Medieval Conflict Research Articles

:Wergild, Compensation and Penance: The Monetary Logic of Early Medieval Conflict Resolution

:<i>Wergild, Compensation and Penance: The Monetary Logic of Early Medieval Conflict Resolution</i>

Law and moral theology in Christian Europe: the limits of sacralization in the late works of Paolo Prodi

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the work of Paolo Prodi (1932–2016), which is characterised by a constant reflection on secularisation. As a democratic Catholic, he explored the relationship between the Roman Church and the modern world starting from the Council of Trent and from the dual figure of the pope as a temporal ruler and spiritual guide. His original contribution concerned the conflict between law and conscience: a problem that led him to design a triptych of books on the foundations of the western world. He was influenced not only by Verfassungsgeschichte (German constitutional history), but also by Harold Berman. If for Weber the modern world was born from the Reformation, for Berman it was the ‘Gregorian revolution’ that changed the fate of Latin Europe. For Prodi, too, the medieval conflict between canon and civil law introduced a peculiar structure in Europe that would last until the triumph of the nation states and the so-called ‘political religions’. In his three books (the first dedicated to the oath, the second to justice, the last to economics), Prodi placed at the centre of his analysis the notion of forum; the history of moral theology and casuistry and the relationship between penitence and justice.

Wergild, Compensation and Penance: The Monetary Logic of Early Medieval Conflict Resolution by Lukas Bothe, Stefan Esders and Han Nijdam

Reviewed by: Wergild, Compensation and Penance: The Monetary Logic of Early Medieval Conflict Resolution by Lukas Bothe, Stefan Esders and Han Nijdam Julian Calcagno Bothe, Lukas, Stefan Esders, and Han Nijdam, eds, Wergild, Compensation and Penance: The Monetary Logic of Early Medieval Conflict Resolution (Medieval Law and Its Practice, 31), Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2021; hardback; pp. 322; R.R.P. €143.00; ISBN 9789004466128. This volume is an edited collection of observations concerning a revitalization of the study of wergild and conflict settlement in medieval Europe. Interest in this area has peaked in recent decades and this book reflects that interest. This volume contains thirteen single-author chapters that set out to examine the role of compensation in different medieval legal systems. Though some attention is paid to the classical Roman period, in order to demonstrate possible efforts of continuity in the Germanic legal systems, the overall emphasis of this volume is skewed towards Anglo-Saxon England and Frankish and Carolingian France, with some emphasis on Frisian, Scandinavian, and other ‘Germanic-like’ sources. There is a great deal of dialogue between the chapters, with each author adding their own insights with respect to each other’s work. Indeed, this gives the volume a more insightful approach, as each author builds on the overall thesis that aims to uncover how a person’s worth was established in the medieval era and why monetary values were applied to resolve certain conflicts. The first three chapters are largely devoted to analysing the incentive behind wergild as a method of compensation. In doing so, the authors set out to unpack the structural approaches outlined in Germanic law codes such as the Sachsenspiegel, the leges barbarorum, and the Lex Frisionum. These studies are broad and investigate many law codes, yet they deliver a well-rounded preliminary [End Page 226] understanding of early medieval mentalities surrounding conflict resolution. The focus of these first few chapters appears to be on tracking down the transition from ancient Roman law to the beginnings of medieval statehood. It is argued that the phenomenon of wergild was ‘superior’ to models of conflict resolution, as payment would disincentivize kinship groups from getting involved in individual feuds (p. 10). However, as Stefan Esders quite rightly points out, the problem with quantifying human life in terms of monetary value is that ‘value’ is always abstract (p. 12). To understand this abstraction, many of the contributors in this volume refer to the idea of honour, albeit represented as an idea numerical in value. The theme of honour runs predominantly through most of the book and is well examined in Chapters 6 and 7. Overall, these studies deliver an enhanced appreciation of understanding why honour played a substantial role in the psychologization behind wergild utilized as payment to resolve conflict. The first half of the volume will appeal to those unfamiliar with Germanic law or early medieval mentalities concerning law and order. For those interested in a terminological analysis of wergild, then Chapters 4 and 5 will beguile the reader. Naturally, they are useful guides for examining links of continuity and similarity between the different Germanic law codes, most of which are examined in this book. The chapters that make up the second half of the volume are devoted to independent themes. The approaches delivered are less broad and focus on a specific area of law or a particular law code. Rob Meens’s chapter interestingly draws us away from what one may consider ‘secular’ law, as he focuses on penance and penitential practice. Recent scholarship has considered the likelihood that penance would have been part of the punishment process. Meens correctly draws our attention to the idea that many texts that include methods of penitential practice often circulated throughout early medieval Europe and were made to exact punishment from lawbreakers. Making peace with God and absolving oneself from sin was, therefore, arguably just as important as monetary compensation in the process of restoring conflict. It is here that Meens reminds us that there is always an uncertainty between what we consider secular law and ecclesiastical law (p. 233). Both were interrelated in the medieval period. To make a distinction between the two would be to...

