8 Courts, Institutions, and Cities: Flanders and Italy

Do cities and city-states offer an alternative explanation for representative emergence, one in which the benefits of trade loom large, as much scholarship holds? Do they even form part of the same phenomenon being studied here, the emergence of polity-wide representative regimes? And can we say the local participative government in European cities was a function of urban “independence” from the state—a claim some economic historians have tied to the European urban (and thus economic) development outpacing the Islamic world and the East more generally?1 The evidence in this chapter suggests a negative answer to these questions, challenging some prevalent causal mechanisms imputed to commercial dynamics. As I will argue, cities have crucial differences from states in how governance is structured; social actors’ incentives for participation are more readily explained when they control decision-making. Yet, even if these differences are sidestepped, the historical record shows that the commercially-sustained republican moment followed a period of institutional learning under conditions of effective central leadership with many similarities to the dynamic derived from England. This chapter therefore addresses the challenge of equifinality, namely that the same outcome can occur through different paths.

Most studies focus on the period when participatory institutions are fully formed, especially because evidence about their rise is scant—they rely on a truncated view of history. A longer time-period reveals that in every case we examine, a crucial prehistory can be observed, where strong ruling powers of a feudal character developed institutions that engaged the social groups that eventually developed forms of relative self-rule. Once formed, these institutions acquired equilibrium qualities that allowed them to function even when central authority declined or was removed. However, social scientists are increasingly demonstrating what historians noted long ago: this stage invariably did not last long—it was not a self-sustaining equilibrium.2 Such republics fell under the control of rent-seeking elites and reverted to principalities, not the representative regimes that are the focus of this study. Moreover, this takes for granted the most crucial question: how economic groups with often conflicting interests solved their collective action problem to flex their common political muscle against central rulers.

The argument here is not that trade was not important for the rise of cities as agglomerations of population that thereby received greater freedoms and protections, as Henri Pirenne influentially argued a century ago.3 Many parameters of his thesis have been challenged, but the commercial growth after the millennium is undeniable, even if the previous conditions were not as dire as previously assumed.4 Rather the claim is that trade does not endogenously produce the political structures in question here, though merchants did set up urban institutions of self-rule. Not only are the latter not sufficient to explain the former, however, but

1 van Zanden, et al. (2012, 13), Bosker, et al. (2013).2 Jones (1997), Stasavage (2014), Puga and Trefler (2014), van Bavel (2016).3 Pirenne (1925).4 Buylaert (2015)*.

the more independent and developed they were, the more polity-wide representative institutions faltered. England shows that such autonomy was not indispensable for the creation of trade-friendly forms and mechanisms.

In what follows, I first describe how city-states have been classified inconsistently across social scientific literatures. Then I show how a longer time frame, including origins and ultimate collapse of republican regimes, highlights the role of executive power and of judicial integration, as preconditions of political and economic growth. I consider Italian city-states first, followed by Flanders and, more briefly, Holland. The same conclusions about the importance of institutional prehistory and importance of centralization will be drawn from later chapters on Catalonia, Hungary, and Poland.

8.1 The Differences between Cities, City-States, and Constitutional Regimes: Selectorate and Incentives

City-states are not distinguished from representative polities in a systematic way in the literature. In studies focused on state emergence, they are treated as a separate empirical alternative: city-states reflect a different path than the one that led to territorial states or empires.5 However, studies with regime variation as the dependent variable assume unit homogeneity with territorial states.6 They assume that since all types of regimes had similar functions to differing degrees (voting and administration of taxes), they can be coded on these dimensions and compared.

But city-states removed the central element of representative emergence: an executive power with interests and resources separate from those of its subjects. Cities became republican, by contrast, only when they became de facto independent of any overlord. This happened in Italy. There, cities “practiced their own foreign policy, were fiscally independent, could raise an army and enforce the death penalty, and could mint coins,” as well as forge independent commercial policy.”7 The Holy Roman Emperor was juridically sovereign over Italian cities, but this did not affect daily governance during periods of republican rule, a compromise forged with the Peace of Constance in 1183. The general body of citizens, the universitas civium, had plenary power in all constitutional and jurisdictional questions that affected the commune.8 Venice was the exception, but it was also exceptional in lasting until the eighteenth century, as discussed below; the longevity is related to its strong executive, as my argument suggests.

