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Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Murtaz Ajizadev from Critical Theory Channel. Today, I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Jorgen Muller. Dr. Jorgen Muller is a professor at the Department of Political Science. Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. He's here to speak with us about a book that he published with Cambridge University Press in 2022. The book is called
The Catholic Church and European State Formation, 1080 to 1500. Jorgen, welcome to New Books Network. Thanks so much, Martisa. Just one correction, the book came out with Oxford University Press. Oh, I said Cambridge, right? Yes, yes. Sorry. It's an Oxford University Press book, right? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much for the correction.
So let's start with the idea of the book. I'm sure the title might be surprising to some people, the Catholic Church and European State Formation, because the church is usually associated only with religious institutions in Europe. But can you... Briefly first, tell us how the idea of the book came to you and just in a nutshell, what the main idea of the book is. Sure.
I've been working, my two fields of expertise are really comparative politics and I are, but I've been working on European state formation for almost two decades. And what happened was that I just kept hitting up on the importance of the Catholic Church.
And at the same time, I could not help but notice that the social science literature on European state formation, so not the work by historians, I want to emphasize that, but the social science literature on European state formation had very little... to say about this subject. And the reason was basically that it has been totally dominated by two other explanatory factors.
war and economic development. So what is sometimes referred to as the bellicist literature focusing on one state formation and the endowment literature that looks at economic factors and how they affected state formation. So what gradually became clear to me was that we could not really understand, especially the earlier phases of European state formation, if we did not include the Catholic Church.
And in the book, we basically argue that what is normally termed the conflict of church and state, and I think we'll come back to that, shored up a twofold balancing act as seen from the perspective of European state builders. First, against strong social groups.
nobility the clergy later on the townsmen and secondly against each other so against other monarchs in the european multi-state system and in that double sense European state builders henceforth had to walk the line when building states. So what we're basically doing with the book is to insert the Catholic Church as the main engine of this double balancing act.
which itself has, by big literature, been singled out as a kind of precondition for the development of the modern territorial state, modern representative democracy, and even... modern economic development. Thank you. It was a great summary. And I'm glad that you mentioned that a conflict of the church and state in the 11th century.
Would you please provide more background and details about that? What was that conflict? And also, because that's, I guess, in your chapter one, and you also talk about... Gregorian reform movement, which had some consequences, which we'll discuss later on. But what was the conflict of church and the state and the ensuing Gregorian reform movement that happened? Yeah, so normally the conflict of church and state is seen as beginning in...
1075, when Pope Gregory VII outlaws lay investiture of bishops, and I'll come back to that concept. And some people argue that it ended... 50 years later with the concordat of Worms. But what we say in the book, or one of the things we say in the book, is that to really understand the conflict of church and state, we must first understand that it has much deeper roots.
And we basically argue that these roots are to be found in an episode of state collapse, namely the Carolinian state collapse of the 9th and the 10th century. And the point here is that this state collapse, which really was a... grand buckling of royal power in the Carolingian area and especially in what became France and then a central zone stretching from the Netherlands to northern Italy.
that this buckling of royal power both incentivized and permitted a religious reform movement to radically transform the Catholic Church in the period from the late... 10th century onwards. So the way we frame this in the book is that state collapse can be seen as kind of environmental shock, which enabled social and political realignments, basically led by
church forces. The British historian Robert Bartlett has termed it the fertile confusion of post-Carolingian Europe. And this impetus then triggered the bottom-up Cluniac refilm. movement which as the name says was centered on the monastery of Clunien in Bourgogne in southern France and the central agenda of this reform movement was really to fight for the liberty of the church against lay encroachment, lay encroachment that had become possible due to this state collapse or this box.
of royal power. What was the more specific aims of the reform movement? Basically, it was fighting against two common practices at this point in time.
