull formalism in all areas, although occasional, significant, and violent transformations showed the power of human will and understanding, though only in order for novelties to become abstract formalities within a few generations. Above there were vacant mechanisms, below inorganic instincts. In the cities, the masses executed the public will; in Constantinople the audience of the Hippodrome disposed of and elevated emperors to the throne. In the countryside, great feudal families led their people into rebellion. The clergy lived among the people, yet as a separate and abstract profession they were able to fanaticize their believers with brilliant forms and blissful principles from their vast cloisters. The role of the secular clergy was insignificant compared to the monks; there was no true parish organization. The result of the dearly-held rational principle of the national Church was the political excitation of those masses of monks who were excluded from the cloisters and subsequently gathered into gangs of robbers, while above there was rivalry between the national government and the patriarchs and the dignitaries of the Church. Finally, from the commonwealth a plurality of nations emerged, with strong linguistic differences and the infiltration of Eastern elements even in the case of the Greek population. The Slavs, who arrived early on, assumed Byzantine forms then lost their political independence without, however, creating a new synthesis, a civilized nation, as happened in the West within a Latin framework. The Slavic nation retreated to the instinctive pattern of extended families 249

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without any divisions according to profession or lifestyle. Above: subtle principles and forms; below: growing shapelessness; this is how this ancient cultural region turned into “the Balkans.” No doubt, precisely that internal differentiation, which was brought to the West by the simple, interest-free recognition and expression of the rules, was missing. The rational men and the social organization structured by reason could not stop at such human or social facts that they were not able to use according to an already established criterion. That is to say, they recognized only those features that had already been listed under an established, sensible social organization, instead of being able to experience the completeness of life. The bare “rationalism,” which made Byzantium and the entire ancient region of the Near East more and more dreary, was not the result of a certain transformation within the human soul, but of the conscious continuity of the overripe antique cultural structure. Dreary rationalism takes over man and society if they do not need to accommodate such rules that “have no use, no reason in themselves.” It perfectly and simply uses everything it is equipped and able to grasp; however, no new principles or scientific works can change the existing basic methods of social evolution. Strict formalism is always the result of empty rationalism, and the most primitive and the most civilized societies, therefore, become influenced by abstract ideas, superstitions, unleashing the instinctive, the “natural” way of life. It seems, however, that Western societies stopped at each and every unique variety of their natural environment, adjusting to all of the significant life signals of their neighboring existences. What had no reciprocity of interests became a strong basis for neighborly relations, appreciating the significant expressions of human existence. It aimed not at the result of labor, for instance, but its forms and the attitude of life to this. Numerous different social patterns that could not be described according to causality or principle were created this way. A profound division organized in a bottom-up structure emerged, since greater, stronger organizing ideas are forced to recognize and develop the “irrational” creations of everyday life defining the surrounding natural environment; to live according to their standards; and to keep an expressive reciprocity instead of pragmatic aspects in mind. *** 250

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The actual principles and forms of Western feudalism can barely be found in the societies of the peripheral, new nations of the Latin Occident. There is, however, a sharp and clear separation from Byzantium and the Greek Orthodox civilization emanating from that region. The first written records show a similar petty, naïve understanding of society characteristic of the West. Even in the case of bestowing a latifundium, small existences and variegated situations are laconically listed, just as reminders to commonly known facts rooted in custom. After a while, the leaders of society were obliged to register these various facts in an increasingly detailed fashion, for they could hardly be handled in any other way than by simply acknowledging them and writing them down. Charters and “privileges,” that is to say the registration of genuine developments in their individual framework, were spreading. What did not exist in antique sources, and what is also significantly missing from Greek Orthodox cultures is the growing mass of medieval charters—similar to the West these are the most significant remains of the ancient social structures of the small peripheral nations. The basis of the Western-style development of peripheral nations is, thus, not the adoption of legal principles or set social patterns, but the integration of the elementary methods of constructing societies. The evolution of peripheral nations points us in the direction of analyzing the essential evolutionary structures of the Occident in the realization of these elementary, basic methods. “Feudalism,” as we have seen, can be a rather rational notion, a structure of reciprocity of interests in case the central mechanism is unable to reach all the distant parts of society and wishes to use middlemen to collect its profits. This dispersion of parts happened, however, in a different way in the West than in Byzantine civilization. Without purposefulness and practicality, completely new creations appeared in the broad lower echelons of society, and made their way slowly upward, finally overcoming the uppermost circles. We have no primary sources that include descriptions of the specific social structuring methods of Western feudalism. The role of custom can only be analyzed from subsequent legislation and diplomatic practices, as well as the internal structure of individual social patterns. Based on all these sources we may only speculate backwards about the centuries-long process during the first half of the Middle Ages, which took place through an unlet251

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tered way of customization. On the contrary: from the early Middle Ages we mainly have written records on phenomena that represent conscious, rational creations as though they were struggling against the expansion of custom; the foundation of purposeful organizations, institutions, in turn, would be transformed into the opposite of their original purpose, role or structure by an unlettered, unmarked process. Among peripheral nations, the innovation we deem principal was not the development of kingdoms or castle-centered units or even the introduction of the new Western-style church organization. It is true that these organizations served as substitutes for and deconstructed the pagan clan-tribal organizations; this in itself, however, would not have Europeanized their evolution. What is more—as subsequent phenomena demonstrate in varied fashion everywhere—among such power structures, various dimensions of ancient social ties still might have resurfaced, adapting to the monarchical framework and entering into a negotiating alliance with it. Further, since the tribal structure is nothing but a community of interests with the fiction of family relations, they could have been included in the power interests of the state for a limited amount of time. The monarchy and its methods, which were not devised purely with a single purpose, however, began to expand to new territories. What was, then, the basic method in Western feudalism, which leads us to examine the internal transformations of peripheral nations following the adoption of Christianity? Western feudalism meant a more profound connection than reciprocity of interests; the significance of this characteristic has long been emphasized. However, it is precisely this spirit of mutual loyalty that remains ineffable, inexplicable in terms of its genuine value, its structure, and its creation. Recently, legal history has been making attempts at acquiring a more profound meaning of ancient theoretical and practical regulations, thereby moving towards the study of the specific social structure from the insecure focus on psychological patterns. There are, however, relatively few sources on the transformations of the broad lower echelons of society taking place precisely in the “classical” age of feudalism: in the early Middle Ages before the differentiation of feudal estates. Furthermore, feudalism as a legal system is a somewhat distant, theoretical notion and as such has little connection with the minute details of everyday life, which, after all, also shaped the feudal structure of the upper, more politically ac252

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tive strata. Even this type of sources, however, allows us to seek the meaning of Western feudalism in social factors besides mutual and direct interests. The legal historical work of Mitteis,2 which analyzes the feudal laws of different regimes of pre-feudal Europe, regards “long-term relations” as paramount in feudal law through the role of the vassal, preserving his capacity for active performance and ensuring the proper handling of the object of the vassaldom. Originally the vassal’s value was not measured according to certain services, but as a negative obligation, as its own established, solidified, and multifunctional occupation and activity. When this began to transform into a generally accepted obligation in the ninth century, the vassal still had to give his orders individual consideration, judgment, and occasionally defiance; he had a responsibility to keep his and his master’s future in mind. Mitteis partly sees the instructive influence of military practice on individual judgment in such principles, whereas we believe that they express a far deeper process: the acknowledgement of the established lifestyle, activities; the necessary accommodation to the actual methods of customariness; and the suppression of instinctive interests as opposed to the long-term interests of cohabitation for generations. It is not the fidelity principle that rules, for who could apply such an abstract theory to actual cases? Customary structure is the essential aspect, without which the most fervent fidelity might turn into mayhem. The most characteristic feature of this relationship of fidelity, however, was that it had been principally a personal, material relation, without tribute, and usually provided a mutual benefit. Furthermore, even though the material basis of fidelity was generally established early on, by the ninth century, in the original regions of development, such as Central France, this applied less to financial material property, such as the feudal tenure of land or other materially valuable objects, but to a specific permanent function or occupation. This applied to the administrative function, and practically to an infinite number of other functions, such as the organization of a grain depository, the maintenance of post-horses, etc. Even a commission for monetary deals may turn into a feudal relationship. In the case of estates as well, it is the activity itself that is the material basis of fidelity, as opposed to any notion of useful landed prop2 Heinrich Mitteis, Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt: Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Verfassungsgeschichte (Weimar, 1933).

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erty. Especially in France, fairly advanced enquiries were conducted on deciding which cases may be regarded as breaches of feudal obligations caused by the mishandling of the land, such as how and when to change types of cultivation or the organization of the land. A fortress, and even the part of a wall, tower, and gate can serve as an object of feudal relationship. This includes the maintenance of the building as well as the regulation of power relations between the feudal partners. Moreover, feudal relationship does not mean the exclusivity of the two partners to one another; early on, the same person appeared under more than one landlord, and the same activity could have multiple links. The landlord was forced to exercise objective judgment on the legal services regarding the relation between the parties, so much so that he may appear as accused in front of his own court. This is not even individual, subjective fidelity; the landlord may hand his vassal over to other landlords so long as the vassal’s interests are not harmed. The people concerned might change even if the feudal relationship remains the same. The position of the vassal is equally mobile; he may transfer his feudal obligation with the lord’s agreement. From all this one can feel the acknowledgement of occupations and lifestyles, as well as the assurance of the internally organic operation of their lifestyle against the intrusion of alien influences. These are not matters of principle; not even does the feudal pledge ordered by Charlemagne require an abstract state loyalty, but rather an attachment to solidified “civil law”-type relations. Feudal relations are hereditary if the descendants renew their obligation; moreover, they are hereditary according to primogeniture, though merely providing the firstborn with a certain role of superiority above his siblings. This traditional continuity of the entire family venture shapes feudalism as opposed to the logical division of property among the siblings. These are traits taken from the surface of the social context. For what is below does not always count as feudal law, although on French soil not even the bourgeoisie and the peasantry are excluded from the possession of a feudal property. But even in the more developed legal system the narrower legal source prevails over the broader one: customs rooted in real-life situations overrule the more abstract, theoretical requirements. No doubt, the principles of feudal law make no sense and are not applicable in themselves; only the broad lower social strata, the various transformations of family ventures and occupations provide their actual composition. The relations of 254

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the above elements to one another form the superior legal system. In France, even within the legal system the ritual retained its importance, the form; the recognition or renunciation of practical reciprocity is not enough, an homagium, an investiture, an oath of allegiance, or a ritual release from all this is needed. These forms are symbols, though they refer to the most profound fact of social life, namely to the appreciation of the graphic shapes of the entire way of life. The former Roman slave who has been working on the land of his lord finally turns his work, his lifestyle, his tools, and his methods into his “feudalistic” property. His state and his name remain servile; yet slavery disappears, for it is transformed into a multilaterally regulated relation. The peasant ceases to be the worker of the latifundium; the natural environment in which he is working and which he cultivated thoroughly, becomes the object of feudal relationship. The methods of craftsmanship become secured states as well. The same thing happens to the seigniorial parson’s job; the parish keeps the feudal independence of its proper functions and occupations on the lord’s land as well. This is so even in the case of the clergyman in the lord’s service, since he depends on the landlord; the activities of directing his environment and the objectivity of his methods are, however, preserved. In historical literature one may encounter remarks on the essential role of feudalism in the establishment of modern constitutional states more and more frequently. Furthermore, the role of feudalism is noticed, above all, in the formation of modern credit law: instead of the complete, systematic defenselessness of the debtor who does not pay, his performance abilities and his occupation are preserved, which is in the interest of the creditor as well. Today this is seen as a “rational” regulation; its origin, however, comes from the fact that instead of the “rational,” vindictive extradition method of Antiquity, the “irrational” aspects of life and work are also taken into account. Modern “professionalism” is usually such a creation: the expression in its necessary forms of the life-material that is essential for a complete life, as opposed to momentarily useful aspects. The social structuring role of customariness diverted Western evolution from the road of antique civilization’s fatal consistency. This social structure is missing from Byzantium; this is why the cultural mechanism works with an increasingly narrow and abstract life-material exhibiting gradually increasing gaps. 255

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The truth of this remark, however, can also be verified within the framework of Western evolution. The region defined by the most profound feudal evolution is Central France, where even in later times and during most of the modern era the predominance of customariness was most persistent. The further we proceed from this Central French deep structure, the more “rational” feudalism is becoming. Even in German territories there is a rather strong emphasis on the material aspect of feudalism, on the feudal object, from which both parties may expect to gain profit. Profession and occupation, thus, do not have such a strong internal structure, which could enforce the more crude social tendencies to accustom or accommodate. Feudal servitude is more one-sided and restricted to positive cases; there are less socially accurate, and therefore more independent administrative professions developing, which could resist the play of forces around them. This crystallization process of custom is not able to reach the topmost organization, the imperial constitution—while, after two centuries of territorial fragmentation, the Kingdom of France could work on the establishment of a new administrative state resulting from the organic composition and the administrative applicability of feudal law. Processing the life material shaped by customary methods entails the subsequent evolution of Europe until the most recent times. Western feudalism is the basic structure according to which feudal and then absolutist societies developed in various shapes. It is not feudalism itself that elevates the depths of life into civilized structures, but rather the basic method of social structuring, that is to say custom. The observation of these methods would, thus, be the essential task of any research on historical evolution. In later social formations, the role of this element, of “irrational” structural diversification, should be reconstructed, as opposed to the vindication of the short-term interests of life, which always receives less opposition in theoretical, rational regulations than in custom-based institutions and creations. Custom itself, however, is not a productive method; it can serve as the greatest obstacle, the most powerful means of ossification in the way of progress. Today we usually only see this aspect. The Australian horde also produces superstitious customs; they lead their instinctive, non-structured, non-historical life below these. Custom is only fertile if it leaves no space for vindicating bare, direct interests; if custom aligns with custom, they may 256

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express something permanent, something compatible with the profound meanings of human existence, among all hardships, traversing through generations and various events. How could this occur in the early Middle Ages, after the decline of Antiquity? This is the problem facing the basic structure of European culture, as well as the problem of each new culture. Our task in this case is merely to find general, common bases relevant to comparative evolutionary research through the recognition of general, elementary methods of social structuring. What seems clear, however, is that we cannot solve the problem of cultural roots by posing philosophical questions, by presenting specific psychological features in a certain manner, or by the complex interaction of moral or legal principles. The creation of the new always stems from the internal evolutionary regulations of the old social structures. The science of social evolution can never answer the great final questions of humanity’s fate. In case it continues to examine concrete evolutionary methods, however, it may enrich, even transform the theories generally accepted today, which naively see the work of living forces, the struggles of living nations everywhere, rather than structures, which control the play of forces with permanently valid forms, thereby obliging generations to live and work in organic continuity.3 ***

[…] The historiography of peripheral nations has thoroughly studied the question of whether feudalism existed there, and if yes, to what extent and in what sense since it was not able to identify a truly Western-style, feudal legal system anywhere. It, nevertheless, analyzed the social strata appearing during the first two centuries of Christianity in a detailed manner, as far as the small amount of sources permitted. In Hungary, the phenomena similar to feudalism are somewhat more tangible than in Polish society, and our German neighbors in the West were on a more advanced level of feudal development than the German

3 István Hajnal, “Történelem és szociológia,” Századok 73, no. 1 (1939): 1–32, and no. 2 (1939): 137–66.

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territories adjacent to the Poles.4 The Hungarians, on the other hand, were a new population in Europe. They were, no doubt, a nomadic population with a structure that was not shallow; behind the military there was a wellstructured, free Hungarian middle stratum that served as a permanent workforce both in peacetime and in war.5 Yet Hungary’s relatively fast and profound settlement into its new social structure sheds light to an essential condition of Western cultural evolution: the Western Roman Empire transformed a significant part of Hungary into its own image and the remnants of this structure fulfilled a similar role to that of the Western frameworks in the social structuring of the settled nations. The Romans and other populations have disappeared since, but the shapes of the cultural landscape continued to influence the Hungarians as well, forcing them to adapt. Tellingly, on the ancient territories of Dacia, Byzantine Christianity spread temporarily: it is a well-known fact that the cultural organization of the region had been strongly influenced by Hellenistic trends even under the Western Roman Empire.6 The Western “impression” had already begun its transformative effect long before the conversion to Christianity. The victorious permeation happened, however, simultaneously with the other peripheral nations’ conversion, which obviously proves the ripening and “transferability” of Western methods. The tribal and kinship bonds are broken up by royal organizations; yet, what is even more efficient than these conscious efforts is customariness, diversifying all interest organizations. Even the organizations of royal castles are separated by this Western-style division during the first two centuries. The charter, for instance, is an artificially imported form at first, which disappears only to solidify later in a Western form adapted to Hungarian circumstances. By stating that the first monarchs ruled in a “patrimonial” fashion, we might describe their approach to the affairs of state. We do not explain, however, the internal social evolution. There is no feudalism: the monarchs donate estates without feudal conditions. This, however, might mean that, accord4 Mitteis agrees with this thesis. On Hungarian development consult the works of Bálint Hóman, Elemér Mályusz and Péter Váczy. 5 See the recent contributions by Sándor Domanovszky, József Deér and Zoltán Tóth in Magyar Művelődéstörténet, ed. Sándor Domanovszky, György Balanyi, Imre Szentpétery, Elemér Mályusz and Elemér Varjú, vol 1. (Budapest, 1939). 6 Endre Fischer, “A dáciai viaszostáblák okleveles gyakorlata,” in Emlékkönyv Szentpétery Imre születésének hatvanadik évfordulója ünnepére (Budapest, 1938), 157–68.

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ing to their views, the beneficiary of the donations is obliged to serve them unconditionally whenever it is required. This, therefore, is not the regulated and customary relationship between a monarch and the status and duties of a landlord, but rather an obligation exposed to various interests and powers, which royal power can impose only by force after the expiration of personal gratitude. This is what the phraseology of donations, free from all feudal legal conditions, would show. In reality, we may see that, within a few generations, a seminal layer begins to form, first under the name of “miles,” then “familiaris,” then “serviens”; it is not a directly servile relationship but similar to an employee in a broader sense, although also not entirely like a private property owner, but rather something between the two notions, like a vaguer incarnation of the Western knight. It entails a readiness for military service, but also for more permanent tasks of public affairs and social administration. These are obviously not clear-cut, rationally organized roles and tasks, but conditions, leading social positions developed in local varieties on which the monarch may rely. Their functions are intrinsic, even if the governing forces have no particular need for their services. Thus, the execution of royal administration and jurisdiction, which originally aimed to reach down to the lowest layers, somehow transferred this task to local social formations, to the influential families and landlords embedded in them, whose significance was established over generations and who took up the duty in a customary, regulated fashion. Under the great landlords, similar conditions developed in order to provide administration for their subjects, employing not only those who were their employees or received land from them for other reasons, but also free families with whom they established long-term connections almost imperceptibly over generations. The differentiation continues below this defining layer: familiares, serfs, certain occupations that had been, in some cases, the beneficiary trustees of royal organizations were gradually filled with social content. The governor of a castle is becoming the representative of his county upwards as well; his official estate is not strictly distinguished from his private property, which in turn loses its rigidly private features, burdened with the challenges of social administration. The remuneration and the tasks of the royal castle-serf also transform into a steady family business, though not on the basis of private property, but rather a social position established to direct the lower classes. “Serfdom” (jobbágyság) could originally have been such a directing role, with several ranks and various meanings both on the royal and seigniorial estates. 259

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Its origins may be similar to the French “farm-bailiff.” Originally, they were the landlord’s procurators for the local direction of the people on the land, and then with their remunerative estates, they came to form an independent feudal layer between the landlord and the people. In most cases, the Hungarian serf equals the family to whom the landlord can turn with any local questions due to their permanent function and lifestyle; at the same time, the local society may rely on the serf as a representative opposed to the landlord; the family’s use of the land, thus, becomes their solidified right. They are the experts of settlement and internal colonization; the general expansion of their lifestyle is the broadest construction of civilized society. The largest of these serfs could reach the nobility, while certain smaller ones degraded to the ranks of serfdom in its later sense—yet until recently, their customary, regulated occupation is still the basis of Hungarian historical social structures, as opposed to unrestrained, freely engaged popular elements who became pawns in economic games and ended up mainly as servants or day-laborers. Even below these layers, however, among the slaves the same transformation occurs; they cease to exist as defenseless private property, even without formal liberation. This is the consequence of the social structuring methods of the West, which may be observed generally among the peripheral nations. The experience and customary recognition of constant occupation overcomes the rational principles of interest and law. The rational organization of the royal castle and private land tenure, thus, collapses as a result of the development of customary frameworks. There are hardly any traces of this process, but the varied and new social divisions, however, may not be explained by any other reasons. What could trigger the various conditions that permit their forms to rise quite inexplicably against the monarchy and landlords? What about their success in erasing ancient kinship structures? The first serf names mentioned in charters are mainly Hungarian names; social structuring, thus, tore them from the bonds of descent, proving the great social force of customariness. Kinship and tribal relations are in reality fictional social bonds; they are rather interest organizations. Their base unit is the nuclear family, within the framework of which the consciousness of blood ties is confirmed by common practices of lifestyle, custom, and education. The neighborly relation of mutual interlocution of occupations overcomes the more remote blood ties. Lifestyles interlock instead of instinctively gather, which was the general 260

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custom in the extended Southern Slavic families of the Byzantine civilization. Kinship structures become even more blurred in Hungarian society than in the Polish or even the Scandinavian case. This raises new problems, as kinship structures are not evident notions either. The explanation, once more, does not lie in analyzing the spirit of blood ties, but again in examining the methods of structuring the social framework of kinship. A similarly significant characteristic of Hungarian evolution is the relatively weak presence of particular social organizations; among the Poles and even among Scandinavian societies the separate historical organization of particular regions is relatively stronger. Yet, Polish particularism has little to do with Western feudalism. Particularism, thus, is merely an external notion; various essential forms may be lying behind it. The separation of French and German feudal regions, therefore, cannot be understood in an external fashion, explained by the mechanism of interests. Our outline of Hungarian quasi-feudal relationships without a fullyfledged feudalism may only be an approximate one, without the in-depth knowledge of sources; our aim, however, is merely to direct the research towards common, basic social structuring methods, which are similar in all evolutions. We need to excuse ourselves even more with the same aim in mind when we are talking about the Polish and Scandinavian peoples’ “quasi-feudal” development, for in this case we could use even the secondary literature in a rather superficial manner. In Polish evolution,7 the role of genealogical links is more marked, more permanent; otherwise their feudalism and estate system resemble the Hungarian one in many aspects. In the pre-Christian era, the basic unit of society 7 Oscar Halecki, La Pologne de 963 á 1914: Essai de synthèse historique (Paris, 1933); Stanislaus Kutrzeba, Grundriss der polnischen Verfassungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1912); Jan Rutkowski, Histoire économique de la Pologne avant les partages (Paris, 1927); La Pologne au VIIe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques (Warsaw, 1933); a collection of essays, see especially the studies of Z. Wojciechowski and K. Tymienicki; H.F. Schmid, Lebenswesen und slawische Rechtsordnung: Résumés des communications présentées au Congrès, vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1933), 19; K. Maleczyński, “Abendländische Einflüsse auf die polnische Urkunden des XII–XIV Jhdts,” Résumés des communications présentées au Congrès, vol. 1 (Zürich, 1938), 51; Władisław Semkowicz, “Der polnisch-schlesische Adel bis zum Ende des XIV. Jhs,” in ibid., 135; C. Tymienicki, “Les origines des l’asservissement des paysans en Pologne,” in ibid., vol. 2, 312; W. Hajnosz, “Die Frage der Unfreiheit und der Sklaverei bei den Westslaven im späteren Mittelalter,” in ibid., 319; R. Grodecki, “Bäuerliche Freiheit in Polen im Mittelalter,” in ibid., 320; Z. Wojciechowski, “L’État corporatif en Pologne du XIIIe au XVIIIe siècle,” in ibid., 298; Miklós Bezsák, A középkori magyar okleveles gyakorlat kapcsolatai a cseh és a lengyel okleveles gyakorlattal (Pécs, 1939).

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is the family-group (kin, gens, rod) made up of a few families and apparently including other families of the fitting status as far as the locally established interest community requires. This is, therefore, probably not a long-lasting, permanent group that stays together for generations. The tendency of these organizations is to gain strength and rise above similar groups and rule above them as possessors of a common castle and cult. These groups may then diversify, that is to say, certain families may secede and impose themselves on weaker groups of further regions, maintaining joint interests and mutually supporting their original kinship groups with reciprocal and mutual inheritance. In this way, particular and diverse bonds of succession spread across the region; the significant factor, however, is not family, but the allegedly common kinship of the past. Rights of inheritance are also regulated according to this. Weapons, tools, and, later, other immobile property are all private, while the land or rather the territory on which the group exercises its own rights is common. Consequently, there are various irregular layers beside and above one another; the stronger family actually detaches itself from the land and its direct cultivation, a labor which, in turn, is done by the groups below but feeding those above as well. No kinship in itself is an entire “work organization” raising itself from the soil of nature, with self-regulating functions. This must be the reason for the relatively significant proportion of slaves, for each bond of kinship tries to use a subordinate workforce. This is a persistent method of social structuring, and certain features of it spread across the medieval period and persist up to the modern evolution of Poland. The force and the role of custom is significant in all aspects of life; the recognition of leading groups is ensured by custom rather than by their constantly prevailing power and coercion. Their superior lifestyle, their military and administrative roles, and their traditional training connected to these occupations are the factors sustaining these layers, in addition to their alliances, which protect their interest groups. Yet it is obvious that custom is not the basic method of this social structuring. People do not observe their neighbors’ daily labor or the forms of life that may be experienced on a personal level, but they make attempts to remain in accord with their own kin and with other families in order to be able to prevail as interest groups over other such groups. Such historical-social antecedents, which could prevent the formation of these interest groups, are missing from medieval Poland; the preparatory work of antique civilization is missing. 262

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The persistence of kinship, thus, directs the attention towards a significant condition of Western evolution: the preparatory work of a previous high culture. Those who existed beside each other in Gaul were divided according to the rational legal-economic-political principles of Antiquity, and when this high culture became mechanical in its overripe state, that is to say when the Roman Empire in its later phase used law, economy, and administration as compulsory organizations serving abstract common goals, the lower echelons of society began to align with one another, recognizing the most subordinate slave according to his visible, customary occupation. Without changing their position in principle, they began to appreciate their customary lifestyle, their opportunity to work, their relations with the land, the entire financial-mental toolkit of their occupation as the undoubted basis of their existence. In the Polish case, however, the centurieslong preparatory process did not introduce such differences between people who lived next to each other; there were no ancient principles that would splinter society during and even beyond the decline of the Empire, inhibiting the cohabitants to regroup according to “blood” ties, that is to say into any kind of primitive interest group. This is an invisible process, since the ancient landlord partially preserved his essential detachment from the peasant and the slave even in the early Middle Ages, whereas in the West, mutual custom became the basis of social structuring. In the regions untouched by Antiquity, custom could only adjust to the oscillation of interests. The nuclear family, which is the long-term producer of lifestyles, professions, and traditions, could not become the fundamental basis of the social structure. There is no customariness governing all aspects of society that would vindicate the expressive unity of human existence as opposed to the more direct, coarser bias of interests, thus establishing a structure based on recognized forms even below “irrational” human needs. Custom only equipped certain common features of interest with persistent durability regarding the inter-personal relations. This is a rough structure operating with gaps; it is not interested in those aspects of life and work which enrich their forms and methods, but only in directly utilizable output. Pure customariness processes life material as a whole, constantly producing new shapes and forms and thus creating an internal structure and development, whereas incomplete, partially functioning custom strengthens the interest groups and, in a way, blocks the way of progress. It is not custom that stops 263

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or inhibits evolution, but sheer interest, which does not allow custom to appear in each sphere of life. We should, however, have mentioned all this in connection with the Slavs who joined Greek Orthodoxy. The Western peoples of the Northern Slavs obviously held a certain, more internalized community with Western-style social organizations. After converting to Christianity, Poles have also undergone thorough “feudal” training. It is perhaps not entirely right for the study of evolution to generally refer to the characteristic form of social organization in the Central-Eastern region of Europe as “kin structure.” “Kin” and “tribe” are notions we are inclined to connect to certain natural, racial features. The popular linguistic notion of “Slavs” may also entail obscure racial explanations of evolutionism. As opposed to this, one could raise the question whether the “Slavic bonds of succession” were not such a structure that characterizes the more intrinsic, continental zones that are adjacent to the regions with the deepest civilization? The sociological explanation of kin- and tribal organizations, we believe, focuses too much on set formulae instead of examining basic, concrete methods of internal construction. Czechs, Moravians, and Slovaks have almost entirely shed Slavic social structures; the Poles have also separated from them; only the Slavic peoples under the rule of the mechanically barren Byzantine civilization kept their ancient instinctive-rational formations. The Polish prince, having been converted to Christianity, also wished to use Western methods to establish a centralized organization. Some regions that constituted a certain tribal unity were reorganized as castle districts; the tribal chief based his power on service relations instead of the starosta and the diet. However, soon the “irrational” consequences of Western methods began to show. From the kin-members and the officers serving the prince a type similar to the Hungarian miles evolved, hand in hand with the establishment of parish churches. It appears that the Polish “knight” relied more markedly on his “immunitas,” which provided him special rights, including taking over from the state power the right to rule over the people below him. Concerning the clergy, cloisters played an even greater role here than in Hungarian evolution; foreign, German monks filled their ranks for a long time from abroad, and they provided the ecclesiastical organization with stricter and more superior detachment from the people. Yet, transformation was general in the popular layers as well; a variety of social positions 264

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and occupations emerged, slavery became blurred, while the various types of peasant status were already visible at the beginning of the thirteenth century. However, Polish “feudal customariness,” like that of Hungary, can be examined retrospectively, with conclusions drawn from the feudal developments of later centuries rather than from the first centuries of their Christianization, which provide a limited amount of sources. The example of Hungarian and Polish “feudalism” points to the fact that in these peripheral regions of the West, customariness could not establish lifestyles as such, free from bare interests. Professions and offices were not based on their own structure, on their own social efficiency; they could only sustain themselves with the help of the estate and interest organizations, that is to say, by aspects alien to their professional occupations. In true feudalism the object of feudal relationship is the professional vocation, which may serve several goals below one landlord, fulfilling certain common requirements of society. In contrast, Hungarian and Polish feudalism seeks the attention of the strongest party of interest, the ruling power, even deriving its estate from this power. The nature of their feudalism exhibits a nature of “public law,” and it is blurry, theoretical, and “symbolic,” whereas in the West, this is transferred from person to person, from family occupation to family occupation, thus reaching the monarch only through a layered hierarchy. The difference is not provided by the validity of conscious legal principles, but the stronger, more profound role of Western custom, which is also closer to the sensible experiences of everyday life.8 Scandinavian peoples9 also remained intact from ancient civilization, yet they have more internal elements of Western evolutionary structures 8 H. F. Schmid, “Lebenswesen und slawische Rechtsordnung,” in Résumés des communications présentées au Congrès (Warsaw, 1933), 2:19; Péter Váczy, “A királyi serviensek és a patrimoniális királyság,” Századok 61 (1927): 243–90 and 62 (1928): 351–414. 9 Johannes Paul, Nordische Geschichte (Wrocław, 1925); Oscar Albert Johnsen, Norwegische Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Jena, 1939); A. Nielsen, Dänische Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Jena, 1933); R. Swanström and C. T. Palmstierna, A Short History of Sweden (Oxford, 1934); Carl Gustav Grimberg, Die wunderbaren Schicksale des schwedischen Volkes (Munich, 1938); Oscar Montelius, Kulturgeschichte Schwedens bis zum XI. Jahrhundert nach Christus (Leipzig, 1906); Edvard Bull, Vergleichende Studien über die Kulturverhältnisse des Bauerntums (Leipzig–Oslo, 1930); H. Koht, “Vereinigte Königreiche des späteren Mittelalters,” in Résumés des communications présentées au Congrès, vol. 1 (Warsaw, 1933), 119; K. Oestberg, “Forschungen in der nordischen Rechtsgeschichte und in dem geltenden Volksrechte (Bauernrechte),” in ibid., 325; P. Törne, “Die Ausbreitung abendländischer Bildung zu den nordischen Ländern im Mittelalter,” in Résumés des communications présentées au Congrès, vol. 1 (Zürich, 1938), 112.

