Rorotoko

In a nutshell

This is a book about power in a great period of the European Middle Ages. All societies have governments, right? And surely so in the famously progressive twelfth century? No, not so. The Crisis of the Twelfth Century argues, against an old and massive consensus of historians, that the story of power in the twelfth century is not that of government, but rather one of lordship—and that the exercise of power for social purpose began in the western world only as the resolution of a prolonged crisis of power.

In twelfth-century Europe, the public powers to protect and judge exercised by emperors and kings were subverted by ambitious pretenders to personal powers over people. Building castles in vast numbers, they created multiplied lordships over peasants who were forced into submission, and even servility. The masters of castles and their knights, craving noble status for themselves, had to dominate by force, exploitatively, in order to avoid submission themselves.

The book asks not only how they exercised power, but also how the masses of people experienced power. Their suffering, their voiced complaints against arbitrary lordship, led to reaction and to the revival of public justice. By granting charters, including the English Magna Carta, the greater lord-princes restored public taxation (and consent) in support of public enterprise.

But the crisis thus resolved was not only, perhaps not even primarily, one of suffering people. It was also a crisis of economic growth, for lord-princes were compelled by increased numbers of productive people to impose accountability on their appointed agents, to learn how to manage as well as to exploit. And it was, above all, a crisis of lordship. Could the multiplied masters of castles impose their exploitative domination? Their ultimate failure marked the origins of government in Europe. Could the great lord-rulers overcome the genetic defect of their status: the accident of dynastic failure leading to civil war? Their success in France and England coincided with their success in putting down the castellans, whereas in Germany dynastic conflict long delayed the resolution of crisis.

The compounded crises can be traced in varied “cultures of power”: those of troubadour singers, of moralists such as John of Salisbury and Peter the Chanter, and of the lawyers who rediscovered the concept of public interest in the twelfth century.

The wide angle

The Crisis of the Twelfth Century was conceived in 1987 when, upon moving from Berkeley to Harvard, I was invited to offer a course in Harvard’s undergraduate core curriculum. I welcomed the opportunity, for after some 25 years of teaching what I had been taught about medieval Europe, I was ready to try out a new and different view of the twelfth century. With the help of students and teaching fellows, my course, which was offered from 1988 to 2003, became an ongoing laboratory experiment in historical reinterpretation. My new argument was there from the start, but students read the sources with me. They were invited to draw their own conclusions about the shortcomings as well as the merits of my revisionist case.

To argue for a “crisis” in the twelfth century is altogether new, for two reasons. First, it challenges the view made famous by Charles Homer Haskins in his 1928 book entitled The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Was this not the grand creative century in medieval history, the century in which all was growth, creativity, and human progress? Second, my book challenges the great corollary of Haskins’s work: that government was a real element of twelfth-century progress, exemplified in the celebrated reigns of William the Conqueror and his Norman and Angevin successors, and in much else.

In my view, now long tested with students, this understanding of history is either seriously mistaken or seriously misleading. Wherever one looks in twelfth-century Europe, what the sources talk about is power and lordship, not government. Contemporaries had no definition of government, nor even a vision of it. Even when, after about 1160, they were stumbling into ad hoc contrivances for the general welfare, they had no vocabulary for that—no way of thinking about government or the state. And because I refrain from imposing any such usage on my subjects, the modern relevance of my book will seem understated to some readers.

Conceived during Ronald Reagan’s second term, and published at the moment of Barack Obama’s election, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century has resonance for us—to say the least. The Europe of knights, castles, and violence was, in our perspective, an ungoverned jungle. Government was to be the solution as well as a resolution, not the problem. To begin to think about power as “ours,” not just as “mine,” was new and progressive in the twelfth century. Unregulated power no longer worked. It is from the resolution of compounded crises in the twelfth century that government originates as a continuous phenomenon in European history.

the exercise of power for social purpose began in the western world only as the resolution of a prolonged crisis of power