Fear, Hatred and Strategy during the Wars of the Roses

AbstractThis article examines the importance of emotions such as fear, enmity and hatred during the Wars of the Roses. Despite the large body of scholarship on the wars and extensive corpus of primary sources, historians have not looked at the Wars of the Roses from this perspective. This lacuna is unfortunate for two reasons. First, examining the role of emotions provides an additional insight into the wars that current discussions have viewed as tangential. Second, the Wars of the Roses provide a different way of viewing emotions in medieval warfare from studies of emotions in other wars. Discussions of emotions in medieval warfare tend to examine the experiences and mental worlds of individual combatants, the performative value of emotions in political conflict or the use of emotions in the memory of wars. In contrast, this article demonstrates that, during the Wars of the Roses, emotions had a real and tangible influence on the course and outcome of the wars, also influencing military strategy. This article highlights the potential of the late medieval English sources for revealing the use of emotions in war. It then examines three ways in which emotions shaped the wars: the personal enmities between successive dukes of Somerset and members of the House of York; regional hatreds between northerners and southerners; and finally collective hatred and blame directed towards individual councillors. Taken together, the material examined here provides new insights into the tangible effects that emotions had on the strategies of commanders and the politics a late medieval conflict.

Between Sea and Land: Geographical and Literary Marginality in the Conversion of Medieval Frisia

Ancient and medieval Frisia was an ethno-linguistic entity far larger than the modern province of Friesland, Netherlands. Water outweighed land over its geographical extent, and its marginal political status, unconquered by the Romans and without the feudal social structure typical of the Middle Ages, made Frisia independent and strange to its would-be conquerors. This article opens with Frisia’s encounters with Rome, and its portrayal in Latin texts as a wretched land of water-logged beggars, ultimately unworthy of annexation. Next, the early medieval conflict between the Frisians and the Danes/Geats, featured in Beowulf and other epic fragments, is examined. Pagan Frisia became of interest during Frankish territorial expansion via a combination of missionary activity and warfare from the seventh century onward. The vitae of saints Willibrord, Boniface, Liudger and Wulfram provide insights into the conversion of Frisia, and the resistance to Christianity and Frankish overlordship of Radbod, its last Pagan king. It is contended that the watery terrain and distinctive culture of Frisia (pastoralism, seafaring, Pagan religion) as noted in ancient and medieval texts rendered it “other” to politically centralized entities such as Rome and Francia. Frisia was eventually tamed and integrated through conversion to Christianity and absorption into Francia after the death of Radbod.

Between violent outbreaks and legal disputes: the contested cityscape of Frankish Jerusalem through the prism of institutional and socio-economic conflicts

ABSTRACT Focusing on the case of Frankish Jerusalem, this article engages with recent advances in the study of medieval urban conflicts in order to shed new light on their role in socio-ethnically heterogeneous urban environments, such as those formed in the Latin East. It examines several episodes of conflict that occurred in Jerusalem between the 1130s and the 1150s, involving key figures in the city's institutions and population. I propose an analytical framework that places these episodes within a mutual municipal context, linking broader socio-economic mechanisms that were at play in each episode to the renegotiation and reshaping of contested and symbolically significant areas inside Jerusalem. This approach unveils strategies of urban transformation that oscillated between violent outbreaks and legal resolution of property disputes, and were affected by tensions between social, religious and institutional configurations.