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than Polish or even Hungarian society. This is so, even if they are truly peripheral regions, there is nothing north of them, and elsewhere seas separate them from medieval feudal societies. Furthermore, they are not blessed with many natural endowments. These nations are regarded as more tightly connected to the West not only because of the Western-style characteristics of their subsequent evolution, but also because of their ancient, pre-Christian civilization. In some ways, we can consider them as the remnants of the ancient, original European structure. True, first and foremost they are the remnants of the Germanic ancient civilization. However, those parts of the Germanic peoples, which broke away towards more spacious continental regions, largely shed the Northern structure and their organization approached nomadic tribal structures. Ancient Scandinavian social and cultural formations, however, cannot be unbreakably linked to racial factors. This is even less valid if we consider the fact that the migrations of the Neolithic Age did not bring here a pure Germanic people, but a racially mixed population. It is more likely that different populations getting rooted in Scandinavian regions established the same formations for their societies in circumstances similar to the ones in which the Germanic population lived. We need a simpler, more rudimentary explanation than racial features, something that may be applied to the evolutionary structures of every population, and therefore it may serve as a general aspect of the research of social evolution. Scandinavian history again points out such basic facts of Western development that would be difficult to deduce from the deep structure of the West itself, for instance, that in the regions close to the seas the ground had been prepared, even before Antiquity, in a manner that would pave the way for the transfer of cultural formations of the ancient and medieval times. Scandinavia is the farthest piece of that zone, where all the great cultures were developed by the Asian, African, and European societies pressed to the sea—as in America where the terrain of civilization is the peripheral zone of the continent. Scandinavian peoples thus share the destiny of societies that are congested at the peripheries of the continent. Instead of the broad possibilities and expansive methods of social formation available to those within the continent, they are forced to rely on establishing neighborhoods using customary methods from ancient times. Lacking the influence of Antiquity, which in Gaul led to the complete and consistent prevalence of cus266

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tomariness and consequently to Western-style feudalism, the customariness that prevailed here was that which prevailed essentially everywhere in this part of the world before the impact of high cultures—meaning the most elementary bases with numerous local variations and degrees. This is the undoubted fact of cultural transfer, as there is hardly any other common, fundamental explanation for it. What was this customariness like in Scandinavian prehistory? In what way were its structures different from those of the continent? How did they receive the transfer of Western culture, such as feudalism? These questions may open perspectives in the study of Western evolutionary structures as well. “Archaic” evolution: the reason for Scandinavian society still being attached to this notion actually lies in the fact that it was considered a peasant society throughout the Middle Ages, even into modern times, and the peasant lifestyle is still more persistent there than in any other society. The only evolution—not including regions in the Alps—was that peasants were incorporated into the estates, to the amazement of Europe at the time. Peasants as the original basis of European evolution: this problem is connected to the question of Scandinavian prehistory. Indeed, the Western Middle Ages stemmed from peasant societies, with even the leading ranks living according to a peasant lifestyle for a long time, which was markedly different from Antiquity that was based on urbanity. The civilized zone along the seas has been the terrain of cultural transfers since prehistoric times; observing custom and observing the peasantry is, thus, the same task. Life bound to land and nature does not define the peasantry in itself. Neither the Australian hordes nor the African tribes are peasants; one cannot speak of nomadic peasantry either. Similarly, the notion of ancient Greek peasantry sounds odd, and Roman agrarian society also does not entirely fit into this category. We do not usually talk about Arabic or Turkish peasants either. Russian or Wallachian peasants can be considered only a development of the modern era. There is no peasantry in today’s America, as no social layer fits the description whatsoever. It is natural, however, to mention Chinese or Indian peasants. The essence of the peasantry does not lie in accommodating life to nature, in taking advantage of natural resources, and in defending oneself from natural forces; it is also not the same as the settled farmer, as the example of the ancient agrarian laborer or the American farmer dem267

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onstrates. The Scandinavian people, however, were true peasants, whether their occupation was animal husbandry on hilltops or lumberjacking in the woods, or even living from fishing or trading along the sea. Until recently, it was believed that the principal feature of a peasantry was yeomanry with democratic autonomy, which is also how Scandinavian societies were imagined to be. Now we know that the ancient peasantry was also a society of complex differences, correlations, and limitations. It was not theoretical freedom, independence, or the association of interests that made it peasantry, but custom, which worked out every detail of life and permanently intertwined the neighborhoods. The courts of the ancient Scandinavian peasantry, scattered on the hills, became interlocked by their customs, which had developed through a long process. Each small farm was a versatile “operation,” and the versatility of lifestyles and labor forms could only be ensured by mutual interaction. None of these operations were the same; differences in soil quality and historical customs destined each one to serve a certain, hardly detectable, special role, and this specialty conditioned the internal divisions in every small operation. This does not only concern economic functions, but also every other aspect of life. While in one family, the special feature is the practical and artistic processing of wood or stone, the other may excel in storytelling—without these features entirely defining the bases of their existence. There is nothing intentional in this reciprocity, nothing that may be legally defined; all conformity and every little shape is supported by customs stemming from everyday visibility. This is a profound structure despite its primitiveness, as opposed to, for instance, Slavic kinship structures. A peasantry is not a natural state, but a profound cultural creation. Its establishment is not an accommodation to nature, but a process that takes place within a society. This is precisely the reason why it should remain attached to the idea of directly dealing with nature, since it is principally based on custom. No form or occupation may prevail that from an abstract rationalist perspective would wish to serve and take advantage of others. A tradesman may serve as a good example, who is attached to his customers only by barter and not by a lifestyle connected to the neighborhood, which remains entangled with other occupations that work with natural resources. The peasantry, therefore, is not a social layer bound to the land; it rather ties the land to itself, developing and incorporating its resources and phenomena into its social structures. It is neither a frightened 268

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accommodation to the elements, nor merely their skillful exploitation, but a physical-spiritual human attitude towards nature’s phenomena grasped and expressed in lasting forms. This is what makes a village settlement a true home, as opposed to national, modern farming. This ancient society was, however, not only about reciprocal interlocking of the versatile, traditional “family operations,” but also about subordination or dependencies. The status of servants is customarily bound in the farmland of the great peasant, whereas the farmer is also bound by the traditional needs of the servants to their customary occupation. What is more, some of the area’s families are also bound to the richer farmer by customary ties. These are, thus, dependencies, which may be regarded as burdensome or unfair by living generations, but the institutional nature of which may save the subsequent generation from fatal trials. The rich farmer not only surpasses his fellow men by possessing the largest estate, but also by his role in local customs and interlocking social differentiation. This is the primary formula of the Western feudal “squire.” In the Northern pagan tribal organizations, uniting the locality’s communities who live according to the same traditions is even more significant than blood ties. Therefore, the widespread joint interests of dominant kinship structures cannot truly gain importance. The tribe, thus, is a complete work organization and an administrative group; tribal chiefs, and above them the minor “rulers,” feature as expert leaders in folktales, looking after the regulated cultivation of lands, forests, and waters. At tribal gatherings they not only render decisions on common interests, but provide direction to the society about the details of everyday labor, such as questions about changes in cultivated lands, stock-raising, pasturing, manuring, or the use of forests and waters. The “lawspeaker” preserves this social expertise stemming from customs as against the oscillation of interests of the moment. He recites the text of local customs in front of a gathering on a yearly basis. He validates the power of small-scale lifestyles; meetings are not based on mass equality but are led by those claiming a greater reputation, but they are also the administrative representatives of custom. Ensuring the long-term efficiency of carefully interlocked peasant occupations supports the refining of methods and encourages each faint attempt without necessarily expecting direct profit. It is telling that foreign social forms and means can enter them only with great difficulty and only 269

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when they have been adapted to fit local customs and organization of labor. Foreign goods do not flood in through trade and plunder, large amounts of which are still excavated from the sites of continental nomadic societies. Even the Iron Age penetrates this society with difficulty, and only when iron is no longer a foreign good but a material that can be worked by the local peasant artisans. Practical labor is not strictly divided from the mental-spiritual aspects of life, customariness expresses all of these in full life correlations. Rich forms of peasant art accompany everyday activities. Traditions are transmitted through well-defined popular methods, and the adult generation reinforces its own lifestyle by educating the youth, thus preparing the nuclear family for the role of a permanent operation as opposed to the principle of bloodtie relations. A particular folk-poetry blossoms from peasant intellectualism, which often describes the details of everyday life or work. Literature is not used only for magical or political purposes by literary vagrants as in the case of several nomadic peoples, but besides remembering the ancestors it is also employed for practical purposes; even gravestones often depict professional tools in addition to other patterns. This is, thus, a strongly customary, profoundly structured peasant society—yet it is not the kind of fertile soil from which Western medieval society evolved. Scandinavia, after all, belongs to the peripheral societies in the sense that the organic development stemming from below was halted at a certain point. This is the reason the history of the Scandinavian people belongs to the periphery, like that of the Poles and Hungarians. Occasional fearful expansions threatening the whole of Europe—the most significant examples being the Vikings, the Normans, Cnut the Great’s, and later on Gustav Adolf ’s and Charles the Twelfth’s conquests—alternate with periods of degradation into obscurity. The peasantry was preserved, though it could not produce superior lifestyles like those of the West, whereas this would have been the natural evolutionary course of a truly profound custom. We are, therefore, obliged to examine ancient Scandinavian social structures and draw conclusions regarding the specificity of medieval Western society and customariness, which proved to be so capable of development. Customary social structuring methods, however, apparently could not achieve exclusive predominance among Scandinavian peoples. The conges270

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tion zone of societies, which exists on the peripheries of all great continents, did not manage to dissolve instinctive popular bonds to such an extent that people would be obliged to adapt to their neighbors purely on the basis of custom. In order to achieve such a perfect disentanglement, the structural influences of certain high cultures are needed. Ancient precedents are missing from Scandinavian evolution. This is the reason why the ties of succession, the tribal organizations, could persist. The larger kingdoms wished to use Western feudal customariness adopted together with Christianity to establish a central power structure at first, similarly to and simultaneously with other peripheral nations; their tribal organizations, however, produced greater resistance than those of the Hungarians or Poles. The reason for this is that Scandinavian tribal organization covers a work and cultural structure that runs deeper than that of the latter. It is an organization that occasionally succumbs to interest-based alliances unifying great lands and spreading fear among the feudal societies of the region with their swarming conquests; yet unlike Hungarian or Polish expansions, it can also establish more lasting connections abroad, beyond conquering and pillaging. The monarchy establishes rational administrational-military districts (herred) to overcome tribal organizations here as well and employs parish churches to achieve their disintegration. In this case, however, similar cultural methods faced one another from the sides of the ancient and the new. The members of the tribe, both lesser and greater, were tied to one another by ancient customary connections. Western feudal methods, thus, are not imported as in the case of Poles or Hungarians; they are forced to merge with popular “feudality” found in the region. With time, a peculiar “Northern feudalism” is established. Among the Eastern peripheral nations, feudalism has no visible outlines; instead of their customary, society-directing function, their leaders prefer to enforce their power based on land and joint interests, while toward the monarch they acknowledge merely a certain obligation based on constitutional law. Scandinavian feudalism, however, enforces a customary administrative role as well, a result of which is the establishment of a unique, faintly outlined stratification moving from below towards the top, without assuming the forms of Western feudal hierarchy. This customary hierarchy created a versatile, self-sufficient work organization out of the Scandinavian peasantry; yet this was somewhat more 271

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than just a peasantry, as it did not rely merely on custom but on activities dissolving the customs and having practical interest-based purposes. A roughly self-seeking peasant intellectualism was formed, which then led the society to distant ventures through spontaneous alliances. This is what inhibited the customary social administration’s fusion into higher structures or professions. It did not allow larger estates to be installed on its land. Even higher clerical organizations, bishoprics, and archbishoprics could hardly settle, for they were supported by seigniorial-administrative functions to a lesser extent. The freeholders did not subject themselves and their lands to the landlord en masse as they did in the West, where this could be done with the full confidence that their lifestyles would be preserved, and where all latifundia with ancient roots, especially church lands, transformed into radically different organizations, losing their proprietary characteristics, and turning into the totality of administrative rights. It is true, however, that no large estates were established as they were among the Poles and the Hungarians, where the economically-politically stronger party could enforce his rights, surpassing administrative roles. In Scandinavia, the basis of feudal hierarchy above the peasant is not so much the organic formula of the landlord, but rather an administrative function further from the peasant mind and largely connected to financial matters. These upper strata did not evolve as a result of local developments; furthermore, in Norway, they were stemming from foreign nations, establishing a foreign civilization above Norwegian peasant culture. Especially the Norwegian peasantry assumed a somewhat archaic character, strictly secluding themselves from the layers above. On the one hand, this was due to the fact that theirs was the deepest among the Northern peasant structures, and it could stand on its own, whereas the Swedish and Danish peasants were more tolerant of the superiority of stronger interest groups, later on in the form of a nobility. On the other hand, Norwegian peasants could not establish new professional layers from their versatile lifestyles, which in the West became social necessities as their artisan or intellectual methods evolved from customs close to everyday life. Kinships ties and self-governing autonomies merely suggest that Scandinavian society is, after all, not composed entirely of a peasantry in the fullest meaning of the term. They have analogies in other European regions, which are similar to the seaside peripheries of continents due to 272

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larger mountain ranges: the mountains seal off the regions from the possibility of establishing expansive connections and oblige the population to live in customary reciprocity. Relatively profound and versatile hierarchies were established in rather unfavorable circumstances, for instance among Alpine peoples or the Szeklers of the Carpathians. These, however, are not fully-fledged peasant societies; there is too much interest-based motivation among them that regulate the interactions between individuals and communities. Common interests influence and shape customs; certain methods of occupations do not mean stable lifestyles for generations, as they are not appreciated for themselves but for the profit they may bring. This is why they cannot deepen and improve in their details and connotations. The peasantry of the West already appreciated experimental tendencies in themselves and inserted their interesting and uplifting approach to human life into their customs based on their moral significance, without expecting profits. Taming the forces of nature would never have deepened without peaceful continuity, which ensured the fundamental bases of handicraft specialization. Meanwhile, Scandinavian peasant craftsmanship remained an occupation dependent on mutual profit, and thus, a mobile profession rather than one slowly established by local circumstances. Iron processing also remained on the level of processing iron found on the surface of the earth, which was easy to work. The trade of goods did not remain closely connected to cultivation either; a busy, often pugnacious peasant trade was established on land and on the sea. Peasant intellectualism decided on practical and theoretical questions using common sense and kept even the clergy in its interest circle simply without allowing it to govern them as objective administrative experts. This interference of direct interests prevented the pure interlocking of forms of customs, their mutual supportive development, and their transformation into general regulations. The fate of the remote Scandinavian people, spreading to Iceland early on, is the most significant evidence for this: it is a truly precocious civilization with reasoning already in its cradle, its social structure shaped in a calculated fashion, whereas the early superiority of its peasant intellectualism eventually turned into rigid practice. ***

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[…] Within our evolutionary theories there must be numerous speculations based on a rather superficial understanding of facts—our aim, however, was merely to point out concrete, generalizable, and common methods of social structure, as opposed to evolutionary theories based on specific spiritual or national character features. Such concrete methods may be compared, and their complex operational nature can be measured by means of depth and division. We are not talking here of cultural facts amassed according to the ancient positivist fashion, that is, separately from the fields of law, economy, art, etc., for the basis of this separation was also the idea that each physical and spiritual need of human existence creates its own methods and tools appropriate for its aims, in order for the cultural results of legal, economic, artistic and other needs to mutually develop one another. As opposed to this, the research of social evolution ought to grasp the past life as an essential and indissoluble unity, that is to say, it needs to examine the methods serving as the bases of all cultural expressions. These basic methods transform society into creative organizations capable of work. We identified customariness as such a method, shaping the social organization of the West in the early Middle Ages. Researching customariness, however, would be a rather complex task given the rare and altered condition of primary historical materials, as we have explained earlier. Customary social organizations were subsequently disrupted by the process of estate-based abstraction during the high medieval era, even though they were not erased completely. This turning point was an internal structural transformation rather than an event-like manifestation of powers. The new intellectual method, the essential tool of which was literacy, evolved from ancient customs instead of being based on a peculiar spiritual movement. Literacy, just like customariness, was not a power functioning on its own, nor was it a factor working individually, but rather a method of expression weaved into the existing social structure. New intellectualism, which controls the method, has its own specific historical organization internally connected to the entire social structure. There are cultures in which writing could not have become a general method of expression due to the more shallow development of its social organization. Medieval education; the education, social status, and professional organization of the cleric; as well as the stratification of the entire society and the nature of human relations 274

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are all internally linked with the role and evolutionary abilities of writing. What is more, it is precisely this use of written records that allows us to make deductions backward in time, even regarding the customs of the early medieval times, while also analyzing the ensuing late medieval and modern evolution. If the issue at hand is to find essential, concrete methods that will serve as the bases of the cultural structure of the entire Western region, and to observe the functioning of these methods from the greatest distance, in the evolution of small, peripheral nations, then we regard examining the use of written records as the most beneficial, most simple and practical way. This would be conducted not as a one-sided history of education or cultural history, but rather as a historical-sociological research. The use of written materials is not linked to certain institutions but to the entire social structure. Disregarding, for the moment, the actual contents of the written records, we ought to examine and compare forms of writing, their circumstances of creation, the status and education of the writer, and thus the internal structure of written intellectualism in various regions of Europe. This matter has been a rather understudied problem of historiographical research. Moreover, it seems as though it deemed it necessary to wipe or to erase the external features of source materials from the perspective of the reader in order to present a more vivid picture of events. Diplomatics is considered a specialized auxiliary science; its statements are not summarized and not used for the benefit of cultural evolution. Its results are seen as critical supplementary materials for local history, and therefore international research may only gain access to diplomatic works of greater nations written in world languages. The analysis of these materials, however, is also a complex task. Furthermore, in the historiography of small nations, diplomatics remains almost a domestic question. One can only find certain data regarding the use of written records among small nations’ historical literature published in world languages on an ad hoc basis. Not even the neighboring country’s historiographer can create a fairly accurate representation of the proportions, the methods, and the nature of the medieval use of written records in the Russian, or even the Polish and Scandinavian contexts. However, specific data on the proportions of literacy and the number of charters may suddenly deepen and 275

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constructively specify our ideas about the internal structure of the society in question.10 The analysis of small nations’ use of written records is of special significance regarding the assessment of the entire European cultural structure. On the one hand, this is where we may state the definite boundaries of the reach and depth of Western literacy, as well as the methods and conditions of this reach and the common features of the changes marking its development, that is to say the speed of its cultural expansion. In this way, the institutions and professions used for cultural transmission gain well-defined outlines, and the precise expressions of their functions may unfold. On the other hand, modifications that affect the use of written records while reaching faraway societies of various structures provide opportunities for drawing conclusions regarding the structure and social structuring role of Western intellectualism. Finally, comparing the literacy of small peripheral nations with the use of written records of a foreign nature among the neighboring Greek Orthodoxy may shed light on the internal discrepancies of the two civilizations. We, therefore, believe that the common labor of small nations should primarily tackle this task if it wishes to provide the international research of social evolution with basic, yet properly comparable results. The use of written records and the structure of intellectualism would be its primary framework, which, in turn, could be connected to concrete forms of complex social change. Even the analysis of writing, however, should start with the simplest tasks in the common enterprise of small nations and refrain from drawing hasty theoretical conclusions. For even gaining statistical summaries of certain peripheral nations’ written records would be a significant result, clarifying our present ideas on medieval cultural unity and discrepancy, at least from the first centuries of the establishment of new clerical educa10 On the study of written records to understand the sociological relevance of “writing,” see István Hajnal, “Írásbeliség, intellektuális réteg és európai fejlődés,” in Évkönyv Károlyi Árpád születése nyolc­ vanadik fordulójának ünnepére (Budapest, 1933), 185–214; I. Hajnal, “Le rôle social de l’Écriture et l’Évolution européenne,” Revue de l’Institut de Sociologie Solvay (1934); Lóránd Szilágyi, “Oklevéltan és általános történet,” in Emlékkönvy Szentpétery Imre születésének hatvanadik évfordulója ünnepére (Budapest, 1938), 454–74; Géza Istványi, A magyar nyelvű írásbeliség kialakulása (Budapest, 1934); ­Istványi, “A generalis congregatio,” Levéltári Közlemények 17 (1939): 50–83 and 18–19 (1940–1941): 179–207; Kálmán Guoth, Az okleveles bizonyítás fejlődése Magyarországon (Budapest, 1936).

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tion and the beginning of estate-based abstraction. The ensuing task could involve providing an outline of the forms, intensity, and the nature of the use of written records and of the situation, organization, and education of clericalism, thus proceeding to tackle more profound social correlations by examining intellectualism in this fashion. […] But this involves complex phenomena, the analysis of which belongs to the tasks of the future. Nevertheless, no matter how complex a certain phenomenon may be, no matter how vast a certain movement is, we should never interpret them as the direct spiritual-financial power eruptions of the people living in the period in question. Complex phenomena and great transformations can only result from structural processes. The historiography of small nations may only prevail in the framework of international science if it provides specific aspects and methods for the understanding of this concrete structure.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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3 Beyond the National Grand Narratives

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The Development of Nationalities in Central-Eastern Europe s o u r c e

Marceli Handelsman, Le développement des nationalités dans l’Europe centrale-orientale (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1932). Extrait de L’Esprit International 6, no. 24 (Octobre 1, 1932).

Marceli Handelsman (1882–1945) was a Polish historian of Jewish ancestry

and professor at Warsaw University. He studied in Berlin, Paris, Zürich, Vienna, and London. One of the most prominent historians of his time, he fused

his interest in socioeconomic history with an inquiry into the origins of nationalism and national movements in Europe. His main work was a multi-volume

monograph on the life and politics of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. He is al-

so considered to be the founder of the Polish social historical school, counting

among his students Aleksander Gieysztor, Stefan Kieniewicz, Tadeusz Man-

teuffel, and Marian Małowist. His influence was also due to the fact that he was the editor of the most important Polish historical journal, Przegląd Historyczny. During World War II, he was involved in the Polish underground movement. He fell victim to an internal clash within Armia Krajowa, which resulted in his being denounced to the Gestapo and taken to a concentration camp where he was murdered.

This essay, Le développement des nationalités dans l’Europe centrale-orien-

tale, was the French summary of his ideas on the emergence of modern na-

tionalism first delineated in Rozwój narodowości nowoczesnej. An active partic-

ipant in the debate on historical regions in the 1920–1930s, Handelsman was also the initiator of an association of historians from East Central Europe and

served as the editor of a highly influential organ of scholarly exchange, Bulletin d’Information des Sciences Historiques en Europe Orientale launched in

1928 and published in Warsaw, which provided a forum for theoretical debates on the transnational perspective of research. The present study focus-

es on East Central Europe and offers a comparative analysis of the social and

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political conditions of the emergence of nationalism, sketching out a certain framework of periodization of the development of these movements. In this

sense, his work can be read as one of the interwar precursor of the tradition of comparative nationalism studies, which experienced a revival in the late 1960s in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and which continues to

serve as a principal preoccupation for scholars working in and on the region. · Kara w najdawniejszym prawodawstwie polskim (Warsaw: Skład Główny w Księgarni E. Wende i S-ka, 1907); Historia polskiego prawa karnego, vols. 1–2 (Warsaw: Kasa pomocy dla osób pracujących na polu naukowym im. J. Mianowskiego, 1908–1909); Napoléon et la Pologne (Paris: Alcan, 1909); Z metodyki badań feudalizmu (Warsaw: Skład Główny w Księgarni E. Wende i S-ka, 1917); Zagadnienia teoretyczna historii (Warsaw: Nakładem księgarni F. Hoesicka, 1919); Historyka: Zasady metodologii i teorii poznania historycznego (Warsaw: Nakład Gebethnera i Wolfa, 1921); Rozwój narodowości nowoczesnej (Warsaw: Nakład Gebethnera i Wolfa, 1924); Les idées françaises et la mentalité politique de la Pologne au XIXe siècle (Paris: F. Alcan, 1927); Mickiewicz w latach 1853–1855 (Warsaw: Nakładem księgarni F. Hoesicka, 1933); Rok 1848 we Włoszech i polityka ks. Adama Czartoryskiego (Cracow: Nakładem Polskiej Akademji Umiejętności, 1936); Między Wschodem a Zachodem (Warsaw: Drukarna D. I., 1943); Adam Czartoryski, vols. 1–3 (Warsaw: Nakł. Tow. Naukowego Warszawskiego, 1948–50). secondary literature · M. B. Biskupski, “Marceli Handelsman (1882–1945),” in Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, edited by Peter Brock, John D. Stanley and Piotr Wróbel (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2006), 352–85.

main works

W

T

his lecture is not about questions permanently resolved by science, nor is it about problems to which science has only found temporary solutions. On the contrary, what I propose today is to present a series of observations to you, to develop a few generalizations in front of you, drawing on certain aspects of phenomena in order to prove that, right now, we are witnessing the unfolding of an immense historical process that powerfully imposes itself on the attention of the scholar and on the conscience of the politician.1 After the great period of the feudalization of Europe came the creation of absolutist states. Absolutism, a type of government, a political formula of international existence, was also a new category of social life. Absolutism, 1 These problems are tackled here in a different manner than those used by other authors, see for example C. J. H. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931).

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however, was replaced by a new historical step in the life of humanity. The awakening and transformation of nationalities characterizes this period that began more than one hundred and fifty years ago in France, Italy, and Spain, and has been emerging during the last few decades in the strip of land separating Germany from Soviet Russia, that is, the territory that covers the Near East of Europe under the influence of Western Europe. Characteristics of the Situation of the Peoples Living in this Region in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

This frontline zone is occupied by nations that regained their independence during the World War and others that realized an evolution in the same direction. These nations, however, are not uniform in terms of their traditions. One may observe, on the contrary, great diversity in their historical elements, a simultaneous coexistence of phenomena on different levels of evolution, a mix, a mosaic of political forms. Beside those nations living according to their great, ancient historical traditions, we may find ones whose existence began only with the Great War. Between these two poles there are multiple nuances and states in transition, lending a frenzied aspect to the picture. To be precise, Poland and Hungary, two thousand-year-old states that lost their independence for good in the nineteenth century, and Bohemia, or what is now Czechoslovakia, which was conquered in the seventeenth century, had to follow the fate of the other branches of the dynasty. But they never forgot their distinct, independent existence in the past, and their brilliant tradition supported the aspirations of succeeding generations, as these aspirations were vibrating in their collective spirit. Secondly, a series of peoples lost their individual political existence in a more distant period, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. One of these peoples were the Lithuanians and another was the Western Ukrainians, who regarded the loss of their independence as a consequence of having their states attached to other ones, to which they adapted by a specific process of peaceful assimilation of their own upper classes to the foreign nobility, namely the Polish nobility, which absorbed all of them. (There is an astonishing analogy here with the Norwegian nobility, which was absorbed by the Danish nobility in the sixteenth century.) 283

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The others, the peoples of the Balkan states, such as the Moldo-Valachians or Romanians, the Serbians, and Bulgarians, were overthrown by the Ottoman advance; their nobility was violently destroyed and deprived, and their territory was eradicated and dominated by the Turks, but still they did not lose the memory of their past. The ancient historical tradition, deformed by time, was reborn among all these peoples in order to engender, in such circumstances, an oppositional spirit, a national individuality, pushing them toward the recovery of a lost, ideal state that never existed in the shape they saw it, and which, in their eyes, was a matter of a simple and pure restitutio in integrum. Finally, we find peoples and nations that never had political independence. Neither Latvians nor Estonians, or even the Finnish people, apart from a few years of relative independence in the sixteenth century, nor the White Russians in the North, nor the Albanians in the South could form separate political bodies. Even these nations, however, like all the others, have, in their recent movement towards national freedom, reached back to the past in order to find an explanation for their collective individuality and recover the stimuli for their subsequent evolution. They appealed to prehistory in order to justify the rights of their race, immersing themselves once more in their folklore to see the true source of their national traditions. If you visit all these countries, you will admire the prehistoric, ethnographic, and other museums and collections, witnessing the great effort of their civilizing work. During the past century, all these different peoples enjoyed a certain degree of self-government, even political autonomy. Serbia and the Danubian principalities, Greece, and finally Bulgaria and Albania, this last one only in the twentieth century, proceeded through analogous steps of evolution, starting with self-government and restricted autonomy under Turkish suzerainty, then often division by another power, Russia in most cases, and ending with the establishment of complete independence. Hungary, in the meantime, went through the ebb and flow in a manner of speaking. In the beginning of the century, it was a crown province assimilated to other hereditary countries of the Habsburg Monarchy; it became more and more distinct towards 1840; it achieved independence at the time of the revolution of 1848–1849; it was deprived of all its rights after this debacle; then it recovered autonomy almost equal to that of an independent state through the 1867 Compromise; and then it entered the World War 284

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in political conditions that caused it to lose a great part of its territories while simultaneously gaining absolute independence. One part of Poland created in 1815 called the Congress Kingdom possessed an analogous position to that of Hungary after 1867 within the framework of the Romanov Empire: the revolution and the unfortunate war of 1831, however, caused Poland’s successive degradation, in due time depriving it even of municipal self-government. Finland, annexed to Russia in 1809, enjoyed a similar regime subjected to changes according to prevailing circumstances: the year 1863 brought the reinforcement of autonomy; from 1904 onward, the definitive liquidation of Finnish separatism began. Meanwhile, autonomous political conditions were granted to Czechs, Poles, and Slovenes on the Austrian side, and to Croats and Slovenes on the Hungarian side of the Habsburg Monarchy. Finally, Latvians and Estonians living in the provinces enjoyed selfgovernment until the end of the nineteenth century. This benefit, however, was uniquely reserved for the nobility and the German bourgeoisie of the country, and was completely inaccessible to Latvians and Estonians, with their large and typically peasant populations. Other peoples and nations in this zone, as well as these peoples in other eras, did not possess the rights of autonomy; they were governed by common laws imposed on them by a foreign state. From this point of view, that is to say with regard to the political regimes this or that state enforced on these different peoples, we may observe a striking diversity of conditions. The Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Hungarians, and Czechs all lived under the rule of one single state. The other nations were divided between several states and were often subjected to completely different political regimes: the Polish people thus belonged to Russia, Prussia, and Austria, the Lithuanians to Russia and Prussia, the Ukrainians to Russia, Austria, and Hungary, the Slovaks to Hungary and Austria, while the Yugoslavs lived in Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Montenegro, and Turkey, and the Bulgarians in Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania, and so on. A more thorough observation of these very facts may lead us to the following conclusion: next to the territories where the inhabitants are of the same nationality and form a compact, united, and homogenous body, we find territories or branches that depart from a compact national nucleus and successively scatter. These branches lose contact with their primitive 285

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nucleus, transform into islands of nationality distinct from the milieu they are plunged into, and, depending on their distance to the core, they gradually cease to exist. In the case of a specific and relatively limited region, these are the “national minorities” dispersed in a nation that forms the bulk of the population. This is why there exists a Swedish minority in Finland, or Polish, Lithuanian, Rutheno-Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian, or Greek minorities. The diversity of the population of a given territory may be quite complex, and its ethnic crossbreeding so disorganized that an external observer might find it impossible to draw any conclusions regarding the national character of the inhabitants of a territory. There are only minorities, and a recognized majority is missing, as in case of Macedonia. In principle, an entire nation belongs to the same circle of civilization— but only in principle, not in reality. Within nations comprised mostly of peasants, religion plays the primary role in determining the nature of their civilization: yet the different religions caused a significant difference between the types of civilizations to which different parts of the same nationality belonged. By observing the Yugoslavs we may understand the great divergences between Croatian and Slovenian Catholics, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslims in Bosnia and in Herzegovina. Similarly, the Ukrainians are divided into two markedly different camps: the Orthodox East Ukrainians on one side and the Greek Catholic Galician Ukrainians on the other. There are remarkable phenomena concerning the social structure as well. In the case of those countries where a national consciousness awoke only during the nineteenth century, the peasants tend to occupy a dominant, if not unique place. Social differentiation developed slowly on the basis of the peasant class and peasant property only from the nineteenth century onward. Great property is almost entirely missing. On the one hand, the Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Ruthenians or Ukrainians, White Russians, as well as the Transylvanian Romanians and Upper Silesian Poles formed such societies. On the other, along the borders of nations with great historical traditions one may find the existence of a single social class: the great and middle landlords. See the Swedes in Finland, the Poles and Romanians in the East, or the Hungarians on all the borders of their ancient territory. Finally, the Russians should be mentioned as well, as they had formed a—usually not very numerous—governing nationality in each province in the ancient Empire 286

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of the Tsars, a minority that remained isolated, with no territorial ties to the bulk of the Russian nation. The Germans and the Jews form rather special national minorities in this zone. To start with the Germans, they belonged to different classes in different countries. Some of them were great landowners (in Latvia, Estonia, and Czechoslovakia), some of them were peasant settlers (in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, and Bohemia), and finally some of them belonged to the bourgeois middle classes and to the working classes (in Latvia, Estonia, parts of Poland and Hungary, some of the Balkan countries, and Bohemia). They encompassed the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the urban middle classes in the ancient Baltic provinces of Russia. In other countries, the Germans usually belonged to one single social class and nowhere did they live on more or less extensive territories. Apart from Czechoslovakia, thus, there is no whole province where the Germans were part of every social stratum. Their habitat resulted from two distinct phases of colonization. One began in the High Middle Ages and finished around the sixteenth century. On the Slavic borders, it was a spontaneous, violent colonization, while to the Central Eastern European countries it was a peaceful Germanic infiltration, up to the mouth of the Danube and the Balkans. The other phase of colonization happened more recently. It was due to Prussian and Austrian political expansion as a result of seventeenth and eighteenth-century absolutism, and it aimed at increasing the population of some devastated lands, wishing mostly to replace a refractory native element by another one that would be docile and servile towards the state, an element introduced by force with the aim of Germanization. This colonization, carried out according to a grandiose plan using the power of the Reich, invaded the provinces adjacent to Russia from one side, and attacked the interior and maritime territories of the Balkan peninsula from the other in the second half of the nineteenth century. Whether Catholic or Lutheran, these German settlers were always connected to the great Germanic fatherland and were surrounded from all sides by the native population; this was the forerunner of the German economic and political advance, which became more and more menacing by the end of the century. The Jewish population has been present in all these regions for centuries. They started to seek refuge here during the crusades and the first religious persecutions on the Rhine. Settling here, they flocked into the towns and 287

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townships and locked themselves into the circles of rigorous and perpetual ancient rituals and prejudices, voluntarily squeezing themselves behind the walls of the ghetto imposed by the suspicion of the original population of the country. From the eighteenth century onward, Russia’s systematic expulsion policy caused further waves of persecutions, squeezing the Jews together in an extremely high percentage, unique in Europe, being concentrated in the frontline zone starting from the Baltic Sea and ending in the suburbs of Constantinople. In every state and country, they devoted themselves to trade: small tradesmen, shopkeepers, moneychangers, and artisans were their professions. Since the middle of the past [the nineteenth] century, however, they have witnessed the birth of a veritable bourgeoisie and the development of a factory worker proletariat. Successfully assimilating to the civilization of the given country’s ethnic majority, they also adopted their language. At the same time, the bulk still preserved their own special language, ceaselessly transforming it to a new language, or rather dialect: Lithuanian and Occidental Jewish. From the point of view of collective consciousness and of national sentiment, several clear distinctions can be noted in the Jewish milieus. Next to the groups that are morally assimilated to the Christian population of their country and regard themselves parts of that nation, there exist the Orthodox masses, perpetually and uniquely focused on their religion, opposed to any form of change and to all new ideas, and interested only in racial and religious solidarity. As opposed to this, besides the partisans of each new moral and intellectual movement, a great national and nationalistic wave emerged, directing their aspirations towards the rediscovery of a “national home” in the Holy Land, and becoming economically and morally organized into a national unity, just as the other European nations, in the lands where they lived. The Stages of National Evolution

The national sentiment, or the consciousness of nationality, became the motivating force of development in this part of Europe: although it triggered the movement toward dissolution, it also served as an element of concentration. This is the force, established by centuries of history, that dissolves 288

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ancient ties; moreover, it facilitates the connection, alliance, and union of diverse political elements. Apparently inoffensive, it gains power with time and becomes the focus of attention for all contrasting or similar forces, often acting blindly over the heads of the people and their will. This is because, in the course of their development, all nations aspire to the same solutions after having gone through the same sequence of changes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The steps are the same, the results of the changes essentially analogous, even though their starting date, the length of the successive phases, and the intensity of their impact may differ. The Poles stand apart among all these peoples: our national development was far ahead of other peoples, and our evolution chronologically belongs to the Western type par excellence. I have tried to underline this simultaneity by comparing Poland to France at the beginning of the last century in my book on Idées françaises et la mentalité politique en Pologne (F. Alcan, 1927). In other countries, the same evolution starts later, operates in a somewhat more accelerated fashion, and results in the confusion of its elements, preventing the observer from being able to clearly distinguish the consecutive parts of each successive element. The characteristic features of each stage of development appear simultaneously; they unite only to get mixed up and to lose their essential characteristics: the differences between the stages blend together, and thus establishing their sequence becomes problematic. Therefore, we witness an evolutionary process that is, in several aspects, different from what could be called the ideal or typical process of national development (see France). The peculiarities of this process are deepened even further by problems that result from more general phenomena. Events of international value, common for a part of the world or for the entire world: wars, serious economic, political or social crises, strong trends of generally accepted views, for instance, what we call “spirit of the times,” may penetrate the evolutionary process of a given nation or people to play the part of an external reactive that restricts the normal unfolding of the previous progressive expansion, impeding or causing a deviation in the preceding trend, which leads to an unexpected explosion (revolution). The development of national sentiment embraces two different elements, that of individuality and that of the masses. For the individual this is a process of the successive growth of consciousness connected to the nation to such an extent that it—this consciousness—becomes the one and only 289

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creative force in the life of the individual. Transformed into the main source of the individual’s actions, this sentiment guides his impulses and influences his judgments concerning his own and other people’s behavior; it pushes him towards certain actions and prevents him from others. For the masses, as far as it goes, this feeling becomes the most essential part of the unifying link, of solidarity, resistance, but also aggression towards other, analogous bodies, the other masses united by similar ties of a psycho-national nature. For the masses, national sentiment is a common source of courage or cowardice, of heroism or crime, of the enrichment and devastation of others, as well as limitless sacrifices or self-sacrifices. Each social process is comprised of the influence of individuals on the masses and masses’ influence on individuals: the process of national sentiment, as with others, is created by the same reciprocal influences that provoke a certain succession of changes as a whole, a succession that is, in principle, the same for all peoples. In order not to reiterate the same questions I treated in some detail elsewhere, I will merely specify the starting points of the successive phases of this evolution, the sequence of which represents a certain rhythm that may seem to be perpetual and unchanging. The rhythm of this sequence, seen through the centuries and observed in the example of these peoples, seems so stunning that it might almost be labeled a “law of evolution.” The cycle starts with a romantic, individualistic period (see the lovely book of my friend E. Fournol). The individual who is the teacher of his people, the prophet, awakens the collective conscience of the people. A Fichte in Germany in 1807, a Brodziński in Poland in 1831, a Rainis in Latvia during the World War—all three of them direct successors of Rousseau—preached, in their role as Precursors, the future that was to come. Fichte, however, was still isolated and stood out from among a group of people who were not yet a nation. Brodziński took upon himself the role of leading a movement that eventually became the mortal struggle of an old historical nation, lacking, however, the support of the masses, and Rainis, in the midst of the downfall of the ancient Empire of the Tsars, faced all original possibilities and wished to push his people towards a solution: that of political independence, without being aware of his national role. You may see that, even in this initial stage, the elements get mixed up, and the picture appears tangled in the complexities of each group’s particular situation. 290

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This is followed by the second period, still romantic but already belonging to the masses. The faith in nationality as the basis of all collective organization becomes universal or nearly universal in all echelons of the society, a naïve, sentimental belief comprised of two elements: the profound certainty of a providential mission of the people one belongs to, and a feeling of solidarity with all other civilized peoples who live according to the same principles and sentiments, uniting to form the basis of a new process, that of ideal democratization. This is the era of Mazzini, the time when Mickiewicz, the great Polish pilgrim—no, the great pilgrim of all oppressed peoples, Italians, Slavs, Magyars—becomes the spokesman of common aspirations, the effervescence of which rose ceaselessly, reaching its peak by the lively but transient emotion of the Spring of 1848, only to see the failure of all hopes, from Paris to Constantinople, in 1849. Then came the reaction. This is the positivist-individualist era influenced by Comte and Mill at the same time, a period when the individual, the second time in one century, took upon himself the task of tracking ahead of the masses, still full of their deceived aspirations, a new way, a harsh way, adjusted to the arduous reality of life. The tendency to organize the masses, conscious of their rights, within the framework of a constitutional, liberal system, and adapted to the new social conditions under recognized leaders, becomes the watchword of the whole of Europe. In its Eastern part, where this general tendency is manifested by the lowering of popular aspirations to the possibilities of the moment, it is Deák who grows into a symbol of the coming times. The positivist-individualist period, however, had to give way to a new period in which the scene was invaded, once more, by the masses. This is the nationalist era. Formal legality had to give way to an internal legality, emerging from their collective conscience. They feel it is their “right” to fulfill their potential, which seem to be “justified aspirations.” Their aim, hardly ever properly clarified, consists of overthrowing the existing juridical bases: the borders on the outside and the political principles on the inside, in order to satisfy their overflowing energies. It is in the name of the unity of all groups who have common origins but live under different regimes that a movement of unification emerges, aiming more and more at new, prosperous conditions, mostly in a material sense, to satisfy the appetites of these same masses (imperialism, colonialism, internal colonialism, anti-Semitism, Bolshevism, etc.). 291

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This positivism of the masses was still flourishing when we assist to the birth of a new wave of individualistic romanticism. Would it not be enough to mention one of the great leaders of France and a world that just disappeared, who proposed to resolve the common difficulties of the world through the renewal of the solidarity between nations at the same level of civilization? Proceeding towards chronological precisions of the evolution of the region in question, we should note that the great events of general European history should be considered as the basis of the division of the history of Central Eastern part of the continent. The influence of these events from wherever they may come—West or East—diminishes as one proceeds from their center of intensity, evoking hardly discernible echoes in the periphery. Furthermore, in one part of our region, the sequence of these events appears, usually with a delay of some years. Otherwise they produced the same sort of fluctuations as in other European countries, perhaps even more markedly: these oscillations were noted in the Napoleonic era, followed by an occult movement of suppressed national aspirations; after the outburst of 1848, the hopes and the unpleasant aftertaste of the Paris peace in 1856, and finally the remarkable growth of these aspirations after 1859. What are the main chronological steps? The Napoleonic era brought universal national agitation to each group of people in this zone, but only in Poland did the national movement transform into a great wave of thought and materialized in major political action. It also revived, however, some potential hopes in Hungary, and for the first time in centuries it provoked political activity in Croatia and Serbia under the characteristic form of ­“Illyrism.” The period between 1846 and 1849 was the time of a universal battle of everyone against everyone. Austria became the main theatre of these events: Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians, Serbs, Romanians, and Ukrainians defined their national and political claims. The Poles, by their actions in Austria and in Prussia, by their hopes in the Russian part, joined the grand movement of the People’s Spring. War burst out in Hungary. In the Balkans, in Serbia, the idea of one Yugoslavia was born; in Moldavia and Wallachia the people desired one Romania. Bulgarians, Bosnians, and Albanians deluded themselves with the hope of religious autonomy—or even religious and territorial autonomy. Even on the Baltic coast of Russia, the first traces 292

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of the local peoples’ national and social awakening appear, the distant and belated result of the common breeze.2 The years between 1859 and 1870 saw the development of a general tendency to form great nation-states based on the principle of an independent national state that had existed before—on the principle of a “Piedmont”; the word “Piedmont” was used henceforth as a common noun—by the union around the nucleus of the territories inhabited by a population of common origin, common language, and common aspirations. This process of successive unification embraced those states that never formed a unified political body as well as parts of a state that was subjected to partition and was dismembered. This great centripetal process, from a national point of view, was also a march towards the fatal dissolution for all those states that were comprised of multinational territories, with Austria leading the way but not finishing the march until 1918. Pan–Italianism, crowned by the success of 1859–1860, provoked a Pan–Romanianism in 1859–1860, a Pan–Polonism in 1861–1864, which was vanquished mercilessly by Russia, and a Pan–Slavism that was elevated and supported by the same Russia and directed against Poland and especially against Austria (not to mention Pan–Scandinavism in 1863–1864). It reached its peak in 1867. It brought the renewal of Ukrainian, Czech, and Slovakian centrifugal tendencies in Austria-Hungary and uprisings in Serbia and Bulgaria against the Turks. Opposing German predominance in the north, from 1871 onward, Russia decided to undertake the expulsion of the Turks from Europe; its victorious march was stopped, however, by the British at the walls of Constantinople. In this march, various Balkan peoples joined Russia, lifted by the same breeze of national rebirth, with a tendency to unite and to increase their territories. But their enthusiasm also ran out. Romania, however, was definitively established in 1878 and so was Serbia; Bulgaria reached autonomy under Turkish suzerainty and Russian guardianship; Greece’s territory was expanded. The appearance of the Balkans changed. In order to organize themselves independently, they were emancipated and established on this recently acquired moral and material basis, which led to a great movement of competitions and battles between peoples and states. All aspirations had 2 A. S. Nifontov, 1848. god v Rossii: ocherki po istorii 40-h godov (Moscow, 1931), 159–61.