First simony, so the selling of clerical offices, for instance, the office of bishop or... to lead monasteries and secondly against clerical marriage and especially clerics producing airs which was also quite common at this point in time and the argument against both practices was exactly the same namely that it involved the church with lay society, it made the
church, for instance monasteries, dependent on lay societies, it hindered monasteries from upholding strict religious standards. And this This reform movement then spread across especially the areas of Western Europe where royal power had disintegrated, meaning that there was no strong royal power to help uphold these religious states. It begins, as I said, as a kind of bottom-up process centered on Cluny and a lot of daughter monasteries that are established by Cluny.
then leads me towards the Gregorian reforms. Then around 1050, it spreads to Rome. It's partly the work of the of the holy roman emperor henry the third he disposes of several church of several popes and then appoints a new pope leo the ninth who becomes the first of a string of reform popes that that really carry this reform agenda to Rome with them.
It culminates with Gregory VII, who becomes Pope in 1073, and who makes a radical change in the sense that he construes any kind of... of investiture for instance of bishops, as a form of simony. And at the same time, he makes the argument that as Pope, he is able to excommunicate and even depose.
kings and even the Holy Roman Emperor. So Gregory... forces what has been termed the investiture controversy, a grand battle over investiture to Gregory, of course, over Simony, which plays out until this conquest. that of Worms that I mentioned before in 1122. We then make the further argument. We base this on on the work of a number of historians that the conflict of church and state really continued to dominate European politics for two centuries more after this point.
So you can say that the more specific premise of our book is that, and this is something that medieval historians have long stressed and cautioned, that it really makes little sense to artificially attempt to to separate the religious sphere and the secular sphere. sphere, including state formation, when attempting to understand political developments in medieval and early modern Europe as much of the previous social science literature.
on European state formation has done, including this one state formation literature and the endowment literature. Just to pick up on the last point you mentioned, I do remember, I think it was a couple of years ago, I made a podcast about another book called The Political History of Territory. At the birth of territory, I've got it on my bookshelf. And it was about the idea of territory, towns, cosmopolitanism. And I think we...
The book also sort of made it clear. When I was reading the book, I was expecting to read something about political history of Europe. But the role of church was so dominant and prominent there, as you mentioned, you can't really separate these two from one another.
No, no, and I think that is key, right? And that then kind of raises the question, why has so much social science literature been making this separation? And here, so my own gut feeling is that We've simply been kind of reading history backward from a situation, a modern situation where the Church of God caused matters much less than it did.
back in the Middle Ages. Historians have long recognized this. So this is a criticism of the social science, literature on European state formation and not the work of historians. And also I would want to emphasize that other social scientists have really also picked up on the notion of the importance of the church in recent years. Anna Groszma-Labush's work is a good example of that.
And I'm myself also interested in the history of education. And again, I get that's one of another things that when you want to study the history of education, modern university.
Again, it's impossible to ignore the role of church in establishing a systematic approach to education, liberal arts and also university as well. I was really intrigued by... the data set you put together, because when it comes to the study of medieval history in a way, so there's a lot of archival information, but you put together a data set.
about ecclesiastical and a lay institution is Latin West. Can you tell us how you went about putting that data set together? What is that data set made of? And what was the purpose? How does it help you in the context of your research? Yeah, thanks, Mortesa. So this data set is principally the work of my co-author, Jonathan Duchept, I should start by saying. Also, of course...
It's not original data in the sense that we are highly dependent on historians who have kind of done the spade work force, you could say. What we have then done... is to try to code based on this prior work. Some of the things that can be... pretty validly coded in this period, so back in the high Middle Ages. And the best example of that are probably the geographic measures that we use in the book. So it sounds very simple, but I think we...
use it to good effect. We code the place of monasteries, Gluniac, later Dominican and Franciscan. We code, of course, the place of... the towns that we're interested in. We also quote whether they had bishops. We also try to quote whether they became self-governing and when they did so. And especially these two graphic measures, that's something we can code very validly in this universe. Of course, urban self-government is much more difficult and we try to deal with that in
in various ways. But what I think this dataset allows us to do is to, and here I would argue that we go beyond what historians have done before, that it allows us to look at broader tendencies. So we can scope up from specific areas, right, and say what are the general tendencies of how urban autonomy appeared across the space of...