Shadowing Shakespeare

In his 1980 film Kagemusha or Shadow Warrior, Akira Kurosawa presents the sixteenth-century Takeda clan engaging a lower-class thief to impersonate their recently deceased leader, Takeda Shingen. I examine Kagemusha as a critical engagement with Shakespeare’s English history plays and ‘shadow’ counterpart to Kurosawa’s trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations, Throne of Blood (1957), The Bad Sleep Well (1960) and Ran (1985). In keeping with Shakespeare’s dramatisation of English history, Kurosawa creatively reworks historical sources, incorporating stories of intergenerational rivalry and fulfilled prophecies, to depict the transition from medieval civil conflict to the early-modern nation-state. Kurosawa also deploys the motif of the double to explore the distinctively Shakespearean theme of power as performance, engaging in a dramatic examination of Machiavelli’s ideas about politics. I argue that Kurosawa’s use of the double posits a theory of influence, drawing on Japanese cultural traditions, in which doubling can achieve a form of transcendence through self-annihilation.

Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture

Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture

‘Westward on the high-hilled plains’: the literature of Shropshire and the early twentieth century imagination, 1896–c.1939

This article explores English national identities in the early twentieth century through the regional case study of Shropshire. Building on existing research on English regions, this article addresses the scarcity of border case studies. I argue that Shropshire was perceived as a border region that, at the same time as being incorporated into the model of the South Country, was also powerfully shaped by its proximity to Wales. Shropshire was valued as an escape from commercial modernity through its countryside landscapes, as a gateway to the past through its buildings, place-names, and folk customs, as a borderland of medieval conflict with Wales, and as a mysterious region of superstitions and the supernatural. This article suggests that the motifs and themes which worked through the images of ‘Shropshire’ and ‘England’ supported an imagination of diversity, multiplicity and contradiction—not solely one of national unity.

Urban Diplomacy: Cologne, the Rhenish League (1254-1257) and the Rhenish Urban League (1381-1389)

One of the distinctives of Rhineland cities of the central and later Middle Ages is their propensity to form leagues (Städtebünde) on their own initiative in the absence of strong imperial central authority. These alliances represent remarkable diplomatic collaborations between otherwise economic rivals in order to resolve conflicts and sustain the “king’s peace” (Landfriede) when the monarch was incapable of doing so. The inclusion of these regional and interregional Rhenish urban leagues into the historiography of European urban history has only recently begun in German-language medieval scholarship, yet it remains profound in its absence among Anglophone or any other western historiography on medieval urban history. This article seeks to address such an historiographical absence by introducing the subject within the context of this volume’s comparative, European-wide focus on medieval institutional structures, conflicts, and political culture. After situating the subject in its modern historiographical context, the two great Rhenish urban leagues (1254-1257 and 1381-1389) are studied, providing a further framing context for a close consideration of the Cologne-led Rhineland urban alliance of 1301-1320 directed against the elector-prince archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier. The sophistication of administrative, diplomatic, financial, military, and communication organs among the Rhenish cities in this period is extraordinary and thus provides additional insight into central and later medieval European political culture, conflict resolution, and territorial government. Medieval urban history thereby extends its landscape from that within the city walls to the pathways of diplomatic discourse between them.

Degrading the Male Body: Manhood and Conflict in the High‐medieval Low Countries

Recent studies of medieval manhood have prompted scholars to revisit the established research field of medieval conflict and have directed attention towards the role of gendered violence in (elite) political culture. However, symbolic impermanent defamations of the male body proper remain to be discussed. Drawing from the rich narrative sources from the high‐medieval Low Countries, this article aims in particular at remedying this blind spot by scrutinising specific forms of gendered violence, such as the enforced shearing of an elite man's beard or a public mocking of his chivalric manly fortitude. It also presents the argument that these practices, when used in contexts of conflict and punishment, not only tapped into the authority of ancient traditions and rituals but rather might have served clear contemporary interests relating to the pacification of society. Such tactics would have helped to avoid feud in a world in which aristocratic manly honour regularly seemed to demand it, especially in a time when centralised and consolidated structures for conflict management were still lacking and a religiously inspired peace ideal influenced policy‐making as well as day‐to‐day social dynamics.