It is on this dimension that most city-states also differ from cities with municipal governance, such as those in the Low Countries.9 Although the latter practiced municipal self-rule, they lacked the attributes of sovereignty that city-states had gained, as Flanders was subject to counts, dukes, or kings. Flemish cities differed in that “the counts of Flanders always remained in place as the ruling power.”10 This, however, also explains why their representative institutions were

5 Blockmans (1989), Tilly (1990), Spruyt (1994), Downing (1992).6 Stasavage (2011), van Zanden, et al. (2012), Abramson and Boix (2012).7 Epstein (2000), Wickham (2015, 15-6).8 Jones (1997, 406).9 Tilly (1990), Blockmans (1989), Buylaert (2015).10 Blockmans and Prevenier (1999, 7).

more long-lasting than those of city-states: they did not devolve into self-governing oligarchies, as I argue below. Accordingly, municipalities are better placed on a continuum between the city-states of Italy and territorial states, such as England.

Self-rule in city-states involved radical practices that were not adopted until centuries later in constitutional monarchies such as England. In Italy, the electorate was remarkably broad: over ten percent of the adult male population was eligible to vote.*11 This percentage was not surpassed in England until after the First Reform Act of 1832*. Moreover, citizens could be elected to office by nomination and/or lot. Magistrates often served terms lasting only two months, as in Florence, to allow adequate rotation.12 In general, officials were rotated at two, three, six or twelve months to counter corruption.13 And the Venetian doge was himself elected.

The mass assembly was gradually replaced by a great or general council, “an elective or representative body, exercising equivalent power proclaimed equally sovereign” in most cities, as population grew.14 The numbers present in such bodies varied widely, from one hundred to a thousand or more, but “frequent reselection provided for wide participation.” In a further step, in the thirteenth century, “under increasing popular influence, the great councils in many cities were enlarged and reinforced by other general assemblies, which raised to totals of one or several thousand the overall statutory membership of communal councils.”15

The more radical and democratic the features, however, the more backsliding occurred. In response, executive powers and legislation eventually devolved to more limited hands. In Florence, for instance, in the late 1300s, these powers belonged to the Signoria, a body composed of nine members; eligibility was restricted primarily to rich merchants of the Guelph party, though selection was through a combination of lot and election.16

Fiscal extraction was accordingly very different: incentives to attend an assembly were both different and higher when citizens, not a ruler, decided on policy and level of taxation. Representatives in the parliament of a territorial state, as we have seen, initially had limited capacity to constrain the crown. As scholars have shown, this dynamic was amplified by debt, whereby those who votes on taxes were often dominated by those who had lent to the state and were expecting to be reimbursed through tax proceeds.17 In city-states, the extractive system was even more coercive. Those that had strong republican traditions, for instance Venice and Florence, resorted to forced loans that later consolidated into long-term debts.18 By contrast, “many of those ruled by signori (for example, Milan) relied instead on a

11 Jones (1997, 407).12 Brucker (1962), Najemy (1982), Jones (1997).13 Jones (1997, 411), Brucker (1962, 59, 61).14 Jones (1997, 407).15 Jones (1997, 407), Waley and Dean (2010, 36-7). In Modena membership was 2,400 out of a population of 18,000; Bairoch, et al. (1988), in Brescia it was 2,000, in Padua 1,000 out of about 11,000 and in Bologna 2,000 then 4,000 out of c. 50,000; Jones (1997, 407).16 Brucker (1962, 59ff). Guelphs were an urban faction supporting the Pope, as opposed to the Holy Roman Emperor.17 Stasavage (2007), 2011), Carruthers (1996).18 Mueller and Lane (1997, 454-8), Epstein (1996, 112).

floating debt of voluntary short-term loans.”19 That forced loans were more common in republican regimes underscores the strong connection between obligation and institutional outcomes: it followed from the principle that every citizen had the obligation to support the state financially, as well as to serve in office.20