Western and Central Europe, what was the timing and so on and so forth. To what extent does it correlate with nearness to Cluniac monasteries and later on to Dominican monasteries? So that is basically what we have been doing, but of course being highly dependent on prior work by historians. And you just mentioned the establishment of self-governing.
towns or communities, let's say. You start by, in the book, you talk about those urban autonomies emerging in northern Italy and France. Can you tell us how did they... How were they established? And if those urban self-governing communities also spread to other parts of Europe? Yeah. Thanks, excellent question. So what we basically show in the book here is that... Self-governing towns, Max Weber's free towns or cities, only really came about after the onset of...
the investiture controversy of what I've referred to as the conflict of church and state before. So it's only after this conflict begins that we start having a genuine self-governing town. And... They were especially concentrated, as you also indicated, in northern Italy. But we really find them across the space of Western Europe. We find them in the Low Countries. We find them in parts of France. We find them in the West. parts of Germany. So they arise exactly in the area.
where this conflict between church and state plays out in early phases. Later on, urban self-government spreads much further afield. It spreads throughout the the German space. It later on spreads to Eastern Europe. Jonathan has a forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press where he shows this later spread. But what we are interested in in the book is to explain the origins of urban self-government as well as the early spread of autonomous towns.
So this kind of goes back to our main criticism of what I termed the bellicist and the endowment perspectives. And that is that they are not good at explaining origins in a broader sense. They are unable to explain the origins of this twofold double balancing act that I mentioned before and why they didn't arise elsewhere. But they are also unable more specifically to explain the...
origins of urban self-government. And this is kind of the puzzle, the first puzzle that we really try to answer empirically in the book. And these autonomous towns or town councils, which I guess the legacy is still alive in most Western countries. You have city councils, town councils, even a lot of countries in the Middle East. That is also one of the unintended consequences of the events that happen in Europe, right?
which we can say, I could be wrong, so I'm just posing a question for you to respond to, which is a nascent form of self-governing groups. Am I right? Yeah, this is basically our premise, right? So urban self-government is really a regime form based on a form of consent, even if it's, of course, only of town elites in the beginning, right?
And in the book, we basically argue that this marks the strengthening of the power of social groups. So in that sense, it helps shore up this internal balancing act that I mentioned. before. And we argue that we can only understand this development which antedates the the medieval commercial revolution that I know you had an earlier podcast with Chris Rickham about because I listened to that by directing attention to the
conflict of church and state. But what is important is that urban self-government well that of course only characterized towns but self-government characterized many other political units after this point in time there were also rural communes though we don't analyze those in the book. Chris Wickham actually has an interesting book on those.
So self-government actually came to be practiced on very many different planes in medieval Europe. In the book, we term this the broader structures of corporate self-government. two of those structures in detail empirically, urban self-government and then realm-level parliaments or representative institutions at what a bit... Anachronistically, you can call it the national level.
So you ask, why did urban self-government arise? Basically, we say that this Carolingian state collapse was a scope condition. This is also something... that historians have argued. But we then go one step further and direct attention to internal conflicts between bishops and townsmen, or more precisely, the conflict between Amen. The reformers, so those trying to push this reform agenda that I mentioned before, and then bishops who tried to oppose this reform agenda.
that townsmen who were fighting for church reform in the 11th and the 12th century, that they soon learned that urban autonomy was really necessary to hinder I guess we could call wayward clergy from taking over urban churches, particularly where unreformed bishops rule towns, or where they were fighting with their own reformed where Reformed bishops were fighting with their own unreformed clergy. So what we say is that urban self-government is really a side effect of the great struggle over the
reform project. And the idea of political representation, again, it's, I guess, one of those things that people do not really associate with the Middle Ages and the idea of... political representation and rule by consent, which was first developed within the Catholic Church following the 11th century Gregorian reforms. Can you talk about the idea of political representation, how we develop from the Catholic Church reforms? Yeah. So this is the second argument we make in the book.