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the same goal: the formation of a great national state at the expense of Turkey, which, in turn, entered a phase of feverish nationalism at the expense of its Christian neighbors, even as it lost these European territories. Romania wished to have its dreams of unified Greater Romania materialize, Serbia hoped for a Greater Serbia/Yugoslavia, Bulgaria for a Greater Bulgaria according to the tradition of Tsar Simeon, and finally Greece for Greater Greece, wishing to renew the power of Byzantium. The nationality factor, a creative and destructive element at the same time, the source of oppression as well as of liberty, was certainly the motivating force, one of the principal triggers behind the World War. German and Austrian imperialism on the one hand, and Russian imperialism on the other, Serbian nationalism, and the nationalism of different peoples subjected to Austria filled the air with their aspirations in the years before the war. From 1911 onward, these nations were in a state of effervescence. During the World War, the nationalist tendencies and aspirations infiltrated all fields of people’s lives both on the battlefields and in the lands of belligerent states. The war dragged on. These nationalist tendencies assumed a more and more pronounced social aspect, and their spirit appealed to the young whose national sentiments quickly achieved the same intensity. At the moment of the Russian collapse, followed by the collapse of the Central Powers, the aspirations of the peoples, by now nations, determined the solutions and dictated the final decisions, shaping the political destiny of all these countries. The peace treaties of 1919, in sum, merely sanctioned the changes that had been realized by the nations themselves within the borders of Germany and Russia, and on the ruins of Austria. They introduced some small modifications in the existing situation that benefited some countries, such as Germany and Czechoslovakia, at the expense of others, like Poland, Austria, Hungary, taking the nationality principle, that is, the peoples’ right to govern themselves, as the basis for reconstructing Europe after the war. Furthermore, as soon as the energy of national opposition was unleashed, it could not be stopped. There were endless battles for the borders between the states liberated from the Russian yoke and Soviet Russia on the one hand, and between the different, newly-created or restored countries on the other, and Germany’s aspiration to restore its old borders, at least in the East, and achieve its gradual recovery by all possible means in the new order of things became the great problem dominating all others, casting a shadow on Europe’s entire future. 294

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Particular Results of the Historical Process

The historical process that we have just analyzed engendered the political transformation of Europe on the basis of the nationality principle. Furthermore, it gave several peoples a full understanding of their national power. Keeping in mind certain necessities, national hopes, the inclination to gain and preserve national independence opposing all exigencies of international interdependence, has become the main force in its internal affairs and produced several consequences. a) Extending sovereign nationality reinforced by the state’s mechanism in all new countries—all of which, despite international efforts, encompass national minorities—leads to the gradual absorption and assimilation of these minorities. b) Simultaneously, in the territories which remained detached from their historical national nucleus, and thus politically or territorially continued to be separated from the majority of their nation, one could observe a growth in the intensity of national sentiments: Polonism in the German part of Silesia and in East Prussia, Germanism in Danzig, Magyarism in Slovakia, Bulgarism in Yugoslavia, etc. c) Besides the successive elimination of minorities, their opposition is constantly reinforced. Those minorities, whose ethnical individuality was hardly defined, transformed into nationalities in a few years, full of sentiments of their individual existence. They gravitate more and more towards the national centers outside the states they officially belong to, the Germans towards the Reich, the Ukrainians and the Polish minorities in different countries towards Poland, etc. d) The countries inhabited by a mixed population whose pasts differ considerably from their current political state, finding themselves on the junction of several national territories, acquired the characteristics of disputed territories from a national viewpoint, such as East Prussia, Slovakia, Macedonia. e) The still-vivid ambitions of ancient imperialist nations, the unfulfilled hopes of peoples who recovered their own states, the upheaval of conflicts that became rather serious mostly during the economic crises, gave certain territories the characteristics of disputed terri295

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tories from a political viewpoint, such as Polish Pomerania, Wilno, Memel, etc. f) Finally, the process of consolidation of the new states, comprised of provinces that had existed separately before the war, or of territories united only by the war, according to the principle of national independence, pose further problems: 1) The confirmed necessity to create an organic unity of the parts of the same nation, differing from one another by their historical past and their culture. This is the great problem concerning the creation of the Czechoslovak state comprised of Czechs and Slovaks, as well as the creation of Yugoslavia and partly Romania. 2) Secondly, the question of establishing a modus vivendi arises, creating forms of coexistence among different nations, embraced by the same political organization, between the national minorities and the majority of a state. The impossibility of embracing all the territories inhabited by the members of one single nation within the new borders produced the effect that— in this zone—each nation had a part outside of its new national state. Practically speaking, it was impossible to realize the ideal of pure national states. At the moment when from a national viewpoint relatively uniform territories were divided up, a number of co-nationals were forced to remain on the other side of the border, forming a category of “foreign nationals.” This was the case of the Poles and the Germans, the Serbians and the Bulgarians, even the Latvians and the Estonians, and many others. Furthermore, most channels of emigration directed towards the United States are now closed, leading the people toward the farther corners of Europe, for instance to France in case of the Polish and Czechoslovaks. We witness, thus, the formation of a new political and social phenomenon that we called “foreign nationality.” It is difficult to clearly define it, though this phenomenon may be described in the following details: there are national groups everywhere that feel a deep and unbreakable connection with a nation with which they no longer form the same state; they belong to a state of a different nationality from theirs, to which they relate with regard to political solidarity. This is one of the most complex phenomena, the classic examples of which may be found in the zone we study. 296

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***

As far as I could cover this maze of little known or completely unknown problems for you, extremely complicated problems comprised of several tricky questions, I keep in mind the fact that I have undertaken the solution of an almost impossible task. I do not know if I succeeded in ordering the ideas on these different subjects; what I am sure of, however, is that I have dared to touch on many difficult matters in this conference. The result, the effect that my presentation created is surely this: we are facing a complex of phenomena here, which is forming, moving, and is comprised of profound and essential processes, and before addressing them, I do not mean politically but even mentally, one must try to understand them well. And in order to understand them, one must study them, study them for a long time, study them in detail, patiently, objectively, if not sine studio, at least, in any case, sine ira.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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What Is Eastern Europe? s o u r c e

Oscar Halecki, “Qu’est ce que l’Europe Orientale?” Bulletin d’ information des sciences historiques en Europe Orientale 6 (1934): 82–93.

Oskar Halecki (1891–1973) was a Polish historian, specializing mainly in medieval Polish and Lithuanian history. Halecki himself represented the multiethnic traditions of Central Europe: his ancestors were Polonized Ruthenian noblemen, and his father served as a general in the Habsburg army. He studied

at Jagiellonian University in Cracow (1909–1914) and at the University of Vien-

na. He was an expert of the Polish delegation at the Paris Peace Conference (1918–1919). In 1918, he was nominated to the chair of History of Eastern Eu-

rope at the University of Warsaw, and later he served in various administrative functions, including as dean of the Faculty of Humanities (1930–1931). During

the war he emigrated to the United States and taught at Fordham University

and later at Columbia University. He became a key figure of the Polish émigré community in the United States, adopting a militant anti-Communist position.

Throughout his life, he was an ardent supporter of federalist traditions, while,

similar to Marceli Handelsman, he considered Poland to be at the core of the

region. In 1933, at the Warsaw International Congress of Historical Sciences, he memorably argued for a concept of Eastern Europe including Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, while relegating Russia to the Eurasian space (explicitly following

the Russian Eurasianists). The present text stems from this discussion, as Halecki

tried to define Eastern Europe as a historical region. The core of his argument is a polemical dialogue, going back to the 1923 Brussels congress, with the Czech

historian Jaroslav Bidlo (1868–1937), whose definition of Eastern Europe overlapped with the lands inhabited by Slavic peoples. Importantly, here Halecki extended the usual Polish geopolitical narrative focusing on North-Eastern Eu-

rope to the Balkans as well. Eventually, this framework served as the basis for

his studies in the early 1950s when, during the Cold War, he returned to the problem of defining the region, also introducing the notion of Central Europe.

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main works · Borderlands of Western Civilization: A History of East Central Europe (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1952); Poland (New York: Praeger, 1957); From Florence to Brest, 1439–1596 (Rome: Sacrum Poloniae Millennium, 1958); The Limits and Divisions of European History (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962); The Millennium of Europe (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963). secondary literature · Jerzy Kłoczowski, “Oskar Halecki (1891–1973),” in Nation and History: Polish Historians from the Enlightenment to the Second World War, edited by P. Brock, J. D. Stanley and P. Wróbel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 429–42.

W East and Southeast Europeans

In order to clear the ground, let us first narrow down the most striking difference between Mr. Bidlo’s concept and the definition of Eastern Europe I attempted to provide at the Congress of Brussels. While he considered the whole of Eastern Europe, from North to South, I was only concerned with the North-Eastern part of our continent, leaving the Southeastern part, the Balkan Peninsula, out. I still believe that this distinction may well be justified. It had, after all, been established long before my lecture in 1923. Let us recall, for instance, that in the Weltgeschichte published under Mr. Helmolt’s direction, the 1905 volume devoted to Eastern Europe was entitled Südeuropa und Osteuropa, with the Osteuropa-part corresponding precisely to the definition I delivered in Brussels. On the other hand, Mr. Iorga has, for many years now, been the director of an institute of Southeast European studies, with the Revue historique du Sud-Est européen as its organ. This Southeast seems clearly to be, thus, a distinct region to be treated separately. This distinction can be explained firstly from a geographical point of view. A glance at the map should be convincing enough for this argument. I shall not develop this any further, thus, especially as I will be returning to the geographical aspect of the problem emphasizing the difference between Mr. Bidlo’s and my own method. Eastern and Southeastern Europe, however, can also be distinguished from the perspective of historical evolution. Only Southeast Europe was once part of the Roman Empire, whereas the actual East remained beyond the borders of this Empire, entering European history definitively only dur300

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ing the tenth century. Let us note that regardless of the range given to the notion of Eastern Europe, this fact seems to be of paramount importance to the division of its history into chronological periods. Either its history does not start until the tenth century, or this century marks its most important break, after which the North-East joined Southeastern Europe. Wishing to demonstrate that their destinies still remained distinct, one may observe, amongst others, the Asian advance—such a characteristic element of Eastern European history—which happened in the South in the shape of an Ottoman conquest, whereas in the North it was a Tatar invasion. Meanwhile, instead of enlisting further similar arguments, I prefer to recognize straight away that, despite these arguments, it is more advisable to seek, together with Mr. Bidlo, a definition of Eastern Europe that allows two vast regions whose historic connections have been intensifying for a thousand years to be considered as one superior unity. I voluntarily admit that this concept, in such a large scale, offers the advantage of avoiding too rigid a distinction between the Northern and Southern parts of the Slavic world, embracing the Orthodox Church’s entire field of action and emphasizing the role of Byzantine culture outside Byzantium. Before approaching Mr. Bidlo’s theory from this triple point of view, however, it is necessary to establish the geographical conditions of the region. Geographical Borders and Civilizational Borders

We may see that the two rather different definitions of Eastern Europe can negate each other. This statement may prove that the notion in question is an entirely relative one. This may be noticed even more clearly as one approaches the question of borders between Eastern Europe and the rest of our continent in detail. Geographically, these borders always depend on the point of view of the observer who will call whatever is found east of him “oriental.” Historically these borders never ceased to evolve, either by the migration of people or by the shifting of borders between states. Here is arguably a serious reason militating for the concept of Eastern Europe, following which the word “Eastern” shall acquire a far clearer and absolute meaning beyond the geography. There is another one. It is enough 301

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to read Lucien Febvre’s1 remarkable book to understand how difficult it is to research historical divisions in space—more than in time, and to discern the dangers of determinism, so often misused in human geography. Mr. Bidlo rejects this with reason and, struck by the misuse of “geopolitical” interpretations of Eastern European history, I am inclined to oppose these ideas myself, which draw determinist, fatally arbitrary conclusions from geographical position, based on a community of culture.2 Still, it would be regrettable to fall into the opposite mistake of establishing great historical regions without taking into account physical as well as political geography. It is enough to replace—with Mr. Febvre and, in general, with the French school of human geography—determinism with geographic possibilism. Let us now apply these general considerations to the particular case of our interest. In order to achieve this, let us first eliminate the puerile idea of a perpetual line separating the West from the East of Europe. Let us also eliminate the dangerous idea of a “space” that Eastern Europe, or rather the people living there are destined to fill. Let us seek another way of defining this Eastern Europe in a way that it may settle on a defined territory, surrounded by more or less spacious and short-lived zonal borders, a geographical entity, an organic unity creating possibilities of closer contact for the states and nations forming on these territories: a truly common history. The shape of this community and the realization of these possibilities in general will depend, here as elsewhere, on the free play of historical contingencies and chiefly on major cultural trends. I mentioned the “geographic milieu” of the history of Eastern Europe in this sense at the Congress of Brussels, regarding this merely as a frame in which the “principal trends that left their mark on each era” could flow.3 Eastern Europe, as I defined it, that is to say North-East Europe, limited from the West by a fixed border—after a great number of fluctuations— by the fourteenth century, and from the South by the powerful barrier of 1 L. Febvre, La Terre et l’Evolution humaine (Paris, 1922); published in the series L’Evolution de l’ humanité (dir. by Henri Berr), n. 4. 2 O. Halecki, “Machtgefälle oder Kulturgemeinschaft: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen vom polnischen Standpunkt aus der Christliche Ständestaat,” Österreichische Wochenhefte 1, no. 8 (1934): 1–11, a criticism of the collective publication Deutschland und Polen (Berlin 1933). 3 La Pologne au V-e Congrès International des Sciences historiques (Warsaw, 1924), 74.

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the Carpathians, can be considered a geographical entity on its own from which the most diverse political formations opened in the course of history. Nothing may stop us, however, from regarding this region through its close connections with another neighbor, Southeast Europe beyond the Carpathians, also a geographical unity if one regards all countries of the Balkans from the Danube basin to the Alps. Once again, the Western border would be the result of several political changes; nevertheless, such an enlarged Eastern Europe shall remain a concept complying with the conditions offered by nature for the blossoming of human civilizations. This is why such a concept seems more acceptable to us than Mr. Bidlo’s, which, as he notes it himself, does not coincide with the geographical notion. Eastern Europe and the Slavic World

Until the present day, in all discussions related to the Eastern European problem, a special point provoked the most vivid interest: to know what the connections there were between the notion of Eastern Europe and that of the Slavic World. Obviously, by posing this question one might find oneself facing a similar danger as that of geographical determinism. This is none other than formulating a “racist” concept of Eastern Europe. No matter how the historian defines this region, he shall always find that it encloses an essential part of the Slavic race, that the majority consists undoubtedly of this race, and that it has played a role of paramount importance throughout the centuries. In these conditions, it seems inevitable to try to identify the two notions as far as possible—an idea that seems to finally provide a clear and precise meaning to the contested first notion. A Slavic Eastern Europe is thus opposed to a Romano–Germanic Western Europe. Mr. Bidlo has the great merit of avoiding this mistake. No one could show the historical ties between all Slavic nations better than him. Moreover, he harnessed all his scientific interest to trace in great lines their common history.4 The only objection that could be formed against him in this respect is that he does not seem to be able to isolate this history from the 4 In his remarkable work Dĕjiny Slovanstva (Prague, 1928).

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history of neighboring nations who are not of Slavic origin,5 albeit living in the same geographical region.6 Defining Eastern Europe, Mr. Bidlo, having written the history of the Slavic World, resolutely abandoned the ethnic point of view. We may now be able to see how far he was from exaggerating the importance of the racial community. No less so than his critics, he is aware of the differences between Western and Eastern Slavic peoples, as well as the close connections between Slavic and non-Slavic nations. Proceeding further than them, however, he ends up with a concept of Eastern Europe from which a great part of the Slavic peoples are excluded, whereas the other part is reunited with Greeks and Romanians. Following this distinction, the Northern Slavs and those of the South can be found partly within the boundaries of Eastern Europe and partly attached to Western Europe. I am going to talk of the Slavic race. But I would like to point out that it is not at all due to racial considerations that I hesitate to subscribe to a similar division. In general, even anthropologists today refrain from confirming the existence of a connection between a race and its history.7 Regarding Slavic peoples, we know the origins of the Bulgarians and what heterogeneous elements contributed to the formation of Great Russians. Meanwhile, if the Slavic “race” is merely a more or less inexact manner of speech, if it is doubtful whether there ever was a common Slavic civilization distinct from the neighboring cultures, when even the link between various Slavic literatures is rather disputed. It remains no less true that all through the centuries there was a sense of a Slavic community—the more difficult to define, the more it was based on imponderable factors adding to the consciousness of a linguistic relation.8 Even this last factor taken by itself should not be ignored, for we have encountered several texts witnessing this phenomenon since the Middle Ages which are strikingly convergent.9 5 M. Handelsman, “Monde slave ou l’Europe orientale,” Bulletin d’ information des sciences historique en Europe orientale 3 (1930): 130. 6 Henryk Batowski, “Uwagi o zagadnieniu ‘dziejów Slowianszczyzny,’” Ruch slowanski 6 (1933). 7 See the conclusions Eugène Pittard drew in Les races et l’ histoire: Introduction ethnologique à l’ histoire (Paris, 1924), part of series L’Evolution de l’ humanité, no. 5. 8 H. Batowski showed this in his recent article, quoted above. 9 Jan Długosz, the fifteenth-century Polish historian who afforded little Slavic solidarity in his political views still mentions the “noble Slavic language” resembling the tone of Charles IV of Bohemia in his letter to Stefan Dušan of Serbia.

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This is why all definitions of Eastern Europe, while taking into account the impossibility of purely and simply identifying it with the Slavic World, should reasonably avoid dividing it in spite of this consciousness of a traditional unity. Eastern Europe and Orthodoxy

If, despite their sense of community, the Slavic peoples can be clearly divided into two historical groups, this can be explained firstly by the divergence of their cultural development, a phenomenon that results, in turn, in a religious difference. No doubt the Orthodox Slavs are more united—and have always been—than the Slavs in general. Furthermore, their closeness in faith and rituals with non-Slavic Orthodox communities often seemed more profound than the slightly vague all-Slavic solidarity mentioned above. As opposed to this, Catholic Slavs have always proudly confirmed their ties with the Latin West. Basing his theory on such evident facts and having abandoned the idea of establishing some sort of connections between the Slavic World and Eastern Europe, Mr. Bidlo decided to identify the latter one with the “GrecoSlavic World,” that is to say the field of Orthodoxy. This thesis has, no doubt, a certain tempting quality. First of all, it gives the term Eastern Europe a clear, precise meaning. It is rather geographical relativism than determinism. It is rather a racial ambiguity than artificial barriers erected between peoples simply because they speak different languages. Additionally, what this new concept of Eastern Europe does is to confirm the primacy of spiritual forces summarized in the word civilization, in a way doubly fitting our times as the religious idea occupies a primordial place among these forces. This is a high-level conception to which I wish to refrain from making objections of principle. Meanwhile, one should be allowed to ask oneself if, applied to the history of Eastern Europe, this concept is truly a novelty. Certainly, Mr. Bidlo’s purely scientific approach proves all the novelty of its positive method, its logical argumentation, and its philosophy of history, albeit a personal one. There is, however, a striking similarity between his brilliant synthesis and an ancient interpretation of Eastern Europe’s destiny in relation 305

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to the S­ lavic World and Orthodoxy. In order to discover this analogy it is enough to examine the periods of Eastern European history, as Mr. Bidlo establishes them, more closely, emphasizing the great importance of these chronological divisions. Yet, in his system, the date 1453 is the clearest break and the main turning point in the historical evolution, not only because it marks the downfall of the Byzantine Empire, but also, and most importantly since, from that moment on, Moscow replaced Constantinople and the Tsarist Empire the Greek Empire. Would it now be too bold to claim that this is nothing but the old theory of the Third Rome and the historical, if not philosophical, concept of Slavophile Russians? Certainly, Mr. Bidlo being the great scholar he is, otherwise making explicit references to Slavophile works, achieved his results independently of these recollections and independently of the party—national and religious at the same time—who invented this set of ideas. Opposed to the Slavophiles convinced of the superiority of the East over the West of Europe, he considers Eastern Europe a “latecomer” in cultural development. However, the similarity of historical interpretation remains; so do the inconvenient aspects of this interpretation. It seems useless to prove how artificial and arbitrary the belief in Moscow being the Third Rome may be. It was actually not formed before the sixteenth century and has been criticized since the seventeenth century onward.10 If it is questionable whether the whole of Eastern European medieval history, not only of the South-East but also of the North-East, should be included in the framework of Byzantine history, one would be even less inclined to link its entire modern history to Muscovite Russia. Naturally Mr. Bidlo, speaking of Moscow’s “defensive offensive,” manages to avoid the error of the Slavophiles who condemned even the Catholic Slavs of the West to absorption into the Russia of their dreams. Since, however, next to the Orthodox Eastern Europe, in this “Greco-Slavic” world, there is no place for them; there exists only a Romano-Germanic West, and these other Slavs essentially remain merely an appendix to the Orthodox World, with their role significantly reduced in general history.

10 See Hildegard Schaeder’s well-documented study Moskau, das Dritte Rom (Hamburg, 1929).

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Rome and Byzantium

It is true that the Western Slavs, including their non-Slavic neighbors such as the Hungarians, have been under Rome’s influence for the last thousand years, whereas the formation and evolution of the Eastern Slavs’ civilization, including, once more, non-Slavic peoples such as the Romanians, has been predominantly influenced by Byzantium. The role of Byzantium in the diffusion of Orthodoxy and in the creation of the Slavic World11 was so considerable that it proves to be—I voluntarily admit—a rather serious argument in favor of the concept of an Eastern Europe encompassing both South-East and North-East Europeans. Is this enough, however, for isolating the part of Europe that was under Byzantine influence and opposing it to the rest of our continent? Moreover, can we consider it “another cultural world”? Certainly, the differences separating the Greek and Latin worlds from the beginning, differences that could be erased neither by their collaboration in the Roman Empire nor by adopting the same Christian faith, were even more emphasized as a consequence of the religious schism, as the two rival hearths of European civilization seem to oppose one another implacably.12 Meanwhile this opposition never hampered any attempts for union that followed, not entirely unsuccessfully, throughout the entire history of the schism, nor did it prevent the reciprocal permeation of the two cultures, notably during the period of the Renaissance. Only the downfall of the Eastern Empire could end this connection, and it was only in Moscow, where the Turkish conquest of Constantinople was regarded as a punishment provoked by the union of Florence, that hostility and suspicion towards the Latin West seems to have perpetuated. This was not eliminated, neither by their assimilation—albeit a superficial one—since the era of Peter the Great, nor the attitude of the “zapadniki” (Westernizers) similar in Russia to the Byzantine “latinophrones.” This is the first reason it is difficult to admit the existence of a “dualism” in European civilization. Additionally, there are two others. To start with, Latin civilization is far from forming a homogenous entity that could be distinguished by the secular nature of its creation, which could be op11 See Charles Diehl, Byzance: Grandeur et décadence (Paris, 1920); the chapter entitled thus is followed by another: “La diffusion de la civilisation Byzantine en Occident,” 311–25. 12 See the recent and deep analysis of B. Jasinowski, Wschodnie chrześcijaństwo a Rosja na tle rozbioru pierwiastków cywilizacyjnych wschodu i zachodu (Wilna, 1933).

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posed in itself to Byzantine civilization. It is enough to remember the profound differences between the Roman and Germanic nations resulting in the Protestant Reformation. Moreover, if the greater part of the Slavic peoples is linked to Western Europe, its internal diversity becomes even more pronounced. There is more, though. The Roman and Byzantine spheres of interest were never clearly separated by any boundaries. On the contrary, certain regions successively succumbed to one, then to the other influence. By studying the history of the Southern Slavs, for instance Bosnians, one may verify the above thesis. Furthermore, Lithuania seems to be a particularly characteristic case from this perspective.13 What is most important, however, is the problem of the Russian World’s differentiation,14 which seems to be the least disputed field in the whole of the Slavic World regarding Byzantine supremacy. Yet, this is only true of Greater Russia, that of Muscovy, whereas the Ruthenians—the White Russians and Ukrainians of today—always seemed to be less resistant to rapprochements with the Latin West, and even spontaneously sought them in different eras and definitely appeared to benefit from this interaction during their life together with Poland. Obviously transitional regions also exist between the Slavic World, belonging—it seems to me—to Eastern Europe, and the Germanic center of Europe. This is the case, for instance, in Bohemia, which was always attempting to intensify its connections with other Slavic countries while having been incorporated in the German Empire for centuries. This case, however, may serve to clarify precisely one of the most significant features of Eastern European history. Europe and Asia

Being the only Slavic country barely touched by the Mongolian invasion of the thirteenth century, Bohemia never had to deal with the danger of Asia. 13 I tried to show this in a lecture on “Rome and Byzantium in Lithuanian History,” delivered at the Sorbonne on March 22, 1933. 14 See the little-known work of Stanisław Smolka, Die russische Welt (Vienna, 1916); as well as the Ukrainian point of view—Mr. Korduba’s paper “Die Entstehung der ukrainischen Nation,” presented at the Congress in Warsaw and published in Contributions à l’ histoire de l’Ukraine au VIIe Congrès international des sciences historiques (Lwów, 1933), 19–67.

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This was a common danger, however, for all other Slavic nations as well as for the non-Slavic peoples inhabiting Eastern and Southeastern Europe. I have noted above that this danger was manifested by various aggressors; notably I have made a distinction between the Tatar incursion and the Ottoman advance. Meanwhile, this was a common problem and a constant worry for all the countries that, in my opinion, form Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe certainly is a part of Europe—of this Europe that is one despite its diversity, and whose history should be treated as one political and cultural unity instead of being divided into “two pictures.” If this part of Europe, which is at the center of our focus, is “Eastern,” it is partly due to its geographical position and partly due to its more or less immediate proximity to, and more or less close connections with the real East: the Asian East. In this case it is a matter of an irreducible opposition between two profoundly different civilizations, whose striking contrast has been apparent since the Greco-Persian Wars. The common feature of all Eastern European nations, despite all their differences regarding race, language, faith, or mentality, is the necessity of taking a side against the Asian East and defending themselves from its grip, and, in the meantime, defending the whole of European civilization, a civilization based on Greco–Roman traditions and on Christianity. Regardless of the numerous wars Asian aggression forced on this part of Europe, Asian civilizations influenced this region by trying to penetrate it in various forms. These Asian influences distanced Byzantium even more from Rome than did the schism, finally separating them with an impassable barrier: the Turkish invasion of the Eastern Empire. Besides Orthodoxy, the long Tatar domination undermined the relationship between Muscovite Russia and the rest of Europe, preparing the future Russian Empire to become “Eurasia.” Here is the reason why one part of Eastern Europe, the part for which Mr. Bidlo wishes to reserve this term, is actually distinct from the other. The other part, including the nations most intimately linked to the Latin West: Poles, Hungarians, Croats also fought against the Asian menace throughout their entire histories, without succumbing to it. The Eastern invaders, both the Tatars and the Turks, finished by being completely pushed out of Europe, at least in a political sense; traces of their regime, however, are still apparent in Russia as well as in the Balkans. The latter definitely seems to 309

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have been regained by Europe. What shall Russia’s future course be under its new regime? To what extent will the “Eurasian” concept dictate it? These questions obviously are outside of the competence of historians. Conclusion

For a historian and even more for a geographer, Europe (keeping in mind its civilization one may specify: Christian Europe) forms a unity. Meanwhile, it has always been united and diverse at the same time, which is one of the features of its grandeur. This diversity allows us to divide its history not only in time but in space as well. In our territorial divisions, we should keep in mind geographical parameters and their nature. They ought to correspond to ethnographical divisions without necessarily overlapping with them. They should also be justified by the existence of great problems characterizing the historical evolution of this part of Europe. All these conditions seem to be fulfilled by the concept of an Eastern Europe encompassing every country to the East of Germanic and Italian territories.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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An Attempt at a Comparative History of the Peoples of Europe s o u r c e

Charles Seignobos, Essai d’une histoire comparée des peuples d’Europe (Paris: Rieder, 1938), Chapter 18, “Les Révolutions et les Réformes,” 372–97.

Charles Seignobos (1854–1942) was a French historian. He came from a Protestant family with strong republican political convictions. He completed

his studies at the École Normale Supérieure, with Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges and Ernest Lavisse serving as his mentors. He also spent two years in

Germany and, from 1881, he taught at the Sorbonne. An author of numerous works on ancient and modern history, his main contribution to the development of French historiography was his strong methodological awareness,

which he derived from his engagement with German and also, to a certain extent, British methodological discussions.

His advocacy of rigorous source criticism notwithstanding, his fame was

mainly due to the popularizing books he wrote in the interwar period. The text presented here is an excerpt from his last major work, a comparative history of Europe. The chapter on 1848 describes the revolutionary period of the nineteenth century in terms of a complex web of interconnected events,

with French developments serving as a model for other revolutionary movements. This model of entanglement, however, did not exclude a more straight-

forward comparative analysis, as his main question was precisely why the European revolutionary projects, which seemingly followed a common script,

led to such different results. Seignobos also continued his analysis to the period following the “Spring of Nations,” contrasting the different strategies of

the major European states. Here the universal model was Anglo-American

liberalism, which was then locally adopted, similarly to the French revolutionary doctrine in 1848. On the whole, the European tableau drawn by Seignobos features a dynamic interplay between the national and the supra-nation-

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al levels. In his vision, the main trends of social and ideological development

are global, but individual nations have particular local social and cultural fea-

tures that filter these global influences. In this sense, the comparative scheme suggested by Seignobos does not completely reject the national framework of history, but rather supplements it.