Landscape and warfare in Anglo‐Saxon England and the Viking campaign of 1006

This paper outlines the state of research into early medieval conflict landscapes in England and sets out a theoretical and methodological basis for the sustained and systematic investigation of battlefield toponymy and topography. The hypothesis is advanced that certain types of place were considered particularly appropriate for the performance of violent conflict throughout the period and that the social ideas that determined the choice of locale are, to some degree, recoverable through in‐depth, interdisciplinary analysis of landscapes, place names and texts. The events of 1006 and the landscape of the upper Kennet are introduced as a case study that reveals the complex interplay of royal ideology, superstition and place that were invoked in the practice of violence in late Anglo‐Saxon England. In the course of the discussion, this paper seeks to demonstrate the value of applying a similar approach to the full range of evidence for conflict landscapes in early medieval England and beyond.

An Introduction to the Chansons de Geste by Catherine M. Jones (review)

Reviewed by: An Introduction to the Chansons de Geste by Catherine M. Jones Mihaela L. Florescu Catherine M. Jones, An Introduction to the Chansons de Geste, New Perspectives on Medieval Literature: Authors and Traditions ( Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2014) 218 pp. Catherine M. Jones, the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of French and Provencal at the University of Georgia, has produced an excellent introduction to the tradition of the Old French chansons de geste. The resulting book is divided into three major parts. In part one, the chansons are placed in historical and literary context. Part two presents on overview of the numerous texts. Part three looks at six popular chansons in greater detail: La Chanson de Roland, Le Charroi de Nimes, La Prise d’Orange, Raoul de Cambrai, Ami et Amile, and Huon de Bordeaux. Jones approaches the study of the chansons from feminist, postcolonial, and cognitive theory points of view. Jones explains the tradition of the chansons contending that while there are similarities with epics from earlier ages, such as the Homeric epics, the focus of the Old French chansons is more specific than that of its predecessors. The chansons are very much a product of a specific time and place, and often revolve around local conflicts in France usually involving the constant battles for power between the monarchy and the aristocracy and the medieval conflict between Western Europe and Islam. Many chansons de geste are associated with actual historical events. The events depicted in La Chanson de Roland, composed in the late eleventh or early twelfth century were based on an attack on Charlemagne’s troops that took place in 778. The character of Guillaume d’Orange, is loosely based on Guillaume, Count of Toulouse. Historical similarities can be seen even in the portrayal of minor characters. Geographical references and local conflicts are also based in historical fact. Nevertheless, an exact historical reading would be inaccurate as the events the chansons purport to portray were written hundreds of years after they were supposed to have occurred. It is possible the chansons had their start when noteworthy events were recorded contemporarily into lyrical narrative pieces later modified by generations of oral poets. The Old French chansons de geste may have evolved from the Germanic oral tradition prevalent at the time. Itinerant jongleurs in northern France may have been influenced by the traditions of their neighbors. Others theorize that the chansons were inspired by local legends. Neotraditionalists, such as Ramon Menendez Pidal, demonstrate that the early epics [End Page 249] preserved in manuscripts prove the stories predate the oldest surviving texts. Others point to Hellenists Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord’s findings on orally composed epic songs in Yugoslavia as evidence of an example of transmission of stories through an oral tradition which could have been very similar to the method employed to record the Old French chansons de geste. Delving into an even more distant past, Jones explores the possibility that the chansons are related to their older Indo-European forerunners. Joel Grisward’s three ideological identifiers of Indo-European culture are present in the Old French chansons de geste. The sacred, represented by a leader, in the form of a sovereign or a priest, the warrior, and abundance, represented by characters associated with nourishment and riches are the three Indo-European identifiers present in to Old French chansons. Grisward’s theory is further substantiated by the striking similarities in which the chansons align themselves with the earlier substrate of Indo-European themes. In the medieval age, the chansons de geste were distinguished from other writings by their distinctive form. The chansons from the twelfth century were composed in assonanced decasyllabic laisses. The decasyllabic line usually exhibits “epic caesura,” or a division into two parts, 4+6 syllables. The division 6+4 also appears from time to time. “Assonance” refers to the concept of an identical stressed (tonic) vowel at the end of each line. Chansons from the thirteenth century on, made use of the alexandrine verse of twelve syllable lines, featuring a division after the sixth syllable. The thirteenth century saw transition from assonance to rhyme, with many poems undergoing a transformative period containing both...