that representation and also consent was really developed by canon lawyers within the church and then spread to lay society by church actors. What happens is really the following, to try to give a very short summary. papal declaration of independence as Harold Berman once termed it. It produces a flood of litigation or lawsuits in Rome. This happens because the
Pope really becomes recognized as what the historian Richard Kaye terms, and I quote here, the omnicompetent court of appeal for all of Christendom. So Rome becomes where... you go with... with clerical lawsuits after the conflict of church and state or following the conflict of church and state. But of course, Rome is very far afield. The distances are really prohibitive and representative. and consent are really developed to handle this problem or to handle litigation in church courts.
So the idea of representation is that an appointed representative had full powers to act on behalf of a group. It has a basis in the rediscovered Roman law, but it is really redeveloped by these canon lawyers. Consent, which is also found in... distant corner of rediscovered roman law is the notion that groups that were affected by decisions had a right to be heard it's normally said that they had a voice even if they didn't have a So these ideas are developed really to enable...
church courts in Rome to reach decisions that are then binding on the groups that have sent representatives and have to be heard during the the lawsuits. This seems to have been fully developed around the year 1200. But what then happens is, and this is a very fascinating story, that Popes, led by Pope Innocent III, begins to use these practices practices, representation and consent in what I guess you could say is a more political way they use them to call.
representatives to great church councils, including especially the biggest church councils of the Middle Ages, the Fourth Lateran, which meets in Rome in 15 but summons are already sent in 12-13 because distances are so difficult. Why is it that innocence starts calling genuine representatives to these church councils? It's probably due to taxation. He wants to tax these groups, for instance, cathedral chapters. And to do so, he really needs to... to hear the voice of these representatives.
Another fascinating aspect is then that these practices very quickly spread to lay parliaments. And we show in the book that this first happens in the Spanish crown of Aragon. in 1214, so the year after the summons to the Fourth Lateran has been sent out. And it happens specifically because papal legate Peter of Benevento calls the Lerida parliament that meets in August 1214 in order to have a new...
Aragonese king crowned. So Peter of Benevento, he basically reuses these new practices that have been developed within the church, have just been used to call the Fourth Lateran. And he now starts using them at a lay assembly. And we show in the book how this has staying power in the crown of Aragon. Later parliaments are called in the same way.
We also show how it's also from the church that... practice of representation and consent enters in the English case where this development begins in earnest in the 1250s. And the Dominican order of Christianity also played a role in, actually inspired that idea of representative government. Am I right? Yeah, well, it's more that it's spread by the Dominican Order. So the Dominican Order is founded in 1216, so the year after this Lateran Council. It's soon recognized by Pope Innocent III.
And what the Dominican founders do is that they base the organizational structure of the order on these new practices of representation and consent. a constitution from 1220 that's really based on that. So what we argue and believe that we show in the book is how the Dominicans henceforth showcased what was really the most
extensive practice of representative government anywhere in Europe to town elites in the towns where Dominicans were present. So when Dominicans were present in In the cityscape, we say that this really inspired lay political elites to adopt. these representative practices, this notion of proctorial representation. I should say here that this is also mainly Jonathan's work, this part of...
of the book. But one funny thing, maybe it's not funny, but interesting thing that I can mention here is that we show how... The Franciscan order, which was not based on representation in the same way, did not have the same effects, so they did not in the same way inspire urban elites to adopt representation. We frame this as a kind of placebo test, this use of the Franciscan as a comparative frame of reference.