The contemporary identification of democratic with representative institutions thus blurs the distinction between two historically distinct processes: direct participation and institutionalized exchange with a sovereign. The incentives of social actors in the two cases differ greatly. In republics, we need to explain collective action among actors exercising direct power over others as well as themselves: those who decided on taxes also paid a heavy part of them, at least initially.21

As this obligation weakened and the burden became increasingly unequal, city-states tended to oligarchy and eventually collapsed. By contrast, in parliamentary/constitutional cases collective action occurred among actors who at best contested the grounds for or level of taxation, not the imposition itself: representatives did not “rule” or have formal decision-making powers until broadly late in the seventeenth century, if then.22 Incentives to support an assembly in the case of republics were thus much stronger and the problem of collective action was, if not necessarily lighter, at least of a different sort.23

This distinction is usually lost because constitutional regimes are assumed to be power-sharing forms of governance. Popular sovereignty was, however, the outcome of a long process and the emergence parliament qua institution cannot be subsumed under this dynamic. It took centuries for representative institutions to adopt democratic principles such as universal male suffrage, so we cannot assume a natural elective affinity exists between them. The tension between these two principles, the representative and the democratic, may account for much of the difficulty in making constitutional democracy work in most cases, both historically and in the modern period.24

A crucial distinction is that representative institutions, where effective, integrated a composite society that included groups separated by occupation, geographical distance, social status, and other characteristics. By contrast, as historians have concluded, that city-states failed to effectively accommodate rural populations within the republican framework was a key reason why republican governments collapsed.25 Their republican structure reflected a failure to install representation. The economic historian Stephen Epstein has argued that conflict between landed and commercial interests could not be resolved, not least because “extreme [institutional] openness created conditions of ‘permanent revolution’ that threatened the city-state’s survival as a distinctive mode of organised power.”26

Finally, the different institutional structure of city-states compared to the territorial, constitutional state was not due to “too much” capital per se, as in

19 Munro (2003, 515-6).20 Jones (1997, 410), Becker (1966, 12).21 Martines (1988, 309), Jones (1997, 334).22 Pincus (2009). 23 Stasavage (2010).24 Pitkin (2004), Przeworski, et al. (1999).25 Jones (1997), Becker (1960a), 1960b), Najemy (1979).26 Epstein (2000).

Charles Tilly’s scheme, where city-states were classified as capital intensive.27 Instead, city-states differed in their concentration of capital in one group, urban merchants, and by the weaker integration of the rural countryside compared to territorial states. As we have seen in France and Castile, this portended badly for constitutional outcomes.

8.2 Similarities: Common Origins in Central Power and Justice

Constitutional and republican regimes differed in how power was ultimately distributed and governing structures were ordered, but they shared a prehistory of effective centralization. This similar prehistory solved collective action problems and enabled communal institutions. These similarities support the main hypotheses in this account, about power centralization and judicial integration, making city-states a case along a continuum of differential integration levels.

1. Cities in Northern ItalyItalian city-states generated precocious commercial growth after the eleventh

century, presenting a strong case for trade-based theories.28 They offer the classic exemplar of autonomous urban growth, republican institutions, and advanced fiscal development. However, two factors emerge as key. A feudal prehistory was critical for the emergence of communal institutions, even if direct continuity of institutions cannot be established in all elements. To the degree, however, that these polities established a more bottom-up, commercial foundation without a strong executive, they were unable to effectively control their countryside and eventually lapsed into more despotic forms of government.

By the early 1300s, Genoa, for instance, probably the richest Lombard city, had nominal trade about 50 times as large than in the 1160s; this was “roughly ten times the receipts of the French royal treasury.”29 This was the period that saw the emergence of communal and eventually republican self-governance, so connections between the two developments seem obvious. Avoiding the functionalism critiqued in earlier parts of this book, the economist Avner Greif has explained the emergence of two key communal institutions, the consuls and the podestà, as an effort to address economic inefficiencies produced by family rivalries and power competitions.30 The consuls were elected officials and the podestà was an outsider placed as “an executive administrator, above all the head of the judiciary,”31 to transcend local rivalries, which they did for some time. These were common practices throughout Tuscany and Lombardy.