· Histoire politique de l’Europe contemporaine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1897); Introduction aux études historiques, with Charles-Victor Langlois (Paris: Hachette, 1898); La Méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales (Paris: Alcan, 1901); Histoire de la civilisation, vols. 1–3 (Paris: Masson, 1905); Histoire de la France contemporaine, with Ernest Lavisse (Paris: Hachette, 1921); Essai d’une histoire comparée des peuples de l’Europe (Paris: Rieder, 1938). secondary literature · Yves Morel, Charles Seignobos devant ses contradicteurs: analyse de la controverse intellectuelle française du début du XXème siècle sur l’ histoire (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion,‎2000). main works

W Revolutions and Reforms

The 1848 Revolution. The quarter century between the Revolution of ‘48 and the formation of the German Empire was a time of revolutions and political reforms that transformed the political and social climate of Europe, while the technological advancements changed everyday living conditions. The revolution started unexpectedly. Even though the number of discontented people was high in all countries, they did not have the power to provoke a change of regime anywhere. The governments, however, were acutely unprepared to resist: their police forces were weak, and in the capital there was only a small number of soldiers with slow-firing guns, barely superior to the rebels’ weapons. They were unprepared for street fights in an era when the streets were narrow and convoluted, and on the pavement they could easily be blocked by barricades. In France, a small group of republicans started the revolution as unrest aimed at achieving electoral reform, which caused an uprising in the working-class neighborhoods of Paris. The entire Central European region followed their example, although in the Belgian, Dutch, and Danish kingdoms, the revolts were limited to parliamentary reforms that brought about a more representative regime. It did not spread to Great Britain (except for 312

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a small upheaval in Ireland), nor to the Iberian states, nor the Scandinavian countries, or the Russian Empire. The Revolution came to a conclusive end only in France, where the workers forced the provisional government to declare the Republic, as well as to adopt a number of socialist concepts: “the right to work,” national workshops, the reduction of working hours, which, in turn, created hostility towards the regime among the bourgeoisie. The royalist bourgeoisie in the government was replaced by republicans who, like their 1789 counterparts, were animated by humanist sentiments. They wished to improve living conditions without quite knowing how, as they had no personal contact with the workers themselves. New democratic practices developed under their administration: popular journals, political clubs, demonstrations, and arming the workers by allowing them to enter national service. They disrupted the political regime by introducing universal suffrage, which increased the number of voters from 240,000 to nine million in one go. Elections depended on the majority, constituted largely of peasants who were completely ignorant of public matters. The constitution was created by a national assembly, elected by universal suffrage, motivated mostly by a humanitarian spirit, though hostile towards socialists. France’s example encouraged the opposition in other countries to organize demonstrations, which eventually turned into riots, and then revolutions. The governments, paralyzed by their fear of revolution, which they perceived as a mysterious force, hardly resisted at all. They accepted the appointment of liberal ministers and agreed to their liberal policies. They summoned three assemblies elected by indirect universal suffrage in Austria, Prussia, and the German Confederation, which reflected the drafts of liberal and democratic constitutions. The national malcontents were not satisfied with a change of regime— they demanded either unity or autonomy. National sentiments dominated political views, since, fuelled by instinctive hostility towards aliens, they needed no specific ideas in order to intensify. In the Austrian Empire, the Hungarian diet, functioning as a constituent assembly, established a regime that maintained merely a personal union with the Emperor. The other nations, Czechs, Croatians, Serbians, Romanians, who had no government agency, demonstrated in order to gain autonomy. In Italy, the revolution was directed mainly against foreign domination, and the war against Aus313

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tria was led by the king of Sardinia who reclaimed the green, white, and red tricolor flag, the Italian national emblem. The Reaction. The revolution was conducted by opponents of the government, who had disagreements among themselves and who, in turn, quickly found themselves in conflict with one another. In France, the majority of the Assembly, which wished to establish a “democratic Republic” preserving the social regime, was opposed by a minority who demanded a “democratic and social Republic” and reforms that would benefit workers. The old royalist parties, unified under the name of the “Party of Order,” supported the government in their suppression of the “national workshops,” which were aimed at providing a living to unemployed workers. In Germany, the Assembly was divided by a debate on the form of the regime, but mostly by what size the territory that would become the new federal state should be. In the Austrian Empire these conflicts led to a civil war between the different nations. The only reason the revolution succeeded was because it caught the frightened governments by surprise; the majority of the ruling classes, however, detested it, while the peasant masses remained inert. With the exception of France, the monarchy together with the monarch, the court, civil servants and officials remained in office. As soon as they recovered from their initial panic, they recognized the weakness of their opponents and the impotence of the assemblies and sent their armies to reclaim power and reinstate the previous regime. In France, the Assembly passed “executive power” to a general, who set the troops against the protesting workers of Paris. The Austrian government deployed one of its armies to suppress the Italian provinces, while another one was subsequently withdrawn to Vienna to attack the Hungarians who revolted against the dynasty. The Prussian monarch used his army to disperse the Assembly then crush the democratic uprising against the German princes. In Italy, the operation was completed by a French army corps that surrounded Rome and destroyed the Roman Republic. As soon as the army defeated the Revolution, the government restored the autocracy. The bourgeoisie supported it expecting a guarantee for material order threatened by the social revolt, and they began moving closer to the clergy, which was preaching the duty of obedience to the people. The governments, restored to power, began to exercise their authority by abol314

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ishing the assemblies, the constitutions, and the liberties achieved by the press and the unions. They took measures to prevent the ideas of social reform and the democratic regimes from spreading. They reinforced the police, arrested and convicted socialists and democrats, and went as far as placing liberals and free thinkers under police surveillance. They banned public meetings and popular societies, introduced censorship on certain newspapers, and brought others under a regime whereby they could be suspended or subjugated at will. They also subjected schools to clerical supervision. In France, the changes were achieved gradually. Louis-Napoleon, who was elected President of the Republic in 1848, formed an autocratic cabinet. The Assembly elected in 1849 had a royalist majority, and there was strong opposition to republicans. The President, then, abolished the Assembly and formed a constitution that rendered him all-powerful by a military coup d’état. In 1852, this was completed by his restoration of the monarchy, now called the Empire. Meanwhile, this restoration was not entirely complete: in France universal suffrage was not abolished; in Italy the liberal Sardinian Constitution remained in force; while in Prussia the constitution of 1850 created an assembly elected by indirect and unequal elections. In Austria feudal duties and charges as well as the policing power of the nobility were abolished. In all countries where the uprising took place on a national scale, the memory of the battles and the hope of retaliation remained. The re-establishment of the French Empire, forbidden by the Treaty of 1815, shook the previous international order. Wars and Regime Reforms. The revolution and its aftermath were followed by a sequence of four wars between the great powers, which implemented these internal reforms. They were all initiated by one of the three monarchies that were transformed by the revolution: the French Empire, the Sardinian, and the Prussian kingdoms. The initiative was now taken by the heads of these governments, first by Napoleon and Cavour, then Bismarck, to realize what was missed in 1848. A war between these great states was equally dreaded by diplomats wishing to maintain a balance in Europe and businessmen interested in maintaining peace in these countries. The armies, which were still recruited on a voluntary basis everywhere except in Prussia even though they were complemented by compulsory conscription, were unprepared for war. 315

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Their weaponry was outdated: they used piston rifles, which had replaced the muskets but still took a long time to charge and had a mediocre range, and bronze cannons to be filled from the front with a ramrod, and which, again, took a long time to charge, and which fired bullets or bombs instead of shells. Training was limited mainly to the use of arms and maneuvers on the training field. Troops were moved by marching on foot, carrying their own equipment. The officers (except the artillery and the military engineers in France) received no technical instructions and had no experience in warfare. Their training consisted of firing at targets, charging in the cavalry, and maneuvering in the infantry. Only Prussia had a systematically organized army supplied with improved weapons: the “needle gun,” the central drill, the steel cannon that used the cylinder head to discharge. The army operated by obligatory conscription without substitution, offering young men with a secondary school education the possibility to serve for one year. The soldiers entered the reserve army (Landwehr) after three years of service, preserving their ability to wage war as an active army. The officers took part in a methodical education in military arts and strategic practice at a special military institution. The military officers were driven by the doctrines distilled from Napoleon’s campaigns: that the aim of warfare is not occupy a terrain that is favorable for operations, but to destroy the enemy’s army and impose the conqueror’s will upon the adversary. The government, thus, had to keep all the forces alert to strike at any moment, prepare their operation plans, quickly mobilize the troops with the aid of fast transport vehicles, supply the soldiers with the help of requisitions, and have beds ready for them without having to carry tents, as the government was aiming at using war for its own political purposes. The French revolutionary improvisations were translated into method by the Prussians, thus providing them with an advantage over any other state.  The first sequence of wars was started on Napoleon III’s initiative. He proceeded to draw the British government into a war against Russia in order to defend the Turkish Empire, where he himself had no interest. This brought him personal success: the peace congress was held in Paris and presided over by the French. The defeat of the Russian army convinced Tsar Alexander II to introduce military reforms in his empire. He began by liberating serfs, allocating part of 316

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the land to them for cultivation under the condition that they purchase this by annuities, while the other part remained the property of the nobleman. The nobles’ policing power was transferred to the village community and a district tribunal. Subsequently, Alexander established institutions based on European models: the French juridical system with professional judges and a criminal jury as well as universities based on the German model. He refused to convoke a political assembly; he did, however, create local assemblies that were elected by three classes (nobility, urban citizens, and peasants). The second war was started by France, allied with the Sardinian Monarchy, to expel the Austrians from Italy. The only land they managed to win was Lombardy; nevertheless, the nationwide revolts against the princes and their states led to the annexation of these lands by the Sardinian Monarchy, which subsequently transformed into an “Italian Kingdom,” preserving its liberal constitution. Italian unity was realized by a centralized government based on the French model. The land was divided into new provinces (corresponding to the French départements) under a governor’s administration, and into communes under a maire’s administration, all appointed by the government. Enrollment in the army was based on compulsory service and was organized on the basis of sending conscripts to a different region than their land of origin. What was still missing at this point from this unified Italy was Venice and Rome. The war also had a negative backlash on the two great powers waging it. The Austrian government could get no more loans, and the Emperor had to abjure his absolute power in order to re-establish his credit. He transformed his government council (Reichsrat) into a general assembly of delegates from each province of the Empire chosen by a regional assembly (Landtag), which, in turn, was elected by members of four electoral categories. The Austrian Empire was thus transformed into a constitutional monarchy. In France, Napoleon III alienated the Catholics with his foreign policy by allowing the majority of the Pope’s lands be taken away, and also the industrial entrepreneurs with his commercial agreement with Britain, which facilitated the entry of British goods into the French market. In order to counterbalance their opposition, he approached the liberals; he reduced the pressure on newspapers and increased the parliament’s power. This new regime, branded as a “liberal Empire,” gradually reestablished political liberty and allowed previous middle-of-the-road parties to form an opposition. 317

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In Germany, the national upheaval resulted in the creation of a “national Union” along the Italian model, pushing the Prussian government towards establishing German unity. The new Prussian monarch Wilhelm had already put an end to the reaction by appointing new ministers. He, however, wished to reinforce the army by reestablishing the three-year service that had been suspended, as well as by creating new regiments. The elected House (Landtag) terminated its function when it refused the funding necessary for this irregular creation. The disagreement between the majority and the ministers became a theoretical power conflict between the monarch and the House when the Chancellor, Bismarck, accepted to govern while raising taxes illegally. The second sequence of wars was waged on the Prussian Chancellor Bismarck’s initiative. Together with Austria he declared war on the Danish monarch over two duchies (Schleswig–Holstein) whose succession was disputed, and forced Denmark to give them up. Austria and Prussia took joint ownership, but subsequently entered into a conflict over its government. Bismarck found a way to wage a war in which Prussia fought in alliance with Italy against Austria, itself allied to the majority of the German princes. Following the Prussian method, the war was started with a swift invasion and ended in a decisive battle that forced Austria to accept the conditions of the conqueror. Prussia, left with the task of reorganizing Germany, annexed those German states that had fragmented lands and forced all others to enter into a North German federation, except four Southern states. The Prussian monarch, entitled President, was in charge of all external relations (warfare, foreign affairs, commerce, and customs). He governed together with the Chancellor and a federal council formed by governmental delegates from the individual states, as well as an assembly (Reichstag) elected by universal suffrage, the power of which, however, was reduced to voting new laws and taxes. In Austria, the Emperor gave up his wish to force his will on his Ma­ gyar subjects and accepted the “compromise” of 1867, which transformed the Hungarian Kingdom (with its attachments) into a separate state with an aristocratic constitution and a government answerable to the Houses. The other seventeen provinces were under a common constitution for the “countries represented by the Reichsrat.” In both states, the monarchy was limited by a constitution and a Parliament with two Houses. Common affairs were decided by delegates from both parliaments. 318

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In France, Napoleon, discouraged by the failures of his foreign policies and the success of the liberal and republican opposition, continued to negotiate liberal concessions and went as far as accepting the creation of a government that was formed by the delegates of the majority. Great Britain remained outside the crises that caused wars in other lands and enjoyed a period of economic prosperity, allowing workers united in professional federations (syndicates) to press the Parliament into reforming the electoral regime. The majority of workers who had rented housing were granted the right to vote, which, in turn, rendered the British working class an active participant in public matters. In Spain, the generals were entangled in a conflict with the Queen’s circle, which resulted in a military revolution that caused the Queen to flee the country. The assembly, summoned to create a constitution, preserved the monarchy but introduced the principle of responsible government, and an assembly elected by universal suffrage. Offering the Spanish crown to a Prussian prince caused the outbreak of the conclusive war between France and Prussia allied to the German states. It was swiftly concluded by the German invasion of France and their capture of the French armies. As a result, firstly, a revolution broke out in Paris declaring a Republic and creating a provisional government of “national defense.” Secondly, the Italian army occupied Rome and ended the temporal reign of the Pope. Thirdly, there was the declaration of a “German Empire” including the Southern states; and finally, a peace with France that ceded Alsace and part of Lotharingia to Germany, transforming these lands into “Imperial territory” under the direct government of Berlin. Regimes and Political Doctrines. During these crises, the transformation of European institutions, practices and political doctrines unfolded in all states on the same terms, since they were based on the same model. They stemmed from British and American political practices, having been translated into theories and amended by France and Belgium. The basis was primarily the Constitution, composed as an official text unlike the custom-based code used in Britain, explicitly limiting the monarch’s powers and granting rights to its subjects (these were listed in the same terms in most texts). All European states except Switzerland were at this point centralized monarchies. The monarch, ascending to power by heredity, preserved the government, was denoted by legal scholars as the “executive power,” and re319

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mained the actual source of power. He exercised this power through ministers who worked theoretically as councilors of the monarch, and gradually became the true heads of government. They were in charge of state jobs and police matters, they were the ones who allocated grants, favors, and exemptions; they created rules and decrees, they were in charge of foreign affairs, and even prepared “legislative” processes drawing up legal and financial drafts. Beside a government established by virtue of a previous law, the Constitution conferred so-called “legislative powers” to a group of two Houses operating simultaneously and in the same town, following the British model. At least one of the two had to be formed by members elected independently from the government, while the monarch maintained the right to dissolve the elected House. (Only the small nations of the Balkans had single-house assemblies.) The power of the Houses was limited to discussing, amending, and voting on legal and customs matters, usually along the British lines of budget regulations regarding the sums allocated to different governmental expenditures. The French regime invested the power of voting into “financial laws” that prescribed expenditures as well as revenues. The Assembly held public sessions, once again based on the British model. It had a president who invited the members to speak, a process that included “the agenda of the day,” the issue in deliberation, amendments, votes, “motions,” and “resolutions.” It appointed committees (or commissions) to be in charge of preparing the work and presenting a report that would serve as the basis of discussion. The electoral regime was regulated based on two different methods. The majority of the states maintained the old principle that the right to vote is a form of privilege, a public function for men who took an interest in the public well-being and held property of a certain value. Those states that had only recently adopted a constitutional regime tried to provide different interest groups with separate representatives by dividing voters into categories; this was the case in Austria, Hungary, and Romania, and for the local assemblies in Russia. Other states recognized the right to vote as an inalienable right to all citizens, thus establishing universal suffrage, which had revolutionary origins. Authoritarian governments used this method in France for legitimizing the Empire and in Germany to strengthen unity against the backdrop of particularistic traditions. 320

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A specific kind of common European right was thus formed that was based mainly on the principles of a limited monarchy and political liberties guaranteed by two Houses deciding on legal and financial matters, rendering governmental actions public. In reality, however, the regimes, under the same official forms, worked in different ways according to the relations between the monarch and his ministers, between the ministers and the Houses, as well as between the Houses and the voters. The countries, where the ministers were appointed by the monarch and did not depend on the Houses, remained simply “constitutional” monarchies where the monarch retained the real command of power. In case the ministers responded to the elected House, that is to say they were obliged to govern in accordance with the House, the regime became parliamentarian (in British terminology responsible). In cases where the delegates’ powers depended somewhat on the voters or on a privileged electoral body, the regime was aristocratic; with universal suffrage, it became democratic. All constitutions recognized their subjects’ right to freedom, and the laws provided detailed guidance as to how they ought to be detained and tried. In case the state was in grave danger (of war, revolution, or riots), however, the government had the right, either on their own accord or with the consent of the Houses, to “suspend the rights” registered in the constitution and to exercise absolute power that curtailed the regular functions of the regime. It left the Houses out of all proceedings and had the right to forbid unions and the publication of newspapers, to arrest and try subjects in front of special tribunals or military judges who had the authority to order executions. This type of regime was occasionally unlawfully invoked with no real danger ahead, especially in the states of the south, with the aim of getting rid of the opposition and arresting political adversaries. In each state, the increasingly complex matters of public affairs required specialized understanding, practical techniques, and a continuity that the government could only obtain through the presence of permanent professional officials. Even in Britain where the central government had few other personnel besides financial advisors, the establishment of municipalities elected in the cities caused the emergence of a stratum of local officials. All matters were attended to in writing. The government received information through reports and files; the government’s orders were communicated by decrees, regulations, circulars, and instructions to the per321

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sonnel. The only oral proceedings that remained were the discussions in the assemblies and the pleas on political proceedings, which were disclosed to the public only by the press. There remained no personal contact between those who governed and those who were governed. Only government officials had any direct contact with the people, and the public image of the government depended on their attitude. In all the politically feeble countries (the countries of Southern and Eastern Europe), they charged their subjects for doing their work, and even more for not applying their own rules. The Parties. The common starting point for all the states was the absolute power of the monarch and his administration; their disagreements always remained private matters and were not of a permanent nature. As soon as a parliament was assembled to discuss matters, the disagreement between the members led to the establishment of parties, which were public and permanent. The delegates and the voters were regrouped based on their preference, leading to the creation of a platform. Their ideal regime was summarized in a number of formulae, which expressed their sentiments. The points of disagreement were firstly, the amount of power that the government ought to possess; secondly, the source of the subjects’ various rights; and thirdly, the range of people who ought to be granted the right to vote. The absolutist and conservative parties aimed at preserving the power of traditional authority figures: the monarch, officials, the aristocracy, and the clergy; they held social order, authority, family, and religion in the highest esteem. The liberal parties wished to weaken the power of traditional authority and to attach power to the parliament by increasing rights and the freedom of the people; they demanded the “responsibility of ministers” in the House and the “political freedom” of speech, the press, unions, and associations. The radicals distanced themselves from the liberals by demanding universal suffrage in the name of democratic equality and popular sovereignty. They held power only in Switzerland, the one European republic functioning as a federation of states where the power truly belonged to the elected assemblies (both in the Cantons and in the federal government), the Grand Councils of which were made up solely of delegates. In Switzerland, the radicals began experimenting with new institutions such as referendum and popular initiative by calling up the people to decide on whether to adopt or reject (or even propose) laws. These doctrines and formulae, thus, 322

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permeated not only the bourgeoisie, but also the urban lower and working classes, as well as a part of the peasantry. Progress in Production. Production was increasing gradually. The discovery of the Californian and Australian gold mines in 1848 and 1851 respectively caused an unprecedented increase in the production of gold, the average amount rising from twenty to 150 tons per year. This resulted in a swift rise of prices, which had been roughly the same since 1820, thus stimulating production in various sectors. Agriculture in most European countries made little progress. Productivity significantly increased only in the countries that were already familiar with the new British methods, and in the great Prussian latifundia where potato was cultivated for the purposes of alcohol distillation. The use of newly invented chemical fertilizers by German scientists caused further agricultural progress, though these were not as significant as the railroads, which made the large-scale sale of goods on a short sell-by date (animals, dairy products, eggs, poultry, vegetables) possible in cities, thus rapidly increasing their rate of consumption. The cause of such an increase in production was not only the development of agricultural technologies, however; rather it was the establishment of outlets and an increase of prices. Industrial cultivation, which had served hitherto as the most reliable source of income, however, lost its value due to vine and silkworm diseases, as well as to the emergence of industrial coloring. Industry was even more profoundly transformed by the steam engine, iron and steel metallurgy, as well as by the construction of railways, which, after a slow start before 1848, advanced at a rather fast pace. In just a few years’ time, the map of Europe was transformed into a set of great lines running through all countries and connecting the big cities. The railways were organized along the model of large industrial enterprises with employed personnel, salaried mechanics, and workers organized into an occupational hierarchy. They were in charge of all transport and postage, which was further enhanced by the invention of uniformly priced postage stamps. Meanwhile, the electric telegraph allowed immediate communication from one end of the continent to the other, and, since the placement of underwater cables, from continent to continent. Two inventions revolutionized metallurgy: firstly, the Bessemer process, which consisted of pressing air jets through fusing iron, eliminating excess 323

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material, and transforming it into steel of different qualities by adding various select substances. The gas furnace, reaching extremely high temperatures, allowed the production of purer and higher quality iron. The huge ovens heated by coal came into general use. Metallurgy provided far cheaper and better-quality iron and steel for railways, locomotives, steam engines, and metallic frames used for building bridges and vast edifices. The increase of oil and iron consumption in metallurgy caused an increase in the production of mines as well. The steam engine was used more and more in the mechanical spinning and weaving wool, cotton, and linen. The unprecedented speed with which transportation and metallurgy were developing increased the abundance of industrial products and allowed them easy access to every country. They influenced mostly the heavy industries, employing a vast range of expensive equipment that required considerable capital investment. This transformation only occurred in Great Britain, Belgium, and a small part of France and Germany, where it established what came to be called “machinism” and “capitalism.” Trade and Credit. The decrease in the prices of transport on railways and steamships acted as powerful stimulants of trade. Most trade was conducted with goods for mass consumption: wheat, wood, wool, cotton, metal, and “colonial goods” such as coffee, sugar, tea (which was, by then, in general use in Great Britain). Stock market transactions shifted gradually to advanced purchase agreements, which permitted the insurance of goods against the risk of a price change between the time of purchase and the time of selling these goods. Foreign trade also became easier when governmental policies changed following the British model. Free trade, a theory proposed in Britain, benefited from the popularity of the idea of liberty, applied to trade by economists of the “liberal” school. The commercial treaty between France and Britain, drawn up by Napoleon III, abolished all prohibitions and lowered the amount of customs to twenty-five percent of the goods’ value. Similar treaties were drawn up between the majority of European states (between 1860 and 1870 their number was 120), valid for ten years, which provided a solid basis for traders. By adding the “most favored nation” clause, each participant took up the task of not imposing duties on the other besides the minimum ones applied to all states. This procedure of maintaining low customs tariffs was bound to lead to a general atmosphere of “free trade.” 324

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In the same spirit, the states agreed to grant foreigners the right to conduct trade with their colonies. Retailing, however, preserved its old habits and customs. It aimed at the highest possible profit, and, therefore entailed entering into business with a client before setting a price, following the practice of traditional animal markets, forcing businesses to keep goods for a longer period of time. This practice also continued to provide clients with credit for unlimited periods. Commissions were made by retail dealers to traveling merchants who were in the service of big traders. Credit matters were upset by the generous influx of gold from California and Australia, as well as by silver overproduction caused by new extraction methods, which caused a complete breakdown in the thousand-year-old proportion of gold and silver prices. The vast amount of cash introduced into circulation by the abundance of precious metals allowed businessmen to raise enough capital to finance the construction of railways and the establishment of the heavy industries. The revenues, be it from saving schemes or from industrial activities or trade, were collected in the banks, which consequently became the centers of credit. Privileged state banks increased the number of banknotes issued, gradually replacing the gold used in transactions. In Britain, checks became accepted as payment even for consumer products, which in turn decreased the need for banknotes and coins, as well as increased the amount of credit. Banks conducted mostly traditional activities, which seeped into the banking practices of all countries: money deposits, transfer payments, loans on goods, and especially trading discounts, and the issuance of state mortgages. Numerous private banks remained in provincial towns where they could benefit from maintaining personal contact with their clients. However, the great credit establishments requiring high amounts of capital were shaped as anonymous companies in the capital, expanding their practices by opening new branches in other cities. Certain ones, following the Scottish example, began to use the deposits of their clients as long-term loans for great industrial firms, especially railway and gas companies. Those industries that needed large amounts of capital, such as mines, heavy metallurgy, navigation courses, railways, chemical industries, and even certain textile industries, organized themselves into anonymous companies of “limited liability,” issuing stocks that authorized variable dividends 325

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and fixed-term bonds of fixed interest. The states themselves applied for loans to cover their expenses. The French Empire, with its budget deficit, increased its debts from five million to thirteen million francs, while the Southern European states and Austria continued to borrow money despite their existing deficits. The stock markets, where all securities (loans, stocks, bonds) were negotiated, thus became the focal points of speculation, where fortunes came and went with scandalous speed. The importance of international markets was growing gradually, as this was where poor countries could borrow money from wealthy ones. London became the world’s largest commercial center as well as the greatest pool of capital for foreign state and business loans. The Population. The European population was increasing, mostly due to the large amount of births, since both in poor, rural Eastern Europe and in the industrial areas populated by salaried workers, the birthrate remained high. The only place where the birthrate was decreasing, a feature thus considered anomalous, was France, which was otherwise swiftly growing richer and richer. Economists had been teaching that the number of children would rise proportionally with the ease of feeding them. What was found, however, was that the highest birthrates were among the unfortunate peoples of Eastern and Southern Europe, and in Britain and France in the poorest families such as those of agricultural day laborers and temporary workers. The lowest birthrates were in the most well-off families in the richest neighborhoods of large cities. The conclusion was drawn, therefore, that the low birthrate was influenced not by the impossibility of feeding the children, but rather by wealth, which resulted in the desire to raise fewer children in order to maintain the social status of the previous generation; which, in turn, caused a voluntary restraint that had no connection with the families’ financial resources. The population in cities grew rapidly, especially due to a large number of workers migrating from the countryside. The increase of cities above one hundred thousand souls was estimated at a rate of twenty-five percent for the whole of Europe and thirty-four percent for Western Europe. The population of the countryside was drawn towards the cities and began to migrate outside Europe. After 1848, this tendency was particularly strong, especially from Great Britain (including Ireland) and from Germany to the United States. 326

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Society. Changes in society were motivated, on the one hand, by the transformation of politics, and on the other hand, by technical and commercial developments that led to a significant change in everyday living conditions. In Eastern Europe, legal disparities were finally suspended: in Austria and in Hungary this was achieved by decreasing the rights of the landowning nobility and in Russia by abolishing serfdom. Officially, Jews received equal rights as well, and they were invited to benefit from these common rights. Disparity remained rooted, however, in real living conditions as well as in wealth, education, and social position, which manifested itself in clothing, speech, and manners. The masses consisted largely of peasants. In Eastern Europe, even though their position was legally improved, their way of life did not progress far. In Russia, the serfs, now free and owners of part of their land, were crippled by heavy indemnities. In the central region they received merely a plot of the land (less than four hectares), which was not sufficient for nourishing their families; thus they were forced to search for work as artisans or workers in the distant cities. In Poland, Eastern Prussia, and Austria, the majority remained day laborers on the latifundia of great landowners. Although in Western Europe the peasants could benefit from price increases of agricultural commodities, they were unable to retain all of their profits: tenant farmers had to pay increased rent whereas landowning peasants remained indebted with high interest rates that they were unable to pay back. Democratic parties continued to propose agricultural credit institutions, though they never achieved their realization. As a result, day laborers remained dissatisfied, since their salary increased at a slower pace than did the cost of living. At the same time, on the continent, life on the countryside became more comfortable due to an increase of benefits, savings, and in the most fortunate cases, potential wealth. In Britain, however, wheat cultivation became obsolete as a result of high customs rates, which caused the rural population to decrease. Industrial workers profited from technological developments in a rather unequal fashion. Artisans benefited from the rise in prices and especially from the easier accessibility of food, clothes, and industrial products. The increasing consumption of meat and alcoholic beverages (wine, beer, brandy) was considered a certain sign of affluence. Domestic industry, however, was defeated by the competition of machines, and thus suffered from un327

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employment crises, which in turn significantly reduced the number of those who worked in this sector. In Britain, workers of the heavy industries, especially “qualified” workers in fields that required professional experience, began to improve their living conditions by organizing into unions in order to pressure their managers into discussing salaries, working hours, and their relationship with the foreman. Unions of the same profession formed permanent federations, the strongest amongst them received enough contributions to employ a secretary responsible for organizing marches in the common interest. An annual congress of delegates from each federation provided the grounds for discussions to forward their demands to the government. This organization triggered violent conflicts with managers, a result of which was that before a worker could be hired, he was required to hand in a written confirmation that he was not a member of any unions. Public opinion, which was traditionally hostile towards the unions, accusing them of provoking strikes, shifted after an investigation by a government committee concluded that, in fact, unions aimed at preventing strikes, wishing merely to maintain salary levels and working hours. The British system, which was considered an effective way to control working conditions, became the model for workers in various other countries. The “cooperative associations” of consumption formed by workers acquired enough wealth to conduct bulk-buying and to provide bread, spices, and clothes for the lowest prices. Retail dealers and small-scale employees, whose living conditions remained somewhat above that of the craftsmen, also experienced a slight improvement in their circumstances. Their way of life, however, hardly changed: they did not travel, could scarcely read, and still enjoyed traditional forms of entertainment such as weddings, carnivals, sideshows, and celebrations of patron saints.  The “middle classes” profited the most from these industrial, commercial and financial developments, since the managers, merchants, and bankers were all members of the bourgeoisie. The “liberal professions,” such as barristers, lawyers, doctors, men of letters, and professors profited indirectly when their numbers and wealth increased. The landowning bourgeoisie experienced the benefits of an increase in tenant farming and in the price of land. The wealthy had the means to enhance their income by investing 328

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in stocks and in state loans. An increase of interest on money also worked to their advantage (in France the interest on state bonds rose from three to five percent). The nobility remained the ruling class in all Eastern European countries. There persisted, however, a difference between the landowners possessing vast amounts of land and the gentry, whose supremacy was pared down in Austria by the abolition of landowning rights, and in Russia by the abolition of serfdom. The nobility remained superior to the bourgeoisie; bankers, however, began finding their way into high society. In Western Europe and even in Austria, the differences between the nobility and wealthy commoners were diminishing, so much so that in Britain the nobility was willing to mix with the wealthy given that both groups maintained a similar lifestyle on the countryside. On the continent, the nobility remained divided from all other classes based on their traditional repulsion to exercising any profession or performing any occupational function, with the exception of the army and diplomatic circles. They, therefore, refused to participate in the general increase of wealth, except for the high nobility, the members of which maintained their wealth through marriage with bourgeois heirs. Life expanded for the bourgeoisie and the nobility. Their consumption of luxury clothing, delicate lingerie, furniture, and art grew substantially. Developments in printing and engraving techniques allowed the wider spread of reading books, magazines, and newspapers. Photography, a recently invented technology, began to provide an abundance of accurate portraits. It became fashionable to spend longer periods at the seaside or bathing resorts, and to go on journeys for pleasure to the mountains and art cities, and even abroad. “Honeymoons” became customary as well. Entertainment such as theater, concerts, balls, and soirées became more varied as well as more frequent; gambling developed into organized public games in fashionable spots visited by people from all over the world. Men’s clothing followed the British fashion, whereas women’s fashion was based on the French model; this was the era of the crinoline, the bonnet, and wigs.  Women remained subjected to male authority, under their fathers’ or husbands’ legal and financial control, having no means to lead an independent existence except in case of rich widows. In common families, women took care of the household and also had their share in the work; all resulting products, however, even the working woman’s salary, belonged to the man 329

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of the house. In noble or bourgeois households, where the housework was done by servants, the woman was supported by her parents or her husband, yet she had no possessions of her own, not even control of her own fortune. She had no possibility of entering into any profession except as a private tutor or governess; it was, therefore, difficult for a girl to resist parental pressure when it came to choosing a husband. Intellectual Life. The most profound impact on intellectual life came from remarkable scientific developments, the life’s work of a few men who made science their sole profession, most of them working as academics at universities or in a specialized institution. They worked separately, following, however, the same scientific research methods, untroubled with practical applications. These developments arose at the same time: in the field of physics as the theory of the equality of forces (movement, heat, electricity, light, magnetism), and the method of spectral analysis (invented in Germany), which can show the compositional units of all the stars in the universe. In chemistry, they were manifested in atomic theory and by the synthesis of organic bodies; in biology by vivisection, which allowed for the observation of the function of organs, as well as by the discovery of ferments and microbes that revealed the unity of the phenomena of animal and vegetal life; and in zoology by the theory of evolution that explained the emergence of the different species by a lengthy sequence of small changes bound by heredity. The connections between various branches of science led to the belief that all phenomena appear in a given order and are of similar nature. All these branches seemed to converge in a unity and fit the classification of Auguste Comte, whose doctrine was called “positivism,” which reduced all branches of science to “positive” knowledge gained through observing phenomena that are accessible through our senses. This theory, when pushed to the extreme, gave rise to materialism, which recognized only the study of material phenomena. German, Russian, and French physicians took a special interest in this doctrine after 1860. Spencer, a British positivist thinker, proposed the theory of the “unknowable” upon realizing that a part of reality is bound to pass unnoticed by scientific methods, which, in turn, became the basis of “agnostic” philosophy. Scientific progress gradually discredited metaphysical theories and steered philosophy towards scientific logic and the history of doctrines, then towards psychology, which experts attempted to direct towards experimen330

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tation. The study of social phenomena (language, religion, law, arts) turned, especially in Germany, more and more towards a study of the past, using a historical methodology and developing into “special” forms of history. The field of history expanded as experts were able to research and decipher texts revealing customs of ancient Eastern civilizations. The facts and notions revealed by the natural sciences and the history of humanity seemed irreconcilable with the concept of the world and the “sacred history” taught in the name of revelation. The opposition between the two methods turned into the popular “conflict” between religion and science. This was most apparent in the question of humanity’s origins, though occasionally it was confused with the conflict of deists and materialists about the existence of the soul. Different methods were used to propagate these opposing conceptions. Religious doctrines were spread by traditional means: the catechism of children, preaching against subversive doctrines and worship practices, which remained an obligatory part of education (both in primary and in secondary schools) in all countries, whether they be of the Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox religion. The clergy also added new methods: journals, conferences, and pilgrimages were organized by the church, especially in Catholic countries.  New ideas seldom entered primary school curricula, which remained under the control of ministries of culture, or even those of institutions of secondary education (colleges, German gymnasiums, and British grammar schools), which still operated based on humanist traditions. Education was restricted almost entirely to Latin and mathematics; natural sciences and history were only used as supplementary or background material. Liberal education was available only in universities and specialized institutions where scholars and professors, in personal contact with their students, could express non-traditional ideas. These concepts, stemming from scientific methods or historical criticism, remained enclosed in the world of higher education. They, however, found their way to a part of the urban population through debates, journals, and conferences in the form of vulgar negations of ancient beliefs corresponding to popular sentiments.  The most significant innovation in the world of aesthetics during this brief period was realism, which first appeared in literature and then spread to the fine arts. Placing themselves opposite the romantics, the “realists” aimed 331

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at representing the precise truth and were somewhat more inclined to show life’s more painful and unpleasant aspects. Poetry fell out of fashion, and the novel about contemporary customs became the most fertile literary genre. Painters chose more and more often the landscape or everyday life as subjects for their work, battling against the “academic” tradition, and calling themselves “realists.” In music, which was influenced mainly by German and Italian traditions, opera and opera buffa were the fashion; Wagner’s little known and highly contested oeuvre had not reached the public yet, not even in Germany.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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Aim and Significance of Balkan Studies s o u r c e

Milan Budimir and Petar Skok, “But et signification des études balkaniques,” Revue internationale des études balkaniques 1 (1934): 1–28.

Milan Budimir (1891–1975) was a Serbian classical philologist, and one of the

country’s most influential scientists of the twentieth century. Budimir studied

classical philology at the University of Vienna, and from 1920 he taught at the University of Belgrade, where he became full professor in 1938. While his ca-

reer was interrupted during the war, he resumed his position after 1945 and became a key figure in Yugoslav academic life. His main field of research was

the history of the ancient Greek language, but he also published widely on the ancient history of the Balkan Peninsula, especially the history and languages of

pre-Indo-European populations. In 1934, together with Petar Skok, he found-

ed and served as editor of the Revue internationale des études balkaniques, the periodical of the newly-founded Institute of Balkan Studies in Belgrade, which featured the most well-known specialists of the field.

main works · Iz klasične i savremene aloglotije (Belgrade: Srpska Kraljevska Akademija, 1933); O Ilijadi i njenom pesniku (Belgrade: Kolarčev narodni univerzitet, 1940); Grci i Pelasti (Belgrade: Naučna Knjiga, 1950); Sa balkanskih istočnika (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1969).

Petar Skok (1881–1956) was a Croatian linguist. He studied Romance and Germanic philology at the University of Vienna. As a high school teacher, he taught in Banja Luka and served as a librarian of the Royal Museum in Sarajevo. From 1919 until his retirement, he worked at the University of Zagreb,

teaching Romance philology. He was one of the main specialists in Romance languages and linguistic influences in the Balkans.

· Dolazak Slavena na Mediteran (Split: Hrvatska štamparija S. Vidović, 1934); Osnove romanske lingvistike, vols. 1–3 (Zagreb: Izdanje naklade školskih knjiga i tiskanica Banovine

main works

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Hrvatske, 1940); Slavenstvo i romanstvo na jadranskim otocima, vols. 1–2 (Zagreb: Jadranski institut Jugoslavenske akademije znanosti i umjetnosti, 1950); Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (posthumously, Zagreb: Jugoslavenska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, 1971–1974). secondary literature · Diana Mishkova, “The Politics of Regionalist Science: The Balkans as a Supranational Space in Late Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth Century Academic Projects,” East Central Europe 39, nos. 2–3 (2012), 266–303.

This text is the manifesto of Balkan studies published in the very first issue of

Revue internationale des études balkaniques. It was directly related to the 1934 signing of the Balkan Pact by Greece, Turkey, Romania, and Yugoslavia, which

gave impetus to Southeast European cultural-political cooperation, and also

created a wave of optimism among scholars that, after the decades of con-

flict, it would be possible to create a more regionally-encompassing common

historical narrative. The two Yugoslav Balkanists who co-authored this text intended their journal to be a flagship of cooperation, inviting contributions

from scholars from within the region but also prominent specialists of classi-

cal archaeology, Byzantinology, Balkan languages, folklore, and history from

Western Europe. Consequently, the text provides an overview of the main re-

search tasks, and also discusses the main hindrances, among which it explicitly mentions the heritage of nationalism and romanticism in these countries,

which destroyed the common regional interpretative framework and created

self-centered academic communities subservient to their respective nationbuilding projects.

W The Current State of National Scientific Studies in the Balkans

Scientific development in the Balkans was conditioned by three principal factors: first, by the awakening of the national sentiments as in the Slavic parts of Central Europe; second, by the generous patriotism of certain wealthy people who donated considerable sums to national institutions, and third, by the constitution of independent states emerging from the recoil of the Ottoman Empire.

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The Yugoslav Academy of Zagreb,1 for instance, owes its existence entirely to the first two factors, while its sisters, the Serbian Academy of Belgrade2 and the Bulgarian Academy of Sofia,3 which emerged from earlier scholarly societies when the modern Serbian and Bulgarian states had already achieved a solid organization, owe their creation to all three factors. The memory of a millenary, glorious, and still brilliant past gave birth to the Greek Academy of Athens during the full maturity of the Hellenic state.4 The Romanian Academy of Bucharest5 had approximately the same origins as the Slavic Academies in the Balkans; the previous scholarly society transformed itself into an Academy after the Danubian Principalities politically reunited into a single state (1859). All Academies were, reasonably, set to study, at first in an isolated fashion, the Balkan reality manifesting itself in various fields: language, history, folklore, arts, literature, economy, law, etc. At first, the main inspiration was provided by the actual scientific needs of the respective peoples. The natural consequence of this was that little attention was paid to the parallel, converging, similar, identical, and reciprocal features in these fields of study. The inter-Balkanic comparative point of view could not penetrate the academic circles at this point. It was completely missing. These Academies work, and unfortunately keep on working, without enforcing this. They do not show any tendency to undertake labor together, the aim of which is more or less similar. In the scientific organization of the Balkans, one may observe no initiatives similar to the great academic unions of Western Europe, such as the German Academies’ cooperative effort to publish the Thesaurus linguae latinae or the International Academic Union of Brussels, which is preparing the new edition of Ducange, just to mention two examples.6 1 Founded in 1866. On the circumstances of its creation, see Mr. Šišić’s well-documented presentation published in the journal Novosti (1934): 142–44, entitled “Kako je postala Jugoslavenska Akademija.” 2 Founded in 1886; see Stanojević, Narodna enciklopedija S. H. i S., 1: v. 3 Created in 1911. Before this date, the Balgarsko knizhevno druzhestvo was first in Brăila (1869), and then transferred to Sofia in 1878. 4 Founded in 1826, it preceded the Société scientifique of 1889; see La Grèce, ed. by the Direction de la Presse d’Athènes (Athens, 1933), 37ff. 5 Created in 1866 as Societatea Literară Română and put under state authority in 1879, it was renamed Academia română. 6 Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange, a seventeenth-century French philologist, who published a pioneering glossary of medieval Latin.