I'm myself always fascinated by the interconnection of political history and church history in the Middle Ages. And I think this book has been really influential in that sense as well. I think it was a... two years ago that I talked with Dr. Miri Rubin about Middle Ages, a very short introduction, which was a tiny, tiny little book, you know, those series in Oxford. And she did mention as one of the contributions of Middle Ages or achievements of Middle Ages was representative government.
because it was a very short introduction, it wasn't really an elaborate discussion of how that representative government came about, which I guess what you have covered in parts of this book as well. To continue on that idea of government and nation states, I mean states in international relations, there is this phrase in your book, use of course the Latin word.
phrase that I can't pronounce, so I'll leave it to you to say the Latin one. The king is emperor in his own realm. And you talk about how the idea, the modern idea of equality of states in international relations. was again inspired by church. It would be great if you could talk about this for our listeners. Yeah, thanks, Martisa.
So this is part of the final break with Empire. That's one of the downstream consequences of the... conflict of church and state this doctrine i'll not pronounce it in in latin either the king is emperor in his own realm that's also developed by canon lawyers in the century. And it's then made part of decrees by several popes after 1200. Pope Innocent III has a 1202 decretal where he uses. something like this phrase.
So why is this important? The thing is, or at least this is what we argue in the book, and again, of course, basing our argument here on prior work by historians, that this was really a revolutionary doctrine set against the earlier religiously backed view of empire that had been dominant. until the conflict of church and state. So the idea of the doctrine is, of course, that the emperor, the Holy Roman emperor more specifically, does not lord over the other monarchs of the Latin West.
and as such this was a hugely important doctrine which
at least this is what we argue, had long-term ramifications for international relations in medieval and later on early modern Europe. Ultimately, it points toward the modern doctrine of the equality of states in international law to quote historian of ideas francis oakley So according to medieval historians, this is really a key step in the Western European shift from, and I quote here again, universal domination to plurality and formal equality.
between states unquote. This doctrine and the way that the reform papacy was able to challenge empire, the power of the Holy Roman Emperor, ultimately left place for the multi-state system and of course it left place for territorial states such as as France and England, which were not empires, but became very, very strong kingdoms. And thus, we argue, it becomes very important for later European state formation.
external balancing act that I started by mentioning. It is conducive to creating a multi-state system where monarchs balance each other with no...
one player being able to create some sort of hierarchy vis-a-vis the rest of them. And I'm also... interested to know about towards the end of the book you talk about another crisis in the 13th and early 14th century the succession crisis which was known as the great interregnum Can you tell us what it was and how it again reinforced the idea of urban self-government that we discussed earlier?
Yeah, certainly. So what we say is that the great interregnum, which begins in 1250, ends in some way in 1273 with the crowning of Rudolf of Habsburg, but a new emperor is only proclaimed by the Pope in 1312. that this marks the last act of the great struggle between popes and Holy Roman emperors.
And here the key actors are the Hohenstaufen emperors, especially Frederick Barbarossa and his grandson Frederick II. And what happens is that these Hohenstaufen emperors... really attempt to roll back the clock to the... to the period before the conflict of church and state in the sense that they again challenged the papacy and they tried to take back control of wealthy northern Italy, which which Holy Roman Emperors has forfated as part of the investiture controversy.
Now, this Hohenstaufen campaign is ultimately defeated by the popes. There are a lot of dramatic episodes here, both under Frederick Barbarossa, but especially under Frederick Barbarossa. the second who rules out of Sicily but is also a holy Roman emperor.
No less than four times Frederick is excommunicated by the popes and popes enter a lot of alliances both with the towns of northern Italy and with disgruntled German nobles and princes to to put an end to holmstaufen power and this succeeds with the death of frederick in 1250 the pope bars his son from becoming holy roman
emperor. And this is the beginning of a prolonged succession crisis or even an interregnum of the Holy Roman Empire. And this is what we... normally termed the great interregnum, where the throne is basically empty. 23-year period. And we argue and also show in the book how this really cripples the royal power in the Holy Roman Empire, even after Rudolf of Habsburg then becomes German king in 1273. So basically the Great Interregnum breaks...
royal power in the Holy Roman Empire and it's never genuinely reconsolidated, not even under the Habsburg emperors later on. And this vacuum of power really creates room for another round, you could say, of urban self-governance. And we show in the book how, for instance, in the old Hohenstaufen areas, we really see mushrooming of free towns in the period after the Great Interregnum begins.