It thus appears intuitive to derive a commercial basis for republican institutions from these dynamics. But neither consuls nor the podesteria are in themselves truly definitive of the participatory nature of republican governance,

27 Tilly (1990).28 Blockmans (1989), Tilly (1990), DeLong and Shleifer (1993), Spruyt (1994), Tarrow (2004), Stasavage (2007), 2014).29 Greif (1994, 284), Jones (1997, 196).30 Greif (1994).31 Waley and Dean (2010, 40, 42), Greif (1998).

which is the main focus in this account. Without an account of how assemblies formed and elections prevailed, the core of the regime remains unexplained. And assemblies cannot be reduced to the exigencies of commercial growth; they have judicial origins. Judicial assemblies encapsulated the “public identity” of the Kingdom of Italy in the eleventh century, where, “unlike in most of the rest of Latin Europe, highly formal court proceedings were a regular feature of political life.” Called placita, they were “presided over by emperors, or their local representatives (marquises, counts, bishops)” or their envoys. They were “extremely regularized” and “large-scale public occasions.”32 Elections were also already central to institutional life: bishops were elected and they presided over such meetings.33 Once again, the regularity of justice proves crucial for institutional consolidation.

The backdrop to these practices was feudalism, which was very strong in Northern Italy.34 Lombardy produced one of the most important European law-books concerning the feudal transmission of land, the Libri Feudorum.35 It recorded legal practice in northern Italy: in the eleventh century lands were granted by the major landholders, whether secular or ecclesiastical, typically conditionally.36 The “whole idea of feudalism originated from [it],” according to the medievalist Susan Reynolds.37 Although she strongly criticized the concept, it was its application to northern Europe, not Italy, that was contentious.38

In fact, conditional forms of landholding were prevalent in Northern Italy, to an extent not generally recognized in the literature, into the modern period.39 In Lombardy, “a large number of fief-holders enjoyed, as late as the eighteenth century, civil and criminal jurisdiction and the right to make laws and even to coin money. They were usually entitled to…taxation as well as to the profits of justice, in the form of levies for the administration of the courts and penal fines and confiscations.”40 By 1714, two-thirds of the duchy of Milan still consisted of fiefs and the powers of central government were limited in those domains.41 Lands were still held “of the duke,” as in England.42

The medieval/Renaissance communal, republican stage was thus interjected in a feudal landscape.43 Communal institutions emerged between 1080 and 1150.

32 Wickham (1997, 179-180).33 Coleman (2003, 3).34 Black (1994), Magni (1937).35 Lehmann (1896).36 Reynolds 1994, 210-14, 256) questioned the claims about the origins of fiefs in the earlier medieval period. She shows that the terms vassal, fief, and homage are encountered in the eleventh century precisely in Lombardy, but also Catalonia and Normandy; Giordanengo (1990, 61-2), Wickham (2015, 58-62).37 Reynolds (1994, 181).38 Brown (1974), Reynolds (1994).39 The higher levels of “social capital” and better local governance identified in North Italy in the late twentieth century may have some path-dependent connection; Putnam, et al. (1993), Guiso, et al. (2016).40 Black (1994, 94).41 Magni (1937).42 Black (1994, 95). 43 Jones (1997, 560), Structures féodales et féodalisme dans l'Occident méditerranéen: Xe-XIIIe siècles1980), Epstein (1996, 109).

Comital and, especially, episcopal power were still key, particularly in the administration of justice. The bishops and the lay lords originally oversaw the urban consuls administering justice, as in Milan, though the consuls eventually “overshadowed” the lords. The “presence of the Count,” however, was necessary for the final resolution of conflict in the early period (through judicial duel), as urban consuls could not adjudicate. Counts “continued to hear suits” into the 1150s at Pavia.44

In most accounts, however, the early period receives little attention, partly due to the relative scarcity of sources.45 Even when origins are examined, the narrative is typically one of cities overthrowing the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor or of local princes, counts, and bishops.46 Lords appear almost incidentally, typically as the grantors of emancipation or as the owners of the land in which towns had free tenure.47 Further, arguments about the feudal origins of government were associated with a conservative, reactionary view of politics in the early twentieth century, as it placed the origins of government in private associations, rather than public authority.48