Calculating the Middle Ages? The Project »Complexities and Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean and Near East« (COMMED)

The project "Complexities and networks in the Medieval Mediterranean and Near East" (COMMED) at the Division for Byzantine Research of the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences focuses on the adaptation and development of concepts and tools of network theory and complexity sciences for the analysis of societies, polities and regions in the medieval world in a comparative perspective. Key elements of its methodological and technological toolkit are applied, for instance, in the new project "Mapping medieval conflicts: a digital approach towards political dynamics in the pre-modern period" (MEDCON), which analyses political networks and conflict among power elites across medieval Europe with five case studies from the 12th to 15th century. For one of these case studies on 14th century Byzantium, the explanatory value of this approach is presented in greater detail. The presented results are integrated in a wider comparison of five late medieval polities across Afro-Eurasia (Byzantium, China, England, Hungary and Mamluk Egypt) against the background of the {\guillemotright}Late Medieval Crisis{\guillemotleft} and its political and environmental turmoil. Finally, further perspectives of COMMED are outlined.

The Political Theory of the Disruption 1

Of political principles, says a distinguished authority,2 whether they be those of order or of freedom, we must seek in religious and quasi-theological writings for the highest and most notable expressions. No one, in truth, will deny the accuracy of this claim for those ages before the Reformation transferred the centre of political authority from church to state. What is too rarely realised is the modernism of those writings in all save form. Just as the medieval state had to fight hard for relief from ecclesiastical trammels, so does its modern exclusiveness throw the burden of a kindred struggle upon its erstwhile rival. The church, intelligibly enough, is compelled to seek the protection of its liberties lest it become no more than the religious department of an otherwise secular society. The main problem, in fact, for the political theorist is still that which lies at the root of medieval conflict. What is the definition of sovereignty? Shall the nature and personality of those groups

The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric

The Poet as Translator: Mary Wortley Montagu Approaches the Turkish Lyric

Words as Weapons in the Correspondence of Edward I with Llywelyn ap Gruffydd

The correspondence exchanged by Edward I of England and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales, in the late thirteenth century has traditionally been read for its legal and jurisdictional implications. However, as Rees Davies noted, language was itself a weapon in medieval Anglo-Welsh conflict. From this assumption, I examine a single letter exchange to investigate the construction and function of royal epistolary language. I suggest that traditional and formulaic elements were adapted to strategic expression of the authority and longevity of royal power, and that silences were equally intentional and rhetorically forceful weapons in the campaign to dominate Wales.

Mendicants as victims: scale, scope and the idiom of violence

This article establishes the scale of violence perpetrated against mendicant friars in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe, and provides a list of these events in an on-line appendix. It underscores and analyses the wide variety of contexts in which such incidents took place and examines the ramifications for the history of the mendicant orders and medieval urban society generally. Violence was a subtler form of communicative action than is sometimes recognised, and the paper points to the inverse relationship between power and violence in medieval urban conflicts.

Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority among Three Late Medieval Masters

John Wyclif (d. 1384), Thomas Netter (d. 1430) and Jean Gerson (d. 1429) had a good deal in common. They were all theologians, and thus ‘masters of the sacred page’ by trade. They all recognised the absolute authority of Scripture in matters of the Catholic faith over and against any pretensions of canon law. What separated them, therefore, was not the recognition of authority as such, but rather the correct application of that authority. Wyclif exercised his rights as a university master to dissent from ecclesiastical determinations that ran contrary to the truth as revealed in Scripture. Netter and Gerson set out to curb this sort of magisterial excess which they believed would inevitably lead to the destruction of all proper norms of authority within the Church. Rather than being a simple tale of heresy and orthodoxy, therefore, this late medieval conflict turned on the question of professional expertise, rights and responsibilities.

Killing Time: Challenging the Common Perceptions of Three Medieval Conflicts—Ferrybridge, Dintingdale and Towton—'The Largest Battle on British Soil'

The Battle of Towton in March 1461 is said to be the largest battle ever fought on British soil and according to the historical sources appears to have been the longest. However, a careful reading of the sources suggests that the traditional understanding of the battle is based on a misinterpretation of the Medieval concept of time. It is suggested here that the battle was much shorter than has been supposed, and also that the Battle of Towton has been conflated with the battles at Ferrybridge and Dintingdale. What has until now appeared to be the largest battle in Britain and two contemporary small actions can now be seen as three interconnected conflicts, the combined effect of which was to put Edward IV onto the throne of England.