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The metanastasic movements are undoubtedly one of the most characteristic features of the Balkans. Yet, the fascinating research started by the late Cvijić is not really ardently and deeply followed, except by the Academy of Belgrade. Here these studies are limited to countries where Serbo-Croatian is the spoken language. In order to fully understand all the vicissitudes caused by this phenomenon in Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania, the research ought to be organized by the Balkan Academies collectively. The linguistic complications would become more comprehensible at once if enough information was at one’s disposal on the metanastasic movements in all Balkan countries. We would no longer be obliged to rely on hypothetical suppositions.7 The other example is provided by the isolated fashion according to which the folklore of Balkan peoples is studied. Although the glance of a layman is generally enough to discover identical tendencies in this field, we still carry on focusing on the subject of folklore on the level of individual Balkan peoples. We have never consulted one another about the common methods we could adopt. It is a pity that an Academy or a museum or even a publication of Balkan folklore rarely acknowledges the results already discovered by others. It is, therefore, in the subject of Balkan research that we have the most work to do. Whatever has been mentioned regarding these two sciences is also valid for historical and economic sciences. There is scientific disagreement everywhere and no attempts to overcome the boundaries imposed by national organizations. Divided into national sections, as they were created after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan sciences actually do not study anything but scattered chunks of an organic whole. In order to give a clear idea of what the national sciences of the Balkans do, the following simile may serve as an instructive example. The Balkan scholar at the moment resembles a man who lives in a country of six valleys and takes the comfortable position in one of these in order to study what is happening there instead of climbing the mountain where all the valleys, adjoining and parallel ones, converge. Meanwhile, modern times urgently 7 The Serbo-Croatian and Albanian dialectologies cannot be analyzed without metanastasic studies. Future linguistic atlases should take this into account. See P. Skok, “Projet d’un Atlas linguistique yougoslave,” in Sborník prací 1. sjezdu slov. filologů v Praze (Prague, 1932), 2:705–7; similarly, on the Slavic element in Balkan languages, see Slavia: časopis pro slovanskou filologii (1925–1926), 4:129.

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require the Balkan scholar to take the necessary steps to achieve a pattern that would enable him to make infinitely clearer observations regarding the similarities and identities of Balkan life, conditioned by the same environment, the same climate, the same social and economic situation, the same temperaments, the same religion, etc. Why does he refrain from climbing this mountaintop where he could get a better view? This is because the idiosyncrasy of the states is doubled by scientific idiosyncrasies. The lack of collaboration and political solidarity result in harmful consequences for scientific organization. Meanwhile, it appears that the moment has arrived to consider coordinating the national scientific studies of the Balkans, providing them with cohesion, and, above all, to direct them towards the study of a Balkan organism formed in the most ancient times during Classical and Preclassical Antiquity. This is the principal aim of the sciences we prefer to call Balkanology, and the aim to which we devote our journal. Balkan Cohesion and Idiosyncrasy, or the Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in the Balkans

This Balkan organism, the members of which show visible traces of a unique life, already has an age-old history. Despite the multitude of peoples following and living tumbled up next to one another on Balkan soil, sometimes inextricably, one might state that one unique rule seems to control the vicissitudes of their history together. This rule can be summarized as below: In the Balkans since Classical Antiquity and until recently, unification follows idiosyncrasies and vice-versa. These two historical tendencies alternate. A period of non-existent political unification on the Peninsula, when each national party lives its own life while borrowing cultural elements from each other, is necessarily followed by a period of successfully established political, economic, and cultural unity on the Peninsula. This is the Balkan rule reduced to most simple notions. Let us cite some examples. In Classical Antiquity, political unification established by the Macedonians came straight after the rich idiosyncrasy of the Greek poleis. It 337

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was Philip and Alexander the Great who achieved the first Balkan union. Its result was the brilliant Hellenic expansion in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, in all European, Asian, and African countries situated around the Peninsula. It is thanks to the first Balkan aggregation, stemming from the Peninsula’s own forces, that the foundations of European civilization were laid. The second aggregation is due to a force outside the Balkans: the Romans. Its results are no less important than those of the first aggregation; on the contrary, they doubled them. On the one hand, Hellenic civilization has become the common good of humanity; on the other hand, the Peninsula was divided into two linguistic parts, separated by an imaginary line that stretched from Vlorë and from Durrës on the Adriatic towards the North and then to the South of Skopje, which, passing East of Sofia, crosses the Haemus and flows into the Black Sea.8 The Greek world and the Latin world, thus divided linguistically, were united politically in the Byzantine Empire and continued to maintain the Roman cohesion of the Balkans by fighting against Balkan idiosyncrasies that cropped up after the settlement of the Slavs on the Peninsula. These Slavic idiosyncrasies, fed, in turn, into the same Byzantine civilization and obeyed the same law of Balkan aggregation as soon as they understood their power. They also tended, however, to perform their own unifying attempts on the Peninsula. This was the meaning of the two empires formed by the Bulgarians similarly to Dušan, who, by proclaiming himself Emperor of the Serbs, the Bulgarians, as well as the Greeks, underlined by his very title the existing ethnic diversity of the Balkans. This shows that the unifying tendencies of the Balkans, immanent to the historical development of the Peninsula, stem from two sources. They may either be intrinsic or extrinsic. If the Byzantine period was filled only by continuous struggles against Slavic unifying attempts, the Turks were the ones who put an end to these prolonged fights in the fifteenth century by imposing their social as well as political cohesive force on the entire Peninsula, the length of which encompassed nearly five centuries of Balkan history. Its consequences were immense. 8 For further details on this subject, see P. Skok, “Zum Balkanlatein IV,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 54 (1934): 175ff.

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Modern science unfortunately quite often misunderstood the results of this extensive aggregation caused by the Turks. Usually their unifying methods were incorrectly defined. The positive traits of a regime that refused to exercise denationalizing politics as opposed to the practice of many European states were not acknowledged. The reason for the false interpretation of these facts has to be sought in what we may call the Balkan romanticism9 of the nineteenth century. The intellectuals of the different Balkan peoples, wishing to liberate themselves from the Ottoman Empire, tended to see only the deteriorating effect of this long regime on the features linked to the ancient independence of these peoples. Whatever stemmed from this regime was thus considered harmful. All means, whether legal or illegal, were employed to fight the common enemy with the aim of restoring the historical ideal of the Balkan peoples, which only aggravated the general disdain towards the Turks. The science of these newly awakened peoples was bound to suffer from the above features. It actually followed the evolutionary flow of the new Balkan spirit. This is the reason it preferred to study periods prior to Turkish settlement on the Peninsula, almost entirely ignoring the study of national ways of life during Turkish occupation. The long-distant past was believed to be more familiar than recent, one may say eye-witnessed, events. With only a few exceptions, this state of affairs still describes the national sciences of the Balkans even today. Turkish philology is rather poorly developed at the universities of the Balkans.10 Meanwhile, the results of the Turkish unification actions were not only considerable but also decisive in certain matters for future aggregations, which the Peninsula will surely not lack in the future. Let us see some aspects of these multiple results. By imposing the same political and social conditions on all Balkan peoples, the Turks managed to render their mentality identical. Furthermore, they favored the Balkan racial mixture resulting from the metanastasic movements, thus somehow clearing the mental differences the erstwhile id 9 In modern Serbo-Croatian literature this Turkophobe Balkan romanticism is characterized mostly by two literary works, now classics. These are Smrt Smail age Cengića by Ivan Mažuranić (1846) and Gorski Vijenac by Petar Petrović-Njegoš (1847). 10 See the memoirs of T. Kowalski, Les Turcs et la langue turque de la Bulgarie du Nord-Est. Mémoires de la Commission orientale, no. 16 (Cracow, 1933) regarding the subject of Balkan Turkology.

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iosyncratic states had created in the minds of their respective peoples. Note that nomadism11 and metanastasic movements12 were constant features on the entire Peninsula after the arrival of the Turks. Who knows how the problem of Yugoslavian unity would present itself today had it not been largely prepared for by the Serbian migrations starting at the beginning of the sixteenth century? Leaving their territories occupied by the Turks, the Serbs joined their ancient co-nationals in Hungary and Croatia, and merging with them, they smoothed the spiritual differences that may have appeared under foreign domination. The nucleus of the Yugoslavian union was thus formed. The Turks created the Balkan city, completely different from ancient or European cities by introducing Eastern urbanism in the Balkans. Due to this fact,13 the vocabulary of all Balkan peoples was flooded with Turkish terms. The terminology of clothing,14 food,15 house construction,16 and mostly that of different professions,17 this rich terminology is approximately the same everywhere in the Balkans originating from the East. The largest part of the technical vocabulary of the Balkan languages belongs to the Turks. 11 See some historical references on Wallachians in T. Capidan, Români nomazi (Cluj, 1926). 12 We return for quick orientation concerning these confusing questions to J. Cvijić, “Des migrations dans les pays yougoslaves,” Revue des Etudes slaves 3 (1923): 1–26; and especially to his global work La péninsule balkanique (Paris, 1918). 13 It is a commonly held belief (see for example Weigand) that it was the Turkish administration and militia that established the largest part of Eastern vocabulary in Balkan languages. This argument is not verified if we examine the distribution of this terminology’s greatest proportion in different fields of civilization. We, however, take Eastern urbanism introduced in the Balkans by the Turks as the center of radiation for Balkan Turks, an idea developed in a study dedicated to the Turkish element in Bosnia, which will appear in Slavia: časopis pro slovanskou filologii (Prague). The late Șăineanu’s idea, expanded in his two volumes entitled Influența orientală asupra limbei și culturei române (Bucharest, 1900), should be revived for each Balkan language. Until today unfortunately only F. Miklosich’s rich repertoire is at our disposal (Denkschriften der Wiener Akademie, 34–35, 37–38), with Mr. Kraelitz-Greifenhorst’s corrections and some collections of minor importance. Mr. Kowalski rightly underlines the importance of examining Turkisms in Slavic languages from a Turkish dialectological and a chronological point of view in his short speech at the First Slavic Congress, see Zbornik praci (1929), 554–56. We, however, insist upon the above-mentioned article on the necessity of studying geographic areas of Balkan Turkisms. 14 For example, we refer to expressions commonly used in Bosnia, since they are closer: čemer m., čakšire pl. f., salvare pl, f., dimije pl. f., etc. 15 See the tasty Yugoslavian dishes of Bosnian towns etc.: čevapčići m. pl., sogan-dolma, dolmadžik, papaz-jánia, đuveće n. sg., ćufteta pl. n. 16 See in Bosnia: japija, birkatica, musandra, etc. 17 Certain terms in this field have been generalized in literary Serbo-Croatian, such as f. ex. šegrt, zanat, esnaf, etc.

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The result of Turkish unification is no less significant in the fields of folklore and popular literature in general. If, from the point of view of folklore, the Balkan peoples may be considered “young ones,” adopting one of Cvijić’s terms, where folklore is felt and lived, this is because the Turkish regime obliged people to become withdrawn. Among all these peoples, the Turkish era provoked the flourishing of the national epic, an object of their pride. In the nineteenth century, this regime, so rich in all kinds of insurgencies, is rather significant for the development of belles lettres and the scholarly literature of these peoples. These insurgencies provoked the expansion of a romantic literary movement in the Balkans, a Balkan romanticism, the color of which is markedly different from other European romanticisms. Nevertheless, one should not imagine that the Turks ruined whatever civilizational creation there was in the Balkans. The linguist already sees the opposite in a number of words of Greek or Latin origin that were also spread by the Turks.18 Certain Byzantine institutions were preserved by the Turks. It is not by chance that, at the time of the Third Congress of Byzantine Studies in Athens, the late Heisenberg underlined the importance that studying the Turks holds for future generations of Byzantinologists.19 In the nineteenth century, Turkish unification gave way to the idiosyncrasies of the new Balkan states. Balkan history seems to repeat itself. But what can we see since the Serbian insurgence? Already under Karađorđe unifying tendencies were becoming apparent in the Balkans, expanding even towards Greece. The idea of Balkan collaboration started to form very early. The immanent law of Balkan evolution pierces the multitude of modern idiosyncratic states. Balkanology as a science of historical synthesis attempts to study the results of these two tendencies of Balkan history in detail, namely unification and idiosyncrasies, without taking sides, without casting a vote for any of the unifying tendencies, and without praising any of the idiosyncrasies at the expense of the others. 18 See words used in Bosnia: karanfil , ćiler , sèčij etc. See above some indication in P. Skok, “Byzance comme centre d’irradiation pour les mots latins des langues balkaniques,” Byzantion, vol. 4, 371–78. 19 Krumbacher had already thought of this, considering the knowledge of Slavic languages indispensable for Byzantinology.

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If ideal moral conduct were to lead this impartial research, it should be the noble ideal of the intellectual cooperation of the Balkan countries, so necessary an ideal for humanity today, an ideal that science is unable to escape from, as all scientific work orientates towards cooperation. Of all the national sciences developed in the Balkans, it is precisely history that contributed the most to the notion of a special science dedicated to the study of mutual bonds between the peoples of the Peninsula. That is why the historical sciences of the different Balkan peoples are obliged to research either Byzantine or Turkish history, or that of a neighboring country, etc. In order to duly explain the idiosyncratic features of a people, one must always employ what we might call the Balkan reality, represented by the element that is unifying the Peninsula. The historian who deserves the name Balkanizer more than anyone else is the late Konstantin Jireček. No other historian researching the Balkans surpassed him in his ability to grasp the idea of the Balkans as an historical entity. He remains a model to all future Balkanizing historians. Among the living historians, Iorga is the one who is worthy of the title of Balkanizer after Jireček, due to his numerous works devoted to the history of all the Balkan peoples. The Balkan Peoples as Objects of an Inter-Balkanic Science

The comparative study of the Balkan reality has become an utmost necessity, and it has been for a long time. The aim of this study is to define and explain the parallel features appearing in different realms of human action in the Balkans. The method according to which Balkanology should proceed is the following: every time an idiosyncratic feature of a Balkan people is examined, the scholar will ask himself if analogue features may be found among neighboring Balkan peoples. After stating these, he shall duly define their nature. Afterwards he will attempt extending these features, which would allow him to try explaining them. For a given question he will try to take into account all of the Balkan peoples or, alternatively, if this is not possible, at least two peoples, never a single one. This is due to the fact that idiosyncratic features attract his atten342

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tion as long as they may be linked to the whole of Balkan life. He shall leave the exclusive study of idiosyncratic features to the specialists of national sciences. Consequently, there will be no rupture between him and the aforementioned specialists. He will search for particular facts among them. His work will only place them into a concatenation of a higher level. Since we began the research of the origins of certain Balkan peoples, the necessity of using superior links as the means of inter-Balkanic comparison has become evident. We could never understand a Balkan people if we regard it on its own, isolated from its Balkan surroundings. This will become evident as we glance quickly through the evolution of these peoples. The origins of the Romanians, this historical enigma, remained without solution for a long time. In reality, this is also a Balkan problem, the solution of which is actually impossible if we take only the Romanian point of view into account. Originating from the Romanized Illyro-Thracians, merging with colonists brought by the Romans from all over the world, then spreading over the whole Balkan continent, Romanians speaking different dialects appeared between Kostur and Prespa after 976, which is the date they were first mentioned in Byzantium as nomadic shepherds, soldiers, transporters, etc. in all Balkan regions among Slavs, Albanians and Greeks. We may find them on the Via Egnatia as well as to the North and to the South of Jireček’s virtual line. How may we research the historical, linguistic, and economic problems of this people regarding it only from the Romanian point of view, since their fate was connected to the Balkans as a whole? If we were to propose studying the question today: what is the proportion of pre-Roman words in Romanian vocabulary, we would be obliged to turn into a Balkanologist. The solution could only be found if Albanian and Slavic parallels to the Romanian expressions that correspond with the ancient originals were sought. We would note that the Romanian bunget corresponds with the Albanian bunk, the ancient Romanian word brîu to the Albanian bres, the Rom. mazăre to Alb. modhule, the Rom. pârâu to Alb. prua, and the Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian poroj, stapân to S-Cr and Bulg. stopanin, etc. We would then gather a lexicological nucleus of ancient words connected to rural life in the mountains, words that are neither of 343

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Albanian nor of Slavic origins, but found their ways into Romanian from Romanized Illyro-Thracian. What cannot be solved from an exclusively Romanian standpoint may be explained thanks to an inter-Balkanic point of view. We could cite further examples from the field of folklore or economic history in order to support this statement. The second great inter-Balkanic problem concerns Albanian origins. Once more, this people seems to be the last of the Thracians from the province of Dardania province who, as opposed to the Romanians, managed to escape complete Romanization. According to Serbian documents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Albanians found themselves in the same social situation as the Wallachian (Romanian) people. They were mountain shepherds living in villages called katun near Prizren and Kruja. They were first mentioned in 1079 (in Epirus). Their historical hiatus is far more sensible in their case than in the case of the Romanians. History confirms that there were already strong feudal families of Albanian origin in the Angevin era. Under Turkish domination, a part of the people converted to Islam and did not leave the homeland with the other part, which had remained Christian. The Albanian people spread to a large part of the Balkans, from Niš, Skopje, etc., quite far in the South, to Greece, as they were able to benefit from the support they lent to the Ottoman Empire. This is when they arrived on the Adriatic shore, ousting the Slavic population everywhere. A quick glance is enough to demonstrate that all the problems concerning Albanian issues remain incomprehensible if we do not place ourselves in the scope of Balkanology. It would be false to assume that the problem of Southern Slavs concerns only Slavic studies. Their fate and their entire history also seem to be intimately linked to the Balkans, regarded here as an indivisible whole much in the same manner as in the case of the Romanians and Albanians. The great upheaval of the ancient world, which we call the migration of peoples, quickly spread them across the entire territory of the Peninsula, from the Danube to the Peloponnesus. Their first settlement took place under the rule of the warrior people of Turco-Tatar origins, the Avars.20 In the 20 This is the reason for the presence of two layers of words of Turkish origin among Southern Slavs, an ancient one reaching back to the Avar era (such as ban, klobuk, etc.), and a modern one drawing from Ottoman dialects or from the official language.

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middle of the tenth century, they conquered the entire Peninsula. The emperor Porphyrogenitos mentions the entire Slavonization of Greece. Their later destiny, however, was different. They managed quite well to the North of Jireček’s virtual line21 in the Latin Balkans, and somewhat less impressively in the Southern, Greek zone. There the Slavs withdrew significantly, in Epirus, in Albania itself, and disappeared completely from the land of ancient Greece. This introduces a primary problem into the field of Balkanology. The same applies for the creation of their states. The first Slavic states in the Balkans are established in the hinterland of Greek or Latin maritime towns. A Sclavinia is established behind Salonika, the ancient Croatian state behind Zadar, Trogir, and Split, the Serbian states of Zahumlje and Dioclea behind Dubrovnik and Budva. The study and explanation of these facts belongs to the field of Balkanology. Let us note that even for solving certain secondary linguistic problems concerning Southern Slavs, one is often obliged to turn to Balkan studies. The following case serves as an instructive example. By establishing the ancient pronunciation e for ѣ in words of Slavic origin in Greek22 and Albanian,23 we may point out that ancient Croatia24 and the central part of the Peninsula, together with Serbian, Albanian and Greek territories, constitutes a compact area from this perspective, as they are those Balkan countries that pronounce ѣ as ia. The study of Greek, Albanian, and Romanian words of Slavic origin strongly supports ancient Southern Slavic phonetic studies. It is even more significant, thus, to become a Balkanologist in case one studies the history of Southern Slavic civilization. On the Adriatic coast, the Slavs adapted to Mediterranean civilization regarding navigation, maritime fishing, and literature as a consequence of their peaceful penetration into the maritime towns of the province of Dalmatia. On the Balkan mainland, however, they embraced Byzantine civilization through Christianity. 21 This is the reason why we may observe the persistence of Christian terminology from Latin origins even among Orthodox Southern Slavs, like for instance citar, komkati etc. See note 33. 22 For the Peloponnese, see G. Weigand, Balkan Archiv 4 (1925–1928), 25, 33; and for Greek Slavisms in general, see P. Skok in Južnoslovenski Filolog 12 (1933), 102. 23 See A. M. Selishchev, Slavyanskoe naselenie v Albanii, 296ff. 24 See P. Skok in Starohrvatska Prosvjeta, vol. 2, 170ff.

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It is impossible to refer to all the problems of Southern Slavs concerning Balkanology in such a brief sketch but suffice it to underline the main principle here. Needless to say, the Greeks represent one of the most interesting problems in our studies. It is well known that Byzantium did not continue the particularistic life of the ancient Greek poleis. This particularism had already been demolished in Hellenistic times. Byzantium is rather the Christian continuation of the Roman Empire. The Byzantine Empire, essentially, is merely a Christian empire rather than a national one. There is a reason why Byzantine Greeks call themselves Ῥωμαῖοι, from which the Arab term Ur-rum25 and the Turkish Urum-ili derives, a wellknown name in the European part of Turkey. This name, after a triumphant Christianity, makes the people forget the Ancient Greek Έλληνες to such an extent that it is isolated from official use, abandoned by folklore and folk tales, and its meaning changed significantly, denoting an ancient people of giants,26 remarkable for their strength and sense of justice. It is worth noting that the folk tales on Elimi or Ilimi27 are especially widespread in the Banovina of Vardar [Yugoslav Macedonia]. No doubt this is caused by the fact that Greeks became known to Southern Slavs through the Romans on the Latin part of the Peninsula, rather than through their own ancient name. Грѣкъ derived from Lat. Graecus. Studying modern Greeks, one often makes the mistake of exclusively considering their classical ancestors. It is rather their parallel features with Romance peoples that one should take into account. This is suggested with all the force of conviction. 25 This is where the Serbo-Croatian and Bosnian surname Uromov(ić) stems from. The ancient Slavic name ruminь “graecus” from which ρωμαίος stems, however, originates from rumьsкъ, see F. Miklosich, Lexicon Palaeoslovenico-Graeco-Latinum (Vienna, 1862–1865), 805; P. Skok, Mélanges de philologie, d’ histoire et de littérature offerts à Henri Hauvette (Paris, 1934), 15. 26 See Actes du IIIe Congrès d’Études Byzantines, 110; E. Gamillscheg, Sprachgeschichte, 47 (after Jüthner). 27 See P. Skok, Glasnik Skopskog naučnog društva 2 (1926): 283; 3 (1928): 158; 12 (1933): 199; P. Papahagi, Numiri etnice la Aromâni, 155; mentions that among the Greeks and Wallachians of Epirus and Thessaly elin means “uriaşi, păgâni,” approximately the same thing as jidovi among the Daco-Romans. It is the same among Sarakatšani, where Linδις = ΄Ελλήνιδες; see Hoeg, Les Saracatsans, 1:53; it means “a race of men highly superior to those living nowadays.” As for the m instead of the n in the Slavic form Elimi or Ilmi, we could evoke the name of the ancient ΄Ελυμοι people, to explain the changes, attached precisely to ancient Macedonia.

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As the Romance peoples are not direct descendants of the Romans and the various Romanized peoples under their rule, but rather a mixture of different Germanic tribes and Romanized peoples, the same can be stated regarding modern Greeks, who absorbed various Balkan elements under Byzantine and Turkish domination. The task of disentangling the constitutive elements in the formation of modern Greece falls on Balkanology. Byzantium by itself, considering its influence on Balkan peoples, is one of the most significant chapters of our studies. They are followed by the Turks. Their deeds in the Balkans constitute one of the most alluring problems of our studies. Despite their lengthy, four-centuries-long domination of the Peninsula, their unifying tendencies were not identical with those of Alexander the Great or the Romans. It would be misleading to believe that they gave the Peninsula its name only.28 Driven to victories by fierce religious enthusiasm, the Turks left a mark behind them that resembles the Arabic influence on the Iberian Peninsula. If one compares, even superficially, the vast catalogue of Arabic elements in Catalan, Castilian, and in Portuguese with the oriental elements introduced in all Balkan languages by the Turks, one gets the impression that the same spiritual feature is the basis of their victories. Both in Iberia and in the Balkans, it is Islam that brings an oriental-style urbanism, thereby teaching a new way of life to the populations there. As opposed to the Romans’, and then Christianity’s influence, Turkish occupation never required the entire population’s participation in the new way of life introduced by Islam. One could expand on the subject of comparing Islam’s influence on the two European peninsulas; I shall merely comment on this as a linguist. A surprising aspect when comparing oriental words in Ibero-Latin and in Balkan languages is that they quite often register in the same semantic category.29 Examining the Turkish element in Balkan languages, however, often holds interesting Balkan analogies. The Turks, in their turn, also owe many of the features that shaped the construction of their empire to Balkan peo28 In Turkish balkan means “mountain.” As toponym I have often encountered it near Skopje. See my study above, which will appear shortly in Glasnik Skopskog naučnog društva, 13. 29 For example, see the indeclinable word used in Bosnian: filan-falan “someone” and especially fulano, meaning the same, in Meyer-Lübke, Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., no. 3553.

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ples. The Serbo-Croatians and others, for instance, provided them not only with scholars, but also with significant statesmen and great warriors. Determining these aspects is the task of Balkan history. One may, thus, determine a rather high percentage of words of a sentimental and amorous nature borrowed from Turkish in Serbo-Croatian.30 Yet, the same feature may be observed when examining the Slavic element in Romanian, where, for example, the Latin word amare disappeared in all dialects, being replaced by the Slavic iubi early on. This borrowing might well be traced back to primitive Romanian. In order to explain this Balkan analogy, one has to take into account the power of love songs. In the Slavic parts of the Balkans, one may observe that numerous linguistic phenomena spread through popular poetry. Among the Romanians, Slavic love songs rendered the Latin verb amare obsolete. Among the Slavs,31 Turkish love songs introduced a sentimental vocabulary. Balkanology will not only examine what factors the Turks introduced in the Balkans and in what way they replaced Byzantium; it shall also seek to show the Balkan peoples’ attitude towards them. This was not always the same attitude. The Greeks, Aromanians, and Albanians managed to become accustomed to the new conditions far better than the Slavs. During the entire Turkish occupation, the Slavs experienced involution instead of evolution, whereas the above-mentioned peoples benefited from their new masters. The Southern Slavs returned to the system of extended families during their domination, while the Greeks and Aromanians became tradesmen. Merely a small feudal segment of Bosnian and Bulgarian Slavs adopted Islam while staying true to the Slavic language. The Slavs opposed the Turkish regime by emigrating on a far more extensive scale than was the case with Albanians or Greeks. It is interesting to note that even among the Slavs who remained Christian, and indeed among Greeks, there is a large number of originally Turkish family names.32 Concomitantly, and remarkably, a considerable number 30 See Bosnian sevdah in the diction: Od sevdaha goreg jada nema “there is no pain like pain caused by love” where the imperfect verb sevdi(sa)ti in the other diction Sevdiso je i begeniso je: “He has fallen in love and has found great pleasure” stems from. 31 These songs are called in Bosnian sevdalinke, derived in Slavic from Turkish sevdalı. 32 See Bosnia, where, among Orthodox Yugoslavian people, as well as among Catholics, family names are often of Turkish origin, such as Bulut (Catholic), Pašalić (Catholic), Avdalović (Orthodox), Uzunović (Orthodox), in Slavonia Čaldarević (see in Niš Čavdarević, in Greece Τσυλδύρις), in Lika Japùndžić,

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of originally Turkish words appeared in their languages.33 Defining and explaining such features is the task of Balkanology. The Fields of Balkanology

Defining Balkanology as a science based on inter-Balkanic comparison is, however, not sufficient. Comparison in itself is not a widely used method in science. It does not tell everything. One must identify the fields of Balkanology where this method may be applied. Firstly, let us consider all spiritual sciences dealing with Balkan subjects: history to begin with. In a Balkanological sense, history shall not only study inter-Balkanic links, reciprocal influences that can be proved, and the documents at hand, but also analogies and differences one may observe in the evolution of various Balkan peoples. The political history of the Balkans should also not be examined in an isolated fashion based on individual states. The creation of states from one regime to the next, the history of parliamentary parties and political administration, etc.; all provide sufficient analogies for using the comparative method. The history of Europe’s attitude towards these states is the same. This method may be applied concerning cultural history, especially since the Balkans actually represent a unity in this respect. Amongst the historical branches, ecclesiastical history also allows the usage of an inter-Balkanic point of view. Indeed, the Balkan religions encompass a number of peoples. The discrepancy in this case appears in the national Churches stemming from Byzantine Christianity. It is in these areas that the Popes made a significant concession to the Slavic language in the liturgy. Examining the different Balkan peoples’ approach to Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Islam is another important aim of Balkanology. Yet another important object of Balkanology is assessing the contribution of religion to the formation of differences in mentality. In this field, the linguist shall Kasúmović, etc. If such features are to be found en masse among Muslim Slavs, notably in Bosnia and Herzegovina, (such as Ðonlagić from Turkish genüllüler agasi, Džümhur, Hajlarahović, Beglerović, or taken from place names like Maglajlić, Udvarlić etc.) that is entirely natural. 33 See Bosnian burazer “brother.”

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have the opportunity to point to the presence of Christian terminology of Latin origin even among Orthodox Slavs.34 We have stated above that history is precisely the field where the importance of the inter-Balkanic point of view came to be understood. Only in the field of linguistics, however, did the idea arise of binding the list of inter-Balkanic links together in one book. We owe this book to the Danish scholar Kristian Sandfeld,35 who methodically completed what Kopitar and Miklosich had only prophesied. Nothing of a similar nature exists in other fields of Balkanology. Consequently, linguistics serves as a model to the other national sciences of the Balkans, notably to folklore and written records. The tasks of the Balkanologist linguist do not stop at recording links. He has to establish features or “laws” that determine the nature of borrowing in these regions, even though they are partly the same as everywhere else. These features may acquire special colors here due to the perpetual symbiosis of the peoples. Four “laws” concerning loan words may be formed here. Firstly, civilizational expressions are borrowed. The law of civilization is thus the first one.36 The law of prestige is no less significant here than elsewhere; this is the second one.37 The third law, that of linguistic symbiosis, is especially significant in the Balkans.38 Furthermore, there is the law of the same po34 See St. Komanski, “Lehnwörter lateinischen Ursprungs in Bulgarischen,” in 15. Jahresbericht des inst. für rum. Sprache (Leipzig, 1909), 89–134. 35 K. Sandfeld, Linguistique balkanique (Paris, 1930); the French edition is a revised version of his Danish book entitled Balkanfilologien (Copenhagen, 1926). In this short outline of Balkan problems, we did not wish to provide a biased historical application of the Balkan viewpoint in research touching the issue of Balkan languages. Had we wished to do so, we would have insisted on using the work of the first Balkanologist, Vuk Karadžić, who, apart from what he did for the Serbo-Croatian language and folklore, also noted Bulgarian linguistic idiosyncrasies and collected Albanian national songs. For similar reasons we have not mentioned the important bases introduced to Balkanology by the great Slavist Miklosich. 36 The oriental cuisine introduced by the Turks in Balkan towns lent the Balkan peoples words connected to culinary arts, a few of which we referred to in note 14. The Ottoman law in force lent oft-used expressions like mèra, baltàtik, nìćah, šèfia, šefìluk, etc. to Bosnian. A history of Eastern civilization introduced to the Balkans by the long Ottoman occupation, a history that found its eloquent expression in Balkan loan words, remains to be written. 37 See the interesting study of Mr. Bobchev on Bulgarian customary law during the Ottoman era, a study we are proud to be publishing here. The master scholar of Slavic history and law shows us how the Slavic word običaj was ejected in Bulgarian by the word adet. The prestige of the official language caused the Bosnians’ forgetting the Slavic word sоsedъ for the benefit of kòmšija. 38 The adoption of the Greek conjunction oti by the Slavic population of Central Balkan, as well as the introduction of several syntactical loan expressions in the common language (such as imaš li videno in

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litical and social conditions, which, as the fourth one, creates similar, often non-loan constructions in syntax.39 Linguistic communities living in the same sociological conditions produce the same linguistic types on a different basis.40 This interesting feature may be observed most sharply precisely in the Balkans. We will see that this law also plays an important role in Balkan vocabulary. Beside these features, one must thoroughly establish what each Balkan language encompasses regarding the elements they owe to these four above-mentioned factors. Not only should one Balkan language’s influence on another be established, but also specific Balkan features characterizing a Balkan union41 from the linguistic point of view. This ought to be especially emphasized. Apart from these demands in theories concerning the history of Balkan languages, Balkanology will have purely practical tasks, such as the following: a) establishing a geographical scale of Balkanisms, a task which can only be realized when a linguistic Atlas of the Balkans has been established; b) examining bilingualism in those regions of the Balkans where it still exists, for instance in Albania, the Banovina of Vardar, and the Pindus,42 etc.; c) writing a kind of Balkan Hexaglosson Dictionarium, that is to say reviving the idea of the Epirote Daniil of Moscopole,43 who sought to provide the population of his country with a lexicon encompassing four languages. A similar dictionary would, in turn, naturally simplify Balkan studies. The scientific column of our Journal is organized for Balkan linguistics as well as for any other science, which enters the field of Balkanology, with the aim of periodically enlightening the reader regarding a) our actual

39 40 41 42 43

the same regions, see Skok in Južnoslovenski Filolog, 12:111–14), furthermore, the disappearance of declensions in Bulgarian, and the creation of the post-positive article in the same language etc. cannot be explained in any other manner than regarding these phenomena as stemming from a center where a strong linguistic symbiosis was in existence. The origin of the slightly palatal pronunciation of n, l apparent among the Slavs, Greeks, Wallachians and Albanians of the same region is the same. See our essay on pljačka in the next issue of our journal. See below the rather evocative article of Mr. Meillet, who wished to express his interest in our journal through these few lines, for which we are greatly indebted to him. There are similar “linguistic unions” formed by languages of various sources in numerous other regions in the world. Mr. Meillet even refers to the same tonality of the sentence used in Central European languages, see below. B. Récatas, L’état actuel du bilinguisme chez les Macédo-Roumains du Pinde et le rôle de la femme dans la langue (Paris, 1934). V. A. Pogorelov, ”Daniloviyat chetireezichnik,” Sbornik na Balg. akademiya na naukite 17 (1925): 20–42.

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knowledge of the various Balkan languages; b) what Balkan features each language incorporates; c) what features Balkan languages borrowed from one another. Inter-Balkanic links are even more striking with regard to folklore44 rather than linguistics. Nevertheless, a volume similar to Mr. Sandfeld’s is missing from this field. What seems to me the most urgent task is to extend Mr. Murko’s and Mr. Gesemann’s research on the Serbo-Croatian regions to all Balkan national poetry in order to understand the current state of epic poetry. Whatever remained of actual Turkish folklore and the Balkan jürüks’45 folklore, the Turkish songs in Prizren, etc., is threatened with quick extinction if we do not start recording them. Our scientific column dedicated to folklore shall include three points: a) information provided by Balkan peoples regarding the current state of our understanding; b) the Balkan features each of them encompasses; and c) mutual influences. The economic development of Balkan countries also provides significant analogies. The plough of the Vardar valley is not only a Slavic, but also an Albanian characteristic. The economy of different Balkan regions, thus, also indicates a comparative study. If one decides to examine Slavic terminology juxtaposed with the Romanian and the Albanian economic and social organization, one may recognize intimate economic links uniting these peoples in the Middle Ages. Our scientific column concerning this subject will aim at understanding a) modern tendencies of economic evolution of each Balkan people; b) inter-Balkanic links regarding economic history; and c) modern economic links. Furthermore, Balkan similarities appear in a field where one would expect to see the least features enlisted given the spiritual dissociation of modern Balkan intellectuals. It is the field of written records, learned as opposed to popular literature, where Balkanisms swarm. Let us see some issues concerning Balkan comparative literature. Firstly, there is the romantic Balkan movement provoked by insurgencies against the Turks, a movement, which shall be understandable once we have applied the comparative method. The Turks became literary subjects even in Balkan countries where the peoples were not under their domina44 Including, obviously, musical folklore. 45 Nomadic population of Turkic origin in the Balkans and Anatolia.