We also argue that this is mirrored in what's called the politics of succession. So until the great interregnum, all German kings who had living sons had... them elected and crowned as kings during their tenure. But after the Great Interregnum, we have a period of almost 200 years where it's seven different dynasties that... that have the imperial status. And we basically only see one.
succession from father to son in this period. This is something that Robert Bartlett has also shown. So this vacuum breaks the Holy Roman empire, it becomes a fragmented unit that we normally think of when we speak about the Holy Roman Empire. It leaves room for urban self-government. I also show in other recent work that it is mirrored in the way German kings traveled. So I've showed this with a group of collaborators in what is still unpopular.
So we show how strong emperors before the great interregnum traveled much more aggressively. than the weak emperors after the great interregnum. So this is the final defeat of empire, you can say, in the European Middle Ages.
And as a final question, and I think it's an important one for our listeners to know, I think, like I mentioned at the beginning of the interview, I might have mentioned that the church... is notorious and how the medieval church is notorious there are lots of myths about the middle ages but when we read serious books of history like this book you come to understand about the
great things that happened because of the support of the Catholic Church, rise of science, educational institutions, political institutions. I'm keen to know your thoughts that if all these...
developments, most of them democratic developments, to have self-governing town councils, representative government, equality of states and international relations. If all these great developments... were intentionally willed and actioned and planned by the church, or there were consequences of the political turmoil and also all those reforms.
that happened in the church, sometimes maybe unintended consequences. So I think that would be a great place to bring it to an end if I could have your thoughts on this. Yeah.
Thanks, Moteza. So if all that I have said is true, was this by design or not? Well, our argument was that this was definitely unintended. In a sense, the whole point of the book is... that these church actors and also their lay supporters were incentivized by religious beliefs, but of course also much more mundane interests. But this then had...
these lay knock-on effects on urban self-government and on state formation that I have mentioned because it shores up this internal and external balancing act. So these were clerical and lay... actors that were fighting for something much more specifically but then inadvertently ends up. producing a new world I guess would be one way to summarize what we are saying. And I know some historians have a hard time accepting this.
this kind of thinking. And I'll just give one good example. That's a very gracious review of our book. by Thomas Noble in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. And I really like this review. It's a very open-minded review. But Noble then ends by... by saying the following, and I quote here. The authors used the word unanticipated several times. I applaud their candor, but I do wonder about intentionality. Have Muller and Duchet heaped up a very tall pile of coincidence?
I cannot think of a single source that promotes or even observes the thesis articulated in this book. Neither can I. I mean, the whole idea here is that this was really unintended. These are unintended consequences of actors that are sometimes fighting for more mundane interests. sometimes motivated by religious belief, but of course do not have a project of... creating self-government or territorial states or anything like that. And this is also where we end the...
the conclusion. If we invoke the medieval theory of the free orders, those who pray, those who fight and those who work, then we say that Prior social science literature, and again, not the historians, have really tended to emphasize those who fight, so that's the Bellicist literature, and those who work, that's the endowment literature. And our book then adds this focus on on those who pray.
And compared with the historians, we look at these unintended long-term consequences of the conflict of church and state. We could not have written our book without the... prior work of these historians, but we come at it from a different perspective, a much more social science. political science even perspective, where we look at these broader tendencies, long-term consequences, unintended consequences, and so on and so forth.
Thank you very much, Dr. Jürgen Moller, for your time to talk to us about your book on New Books Network. I highly recommend this book to those who are interested in history, intellectual history, political history, the Catholic Church and European State Formation, 1080 to 1500. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks so much, Mortesa. It was a great pleasure talking to you and thanks so much for taking an interest in our book.