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tion such as Croatia, Dalmatia, etc. The literary historian of the Balkans shall study the different aspects that this romanticism brought to Balkan literatures. The peasantry as a literary genre is a special feature of Balkan literatures. The Balkan comparative scholar is required to follow its vicissitudes and conditions in all these literatures. Certain literary types are especially characteristic of these literatures, such as the tsintsar (Aromanian) type, Kir Janja of Jovan Sterija Popović; Baj Ganju of Aleko Konstantinov; Vukadin of Stevan Sremac, etc. It is the Balkanologist’s task to instruct us regarding what Balkan literatures encompass in these types. Meanwhile, a rather interesting problem concerning Balkan comparative literature arises, namely the introduction of folklore into academic literature. Popular songs, which constitute not only the global reputation of the Serbo-Croatians, but also form the pride of other Balkan nations, have been imitated among the Serbo-Croatians in written literature since Kačić Miošić in the eighteenth century or even before. Similarly, among the Romanians national folklore has been encompassed in written literature since the Junimea of Iași, etc. Cvijić already observed that Balkan folklore is a living creature; consequently, all these peoples can be considered young. Academic literature often creates an aesthetic principle from this feature even today. The reason for this is that folklore plays a different role here than it does in countries outside of the Balkans. European literatures, French drama, for instance, also exercise permanent influence on the Balkans. The Balkanologist will also research the different attitudes of Balkan literatures toward the literary movements of non-Balkan countries. The scientific column organized around this subject by our journal will encompass periodical reports on the following: a) quick pieces of information on current tendencies and the contemporary state of Balkan literature; b) inter-Balkanic literary links; c) reports on the specific Balkan features concerning literary topics and Balkan types; and d) links to Balkan folklore. The fact that modern law, as well as that of the past, should be liable to comparative studies is certain. A linguist, however, does not have competence to talk about this. Juridical institutions of Balkan peoples are undoubtedly among the most important subjects of Balkan studies. As for linguistics, I humbly insist on mentioning here the juridical terms of mixed 353

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Greek, Slavic, and Latin origin in the maritime towns of the Byzantine province of Dalmatia in order to demonstrate the potential in studying the legal profession from an inter-Balkanic perspective. Disclosing the specifically Balkan features and inter-Balkanic bonds of painting, art, architecture, etc. is also the task of competent Balkanologists. Our journal will organize a scientific column providing information on the latest publications. It is an indisputable fact that the inter-Balkanic comparative method can beneficially be applied in sciences studying humanity, such as anthropology, demography, statistics, etc., so it is needless to insist on this. Among natural sciences there is a rather specific field in which the interBalkanic viewpoint has had the most significant use. This field is human geography, designed on the basis of Cvijić’s work and applied in the study of the Balkan human environment. It is to Cvijić’s credit that not only the psychological differences and characters of Balkan settlements are researched, but also the habitat, the soil, and economic conditions. It would be beneficial to press the scientific organizations of the Balkans to conduct these particularly interesting studies of our Peninsula together. Other Balkanological sciences could profit from this immensely. We actually did witness Mr. Gesemann applying Cvijić’s method in Serbo-Croatian literary history.46 This attempt seems to have been appreciated in subsequent works of the same genre. There is one more field where the Balkanologist may use inter-Balkanic comparisons in a most valuable fashion; this is the field of the Balkans’ relations with Europe. The task of fighting against deep-rooted prejudices in public opinion also falls within the Balkanologist’s competence. In Europe, Balkan countries are generally seen as regions without civilization, where constant rebellions prevail. The Balkan Peninsula, in the eyes of Europe, seems like a powder keg. It is usually forgotten that this Peninsula, due to its valuable position rendering it able to form close ties with two continents, played the significant role of the homemaker of civilization and served as a cultural intermediary. The cause of this contempt towards the Balkans is well known. It was the Ottoman Empire’s decadence and the religious schism between East and West that nourished this prejudice in European public opinion. The 46 G. Gesemann, “Die serbokroatische Literatur,” in Hand- der Literaturwissenschaft (Potsdam, 1930).

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fact that the civilization transmitted from the Aegean to Greece continued to evolve here is ignored. Whatever Byzantium created and whatever other Balkan peoples took over is the oeuvre of the Balkans. Nevertheless, a general contempt towards all things emerging from the Balkans is one of the characteristics of the typical European intellectual. The evolution will go along the same lines as that of the European opinion on Byzantine civilization and on the Middle Ages. Byzantinology restored the honor of a civilization disdained by Western public opinion due to religious differences. These sciences stem from the European Romantic Movement, such as Romance, German, and Slavic Studies, which had to fight the Voltairian prejudice towards the Middle Ages. Balkanology shall achieve the same. It will show how the Peninsula contributed to the common good of world civilization. The Balkanologist will not only study what influence Europe, with its many states, had on the Balkans, indicating the links between Balkan and non-Balkan states, but also the ways this Peninsula contributed to the creation of a common culture over the centuries, by examining its role as mediator between East and West, between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, and by studying what it retained from ancient Eastern civilizations as well as what it rendered accessible to Europe through its own merits. […] Sources of Balkanology and its Use

Stemming from these three sources: history as seen from Jireček’s perspective, practical human geography according to Cvijić, and linguistics studied in Sandfeld’s fashion, Balkanology seems like an eminently comparative science. It basically is nothing more than a system of inter-Balkanic comparison, the principal aim of which is to reveal, understand, and define Balkan reality as it is, through time and space, in different fields of human action. Knowing what happens in the Balkans and what its typical features are is its main aspiration. As with all human sciences, it also has two faces: a theoretical and a practical one. As a theoretical science, it wishes to expand our knowledge on reciprocal ties between Balkan peoples and to update the intimate laws, 355

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which have been and will be ruling their development and their lives. As a practical science with multiple ties with the social sciences, Balkanology also has a moral scope. It acts upon the Balkan mentality, allowing statesmen to understand the Balkan man, his environment, the social and natural conditions of his life, and the way he thinks and feels, while teaching Balkan communities to understand one another, to get along, and to cooperate. In case we wanted to look for analogies to Balkanology in certain existing branches of the sciences, we would quickly see that the research material is similar to Byzantinology or to Egyptology in that the fields of all these sciences are clearly limited by a given state, the numerous and various vicissitudes of which we seek to clarify. Furthermore, we shall find analogies with classical philology, as it seeks to study the life of the ancient Greeks and Romans as a whole. Just as it is impossible nowadays for a man to embrace the entire stretch of these sciences, no single man will be able to tackle all the enormous fields that allow us to make inter-Balkanic comparisons. From now on, a division of labor is effective, a division that will permit the collection, classification, and coordination of the results achieved by the various national sciences concerning the Balkans. The aim of our journal is to serve as a humble organ for international scholars, a place where they may publish the results of their Balkan research. Whereas Balkanology, regarding its materials, may be too large for one man to develop, its method is rather simple. It is based on the comparative method in the study of languages, popular beliefs, religions, races, historical events, societies, etc., which spread everywhere during the nineteenth century. Balkanology merely applies an already approved method for observing how life flows on a peninsula. We are often wrong in considering the Balkan reality too complicated due to the vast number of languages spoken here. This has been somewhat exaggerated. As for the languages, there are no more than five, and SerboCroatian and Bulgarian are mutually understood. Counting, however, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian as two distinct languages, the complexity of the Balkans is barely the double of the Iberian Peninsula’s, which is far smaller than the Balkans, marked by the formation of literature and specific mentalities in four languages (Catalan, Castilian, Portuguese, and Basque). 356

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This, however, is not all. Modern linguistics requires not only the study of words from a linguistic point of view, but also the profound study of entities represented by words. Wörter und Sachen, the title of one of the journals dedicated to these double studies, is also the motto of contemporary linguistics. Balkanology, studying Balkan reality in all its forms, wishes to follow this stream of modern science.

[Translated by Anna Mártonfi]

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The Effect of the War in Southeastern Europe s o u r c e

David Mitrany, The Effect of the War in Southeastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), Chapter 1, “The Regional Background,” 3–26.

David Mitrany (1888–1975) was a Romanian-Jewish-born, British political theorist. He left Romania in 1908 to study in Hamburg and then in London,

where he enrolled at the London School of Economics. He worked for the British government during World War I and continued as international affairs advisor to the Labour Party. Mitrany was a visiting professor at Harvard University in 1931, and starting in 1933 joined the faculty of Princeton University’s

Institute of Advanced Study. Following public service in the United Kingdom during World War II, he returned to Princeton. Mitrany was also active in journalism and acted as a political consultant. Although his main field was political science, Mitrany typically positioned his research in historical perspective.

His main theoretical concern was how to achieve an international system that would foster cooperation instead of hardening antagonism. Mitrany’s theory

of functionalism in international relations highlighted the effective use of international institutions devoted to specific issues of economic or political cooperation instead of advocating for supra-national federalism or unions just

for the sake of integration without actually analyzing their sustainability and mutual advantages. His ideas stemmed, to a large extent, from his life-long

interest in the social and political problems of Southeast Europe and particularly the legacies of the imperial past and peasant societies.

This chapter, which comes from his book, The Effect of the War in South

Eastern Europe, is a historical outline of the forthcoming analysis of how the Great War impacted the Balkans and the lands of former Austria–Hungary. It builds on a long-term historical comparison of the forms of governance and state building in the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in order to understand

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the reasons for their decline and subsequent collapse. As Mitrany argues, nei-

ther of the two composite states had geographical unity. For him, however, this was not a decisive factor in their collapse. He focuses instead on governance, and concludes that neither of the two imperial elites was successful in creating political unity from their heterogeneously governed lands, and therefore

they subsequently failed to build modern states. Although the chapter intro-

duces a historical argument, comparative history clearly serves the purpose of political criticism. Mitrany’s chief objective is to test whether comparative analysis helps to detect the malfunctions of government and, thus, to establish adequate ways of building functioning political institutions.

· The Land and the Peasant in Romania: The War and Agrarian Reform, 1917–1921 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1930); The Progress of International Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933); The Effect of the War in South Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936); Marx against the Peasant: A Study in Social Dogmatism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951); The Functional Theory of Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975). secondary literature · Dorothy Anderson, “David Mitrany (1888–1975): An Appreciation of His Life and Work,” Review of International Studies 24, no. 4 (October 1998): 577–92. main works

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he region with which this study deals forms roughly the stage on which has been played the drama discreetly known to historians as the Eastern Question. In simple practical terms it was a question of who should inherit the European possessions of the slowly but irretrievably decaying Ottoman Empire. In recent years those possessions had been confined within the Balkan Peninsula. But for reasons both of geography and of population, the political problems of the Peninsula were intertwined with those in the basin of the Middle Danube; so that the political mercury rose and fell alike in the two regions in response to the same historic pressure. This justifies in a way the seemingly wilful choice of the geographical limits within which this study is set. No modern student could fail, indeed, to perceive the historical affinity of those regions, or indeed to note, as predestined, the bond between the Ottoman and the Hapsburg Empires. Did not the peak of Ottoman prowess in Europe—the victory at Mohács—give the Hapsburgs their chance to complete the building of an empire? And has not the final exit of Ottoman 360

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power from Europe fallen in the same hour as the collapse of its century-old antagonist? As long as state limits were set by the military strength or the diplomatic skill of dynasties, the shrinking of one of the two empires inevitably helped the other to expand. Had the Eastern Question been solved a hundred years ago or so, at the time of the Holy Alliance, the result, beyond doubt, would have been the sharing of the Turkish heritage between AustriaHungary and Russia, with certain gifts for England and possibly France. But the jealousies of the Powers held up the final act, and in the meanwhile the power of decision passed from the dynasties to the peoples whom they ruled. During the last century the idea of popular government found its way also into Southeastern Europe. It arrived there belatedly, but as a consequence powerfully mated to the new sense of nationalism; and the union of the two ideas gave birth to forces which sharply changed the trend of the Eastern Question. Hence, when it was settled at last, after 1918, not only was the Turkish heritage divided up among a number of small and formerly disdained claimants, but they also shared among themselves the mutilated body of one of the traditional legatees as well as sundry limbs of the other. But the end of the Eastern Question, as it made itself felt in the nineteenth century, has not disposed of the Danubian problem. The problem which statesmen have to face in this region is, in fact, 250 years old. One may say, in a general way and from a political point of view, that while modern European history is the story of the creation of national states, the story of the Danubian basin is essentially a chronicle of the failure of that process in that particular region. The Hapsburgs successfully removed the first obstacle to national consolidation by checking the advance of the Turks, but after that achievement they failed in their next—the real—task. They never succeeded in welding the various territories and peoples whom they ruled into a political society. Again, the war effort of the Allies was successful in that it broke the shackles that bound so many Danubian nations unfairly together, but their peace settlement failed to provide a new basis which would permit those nations to live peaceably side by side. The Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires were formed during the same period which saw the birth of the great Western states in Europe. Frontiers have fluctuated as greatly in one group as in the other, but in both the centers of gravitation remained stable. If, nevertheless, the progress of the two groups has been so uneven, that is because of differences which reached to 361

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the very roots of their nature. France and England, as later Germany and Italy, consolidated compact territories settled by kindred peoples. In their case the emergent current of nationality helped, therefore, to round up these related elements and to bind them more closely. In Central and Southeastern Europe the very same current burst asunder the structure of the Danubian and Balkan Empires, which, though big and powerful, were loosely put together from odd pieces, gathered here and there—like the towers raised by the Frank invaders upon some of the Greek islands out of loose and miscellaneous blocks of marble, picked from any handy ancient buildings. The structure of the two empires was indeed the more brittle the more it towered over the Western national states. That disjointed trend of statebuilding in Central and Eastern Europe was inherent in the geographical nature of the region. The Central European tract came historically into prominence only during the Middle Ages. Ancient civilization had touched it but little. From the two ends of the mountain barrier, Massilia and Olbia—precursor of Odessa—the Greeks had made weak commercial attempts toward the center of the Continent. More enterprising, the Romans were the first to surmount the Alps. On the other side of the Danube they ruled the Rhenish mountains for a long time, as they ruled Transylvania and the Rumanian lowlands for 150 years. Only the early death of Marcus Aurelius prevented the subjugation of Bohemia. This put a stop to the Roman advance, and allowed the Germanic tribes to gather strength and throw back the Roman power and thus lay the foundations of the Central European group of states. But that effort weakened the strength of the Germanic tribes; in their turn they had to allow the Slav tribes to settle in the eastern lowlands and the Bohemian plain, while the Magyars invaded the Pannonian plain. The rivalry of the Slav and Germanic groups forms the main thread throughout the history of the Danubian basin, as indeed of the whole of Eastern Europe. Geography and Politics in the Balkans

That rivalry was not merely local, in the marches where the settlements touched upon each other. If anything it was more intense along the lines of expansion, and these were determined by the character of the other part of the region we are discussing. On a cursory view it has been customary 362

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to look upon the Balkan Peninsula as a geographical unit, as compact and well defined as the Iberian Peninsula. In truth the first presents a composite picture, with parts and features detached from neighboring systems. Unlike the Italian and Iberian Peninsulas, the Balkan Peninsula is not separated from the Continent by high mountains; rather is it linked to it through the Danube. Similarly, at its eastern end the Bosphorus and the Straits are no more than parts of a submerged valley, forming stepping stones to Asia with their lowest widths of 600 and 1,200 meters. In reality Europe stops not at Constantinople but in the steppe region before it, the city itself having little relation to the northern part of the Peninsula on which it stands. Finally, though on the western side the channel is more formidable, yet it offers an easy passage across, with its 90 kilometers between Valona and Otranto and 135 kilometers between Valona and Brindisi. While the Balkan Peninsula is thus closely related to and connected with the neighboring regions, it displays another contrary feature which has been politically of no less consequence. The Peninsula lacks namely a natural center of its own, round which a great state might crystallize. Its history shows plainly that the Peninsula’s apparent geographical unity was not such as to favor a uniform demographic and political evolution. For though inhabited by two very able groups of peoples—the Thracians and the Illyrians—who have been the primary racial stock of all the Balkan populations, the Peninsula was never able to mold itself into a unity and play in history a great part, like the neighboring Roman Peninsula. Neither the Byzantine nor the Ottoman power found ways and means of overcoming those geographical drawbacks. Finally, while poorly insulated from other near centers of evolution and lacking a natural center of its own, the Peninsula is further characterized by the broad diverging highways which cut through its very heart. Far from being, therefore, a well-defined unit of settlement, it forms rather a natural passage between Europe and Asia—a region of what has been aptly called lands of the overlap. Moreover, it has connected Europe with the fertile and civilized parts of Asia—Phoenicia, India, Egypt, and Arabia—whereas the northern passage through Russia linked Europe to the barren and backward steppe. This circumstance perhaps helps to explain why only barbarian hordes have crossed through Russia into Europe, while the great currents which have carved the bed of European civilization have flowed through Asia Minor and the Agean. 363

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The effect of these geographical features was heightened by the great river which dominates the region. The Danube is the only great European river flowing from west to east. All the others run in groups, and each group runs more or less in the same direction to the same sea. The Danube has less to do with the sea and is more cut off from sea outlets by mountain harriers than any other of the great rivers. It is a continental waterway, linking the basins of a chain of countries with each other. As a highway the Danube debouches into the two corridors which—through the Morava valley and Salonica, and through the Sofia basin and Stambul—give access to the Eastern lands and seas. Thus, the whole complex forms a system of contact and passage which has made invasion by alien peoples easy and made the fate of even small states uncertain. Population and politics bear clearly the mark of that ambiguous geographical structure. Unlike the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas, the Balkan is not the home of self-contained nationalities and states. Its peoples have always thrown kindred offshoots beyond those blurred physical boundaries, so that their interests have never lain wholly within the Peninsula. The Danube has played its part in that mingling of peoples, acting as a kind of Germanic corridor which has prevented the junction of the northern with the southern Slavs. As a consequence, within an area of some 190,000 square miles—that is, considerably less than Spain—the Balkans harbored six native races, with enclaves of a few others, three creeds, and an excommunicated Church. All the facts of history show that the interior of the Peninsula was valued chiefly as a key to the lands beyond it. The Roman military roads and strong points bear witness to that. Already the Via Egnatia was but the expression of Rome’s eastward bent. It led on to Armenia and Persia, running virtually west to east, with the obvious aim of putting Rome into contact with the East. Almost up to the present time roads—and later railways, like the famed Berlin-Bagdad scheme—were in the same way meant to cross the Peninsula rather than to develop it from within. Its historical significance has been, for the most part, that, since Roman times at least, it has lain athwart important world routes. Even now the main economic function of the modern routes is to link up the states of Central Europe with the Aegean and the East, with markets for industrial products and with sources of raw materials. Geographical conditions have been in a sense nearly as step-motherly for the Hapsburg Empire. For if state-building has been made difficult by the 364

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mixture of peoples, that mixture was itself in the first instance the by-product of geography. Take a map of Europe and hold it at arm’s length, so as to be able to take in the main features of the southern half of the Continent, and you will at once become aware that the Danube, with its valleys, forms a mighty corridor from west to east; and not only from the west to the east of Europe, but also from the western to the eastern continents. This becomes clearer if one disregards the river’s break through the Carpathians at the Iron Gates and follows with one’s eye what would otherwise have been its obvious course. After striking the obstacle of the mountains, the Danube would normally have skirted the Balkan range, and flowed down the valley that is now followed by the great transcontinental railway to Constantinople. As it was, neither the lands of the Hapsburg Empire nor the European possessions of the Sultans formed compact regions convenient for the shelter of a large unitary state. Both were instead strung along the corridor which has provided a passage for innumerable invasions and migrations, both eastward and westward, each movement leaving straggling remnants here and there in its wake. The Eastern Question

As empires with dynamic aims, both Turkey and Austria-Hungary were drawn toward the Balkan Peninsula by the magnetism of its two great furrows, with their contained highways. The situation was rendered more complex with the advent of a third competitor. As early as the sixteenth century increase of population and the desire for intercourse caused Russia, which was cut off from every sea, to begin the search for outlets. By the end of the seventeenth century she had turned from East to West, from Asia to Europe, and had planted herself on the Baltic and the Black Sea. The rise of Russia in the eighteenth century was perhaps the chief change in the political progress of Europe. It added a state of enormous potential strength to the European system. Moreover, for reasons similar to those at work in the Balkans, Russia was not divided from her neighbors by clear-cut geographical and ethnographical limits. On the other hand, she was connected with some of them through religious bonds, and was therefore always pressing on their eastern frontiers. The advent of Russia as a European power almost coincided with the zenith of Ottoman power. From 1672 onward Austria 365

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and Russia pressed the Turks back, and their competitive co-operation for liquidating the Sultan’s European titles gave birth to the Eastern Question. After the peace of Vasvár, in 1664, Austria surrendered no more territory to the Turks but, on the contrary, repeatedly got something from them. Russia’s swift conquests in Southeastern Europe at the end of the eighteenth century gave her more land than she could occupy. Colonists had to be brought from many parts; that has left those parts with their motley national aspect and has added still more colors to the map of the region. Thus neither geography nor, as a result, nationality, had offered a natural halting line to the advance of the two empires as long as the lands to the south were held by the declining Ottoman power. During the formative period of the three empires the belt along the lower valley of the Danube continued to be a line of division, a meeting line of the political movements from north and south, as it had been of old. Greek civilization had not penetrated beyond it, and even adventurous Rome had found the Danube belt safer as a frontier than as a province. With the Middle Ages the direction of pressure changed, but the line of pressure remained the same. The Turks in their turn had no difficulty in conquering all that in below the Danube, but never secured a firm footing to the north of it. Europe’s new civilization, the Renaissance, halted like the old on the Lower Danube. Austria-Hungary had organized along that belt a military confine, settled with Teutonic Knights and with endowed and autonomous frontier regiments, as a protection against danger from the south; and she and Russia may be said to have been secure in their power as long as they refrained from crossing that fatal valley. In short, the Danube belt has been at all times an axle of pressure and division—accepted and treated as such until recent times, when economic expansion could not resist following in the wake and picking up the straggling provinces of the retreating Ottoman Empire The Brittle Nature of the Eastern Empires

Largely on account of that geographical and demographic fluidity no state in the modern Western sense took shape on either side of the Danube until recently. Chaotic conditions at the end of that vague period known as the Middle Ages enabled Hapsburgs and Ottomans to build up—or rather to accu366

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mulate—two empires, out of disparate regions and peoples. Yet both empires may be said to have grown from seed accidentally dropped upon the course of Southeastern European history, rather than from the deliberate tilling of its furrows. All the main events that have marked the modern stretch of that history bear the sign of having fallen from the lap of capricious gods. Of the three empires concerned, one had some sort of purpose, in the roving dynastic ambitions of the Hapsburgs. The springs of its progress have been shifting and personal, but at least it pursued some conscious aim, which drew it upon the Southeastern highways. The other two empires found themselves there unexpectedly and without premeditation. They were, in fact, rashly called there to clear the way for that political progress which their presence did so much to check afterward. The Osmanli Turks were first brought across the Bosphorus as mercenaries by contending claimants to the throne of Byzance. They were almost forced by the terms of their contract to camp there instead of returning to their Anatolian home between two campaigns; and their presence was openly preferred to that of the Christian “Latins.” On the eve of the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans, the first minister of the Eastern Roman Empire was heard to declare, as Gibbon avers, “that he had rather behold in Constantinople the turban of Mahomet than the Pope’s tiara or a cardinal’s hat.” Later the Turks were welcomed also by the Balkan peoples, as restorers of the peace and order which those small peoples needed for their political consolidation. Similarly, the Muscovite rulers first crossed the Dniester in the seventeenth century in response to the appeal of the learned Prince of Moldavia, Demetrius Cantemir—and later to the appeal of the Balkan peoples—to protect these small Christian neighbors against Turkish oppression. The agreement signed with Cantemir, as well as the evidence of contemporary writers, shows that it was a campaign for assistance and not for conquest. Neither Turks nor Russians attempted on these first occasions to impose conditions securing them rights of conquest. They were willing to go as they had come. Their political centers of gravitation lay elsewhere. If ultimately the conditions of the time and of the region caused the newcomers “half to be forced, half to succumb” into staying and ruling, they never grew deeper roots. The end of the imperial era in Southeastern Europe sees them deliberately withdrawing to the lands whence they had come at its beginning. 367

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The Character of the Ottoman Empire

While thus geographical conditions offer a guide to the nature and growth of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires—with the former lands of which we are specially concerned—only a grasp of the peculiar character of the two empires can help us to a reasonable explanation of the effects which the World War has had in the Danube basin. To begin with the simpler problem of the Ottoman Empire: that Empire issued from a chain of awkward incidents into which, at any rate at first, the Turks were indeed beguiled. Induced to cross into Europe and to encamp there, for the convenience of their Byzantine employers, the Turks very soon came in conflict with the restless local potentates. Their military pride was too great to allow them to retreat. They subdued the local chieftains, and the welcome of the sorely ill-used populations led them to assume supreme power. At first this was purely nominal. In return for protection the Turks merely claimed the customary tithe and a small tribute. For the rest, they maintained the form and even the position of the subject states; for while Byzance had all the pomp and instruments of power but no territory, the Osmanlis found themselves masters of a vast territory but without the men and the experience for organizing it. But the local princes were not as willing as the peoples to have a settled existence. They harassed their Ottoman suzerain until retaliation led to the overthrow of the Serbian and Bulgarian States, and to the blotting out of the Byzantine Empire. Even then two anachronistic traits proved the aloofness of the new Empire. It never carried a national or territorial title, but remained merely the heritage of Osman and the private dominion of his successors. And while the Turks were the sovereign masters, real power was exercised in their name by dignitaries raised from among the subject peoples—Greeks, Slavs, Albanians, Armenians, and Jews. Until the middle of the sixteenth century the language of official documents was first Greek and then Slav. Even when the conquered countries were brought fully under the rule of the Porte and made into provinces of the Empire, they were never organized into a state. They continued to be governed autonomously, within their traditional limits, as detached pashalics. The provinces contributed jointly to the needs of the central power; but the central power did not contribute a joint policy or administration for the several provinces. The whole re368

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mained, in fact, a military assemblage of disparate provinces without being welded into one state; for even if the Empire’s constitutional principles were general, their application was so wilful as to make in reality each provincial pasha as much a lawgiver unto himself as China’s tushuns. As the provinces were governed locally with continuously shifting personnel supplied from the center, they enjoyed neither a defined central policy nor a continuous local tradition. So anxious were the conquerors not to be burdened with the task of government that they imposed upon their new subjects the duty of governing themselves. Trading settlements in Constantinople had to undertake, through the capitulations, to make themselves wholly responsible for the government of their community. And in their wish to simplify their own task, and accustomed to identify a people with its religion, the Turks not only spared the Christian churches but sought to improve and widen their jurisdiction. The Patriarch at Constantinople received from the new pagan master powers, temporal and spiritual, over the rum milet far greater than any he had wielded before. Some of the elements which later hampered and disrupted the Ottoman Empire were thus created by the Turks themselves. Their treatment of the Balkan and Mediterranean provinces made them into sources of supply but hardly of strength; and it enabled them in time to fall away without serious shock to their life and government. Still less did the Turks endeavor to create organic ties with the provinces across the Danube. During the several centuries of their domination, for instance, they neither sought converts nor settled colonists in the Rumanian provinces, nor built a single mosque upon their soil. After the withdrawal from Hungary, Turkish policy rather sought to isolate itself against danger from the north. It made the Danube the northern limit of empire, studded with strong points and guarded by military leaders as local governors. In fact, the Empire had always been essentially a military organization—used at first to assist in attack during the period of advance, and then to strengthen defense when the tide had turned toward retreat. One could say indeed that the several provinces did not develop through the nerves and sinews of the State but rather in spite of them. They progressed mainly through contact with the West; and the looser the bonds of empire the freer was that contact, and the speedier therefore the advance. Rumania, for instance, progressed quicker than Serbia, Serbia quicker than Bulgaria, and Bulgaria quicker than Macedonia. 369

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The lack of political cohesion thus went much deeper in the Ottoman than in the Hapsburg Empire. In the first it was in truth deliberate. The Osmanlis came not as a people willing to mix and absorb, but as a dynasty and a ruling military caste which used but did not adopt its new subjects. The economic structure and life of the Ottoman Empire naturally reflected its political looseness and detachment. The discovery of the new routes to America and India was bound to throw into the shadow the old Black Sea ports and the Aegean islands which had lain and prospered along the old trade routes to Asia. But even before that, indeed immediately after their conquest, the Turks had closed the Bosphorus and the Straits and thereby ruined the prosperous trading settlements along the west coast of the Black Sea and the mouth of the Danube. As a military system, Turkish rule was not interested in trade or production, but merely in consumption. In so far as any trade with foreign products persisted it was concentrated almost wholly at Constantinople. For the rest, the old and famous Balkan routes and fairs declined, as the production of the provinces was monopolized for the needs of the army and of the residential towns. Even across the Danube the one thing on which the Turkish authorities insisted in the Rumanian provinces was a monopoly of Rumanian corn, at prices fixed by the Turks, which lasted until 1829. During the long period of Turkish domination domestic industry advanced greatly in the Balkans, but it was carried on almost wholly for local needs and mainly by the Christian inhabitants. When, later, large-scale industry began to be organized, this was done mainly by foreigners, especially by Germans. The contrast with Austria-Hungary is telling. Her industrial progress was more rapid and intense, and the bulk of it was controlled by the dominating nationalities, Austrians and Hungarians. Equally instructive is the contrast between the growth of trade in the two empires. While it declined in the Balkans it grew rapidly north of the Danube, but there it was largely in the hands of Balkan traders—Greeks, Kutzo-Vlachs, Armenians, and Jews from Salonica. The Levant company of Greek traders, which was formed in the seventeenth century and survived until the middle of the nineteenth century, had agents in most towns of Austria-Hungary and especially in Transylvania, where it almost monopolized trade. A company of Bulgarian Catholics, protected by Austria, was trading extensively in Oltenia and the Banat toward the middle of the eighteenth century. In the Bal370

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kans the decay of trade, and later of military activity, caused the old roads to be neglected. More recently Austria-Hungary’s strategic interests led her to oppose any work that would have linked the interior with the Adriatic coast. By comparison with the rule of the old and medieval powers that of the modern powers, therefore, hampered the progress of the Peninsula. Means of communication fell into a barbarous state as compared with what they had been in Roman or medieval times. At the end of the nineteenth century even the two main trans-pensinsular roads retained only a local importance, as links between the administrative compartments which strung themselves along their course. The Serbian lands retained some contact with Central Europe, but for the rest the Balkan Peninsula was effectively closed to foreign intercourse. The Character of the Hapsburg Empire

In the case of the Hapsburg Empire geographical conditions were less disjointed, and the aim of the rulers not negative, as in the Balkans. All the more must success or failure have depended on the ability of the State to adapt itself to changing needs and trends; and the subversive effects of the War must therefore be assumed to be generically related to shortcomings in the make-up of the Empire. As far as geography is concerned, the Empire’s structure was such as to make possible a complete divergence of views among authorities. From the standpoint of river drainage the Empire was clearly not one country but a group of countries, each of which had a geographical unity though the Empire itself had none. Geographically there was something in the fact that the kernel of the Austrian Monarchy belonged to the Danube, Bohemia to the Elbe, Silesia to the Oder, Galicia to the Vistula and Dniester, Southern Tyrol to the Etsch, Gorizia to the Isonzo; while Istria, Dalmatia, and Herzegovina looked upon the Adriatic without having any substantial river connection with it. The Monarchy rested therefore upon seven larger rivers: it is worth noting that it broke up in 1918 into seven states. On the other hand—if one left aside Galicia and Bucovina, which in parts consisted of lowlands belonging physically to the Russian mass—on a bird’s-eye view the Empire appeared powerfully knitted together by the sweeping backbone of 371

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Alps and Carpathians, and by the living nerve of the Danube. “The irregular structure of old Austria,” said Ratzel, “is more organic than the rectangular one of young Kansas.” Other writers—for instance, Sieger—looked upon Austria-Hungary as a perfect “communication unit.” If one left aside Galicia, the Vorarlberg, and the Trentino, the remaining bulk formed, in their view, an interdependent complex, with all the natural lines of communication converging upon the Middle Danube. No other European state possessed such a centripetal valley system, with the Viennese basin as the vital center at the crossing of the main lines. Though in this way closely connected with each other, the several parts could not easily be welded together. The original lands of the Monarchy formed a solid core, but the additional lands were ever looser toward the periphery, ending in isolated wedges and enclaves. Political coherence is reduced by distance; Austria lost influence in Germany because even at the time of the Germanic League she had fewer possessions in Germany than Prussia, and was further from the German center. Nor can geographical consistency be reduced solely to the physical factor. Those geographical factors which are related to everyday life help to produce a similar historical and cultural development among the countries which share them. In that sense Austria-Hungary was in the west closely bound geographically to the German formation; eastward her parts became increasingly independent, ending in the wholly autonomous Hungarian plain. Ethnographically and politically the most individual traits in the history of Hungary have emanated from that island plain. In the same way, some parts of the old Empire were relegated to other geographical-cultural regions, especially before the period of dualism. Until the Italian war of 1859 Austria consisted of twenty “lands” and two military frontiers; after 1849 the five divisions of Hungary were, in fact, added to the twenty. Some of the parts were linked together by bonds of history; but the whole was a collection of small and middle-sized political entities. The simplification of 1867 was wholly fictitious. It was not regarded as permanent even by its beneficiaries, let alone by its victims. Under the smooth dualistic cover the Empire was to the end—for the real functions of government—a mosaic which revealed the two acknowledged states as consisting of seventeen provinces (or “crownlands”) and one “associated land” (Czechoslovakia) in Austria; a “separate body” or exclave (the city and port of Fiume) in Hungary; and a province with colonial character (Bosnia-Her372

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zegovina). All of them enjoyed a more or less extensive measure of autonomy, and all of them were conscious of being separate historic entities. And whatever view one may hold about geographical factors, they were playing a role decreasing in importance with the progress of modern conditions, especially since the coming of the railways. On the best assessment it meant not that Austria-Hungary must be a unity but that she might be one, possessing a sufficient geographical cohesion to that end. Originally the political function of Austria was closely identified with her geographical position. She was the eastern march of the German Empire, intended to stem the advance of barbarian invaders. From that function arose both the growth of the territorial empire, as well as the special place of the Austrian ruler among the German princes, which brought him the dignity of a formal empire. The intertwining of these two developments proved fateful for the destiny of the Hapsburgs. From the time when Ferdinand became Emperor of Germany—a title which the Hapsburgs retained during two-and-a-half centuries—the inner growth of the Austrian Empire always got tangled up in the loose threads of those external connections. That the two were essentially incompatible is proved by their inverse progression. The first never fared so well as when the second was in distress. It was the fatality of Austria’s internal life that it could not be insulated from the shocks of external trials. Her internal progress never had a continuous existence of its own, but was always lashed backward and forward on waves of foreign commitments. All the chief landmarks of Austrian history bear the sign of that nefarious association. The union of Austria with Hungary and Bohemia was brought about by the Turkish danger. Likewise, the initiative for the pragmatic sanction came for the same reason not from Vienna but from Croatia, while Hungary took a special part in it. It was an association meant to form a border-league against the pressure of the conquering Sultans. But this fundamental purpose of the Empire very soon lost its strength. After only a few decades the Hapsburg Empire had to defend its existence, not against Islam, but against the whole of Western Christianity. To a large extent this first weakening of the original purpose was made good by the enlightened absolutism of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. Their great reforms placed the idea of State upon the more solid ground of internal development, and especially upon a systematic administration. In that way the possessions secured 373

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during the previous century began to acquire a sense of common and distinct unity, outside the Holy Roman Empire. But even then the territorial and political position remained unsettled. Joseph’s unhappy military adventures put him in need of aid from the Hungarian estates, and he paid for it by revoking on his deathbed a large part of his progressive reforms. The call of the oriental mission competed with the ambitions centering upon German and Italian glories, and the Hapsburgs were never able of their own will to renounce any of the three. Only the advent of Napoleon—which for the first time threw Austria back upon herself and ejected her from Germany and Italy—led the Hapsburgs to acknowledge their true role. They abandoned the fiction of the German crown and created the reality of the Austrian crown (1804). Moreover, it looked as if its wearer at last had a vision of the Empire’s high function. For in contrast with Napoleon’s nationalist empire, the documents relating to the creation of the Austrian deliberately describe it as a Völkerkaisertum—an imperial commonwealth for mutual protection and advance. The basis of this second milestone was almost identical with that of the original pragmatic sanction, which had been signed individually by the various kingdoms and “lands,” and it looked as if their collectivity had at last become a unity and the Empire truly and soundly founded. The Factor of Nationality

That vision quickly faded away, however, with the passing of the Napoleonic danger. The Congress of Vienna recreated the old and distracting imperial title; while Metternich’s wholly negative internal policy undid everything that Napoleon’s attack had done toward the consolidation of the Austrian idea. For a moment a fresh chance was offered by the events of 1848. The new element of nationalism, which was to insinuate itself so quickly and potently into the physiology of European politics, might have been for Austria a paradoxical gift of the gods. Its general effect was to precipitate the formation of unitary national states. To Austria it offered the chance of a new and supreme justification of itself as a multi-national state, in a region in which genuine national states were not possible; as, in fact, the providential savior of the national idea in a region in which the idea could not fulfil itself natu374

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rally and ran the risk of decay either through inanition or self-destruction. Among the original crown-lands and provinces, with the exception of a few small Alpine districts, there was not one which did not contain two or more nationalities. Hence their limits were not co-extensive with the new dividing factor of nationality. The problem was how to link up these nationalities direct to the State, across and above the old territorial divisions. The general demand for a constitution in 1848 meant in Austria, as Sieghart says, eight different things to ten different peoples. The famous Kremsier Assembly boldly grasped the new factor and devised the idea of nationality districts (though it rejected the continuation of the idea as contained in the proposal to link up those districts into nationality groups). Such an arrangement would have offered scope for the development of the new factor for many years to come, while segregating it from the common political problem. In regard to this the Assembly adopted the principles of a federal constitution, thus giving a third and modern content to the imperial idea. But neither the dynasty nor its advisers recognized the signs of the times. When the Assembly met for its final session, they found the room occupied by soldiers, and were told that the Emperor had granted a Constitution of his own—the so-called “March Constitution.” The proposed internal reform was scornfully shelved, promises made under the shadow of the revolution were rescinded, and centralist autocratic rule resumed; while the dynasty strayed once more after the mirage of the imperial Roman crown. Yet in the short space of only seven years the loss of the Italian and German stakes finally closed the northern and southern gates to imperial power. Both the “Christian-Catholic” and the “national-imperial” ideas collapsed beyond retrieve. For the second time Austria was thrown back upon herself. Her discomfiture was but an incident in the progress toward the constitutional-national form of state in Central Europe. Yet it did not break the Empire; in fact, it pointed a way to salvation without disruption, unlike the ideas which had prevailed in the middle of the century. Nationality was but a frame and a binding element for the many new trends and interests whose compromise was expressed in parliamentary constitutions. The numerous interests now at work within the limits of each country were harnessed together to the national chariot. In Austria, of course, constitutionalism was bound to be multi-national. But the problem was not insoluble, and the task was inspiring. Had the Hapsburgs suc375

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ceeded in uniting ten nations into free and spontaneous co-operation, the result might have profoundly influenced political philosophy and practice throughout the world. But the Hapsburgs could not forget their dreams and, once again, allowed internal policy to be governed by external phantasy. The persistence of the German ambition made it imperative for them to have security in their rear, and to that end they proved willing to pay Hungary the price of dualism. So fateful was that step for the progress of the Hapsburg Empire, so pregnant with the seed of all that befell it during the half-century which followed, that it could properly be described as the beginning of the end. The dualist Ausgleich was in effect the final abandonment of the mission and meaning of the Hapsburg Empire, and therefore the first step in its dissolution. Dualism and Disruption

Dualism may be said to have broken the hopes and shaken the loyalty of the other nationalities. For it did worse in effect than merely reverse the 1804 doctrine of a people’s empire. The intermediary period had seen merely a regress of constitutional practice. The existence of the several nations was not denied; they were only refused the right to self-government, and were ruled autocratically, but equally, by the one central government. Dualism meant in a way a check to that autocratic centralism; though, as M. Cheradame said, it was really but a “dédoublement du centralisme.” It meant above all the disinheriting of the many nationalities for the benefit of only two of them. As long as the national idea was kept in leash, there was always the hope that one day it would be released. With dualism it was, so to speak, banned from the Hapsburg Empire. Thereafter the subject nationalities were bound to seek elsewhere the free existence which the Hapsburgs had failed to secure to them. Not even after 1870, when the northern ambitions were surrendered at last, did the Empire gather in the reins of its aim and policy for the purpose of finding itself, as the new German Empire was doing. Instead of following Bismarck’s example, the Hapsburgs followed the insidious advice which he gave to Beust in 1871. Referring to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, Bismarck remarked that one could not conceive of a Great Power not mak376

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ing of its faculty for expansion a vital issue. Thus arose the policy which led Austria for the first time to seek acquisitions in the interior of the Balkan Peninsula. It was for her the most dangerous of all external quests, because that way lay the powder magazine of the national idea. In making herself, after 1870, the inheritor of Turkish dominion in the Balkans, Austria-Hungary began to absorb the poison from which the Turkish Empire was slowly dying. Only a simultaneous reform of her Constitution could have acted as an antidote. Without such reform, the Empire originally created as a refuge and defense from the Turkish system took on the image of that which it was to forfend. Austria-Hungary had been held together less by common ties of history and culture and economics than by a sense of insecurity as to what might follow the break-up of the Empire. With the disappearance of Turkey from Europe, and with the collapse of Russia, the Hapsburg Empire no longer had an external raison d’ être; while in all those centuries its rulers had failed to create a sufficient internal raison d’ être, and the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich now dashed all hopes of a better future. The dualist arrangement hardened the political life of the Monarchy in a way which precluded its adaptation to the national-democratic currents of the latter nineteenth century. It gave in effect notice that it refused to be influenced by them, and adopted a Canutian attitude toward their tide. So violent a twist given to the national evolution of the State was bound to be reflected in the manner of its government. Instead of adapting itself to them, the change flew into the face of the new political ideas which were bubbling up and gathering volume all over Europe, shaping the character of modern democratic government. In rejecting the principles, Austria-Hungary had to deny also the forms which elsewhere were finding expression and advancement. The bastard dualistic constitution could not live together with natural democratic forms of government: it had to conceive arbitrary forms fashioned to its own twisted nature and ends. One must not press comparisons too far, especially in dealing with such a motley region; but of its subsequent instability in principle and personnel, of party and policy—of this fickleness and brittleness it may be said that after 1867 it drew increasingly away from the Western system and increasingly nearer to the Turkish form of government. No idea was after 1848 carried to its logical conclusion; every experiment was abandoned halfway, destroying even such good, and such psychological détente, as it may have achieved. That this type of arbitrary 377

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military-bureaucratic government made the transition to war government much less striking and sensitive than the West, of this we shall have occasion to speak in more detail later on. The fact that in the Hapsburg Empire the administration was incomparably more efficient and honest than in the Ottoman Empire did not alter that nefarious affinity. It made the system more tolerable, it did not make it acceptable. Above all, it did not preclude any less the possibility of change by agreement and compromise. Nothing thereafter could induce the Magyars to allow a modification of the dualist constitution. It became ever clearer that this could be achieved only by force—the force of either civil war or external war—and that meant that the power which guarded the arrangement had to be destroyed first. These two ever-threatening alternatives dictated the policy of the Empire. Autocracy at home was not enough. It could crush attempts at civil rebellion, but this left the nationalist current to batter at the walls of the Monarchy from outside. Therefore, the Hapsburg autocracy could not, like that of the Hohenzollern, rest on its laurels after achieving its national end. It had to be always on the offensive because it was always on the defensive. It had to interfere continuously with the neighboring national states, because the very existence of those states was a perpetual challenge to its own existence. If the nationality problem was to be solved within the Empire it could be only by absorbing those outlying groups. A generous policy in the Fifties, when the idea of nationality was still weak and the Turkish heritage still undetermined—when “Viennese parties” were to be found in the politics of Bucharest and other neighboring capitals—might have made that solution possible. But the war on the nationalities inside, together with the gradual creation of national states outside, apparently settled the point in favor of the centrifugal solution. Nothing was more likely to be fatal to the Monarchy, therefore, than a war; yet its policy remained, of necessity, one of continuous smoldering warfare. The Economic Factor

Geographical diversity and political inconsistency were, indeed, reflected throughout its history in the economic structure and social progress of the Hapsburg Empire as much as in the Ottoman. External events naturally 378

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affect the economic and social life of every country, making dents, so to speak, in its set policy. In the case of Austria, policy seldom opposed those external influences by any effort to regain a normal shape. On the contrary, it was deliberately and frequently changed by the country’s rulers in consonance with their foreign concerns at the time. Such a shifting policy, superimposed upon territorial and historical diversity, produced conditions which did not allow the whole to consolidate itself into a state. From the outset the union of Austria with Bohemia and Hungary was placed upon a basis which caused economic policy to be determined not by state but by provincial interests. The provincial estates had considerable say in military and financial matters and completely controlled all economic questions. Customs lines, where internal goods were treated on the same footing as foreign goods, separated all the provinces from each other. Tariffs differed in each of them and in most cases goods paid both import and export duties. By the middle of the seventeenth century Austria had remained economically far behind the Western states, largely on account of the continuous wars in which she was engaged. This was no better in the second half of the century, when, besides holding up the Turks, Austria had also to fight the French. To raise means for these wars she had to resort to every possible fiscal device, and the economic and administrative deficiencies brought to light by the struggle could not be made good by reason of a lack of means. A period of extensive reform set in after the peace treaties of Rastadt and Passarovitz, which put an end to the struggle with France and Turkey. Her new territorial gains extended to limits which the Empire never reached again; and for once an Austrian Emperor, Charles VI, had no other foreign ambition than to maintain and consolidate the State. In keeping with that, internal policy was directed toward the unification and economic strengthening of the Empire; and as a result, it became in the eighteenth century something of an economic and customs unit. Even so the abolition of customs lines advanced but slowly. It was considered a progress that goods going from Silesia to Trieste only had to pay duties at six points. Goods using the Danube route paid duties at thirteen points in the Austrian provinces. It is true that home manufactures, in transit from one province to another, now only paid one duty; and those duties as well as the regulations concerning foreign imports were determined by the central government—though 379

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not on a uniform standard for all the provinces. But it is significant for our argument that in that period of exceptionally deliberate unification the central government, in the face of Hungarian opposition, created new customs frontiers between Hungary on the one side and Croatia, Slavonia, Transylvania, and the Banat on the other, so as to keep them independent of the authority of Budapest. Under Maria Theresa, the mercantilist policy of her predecessors was applied with still greater intensity. The loss of the valuable Silesian province to Prussia and the Seven Years’ War provoked great efforts toward internal unification. Economic relations with Hungary become so active as to throw the still existing customs line into the shadow. Such progress could hardly have been possible without the sweeping internal reforms which severely curtailed the privileges and influence of the estates; though this was much more true of Austria than of Hungary. Maria Theresa, at any rate, succeeded in creating at least an outward customs unity through the tariff of 1753, which applied equally to Austria, to Bohemia, and to Hungary. The same tariff abolished export duties and replaced them with export bounties; together with other measures concerning the export of manufactures and the import of raw materials, this was destined to further home industries, and therefore called forth reprisals from Prussia. To create that internal customs unity which was everywhere one of the main achievements of mercantilist policy, was more difficult. In the Hapsburg Empire the obstacles were greater than in any other European state. A long step toward that end was the tariff of 1775; it abolished all internal customs between the Austrian provinces excepting that of the Tyrol and, of course, that between Austria and Hungary. The immediate result was a more active economic intercourse between the provinces and greater specialization in their production. Trade on a large scale also advanced rapidly, population increased, the standard of living rose, and Austria, too, began to feel the benefits of the mutual impulse of higher production and greater consumption which was characteristic of Europe’s economic progress in that period. The administrative and social reforms of Joseph II removed obstacles which stood in the way of trade; means of communication were improved; and in 1783 the customs line between Hungary proper and the adjacent Rumanian and Slav provinces was abolished. During that period, when internal policy was more deliberately and intensely devoted to the or380

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ganization of the Empire, Austrian economic life advanced more rapidly than ever before. A setback resulted from the unsuccessful war with Turkey and the consequent money shortage. That caused Austria, in contrast with her general mercantilist policy, to re-establish for fiscal purposes a system of export duties and to raise her transit duties. The effect of this, however, was small compared with the fresh change in the Government’s economic policy, provoked by the French Revolution. The ideas let loose from France caused the established governments to fear any increase in the proletariat and, therefore, to deprecate the expansion of existing industries or the creation of new ones. Until 1811 no import of machinery was permitted, although Austria was in this respect less well equipped than the Western states. Inflation strengthened this new tendency. It also led to the abandonment of the economic unity which had nearly reached completion under Joseph II. In 1793 import and export duties were already reimposed at the Hungarian frontier for all goods passing in either direction. In 1798 most of the duties on cattle, corn, and beverages were re-established between the provinces. The confusion was made worse by the frequent territorial changes resulting from the Napoleonic wars. In 1815 the old Austro-Hungarian union was surrounded by seven smaller customs groups, each of them separated through customs frontiers from the rest of the Monarchy. Export duties were also placed upon manufactures and transit duties were raised, with the result that prices and cost of production increased and the competitive power of Austrian industry was hindered. As a compensation higher protective duties were granted to those industries which had suffered most; and so it went on. The depreciation of the currency and the attempt to stabilize the customs duties produced chaotic conditions. Between 1817 and 1822 the Government decreed no less than seventeen changes of the tariff, each being in turn amended almost as soon as it was issued. The popularity which the free-trade doctrine enjoyed after the Napoleonic wars spread to Austria also. In 1826 the last internal customs line between Tyrol and the other provinces was abolished. But, again, it is characteristic of the inconsistent economic policy of the Hapsburgs that they refused to abolish the customs line toward Hungary. Because the Hungarian nobles were exempt from taxes, while the Austrian nobles had to pay them, the latter were afraid that they would not be able to compete with Hungar381

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ian agricultural products. Hence Austria refused to apply the new policy of internal free trade to Hungary also, as she had refused it before, though this was demanded by the Hungarians themselves. The same irresolute standpoint influenced Austria’s attitude toward the German Customs Union established in 1834. Though the Austrian Emperor was once more Emperor of Germany, Austria refused to join the Customs Union, being unwilling to bring her protectionist policy to the level of the free-trade tendencies which inspired the German Union. Whatever the doubts as to the advantages of free trade that may have been at the bottom of that first refusal, they should have been allayed by the remarkable rise of German industry under the new system. Notwithstanding much lower rates, the receipts from customs in the German Union were three times higher per head of population than in Austria. Nevertheless, in 1843 Austria refused a second invitation to join the Union. In passing it is worth noting that Austrian industrial interests pressed for that refusal with the argument that it might have been useful to join the Customs Union in 1834, but that by 1843 this was no longer possible, because the Union’s industries had left the Austrian far behind. A fresh change took place after the Revolution of 1848. On the one hand the breakdown of the revolutionary movement led to the setting up of an absolutist centralist regime. As part of this policy, autonomous government and the privileges of the landed class, especially their exemption from taxes, were abolished in Hungary, and in 1850 the customs line followed suit. Thus, the two countries were at last joined into one economic unit, more than three hundred years after their political union. On the other hand, these changes were furthered by the growing influence of free-trade ideas, and were explained by the strong wish which Austria evinced after the Revolution to join the now powerful German Union. In 1850 Austria declared her willingness to join, but then—and again in 1863—her desire was balked by the now determined refusal of Prussia to abandon or to share the primacy which she had by then acquired in the German Union. That diplomatic reverse was painfully confirmed by Austria’s military defeat in 1866. This led to the dualist system, but the Austrian customs union was maintained, notwithstanding the now pressing wish of the Hungarians for an autonomous customs frontier. During the following period of internal concentration and relative external detachment the economic progress of the Monarchy made rapid strides, notwithstanding, or rather 382

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because of, a liberal tariff policy. From the same period also dates the greater part of the Austro-Hungarian railway system. Improved communications joined to freedom of trade brought about an increase in imports which affected certain branches of industry, but that partial drawback was far outstripped by the great benefits which arose the reform for the country’s economic life as a whole.

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The Balkan Peninsula and the Question of Comparative Studies s o u r c e

Victor Papacostea, “La Péninsule Balkanique et le problème des études comparées,” Balcania 6 (1943): 1–21.

Victor Papacostea (1900–1962) was a Romanian historian of Aromanian or-

igin and founder of both the Institute of Balkan Studies and Research (Insti-

tutul de Studii și Cercetări Balcanice) in Bucharest (1938–1947) and the journal

Balcania (1938–1945). He earned his doctorate in history in 1932 from the University of Bucharest and served as professor in the Faculty of Letters and Philology at the University of Bucharest. He was also active in politics as a collab-

orator of Gheorghe Brătianu. Under the communist regime, Papacostea was imprisoned from 1950 to 1955 and again from 1957 to 1958.

In his research and institutional activity, Papacostea promoted the compar-

ative study of the history of the Balkans in the interdisciplinary tradition of area studies. He managed to establish a school of Balkan studies in Romania, which

had a considerable impact both at home and abroad. In this essay, Papacostea

pleads for novel comparative “scientific research” on the history of the Balkans, pointing out that local historiography is still “imprisoned within national com-

partments.” He first exposes the “inaccuracy” of the knowledge regarding the Balkans in the Western world, and the lack of scholarly research on the post-

Ottoman Balkans. To correct misperceptions, Papacostea reviews some historical features of the Peninsula, the most important of which was ethno-religious diversity and the inter-mixing of peoples. In the end, Papacostea pleads firmly

for a transnational and relational approach to the history of the Balkans, a call that remains relevant today: “one should not study separately the life of Balkan peoples. That life reveals itself to researchers from all fields of study as an ensemble of circles that intersect but have common arcs. The life of these peo-

ples, indivisible throughout the centuries, must still be studied according to a

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common method.” Papacostea’s vision had a considerable impact on the revival of Balkan studies in the 1960s, when researchers from both sides of the Iron

Curtain promoted new research perspectives integrating the common layers

of historical heritage in the region, including classical antiquity, as well as the Byzantine and Ottoman imperial frameworks.

main works · Problema Partidului Liberal (Bucharest: Bucovina, 1933); Viețile sultanilor, scriere inedită a lui Dionisie Fotino (Bucharest: Imprimeria națională, 1935); Civilizație românească și civilizație balcanică: studii istorice, ed. Cornelia Papacostea-Danielopolu, introduction by Nicolae-Șerban Tanașoca (Bucharest: Eminescu, 1983); Tradiții românești de istorie și cultură, ed. Cornelia PapacosteaDanielopolu (Bucharest: Eminescu, 1996). secondary literature · Nicolae-Şerban Tanaşoca, Balcanologie şi politică în România secolului XX: Victor Papacostea în documente din arhivele Securităţii şi din arhiva personală (Bucharest: Biblioteca Bucureştilor, 2010).

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istorical and ethnographic research on the peoples living in the Balkan Peninsula has hardly advanced in the last years despite recent important contributions. The history, ethnography, milieu, and soul of the Balkan man are still insufficiently known. The great wall that divided the Orient from the Occident for centuries has not yet been completely torn down […] Over the centuries, the geographical and ethnographic knowledge that the Occident had of the Balkan Peninsula did not go beyond what the writers and geographers of Antiquity had already conveyed. It was only later, when the maritime powers of the Western economy (the Venetian companies, the British Levant Company, etc.) obtained navigation and commercial privileges on the sea from the Sultan that we witnessed the publication of travel accounts and even historical narrations, which were, however, completely fanciful—“absurd and puerile histories” as Dimitrie Cantemir dubbed them with profound indignation. At the time, in the West, accounts of events from the seventeenth century concerning the Ottoman Empire were read, just as the descriptions of Marco Polo’s travels to China in 1300! However, nothing illustrates the inaccuracy of knowledge regarding the Balkan Peninsula better than the history of its name. “Balkan” is a Turkishorigin word, which means mountain. This is the name that Turks used to 386

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call the mountain chain known as the Haemus in Antiquity. A glance over the map shows us that the Balkans, with all their branches, barely cover a small southern area, quite insignificant in relation to the entire area of the Peninsula. Compared to the archaic mass of the Macedonian–Thracian Massif, which unites essential geological and geographical elements around it,—the Rhodope Mountains, the Dinaric Alps, Mount Olympus, and the Pindus—the Balkans appear to us as a secondary line, not only from the perspective of Antiquity, but also that of altitude. In short, they do not in any way characterize the Peninsula’s relief […] The error of this designation is due to the maps and geographic descriptions inherited from Antiquity. They were the only source of information throughout many centuries. In all these ancient works, one is struck from the outset by a gigantic mountainous barrier that crosses the Peninsula from east to west, from the Black Sea to the Alps. This barrier separated the southern regions—Greece, Macedonia, Thrace—from the northern regions deemed inhospitable by the Greeks due to the abundant snow, excessive cold, and the presence of barbarians […]. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century, after Ami Boué’s trip, when they realized that this great central barrier did not exist and that, on the contrary, the north and south of the Peninsula were separated by numerous valleys and especially the great Morava-Vardar depression […]. However, much time passed before cartographers were able to take advantage of this discovery. The erroneous name comes precisely from this false image of a central mountain chain. Indeed, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Humboldt and Ritter’s ideas, there was a tendency to replace political or historical divisions with geographical ones in the study of the globe. Significant terminological changes ensued. Consequently, preference was given to designations that corresponded to the main geographical hallmarks, such as mountain chains. In 1808, Adolf Zeune used HaemusHalbinsel for the first time, which was inspired by this misconception with regard to the “central chain,” which was still accepted at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Under the influence of new research, certain German scholars (such as Theodor Fischer, H. Wagner, etc.) have recently put forward a general term: the Southeast-European Peninsula. However, we admit that a change of 387

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name appears almost impossible to us. This is because the designation given at the beginning of the previous century, in an age of significant historical transformations across the Peninsula, has acquired such widespread recognition that it is hardly possible to replace it. Even if someday a “conclave” were in a position to consider a change, we still would not comprehend the real advantage of such a vague and impersonal name that cares only for compass points. If it ever came to finding another name, we could return to the ancient designation, since it would be infinitely more logical to apply to the entire Peninsula the name “Thracian Massif”—employed by geographers to indicate its central part, which is also geologically the most ancient. It would be the most characteristic one, not only from a geographical perspective, but also from a historical and ethnographic one. Today, it is a truth established by objective science that the racial stock, the substratum, of the Balkan population is Thracian-Illyrian. By saying “Thracian Peninsula,” after the most ancient population that determined its human characteristics, we would apply a method employed in the designation of other great European units, such as the Italian, Iberian, and Scandinavian Peninsulas as well as the British Isles. However, this solution could trigger protests from Greek scholars. While it is true that Thracians possessed a great territory and strength in numbers, it is no less true that Hellas gave the peninsula the essential elements of its spiritual unity. In conclusion, there is no doubt that the Balkan Peninsula will remain. (Moreover, it was pointed out that the name “Mountainous Peninsula” would correspond to its geographic reality, the most mountainous of all European peninsulas). After the end of the Turkish domination and the establishment of nation-states, there was an expectation that scientific research in the Balkan Peninsula would make great progress. Unfortunately, there was none of that. The delineation of the new states was conducted according to the absolute conception by which Western Europe made its own frontiers; but they forgot that Spain, England, France, and Italy constituted natural “units” that favored the early formation of nation-states. They also forgot that, apart from strong natural frontiers, the establishment of these states was also enabled by certain conditions that ensured them economic independence. They did not take into account that the Balkan Peninsula represents, as a whole, a geographical-economic unit with its own natural compensation and equilibrium laws which never allowed for hermetic frontiers in the 388

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past, such as those that separate the Western states. Finally, they underestimated the racial stock, the community of culture and civilization, the indivisibility of its natural treasures—in short, that which makes the peoples of the Peninsula constitute a great human family. For a better understanding of this reality, we consider the comparative method indispensable. Let us undertake a closer examination of the question of the method because given its importance, it comes to the fore of our work plan. The Balkan Peninsula presents an ethnic composition whose diversity is unmatched in Europe and even in the rest of the world. The Albanian, Aromanian, and Slavic strata that extend into the heart of Greece, Greek immigration across Thrace, Macedonia, and the Epirus up to southern Albania and along all the coasts, Bulgarian infiltrations into the plains of Wallachia, and Romanian infiltrations into the valleys of the Balkans and the center of old Serbia, all these are but several elements of the mosaic of races we encounter on the peninsula today. In certain regions, such as Albania and Macedonia, we find Slavic, Greek, Aromanian, Albanian, and Turkish villages lying one next to another. The Balkan Peninsula’s geographical position alone is enough to explain this racial diversity. Widely open in the north to the plains of Central Europe, through the Black Sea to southern Russia, separated from Italy by a narrow sea, and connected to Asia Minor through the isles of the Aegean Sea and its straits, it provides easily accessible routes from all sides. Consequently, it is not surprising that so many civilizations and races from the East, West, North, and South chose this territory as a meeting point. It can be accurately described as “an intermediary geographical and geological unit between Europe and Asia.” The antiquity of the cross-fertilization of its peoples goes back to prehistoric times; this cross-fertilization represents a permanent feature, renewed with each age, of the Balkan regions.1 Furthermore, certain internal geographical factors prevented, in turn, Balkan peoples from preserving their ethnic individuality within precise limits. History and economic conditions equally favored an intense trade movement accompanied by massive and repeated population movements from one region to another. Throughout the centuries, all the peoples of the peninsula have been involved in this general movement. Let us remember, 1 Foreword, Balcania 1 (1938): 3–4.

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in particular, some of the specific moments when the antiquity, intensity, and diversity of the mixture of races and civilizations in this region of Europe manifested itself […]. During the period of Turkish domination, migrations from one region of the peninsula to the other occurred in rapid succession. These movements had manifold causes. Many times, it was either brutal repression or an armed conflict that provoked them. In several provinces, persecution led to the mass conversion of the threatened populations to Islam. However, under Turkish domination, the ethnic aspect of the peninsula was further modified by substantial waves of people coming from Asia Minor. Besides a sizeable contingent of Turkish shepherds who arrived from Asia and settled in the eastern valleys of the Balkans, the Rhodopes, the Pirin, and Macedonia, we can mention significant population groups of Syrian and Armenian descent. Nevertheless, it was in Bulgaria proper that the intermingling was the most intense. One can find here, superimposed over an ancient Thracian–Roman stock, a Slavic–Turanic mixture of Bulgarians, Pechenegs, and Cumans, in the midst of whom a significant number of Romanians, Greeks, Armenians, Albanians, and so forth, have blended from the Middle Ages until the present day. These instances briefly illustrate how ancient and intense the intertwining was between races and civilizations in the Balkan Peninsula. The regions that witnessed the highest level of this type of intermingling were naturally Macedonia and Epirus. A typical example pertaining to the entwining of populations, which characterized the Peninsula in the late Middle Ages, is provided by the case of Voivode Ivanko, who took the city of Arta in 1400; in relation to his person, the chronicle mentions that he was of “Serbian– Albanian–Bulgarian–Wallachian” descent. Thus, one should not be surprised that even today, in certain regions such as Thessaly, Macedonia, the “Banovina” of Vardar, and Albania, ethnic diversity is so strong that it entails various forms of bilingualism. Consequently, everyone can realize how considerably peoples must have influenced one another and how easily the manifold civilization and cultural elements passed from one to the other under these circumstances. However, common traits equally developed given that the various Balkan peoples, for many centuries under Roman, Byzantine, or Turkish domination, were included in the same political system and subjected to the same political and administrative, economic and reli390

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gious conditions. The Turkish regime in particular exercised a strong unifying effect by mainly using the spiritual influence of the Oriental Church. The above observations reveal the following truth to scholars: one should not study the life of a Balkan people separately. It reveals itself to researchers from all fields of study as an ensemble of circles that intersect but have common arcs. The life of these peoples, indivisible throughout the centuries, must still be studied according to a common method. It follows that widescope intellectual cooperation is necessary for the successful completion of the endeavor of research and discovery. A new scientific system results from this body of work and research, the objectives and method of which we will outline below. Because the scope of its research is determined by geographical and historical limits, Balkanology seeks to establish the specific laws and circumstances that have underpinned the development of the life of Balkan peoples both in its entirety and in its parts throughout the centuries. Its aim is the strict application of comparative methods in every domain, in historiography as well as philology, in ethnography as well as folklore, in the arts as well as social and economic sciences. Unfortunately, thus far, these methods could not be fully, but only partially applied in the Peninsula, since the borders that were assigned to the Balkan peoples broke up the economic and spiritual unity of the region. It followed that every part wanted to dominate the whole. The small Balkan nations embarked on grand imperialistic endeavors rooted in the myth of the predestined nation […]. As Albert Kutzbach rightfully argues, the shock of imperialist tendencies turned the peninsula into a European inferno: frantic battles for the denationalization of foreign elements were followed by relentless wars. Scientific research of the Balkan peoples imprisoned within national compartments did not escape the nefarious influence of political antagonisms; historiography in particular paid a heavy price because, apart from certain honorable exceptions, it became an instrument of political expansion […]. All modesty aside, let us say that Romanian scientific research has the merit of being the first to have fully embraced this type of study as a genuine vocation. Let us not forget that the dictionaries compiled by Cavalioti and Daniel, the leaders of the intellectual movement in Moscopole, were among the first multilingual dictionaries published in the world. The first is trilingual and the second quadrilingual. Furthermore, Haşdeu, Philippide, and 391

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Ovid Densuşianu deserve much admiration for their contribution to the enhancement of the prestige of Romanian scientific research. From among the historians who passed away, Nicolae Iorga’s oeuvre, together with that of Jireček, remains the most relevant. Nobody perceived the history of the Peninsula as a historical ensemble more clearly than him […].

[Translated by Leonard Ciocan]

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Southeast Europe and the Balkans s o u r c e

Fritz Valjavec, “Südosteuropa und der Balkan: Forschungsziele und Forschungsmöglichkeiten,” Südost-Forschungen 7 (1942): 1–8.

Fritz (originally Friedrich) Valjavec (1909–1960) was a historian with a multi-

national Croatian-German-Hungarian background, and he was a leading fig-

ure of the German School of Southeast European studies (Südostforschung) in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna, he grew up in the

Banat, and after the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy he settled in Hunga-

ry, where he became part of the political movement of Hungarian Germans. In the early 1930s, he moved to Munich to study history, and after his diploma

work he was employed by the Südost-Institut. In 1933, he entered the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), and in the second half of the 1930s

he contributed to the Nazification of Southeast European studies, combin-

ing the focus on ethnic German enclaves with the idealization of the archaism

and vitality of the Balkan peoples. The political implications of this orienta-

tion were increasingly sinister, reaching their climax with Valjavec’s participa-

tion in the Final Solution as an expert and translator for the ­Einsatzgruppe in charge of murdering the Jews in Czernowitz/Chernivtsi in 1941. At the same time, his research work was methodologically innovative, combining sociocultural, political, and ideological elements in analyzing the German influence on Southeast Europe. His case is, thus, a pivotal example of the interplay of

political anti-modernism and radical nationalism with a modern historical approach devising a supranational, meso-regional narrative. Due to his Nazi engagement, after World War II he lost his university position, but in the early

1950s—as many former Nazi historians and social scientists—he reemerged as an expert on the question of Germans expelled from Eastern Europe, while

his institute received support from the German Federal Government as a research hub for studying the communist countries of Europe. In the 1950s, he

published his synthetic works dealing mainly with the history of the Enlighten-

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ment in Central and Southeast Europe, toning down the former political implications and focusing instead on the complex interplay of political, cultural,

and religious factors in a transnational context. The present text exemplifies

his methodological agenda in the 1940s, putting forward a very flexible—

almost constructivist—definition of Southeast Europe as a heuristic concept, while at the same time sticking to an ethno-nationalist understanding of German cultural influence.

· Der deutsche Kultureinfluß im nahen Südosten (Munich: Schick, 1940); Der Josephinismus: Zur geistigen Entwicklung Österreichs im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Brünn: Rohrer, 1944); Die Entstehung der politischen Strömungen in Deutschland 1770–1815 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1951); Geschichte der deutschen Kulturbeziehungen zu Südosteuropa, 5 vols. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1953–70); Geschichte der abendländischen Aufklärung (Wien: Herold, 1961); Weltgeschichte der Gegenwart (with Felix von Schroeder), 2 vols. (Bern, Munich: Francke, 1963). secondary works · Mathias Beer, ed., Südostforschung im Schatten des Dritten Reiches: Institutionen—Inhalte—Personen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004); Franz Leander Fillafer and Thomas Wallnig, eds., Josephinismus zwischen den Regimen: Eduard Winter, Fritz Valjavec und die zentraleuropäischen Historiographien im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016). primary works

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tronger engagement with Southeast Europe entails that increasingly methodological issues arise that are in need of clarification. One of these questions concerns the relationship of the Balkans to Southeast Europe. While in the period before World War I, the term Balkans predominated for various reasons,1 after about 1918, the term Southeast Europe has increasingly come to the fore. This is mainly due to the fact that, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the necessity arose to summarize the entire area extending southeast of the former Austria under a single collective name for which the term Balkans is not sufficient, since it covers only the area south of the Danube-Sava line.2 In contrast, the northern border of Southeast Europe is essentially defined by the Carpathian

1 See F. Valjavec, “Der Werdegang der deutschen Südostforschung und ihre gegenwärtiger Stand,” Südost-Forschungen 6 (1941): 15ff. 2 Maximilian Braun, in his work Die Slawen auf dem Balkan (Leipzig, 1941), 13, also finds that the Balkans were “clearly delineated almost along the entire course of their northern border by the Sava and the lower Danube.”

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Arc. In the northwest it is set by today’s state borders of Germany and Italy, while in the east, the eastern border of Romania coincides with the border of Southeast Europe. As already pointed out by me in another place,3 all these borders are not to be interpreted linearly. In reality, they are formed by quite broad transitional zones. For instance, the Ukrainian territory adjacent to Romania is of a pronounced transitional character between East and Southeast Europe, which cannot be dealt with in detail here. After World War I, at least in German language usage, the term Balkans receded into the background more and more. While it initially held its ground to a greater degree in French and Anglo-Saxon research, in recent years the use of the name “Southeast Europe” has increased there as well. The reduced use of this spatial term is due to the fact that geographical research has long been of the opinion that the term Balkans does not represent any geographical unit.4 Also, from a political perspective there are no longer grounds to particularly highlight the term Balkans. First and foremost, we have to construe the term Balkans rather in a historical sense. If for the modern observer of the Balkans some characteristic traits stand out as typical, then this is mainly due to the fact that the Balkans have been a political unit in the Eastern Roman–Byzantine and Ottoman periods. Especially the Byzantine period has had a strong unifying effect beyond the political, in both religious and cultural terms. This is the decisive basis for so-called Balkan similarities. But the period of Ottoman rule has also intensified similarities in the realms of religion and culture, and it was mainly this period that led to a stronger mixing of the various peoples of the Southeastern area, which also fostered the emergence of common traits. The approximation of certain habits and forms of life was, in large part, due to the mixing of peoples during the Turkish period. The causes for the emergence of these congruences are historical in nature. They have long since been completed, although in some cases there is an ongoing effect. This does not change the fact that since about the beginning of the nineteenth century the process of approximation has ended. It was replaced by a differentiation of individual nations under the banner of national awakening, as well as a stronger convergence with Central and Western Europe. 3 Valjavec, “Werdegang,” 32ff. 4 Valjavec, “Werdegang,” 16.

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The disentanglement of the Balkans from the area of the Ottoman state has created a new situation. Since that time, “Balkan similarities” have been in decline. A certain uniformity of the Balkans is, thus, given mainly on the level of cultural morphology. The national emancipation of the peoples of the Balkans meant simultaneously the desire to catch up with the West in cultural terms. This also implied—at least in principle—a rejection of the old “Byzantine” cultural basis. The cultural Westernization of the Balkan areas was, therefore, also the beginning of a cultural “de-Byzantinization” and “de-Balkanization.” This process is explained by the initially ahistorical attitude of recent Southeast European nationalism. This will to break with the past was, if not a historical necessity, then at least a historical fact. It is significant that within the upper and sometimes also the middle class, the old cultural heritage demonstrated surprisingly little resistance to, and in large part was not able to compete with Western forms. The best evidence for this rapid decline of the old forms of culture is the fact that, in the course of time, in most Balkan areas, the ancient Byzantine cultural bases came to be objects of preservation efforts, and to some degree there was also an attempt to artificially revive them. Let me just refer here to the modern national-Romanian architectural style, which after a period of stronger reference to the West—comparable to other countries—returned to ancient forms, especially in the field of religious buildings. This new, more positive relationship with the cultural heritage of the past meant, beyond conservational objectives, the will to produce a fairer evaluation of the past and the better protection of a cultural heritage. However, over the course of time, they could not prevent the leveling of modern cultural development; the waywardness of nationalism; the course of technological development; the power of the factory and machine have unfailingly destroyed primitive habits and old conceptions. This leveling process, however, is not limited to customs and other ethnological phenomena, but has, to a great extent, an effect on other areas of life. It also appears to a considerable extent—to single out a typical example—in the religious field through the decay of Orthodoxy. Especially in this realm, it is certainly very difficult to make predictions, which should at least claim some preciseness. After all, a consideration of everything that has happened so far teaches us that, until very recently, a steady decline

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has occurred.5 With this we do not want to say that Orthodox religiosity as such experienced a crisis across the board. But a crisis definitely exists with regard to the cultural forms that accompany it. The Orthodoxy of the Balkans also has to deal with the modern world, to stand up to it somehow. This means a modernization, at least in its outward appearance and in formality, and a certain de-Byzantinization (the extent of which is debatable) of Orthodoxy itself. Already the established connections to Protestant theology, especially German Protestantism since the sixteenth century and certain relations to the Anglican church in more recent decades, as well as the influence on Orthodoxy exerted by the Austrian Empire since the end of the seventeenth century, suggest that this process has long been in progress, which of course still would require a closer examination that cannot be provided in this context. All in all, the Balkans as a whole is losing its old, distinctive character. As part of Southeast Europe it retains strong national and cultural distinctiveness from country to country. But while on the one hand the process of a pan-European leveling takes place, on the other hand the special development of individual countries is also taking place. The legacy of Balkan similarities is being consumed from two sides, so to speak. The term Balkans is not to be confined only to its historical aspect. It is also necessary to exercise caution with respect to its spatial sense. The affiliation of certain peripheral areas to the Balkans in a cultural-morphological perspective is quite controversial. This is particularly true for the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. Both indeed display some traits that are characteristic of the territories south of the Danube. But on the whole, one cannot ignore the cultural-morphological position of these two areas, which is also confirmed by recent research.6 Also foreign geographical representations of the region that still cling to the notion of the Balkans distinguish it from the Romanian territories.7 Greece also displayed manifestations that reveal its separate development from the Balkans, which are 5 A certain exception is Romania, where the cultural-morphological conditions are no longer typically “Balkanic.” 6 See F. Valjavec, Der deutsche Kultureinfluß im nahen Südosten (Munich, 1940), 1:128ff; see also Ludwig Elekes, “Die Anfänge der rumänischen Gesellschaft, Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte im XIII.– XVI. Jahrhundert,” Archivum Europae Centro-Orientalis 7 (1941): 381–488. 7 Elio Migliorini subscribed to this already in the title of his book Penisola Balcanica—Romania (Milano, 1939).

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mainly due to the fact that its territories are decidedly linked to the Mediterranean. It is not my task to go into detail in this context. I have to save this for a separate discussion, but I would like to note that we are dealing with a pronouncedly transitional region, where the forms typical of the Balkans are sometimes not that obvious. From what has been said, it follows that the Balkan countries do not form a geographical unit, but rather display similarities and congruence in cultural-morphological respects. There is no Balkan region. The Balkans is not a unit (as has been temporarily advocated based on certain political objectives). Although the research in other countries for the moment still adheres to the designation of Balkans as a spatial term, that is no reason for us to abandon that spatial term, which due to its broader character recommends itself and has already gotten the upper hand in precise language. The Balkans is a part of Southeast Europe. Balkan studies, which receive their justification from the fact that the cultural-morphological and historical similarities of this area make engagement with the Balkans desirable, therefore, are part of Southeast European studies in general. It is not possible that Southeast European studies and Balkan studies exist independently from each other. Southeast European studies would then, in large part, be deprived of their spatial basis, and the term Southeast Europe as such would be thrown into question. But, in this case, Balkan studies would also be an unsatisfactory trunk, which would become obvious in the question concerning the demarcation to the north. If one were to stick to the northern boundary of the Balkans, important connections would be cut. If one also considers them, then they cannot be confined to the Balkans. In precise operational terms, the Balkans has no border to the north. One must refer to the delimitations, which are indicated by the term Southeast Europe. The different structure of Southeast European studies and Balkan studies are thus not to be confused. It is readily apparent that one is essentially more “uniform” than the other can be. But the internal unity of Balkan research is still quite hypothetical in some respects, particularly regarding the Romanians north of the Danube and especially the modern Greek state formed in 1828. And it is this that creates barriers. Balkan research has its limits there, where the Balkan similarities end. It turns out that these similarities of the Balkans also contain a methodological risk. The more incoherent character of Southeast Europe (we will come back to this later) provides a certain ad398

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vantage for methodology. While all research into Balkan relationships and similarities easily runs the risk of overestimating uniform characteristics, Southeast European studies will—if they are to proceed correctly in methodological terms—always be aware of the fact that the unity of the territory it deals with is more of a working hypothesis and, thus, should not be overstressed. Precisely for this reason Southeast European studies will welcome cultural-morphological and historical research on the Balkans that runs alongside it, taking over tasks for which it has only limited competence. The important methodological difference between Balkan and Southeast European studies that comes to light here must be dealt with in more detail. The basic premise of Balkan studies is the presence of Balkan interrelationships, while for Southeast European studies the unity of Southeast Europe is not a precondition, but rather the unit of observation and research, taking into account the fact that Southeast Europe in the modern sense is primarily (not exclusively!), a working concept. Therefore, to a certain degree there can be methodologically coherent research on the Balkans.8 The overlap of research questions is more common in Balkan studies than in the study of other areas of Southeast Europe. Inducement for cooperation between individual fields of knowledge (not a merger or mixing!) is more plausible and at least worth the experiment with research objectives referring to parts of the Balkan area. For research on other parts of Southeast Europe, the conditions are also different in terms of methodology. Again, the possibility and necessity for cooperation of individual fields of research is certainly there. But this cooperation takes place along shorter distances. Their “tactical” character, which is not absent in Balkan studies either, becomes stronger. Methodological suggestions and interactions (such as between history and ethnological research)9 also arise in this area, but are more limited in their extent and effect. Until now, the explanations were intentionally limited to the Southeast Europe–Balkans relationship. But for the sake of completeness, another matter has also to be addressed. We have seen that the Balkans is a part of Southeast Europe. What about the remaining non-Balkan part of South8 Although it cannot constitute a unit in itself: Balkan studies as a subject is just as impossible as Southeast European studies. 9 These could also be models for the work on similar questions on the Balkans.

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east Europe? It mainly consists of the Carpathian basin and some border landscapes to the East and West of it. The Carpathian basin is self-standing, and therein lies a surprising parallel to the situation in the Balkans, an area that has strong similarities and common features, and which carries a strong historical character, which is also the situation in the areas lying south of the Sava-Danube line. Already since the nineteenth century, due to the stronger affiliation with pan-European life and cultural forms, the special culturalmorphological position of the Balkans as well as that of the Carpathian Basin largely receded into the background. But at the same time, this had the effect that corresponding traits appeared in an increasing number, which became characteristic of wide parts of Southeast Europe. All the countries, for example, where there have been agricultural reforms in recent decades, now display social phenomena and problems that allow us to speak of certain common Southeast European issues. The consequences of parliamentarism for the creation of a modern European social structure, the party system, and other similar phenomena are, if not identical, then very similar for large parts of the entire Southeast! The German, French, English, and Italian cultural influences must be taken into account in the entire Southeast European context, in accordance with the fact that these were forces that encompassed the entire area. Similar examples of resemblances becoming evident within the whole Southeast European region could be provided without difficulty. They underline the need for uniform and continuous research on all of Southeast Europe, the area that extends from the southeastern border of the German Empire down to the Aegean. There can be no question, and to avoid misunderstandings it should be emphasized here, that we do not believe in the steady increase in “Southeast European similarities,” which had turned Southeast Europe into a unit in the course of time. With such examples we just wanted to show that there are also Southeast European similarities as a result of modern development, which does not mean that German Southeast European studies should draw the legitimacy of its work from this. The decisive factor is not the unity of the area in question, but the uniformity of our work on it, especially in terms of research. From the above-mentioned similarities in the problems of development of the entire European Southeast, something else emerges that is important to note. With the political emancipation of the Balkans and its concomitant Europeanization, a certain terminus ante quem is set not only for Bal400

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kan research.10 From that moment in time, which cannot be determined in a clear-cut way, Southeast European Studies also had to address the Balkan areas since, from then on, the special position of the Balkans as compared to the rest of Southeast Europe became less relevant. Let me summarize the results of the above considerations, which were only meant to give a short overview. We saw that the Balkans are a historical and not a geographical fact. Today similarities exist especially in the cultural field. The historical aftermath of an earlier Balkan unity in political terms is increasingly fading. The Europeanization of the areas concerned also entails that the special character of the Balkans will increasingly fall victim to the leveling process of modern development and, to a great extent, already has. While earlier a cultural border cut through today’s Southeast Europe, namely the boundary between the Western and Byzantine-Eastern Churches, this former border of culture and life has receded more and more into the background since the eighteenth century. Since the nineteenth century, “Pan-Southeast European” similarities have therefore come about not only in the sphere of social order and politics, but also on a cultural level. Despite such similarities, Southeast Europe is primarily a working concept for us, while the Balkans are a research subject, which in turn represents a part of Southeast European studies. The Balkans are, therefore, as much a part of Southeast Europe as the research on them is a part of general Southeast European studies.

[Translated by Jan Bröker]

10 Which is to be interpreted elastically. It is clear that also a whole range of later phenomena belong to this field. The important thing is that, starting with the nineteenth century, Southeast European studies in the broad sense had to consider the Balkan areas increasingly more.

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about the editors

Balázs Trencsényi is a Professor at the History Department of Central European University. His main field of interest is the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Between 2008 and 2013, he was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council project, “Negotiating Modernity”: History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe. Among others, he is the author of the monograph, The Politics of “National Character”: A Study in Interwar East European Thought (Routledge, 2012); co-author of A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe, vols. 1–2 (Oxford University Press, 2016, 2018); as well as co-editor of Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1775–1945), vols. 1–4 (CEU Press, 2006–7, 2014); European Regions and Boundaries: A Conceptual History (Berghahn, 2017); and Brave New Hungary: Mapping the “System of National Cooperation” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019).   Constantin Iordachi is a Professor at the History Department of Central European University and President of the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies. He serves as a member of the Academic Committee of the House of European History, Brussels. Author of the monographs, Charisma, Politics and Violence: The Legion of “Archangel Michael” in Inter-War Romania (Trondheim, 2004, Hungarian edition: 2017); and Liberalism, Constitutional Nationalism and Minorities: The Making of Romanian Citizenship, c. 1750–1918 (Brill, 2019). Among others, he is editor or co-editor of Comparative Fascist Studies: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2009); Transforming Peasants, Property and Power: The Process of Land Collectivization in Romania, 1949–1962 (CEU Press, 2009); Hungary and Romania Beyond National Narratives (Peter Lang, 2013); The Biopolitics of the Danube Delta (Lexington, 2014); and The Collectivization of Agriculture in Communist Eastern Europe (CEU Press, 2014). 403

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kurt breysig

Péter Apor is permanent research fellow at the Institute of History, Humanities Research Center, Budapest. He obtained his PhD degree at the European University Institute, Florence in 2002. His main research interests include the social and cultural history of post-WWII Eastern Europe and the politics of memory in the region. He was a Contact Coordinator of “Courage: Cultural Opposition—Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries,” funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, 2016–2019. He is the author of Fabricating Authenticity in Soviet Hungary (Anthem Press, 2014); as well as co-editor of Secret Agents and Memory of Collaboration in Communist Eastern Europe (Anthem Press, 2017), and Cultural Opposition and Its Heritage in Eastern Europe (HAS, 2018).

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index

backward, backwardness, 3, 6, 18–19, 27 Bălcescu, Nicolae, 7, 217 Balkan studies, 13, 174, 334–57, 398–99 Balkans. See Southeastern Europe Baltic, 25, 216, 224, 228, 287, 288, 365 Belgium, Belgians, 10, 65–66, 68–69, 81, 312, 319, 324 Below, Georg von, 134, 145, 163–64 Berend, Iván T., 19–20 Berr, Henri, 9, 10, 39, 79 Bidlo, Jaroslav, 299–309 Bismarck, 315, 318, 376 Black Sea, 14, 365, 370, 387, 389 Bloch, Marc, 10–11, 89–90, 229, 235 Bohemia. See Czechs Boniface VIII (pope), 143, 169 borders and borderlands, 2, 179, 193, 200, 220, 222, 226, 241, 286–87, 291, 294, 296, 300–302, 373, 394–95, 398, 400–401 Bosnia, Bosnians, 176–77, 181, 193, 195, 197–98, 200, 286, 292, 308, 340, 348, 372 Botero, Giovanni, 5 bourgeoisie. See capitalism Brătianu, Gheorghe I., 14, 213–14, 385 Breysig, Kurt, 31–32 Budimir, Milan, 333 Bulgaria, Bulgarians, 175–77, 179, 182, 189, 193–95, 198, 201, 226, 284–86, 292–94, 296, 304, 335–36, 338, 343, 348, 368–70, 389–90 Byzantium, 170, 186–89, 193, 197–99, 202, 213–14, 216, 229, 231, 233–34, 245–51, 255, 261, 264, 294, 301, 306– 9, 338, 341–43, 346–49, 354–55, 363, 368, 386, 395–96

academies, 67, 335, 336 agrarian history, 14, 96, 114, 205, 233 Albania, Albanians, 176, 179, 197, 284, 292, 336, 343–45, 348, 351–52, 368, 389–90, Alexander II (Tsar of Russia), 226, 316–17 Alexander the Great, 85, 138, 149, 197 Alps, 267, 303, 362, 372, 387 Annales School 9, 10, 13, 14, 40, 65, 89, 213 Antiquity, 47, 49–50, 54–56, 61, 65, 74, 84–85, 93, 136, 216, 230, 233–34, 245, 248, 250–51, 255, 257, 262–63, 266–67, 337, 386–87 area studies, 1–2 aristocracy. See nobility Aristotle, 139, 151 Armenians, 175, 182, 368, 370, 390 Aromanians. See Vlachs assimilation, 107, 175, 180, 194, 224, 283, 288, 295, 307 Austria, Austrians: authorities, 178; constitution, 320, 375; domination, 177, 192, 294; expansion, 287; economics, 326, 377, 379–81; feudalism in, 315, 329; government, 314, 317; history, 373; industry, 365; and Napoleon, 374; politics of Austria-Hungary, 181, 285, 292, 293, 313, 318, 327, 359, 361, 365, 371, 373; suffrage 313. See also Habsburg Monarchy Austro-Hungarian Empire. See Habsburg Monarchy Avars, 344 awakening. See rebirth

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index

perception of, 6, 8, 31, 73, 94n, 292; interaction among, 136, 350, 389–90; Latin, 243, 245, 307; legacies of, 132, 136, 247; Mediterranean, 137, 138, 157, 245, 345; Slavic, 304, 307, 345; Western, 7, 241, 234 clergy. See Church climate, 72, 337 Cold War, 1, 17, 21, 26–27, 299 colonate, 214, 229–34 Comenius, Johannes Amos, 5 commerce, 4, 81–84, 160, 162, 181, 215, 317–18, 324, 326, 362, 386 communism, 15, 20, 27, 109, 213, 385, 393 community, 37, 96, 141, 150–52, 156–62, 165–66, 176, 188, 193, 232, 234, 302, 317, 389 Comte, Auguste, 43, 291, 330 confederation, 157, 176, 313 conservatism, 322 constitution, 4, 72, 127–29, 137–38, 146–47, 157–58, 162, 167, 169, 171, 223, 230, 238–39, 246, 255–56, 271, 291, 313, 315, 317–21, 334, 369, 375–78 continuity, 45, 54, 61, 115, 128–29, 133, 142, 175, 186, 250, 254, 257, 273, 321 corvée, 205–11, 227, 228 cosmopolitanism, 151 Croatia, Croatians, 179, 241, 286, 292, 313, 340, 345, 353, 373, 380 Crown, 139–40, 147, 319, 374–75 cultural history, 22, 31, 32, 275, 349 cultural morphology, 32, 186, 396–99 culture: advanced, 181; ancient, 152, 161; Aryan, 148; Balkan, 199, 355, 395–96; Byzantine, 245, 301; Chinese, 150; European, 257; Greek Orthodox, 250–51; historical, 23, 173; national, 70, 74, 179, 237, 296; Oriental, 136; peasant, 272; peripheral, 240; primitive, 73, 137; spiritual, 246; Western, 130, 267 customs. See culture Cvijić, Jovan, 13, 173–74, 336, 341, 353–55

capitalism, 18–20, 77, 81–4, 86, 211, 221, 241, 246, 254, 285, 288, 313–14, 323, 328–29 Carolingians, 61, 98, 99, 101, 110, 113, 142, 145, 169, 199, 215, 246 Carpathians, 186, 189, 201, 218, 273, 303, 365, 372, 394, 400 Catherine the Great, 162, 216, 226 Catholicism, 17, 131–33, 136, 139, 148, 156, 159, 163, 165, 189, 191–92, 286– 87, 305–6, 317, 331, 349, 370, 375 character (national), 5, 73, 141, 274, 286 Charlemagne, 100, 139, 254 China, 137, 138, 150, 152, 153, 159, 369, 386 Christianity: believers, 75; Byzantine, 258, 346, 349; Church, 132–33, 156, 159, 369; civilization, 240, 266; conversion to, 138, 252, 258, 264, 265, 271; doctrines of, 151, 309; Europe, 310; faith, 246, 307, 348; kingdoms, 142; population, 202, 204, 288, 294, 367, 370; society, 139–41, 175, 176, 177; Christian West, 130–33, 146, 162, 165, 189, 373 chronology, 44–45 Church, 98–101, 131–33, 135–36, 138–46, 148, 151, 156, 159–63, 165, 167, 169– 70, 174, 178, 186––92, 210–11, 233, 241, 246, 249, 301, 331, 349, 364, 369, 391, 397, 401 citizen, citizenship, 70, 108, 157, 160, 162, 177, 196, 317, 320 city, 17, 130, 137–38, 156–58, 160, 167, 242, 323, 326–27, 329, 340, 363, 372 civic, civility, 2 civilization: ancient, 137, 157, 160, 265, 266, 331, 362; and religion, 286, 305; antique, 136, 255, 262; Asian/Oriental, 138, 309; Balkan, 175, 194, 341, 354– 55, 389; borders of, 301; Byzantine, 245, 251, 261, 264, 308, 338, 345, 355; comparative approach to, 5, 31, 94, 116–17, 247–48, 276, 309; Eurasian, 245; European, 7–8, 307, 309, 338, 363, 366; Greek Orthodox, 240–41, 251; Hellenic, 338, 366; hierarchical

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fascism, 171, 235 Febvre, Lucien, 89, 302 federalism, federation, 158, 199, 314, 318, 322, 328, 359, 375 feudalism, 19, 65, 100, 102–3, 106, 114, 118, 127–32, 134–35, 153–58, 161, 164–65, 170–71, 182, 211–12, 229–31, 233, 238–41, 243–44, 246, 249, 251–61, 264–7, 269, 271–72, 282, 315, 344, 348 Fletcher, Giles, 5 folklore, 284, 334–36, 341, 344, 346, 350, 352–53, 391 France, French: and comparative studies, 2–3, 4, 10, 13, 22, 26, 105n, 116, 120– 21; historical scholarship of, 2, 10, 39, 77, 89, 235, 238, 240, 302, 311; administrative model of, 317; agrarian regime in, 80, 97, 104, 110, 113–14, 117, 122, 208; birthrate in, 326; constitutional history of, 129, 133, 147, 319–20; cultural influence of, 197, 329, 353, 400; economic development of, 82, 212, 324; estates in, 101–3, 158, 166, 169–74; feudalism in, 170, 253–56, 236, 261; Imperial, 315, 316, 326; nation-forming in, 283, 289, 362, 388; revolutions and restorations, 56, 61, 85, 129, 144, 311, 312–15, 381; royal power in, 108, 147, 169, 226; serfdom in, 106, 109–13, 212, 215, 226–27, 260; towns/cities in, 118; wars of, 314, 316–17, 319; and Church, 143, 170, 317; and science, 330 Frazer, James, 93–94 Frederick II (Holy Roman Emperor), 168–69 Frederick II (King of Prussia), 74, 85 freedom, 106, 110, 131, 137,151, 161, 165, 175, 202, 219, 223, 225, 227, 255, 268, 283–85, 290, 295, 321–22, 339 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa, 61, 77, 311

Czechs, 5, 15, 206, 241, 264, 283, 285– 87, 292–93, 296, 299, 304, 308, 313, 362, 371, 373, 379–80 Dalmatia, 177, 180, 181, 345, 353, 354, 371 Danube, 178, 189, 191, 194, 202, 213, 287, 303, 344, 360, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 379, 394, 397, 398 Davillé, Louis, 39 democracy, 7, 26, 146, 160, 182, 268, 291, 313–15, 321–22, 327, 377 Denmark, Danish, 239, 240, 272, 283, 318, 350 Diocletian, 231–32 Durheim, Émile, 8 East Central Europe, 1–5, 8, 12–14, 19–20, 22, 24–27, 236, 281, 300 economic history, 12, 14, 33, 37, 73, 77, 82, 83, 86–89, 96, 97, 127, 205, 206, 207, 281, 344 economy, 35, 75, 82, 84, 86, 87, 136, 152, 160, 202, 215, 221–22, 230, 234, 263, 274, 335, 352, 386 education, 136, 160, 178, 180, 205, 246, 249, 260, 274–75, 316, 327, 331 Egypt, 137, 138, 152, 229, 231, 363 empire, 2, 17, 24, 27, 61, 75, 99, 103, 130, 132, 135, 138, 167, 230, 244, 291, 295, 317, 360–62, 361–81, 391 England: and comparative studies, 7; agrarian regime in, 80, 104, 108, 117; constitutional/parliamentary development in, 86, 103, 129, 137, 143, 145, 147, 169–70; enclosure movement in, 85, 96–98; feudalism in, 108, 122, 131, 166, 170–71; industrial revolution in, 81–83, 96; nation-building in, 362, 388; royal power in, 106, 108; serfdom in, 106, 107n, 109–112; and papal power, 167. See also Great Britain Enlightenment, 6, 393 Eötvös, József, 7 equality, 182, 269, 322 estates, 101–3, 127–72, 178, 221, 229, 240, 252, 253, 258–60, 267, 272, 374, 380

gentry. See nobility geology, 45, 69, 173, 387–89 Germany, Germans: Ancient/Germanic, 33, 72, 105, 113, 116, 118, 130, 134, 136–37, 140–44, 151, 159, 266, 303,

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Horváth, Mihály, 8 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 387 Hungary, Hungarians, Magyars: and Catholicism, 191, 307; cities, 163, 179; estates in, 161, 168, 196, 272, 287, 313; feudalism in, 134, 201–3, 258–61, 265, 271; geography of, 372; and the Habsburgs, 284–85, 313, 318, 373–76, 380–82; historical evolution of, 131, 158, 245, 264, 283, 372, 380; historiography of, 12, 14, 15, 19, 22, 235, 236–40; Holy Crown, 147; influence of, 194–96, 199, 203, 218; interwar, 294; kings, 171, 194, 204; modernization, 8, 327; nationalities in, 340; Revolution in 1848, 292, 314; travelers, 4; wars with the Ottomans, 166, 309

347, 362; medieval and early modern, 103, 110, 113, 114, 117, 121, 129, 133, 137–47, 154–55, 163, 165, 166, 169, 171, 200, 256, 257, 261, 373, 397; German Confederation, 313–14, 372; Imperial, 65, 243, 293, 294, 308, 312 319, 320, 373, 376, 400; interwar, 294; Nazi, 393; Federal Republic of, 21, 393; cultural influence of, 308, 330–32, 394, 397, 400; national movement in, 290, 292, 295; unification of, 312–14, 317–19; industrialization of, 82, 324, 326; as settlers/minorities, 200, 264, 285, 287, 295–96, 370, 393; historical scholarship of, 2–3, 10, 13, 14, 16, 21–22, 26, 31–32, 39, 65, 311, 335; Eastern, 104, 206; Northwest, 208 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 18 Gierke, Otto von, 140, 146 Giurescu, Constantin, 201, 219 Godunov, Boris, 223–24, 226, 230 Great Britain, 312, 319, 324, 326. See also England Greece, Greeks, Hellenes, 33, 72, 83–84, 93, 130, 158, 175–77, 179–80, 182, 187–89, 194, 204, 2, 39, 249, 267, 284, 286, 293–94, 304, 334–38, 341, 343– 48, 355–56, 362, 368, 370, 387–90, 397–98 Guiraud, Paul, 84–85 Guizot, François, 7, 137

Illyria, Illyrians, 292, 343–44, 363, 388 imperialism. See empire independence. See freedom India, 148–50, 157, 267, 363, 370 Indo-Europeans, 94, 115 intelligentsia, 179, 276, 339, 352, 355 International Congresses of Historical Sciences 9, 65, 66–69, 79, 238–39, 299, 300, 302 Iorga, Nicolae, 13, 185–86, 213, 217–19, 300, 342, 392 Islam, Muslims, 56, 130, 138, 153, 156, 174, 176, 243, 286, 344, 347–49, 373, 390 Italy, Italians, 81, 103, 110, 130, 167, 180, 196, 239, 245, 249, 283, 293, 313, 314, 315, 317, 319 I. Tóth, Zoltán, 15

Habsburg Monarchy, 7, 21, 180, 190, 200, 234, 284–85, 299, 359–61, 364– 68, 370–71, 373–78, 381, 383, 393–94 hajduks, 177–78, 190 Hajnal, István, 12, 235–36, 276 Halecki, Oskar, 13, 299–300 Hanák, Péter, 22 Handelsman, Marceli, 13, 205, 281–82, 299 Hatschek, Julius, 143–45 Hintze, Otto, 10, 127–28, 235 historical regions, 241, 243, 245, 250–51, 261–67, 271–73, 281–83, 292, 299–304, 308–9, 334, 360–67, 374, 389–90, 393, 398

Japan, 130, 134, 138, 153–55 Jaucourt, Louis de, 6 Jews, 287–88, 327, 368, 370, 393 Jireček, Konstantin, 131, 342–43, 345, 355, 392 Joseph II (Austria), 373–74, 380–81 Karađorđe, 190, 341 Kocka, Jürgen, 21, 23

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Montenegro, Montenegrins, 176, 178, 285 Montesquieu, 6, 136–37 Moravia, Moravians, 176, 199, 201, 245, 264 Moscopole, 391 Moscow, 131, 306, 307

Koht, Halvdan, 12 Kovalevsky, Maxim, 131, 163 Kula, Witold, 19–20 latifundium, 83–84, 226–28, 231, 246– 47, 251, 255, 271, 327 Lelewel, Joachim, 7 liberalism, 9, 21, 65, 77, 291, 313, 315, 317, 319, 322, 324, 383 liberation, 15, 182–83, 203, 260, 294, 316, 339 liberties, rights, 80, 108–9, 112–13, 122, 135–36, 150–52, 154, 157, 163, 166, 168–69, 209–10, 220, 223, 226, 233, 248, 262, 264, 272, 284–85, 315, 319, 321–22, 327, 329, 367 linguistics, 8, 12, 42, 78, 92, 94, 105, 115, 117, 120, 333, 334–38, 345, 347–57 Lithuania, Lithuanians, 241, 283, 285– 88, 299, 308 Locke, John, 6, 86 Louis XIV, 70, 85

Napoleon, 85, 292, 374, 381 Napoleon III, 315–17, 319, 324 nationalism, 2, 9–10, 13–15, 22, 28, 32, 66, 70, 79, 174, 179, 185–86, 281–82, 294, 313, 334, 361, 374, 393–94, 396 Nazism, 21, 393 Netherlands, Dutch, 5, 81, 212, 240, 312 Nicholas of Cusa, 133, 146–47 nobility, aristocracy, gentry, 80–81, 85, 96, 113, 131, 148–50, 153, 158, 161–62, 168, 171, 174, 176, 178–79, 181, 192– 97, 215, 222, 228, 233, 241–42, 260, 272, 283–85, 287, 315, 317–18, 321–22, 327, 329 Norway, Norwegians, 12, 237, 239, 240, 272, 283

Macedonia, Macedonians, 286, 295, 346, 369, 387, 389–90 Macůrek, Josef, 15 Maria Theresa, 373, 380 Marsilius of Padua, 147 Marxism, 3, 15, 18–20, 77, 87, 235 Mediterranean, 93, 97, 98, 118, 190, 137, 138, 151, 156, 157, 160, 179, 213, 245, 338, 345, 355, 398 Meillet, Antoine, 78, 93, 105, 115, 351 metanastatic movements, 336, 339–40 Michael the Brave, 217–20, 222, 224 Michelet, Jules, 7 migration, 2, 17, 158, 178–81, 194, 218, 222, 225–27, 266, 296, 301, 326, 340, 344, 348, 365, 389–90 Milyukov, Pavel, 131, 162 minority (national, ethnic), 286–87, 295–96 Mitrany, David, 359–60 Mitrović, Andrej, 22 modernity, modernism, 6, 18, 20–22, 26–27, 132, 216, 397

Oppenheimer, Franz, 128–29 Orthodoxy, 187, 191–92, 241, 244, 251, 264, 276, 286, 288, 301, 305–7, 309, 331, 348–50, 396–97 Ottoman Empire. See Turkey Pach, Zsigmond Pál, 19–20 Papacostea, Victor, 13, 385–86 parliaments, 96, 103, 143–45, 147, 168, 170, 318, 319, 322 patriot, patriotism, 74, 76, 182, 334 peasant, peasantry, 77, 80, 85–86, 110, 114–15, 148, 160, 176–77, 182–83, 187, 189, 192–93, 195–96, 199–203, 206–11, 214–19, 222–33, 236, 241, 247, 254–5, 263, 265, 267–73, 285–87, 313–14, 317, 323 Persia, 309, 364 phanariotes, 175, 179, 182, 225, 232 philosophy of history, 60, 68, 85, 91, 305 Pirenne, Henri, 9–10, 65–66, 77, 79, 81, 83, 88, 215, 235

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359–60, 385, 389–92, 395–98. See also Vlachs romanticism, 8, 15, 53, 75, 79, 290–92, 331, 334, 339, 341, 352–53, 355 Rome, Roman Empire, Romans, 55, 72, 83–84, 93, 132–33, 135–36, 138, 146, 156–57, 159–61, 187, 189, 214, 229, 258, 263, 300, 306–9, 338, 343, 346– 47, 356, 362, 364, 366–67, 374 Rostow, Walt Whitman, 18 ruler (King, Emperor, Prince), 37, 45, 70, 99–100, 132–34, 135–43, 147, 149–50, 153–54, 156, 159, 161, 166–71, 174, 193–94, 201–2, 215, 221–22, 230–31, 243–44, 248–49, 269, 368, 371 Russia, 161–64, 215–16, 365–66; and comparative studies, 18; agrarian regime in, 117, 207, 210, 267; and Church, 162, 163, 169–70; and revolutions, 67, 313; and Slavdom, 293, 304, 306; and the Eastern Question, 293, 316, 361, 365–66; as a cultural realm (Greek Orthodoxy/Eurasia), 240, 245, 299, 306, 309, 363, 367; constitutional history of, 320; estates in, 131, 162–64; feudalism in, 161–62; nationalities in, 285–288, 292–94; occupational classes in, 84, 150; science in, 330; serfdom in, 110, 162, 210, 211, 214, 215–16, 222–24, 226–31, 316, 327, 329; Soviet Russia, 283, 294; towns/cities in, 163 Ruthenia, Ruthenians, 194, 286, 299, 308 Rutkowski, Jan, 14, 205–6

Poland, Polish: historical scholarship of, 6, 7, 13, 19, 139, 205–6, 281–82, 299, 304n; historical writing on, 4–7; agrarian regime in, 117, 206, 227; and Christianity/Catholic Church, 140, 167, 191, 264; and/as minorities, 286, 287, 295–96; as part of the Latin West, 241, 308, 309; Congress Kingdom of, 285; estates in, 131, 133, 134, 161, 166, 171; feudalism in, 131, 153, 158, 257, 261–65, 271–72; interwar, 294; national movement, 283, 289, 290, 292, 293, 295; nobility in, 5, 153, 158, 161, 171, 219, 228, 283; serfdom in, 202, 211, 214, 216, 219, 222, 227–28, 327; urban communities in, 163 Portugal, Portuguese, 167, 240, 347, 356 positivism, 8, 16, 31, 39, 242, 274, 291–92, 330 progress, 43, 57, 60, 138, 242, 256, 263, 330, 365, 367, 371, 373, 378–79, 388 proletariat. See workers Protestantism, Reformation, 5, 17, 188, 308, 331, 397 race, 70–72, 148–49, 159, 303–4, 309, 346, 356, 364, 389–90 Ratzel, Friedrich, 372 realism, 331–32 rebirth, revival, awakening, 7, 167, 180, 283, 290, 293, 334, 339, 395 Reformation. See Protestantism religion, 138, 187, 191–92, 211, 286, 288, 322, 331, 349, 369, 395 Renaissance, 74, 167, 246, 307, 366 revolution, uprising, rebellion, 20, 56, 61, 67, 82, 85–86, 129, 144, 150, 175, 182, 188, 205, 242, 249, 284–85, 289, 293, 311–16, 319–21, 354, 375, 378, 381–82 Rokkan, Stein, 17 Romania, Romanians, Danubian Principalities, 7, 15, 175, 179–80, 185–88, 191–204, 213, 217–24, 228–31, 245, 284–87, 292–94, 296, 304, 307, 313, 320, 335–36, 343–44, 348, 352–53,

Sandfeld, Kristian, 350, 352, 355 Scandinavia, 12–13, 130, 161, 240, 261, 265–68, 270–73, 275, 293, 313, 388 Schmoller, Gustav von, 31, 65, 127 Sée, Henri, 77–78, 97, 216 Seignobos, Charles, 9, 214, 311–12 Serbia, Serbians, Serbs, 131, 173, 175–76, 178, 181–82, 187–91, 193–203, 284–86, 292–94, 296, 313, 335, 338, 340–41, 344–5, 368–69, 371, 389–90 serfdom, 80, 113, 162, 203, 208–11, 215– 17, 219–34, 259–60, 327, 329

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Switzerland, Swiss, 238, 240, 319, 322 Szepsi Csombor, Márton, 4

Skok, Petar, 333 slave, slavery, 70, 84, 106–8, 110, 130, 152, 157, 160, 203–4, 215, 225–26, 229, 255, 260, 262–63, 265 Slavs, 175, 249, 264, 291, 303–8, 338, 343–51, 368 Slovakia, Slovaks, 241, 264, 285–86, 293–96 Slovenia, Slovenians, 285–86 social history, 3, 21, 79, 87, 89, 159, 209, 213, 214, 220, 234, 235, 236 socialism, 1, 19–20, 27, 313, 315 society, 10–11, 16, 19, 21, 72, 77, 80, 84–85, 87, 90–123, 129, 137, 140–41, 151–52, 164–66, 174–79, 182–83, 236, 240, 244–45, 248, 250–51, 261–63, 265–74, 276, 286, 327–30 soul, spirit (national), 70, 72, 74, 190, 283–84 Southeastern Europe, 2–3, 13–14, 25–26, 173–74, 178–79, 185–204, 245, 250, 287, 293, 300–303, 306–7, 309, 320, 333–401 Stang, Fredrik, 12 state, 99–100, 129–39, 156–71, 211–12, 222–24, 227–34, 241; comparative studies of, 4–5, 11, 20, 92; absolutist, 70, 212, 282, 322, 373; ancient, 130, 138, 157; Church and, 135, 138, 142, 156, 162, 165, 167, 246; city-states, 130, 137, 138, 156–57, 158, 160, 167; clan state, 155; composite, 7, 360; constitutional, 127, 129, 355, 321; difference between Western and Eastern, 17, 136; economic role of, 324–26; European system of, 132, 135, 165, 167, 365; feudal, 98–100, 129, 134, 158, 211, 246, 254–56; formation of, 20, 22, 103, 165, 169, 182, 201, 361, 388; idiosyncratic, 340–41; Islamic, 130, 138, 153, 156; nation-states, 17, 70, 170, 293, 295–96, 361–62, 374, 375, 378, 388; patrimonial, 258; privilege states, 155; territorial, 5, 165, 169; welfare, 21; and serfdom, 214, 216, 222 Stefan Dušan (King of Serbia), 187, 189, 196–97, 304n, 338 Sweden, Swedes, 133, 147, 161, 223, 239, 240, 286

Tacitus, 137, 154 Tatars, 204, 301, 309, 344 Thomas Aquinas, 139, 146 tribe, 137, 149, 152, 156–59, 176, 178, 264, 267, 269, 271, 347, 362 Turkey, Turks, Ottoman Empire, 368–71; Christians in, 175, 177, 369; cities/towns in, 199, 340; conquest of/ rule over the Balkans, 174–78, 180–82, 190, 194, 200, 202, 218–19, 221, 229, 284, 338–41, 344, 347–48, 367, 368, 370, 390–91, 395; cultural legacy of, 182, 309, 340, 344n, 346–48, 352, 386, 395; feudal relations in, 134, 156; military conflicts with, 166, 218, 379, 381; peasantry in, 226, 267; uprisings against, 177, 190, 221, 293, 352; and Byzantium, 307, 367, 368; and the Eastern Question, 293, 316, 360–61, 365–66, 376–77 Ukraine, Ukrainians, 224, 283, 285–86, 292–93, 295, 299, 308, 395 United States of America, 2, 15–16, 20, 25, 133, 267, 296, 299, 319, 326 uprising. See revolution urban, urbanity, 17, 19, 22, 84, 118–19, 131, 148, 159–60, 162–3, 178–80, 198–200, 203, 210, 246–47, 267, 287, 317, 323, 331, 340, 347 usury, 83–84, 175, 200 Valjavec, Fritz, 393–94 Via Egnatia, 343, 364 village, 110, 121, 175, 177, 179, 187–89, 192–93, 199–201, 232, 234, 269, 317, 344, 389 villeins, villeinage, 106–8 Vlachs, 180, 346, 348, 353, 370, 385, 389 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 18–19 war, 67–70, 118, 177, 213, 223, 247, 294, 296, 309, 315–19, 359–83

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158, 164–65, 236, 241, 244, 251–53, 256, 261, 263, 267, 269, 271; nationforming in, 132, 135, 165, 361–62, 388; state as an institution in, 127, 132, 134, 136, 138, 161, 165, 169, 241, 388–89; towns/cities in, 157, 162–63, 199, 326; and global history, 25 Witenagemote, 143, 145 women, 181, 329 workers, working class, proletariat, 87, 152, 209, 246, 287–88, 312–14, 319, 323, 326–29, 381 World War I, 9, 12, 65–70, 127, 171, 173, 283, 290, 294, 296, 359–83 World War II, 2, 14, 89, 281 Wundt, Wilhelm, 129

Weber, Max, 8, 127–28, 130, 152, 157, 159, 235 Western Europe: comparative studies in, 2–3, 5, 14–15, 20, 25, 26, 238, 355; as a cultural realm, 130, 138, 170, 237, 243, 258, 276; as a model/pattern of evolution, 14, 18, 19, 21, 77, 136, 149, 151, 206, 240, 241, 243, 248–51, 255–56, 263–67, 396; contrasted to Byzantium, 245–50, 258, 396, 401; contrasted to Eastern Europe, 5–7, 14, 17–18, 77, 151, 214, 233, 236, 244–45, 264–65, 303–4, 306; contrasted to Orient, 148–156, 386–89; contrasted to Scandinavia, 266–273; agrarian regime of, 80, 206–208, 210, 215–16, 226, 229–30, 327; estates in, 130–32, 139, 142, 147–48, 151, 155, 160, 164–65; feudalism in, 111, 132, 134, 153–54,

Yugoslavs, Yugoslavia, 173, 179–82, 285– 86, 292, 294, 295–96, 333–34, 340

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