The topic remains controversial, with Italian historians emphasizing the communal aspect and others identifying feudo-vassalic elements, though extending beyond those to include broader strata. As the historian Chris Wickham has argued, however, more recent scholarship has provided a more nuanced understanding of the importance of feudal structures in the gradual emancipation from imperial authority. Most major landowners, for instance, lived in cities and “that was the basic reason why Italian cities were so much larger, more powerful, and more socio-politically complex than those of Latin Europe.”49

But cities were recognized by the Emperor in a conditional mode; Bologna in 1116 permitted the city to retain half of the fines for violating imperial rules—the other half went to the emperor. By the 1160s, more cities gained freedom from imperial jurisdiction, as well as exemption from imperial taxation, a fact recognized by the Peace of Constance in 1183. Finally, the emancipation of the communes also involved the submission of the countryside, the contado. Originally this act of submission was made to the bishop, then jointly to the commune, until finally to the commune alone.50 But the cities adopted feudal relations with the countryside themselves.51

The podesteria itself was first introduced by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who appointed a number of such officials in Lombardy and Emilia after 1160. Further, many “of these early officials were feudatories,” either counts, as in Verona, or lords of surrounding lands. Landholding was thus a critical component of the arrangement. The powers of the office, however, declined during the thirteenth

44 Waley and Dean (2010, 31, 32).45 Bowsky (1962), Brucker (1962), Najemy (1982), Romano (1987).46 van Zanden, et al. (2012).*47 van Werveke (1965, 26).48 Marongiu (1968, 119-20, and 121 for Marongiu’s objections to this view). Also, Tabacco (1989, 185), Wickham (2014, 43).49 Wickham (2015, 8, 9-20).50 Waley and Dean (2010, 33-4).51 Jones (1997, 558).

century until it devolved into a “chief justice with police powers.”52 This contributed to the centrifugal tendencies that eventually undermined the republics.

Did the new communal assembly, called concio, arengum, occasionally even parlamentum, descend from feudal institutions? It had some important differences from placita, leading historians to reject strict continuity between them. Not enough is known about the transitional period to definitively settle this.53 Continuity existed at the level of elites composing them, including the iudices, judges who “controlled public acts.”54 However, assemblies acquired broader roles, both in political decision-making and legislation, and only criminal cases remained in the public sphere, divesting some judicial functions, as in the English Parliament.55 As the historian Edward Coleman points out, taxation was not a major concern, as elsewhere.56 In any case, to the degree that they differed, the new assemblies did so on a dimension that will recur in this analysis as causing regime weakness: no single executive convoked the assemblies, unlike in the conditional setting observed in parliamentary cases.57 Assemblies continued to meet, as we will see, especially in response to civil or external war.58 However, in a pattern also observed in Poland and Hungary, this only made capture by rentier groups easier, leading to oligarchy and instability. As Stasavage has shown in his systematic study, this was a recurrent feature of autonomous cities in the region, and endogenous to their political institutions.59

Feudal lords reemerged after the brief communal phase, as city-states did not remain autonomous for long.60 From the 1250s,

“at the height of commercialization, city after city in anti-feudal Italy began surrendering liberty again for lordship, for government by “domini” or “tyrants” preponderantly feudal, not merchant but landed magnates, barons, nobles, prelates. The land of merchant republics was a land also of despots.”61

Florence did not finally succumb to despotic rule until the fifteenth century. Until then, it saw successive phases of steep social conflict between Guelphs and Ghibellines, mercantile and landed groups. Guilds were fundamental to social organization, structured by the Ordinances of Justice from 1297. Divisions existed on the inequity of taxation, participation, and treatment of the countryside. Since

52 Waley and Dean (2010, 40-42).53 Coleman (2003, 3).54 Wickham (2015, 97, 99-102, 10).55 Coleman (2003, 3, 206-7).56 Coleman (2003, 203).57 Wickham (2014, 47-8).58 Wickham (2015, 87, 96-7).59 Stasavage (2014).60 Venice excepted. 61 Jones (1997, 231), 1965). Venice’s trajectory is an exception, as it retained its original institutions relatively unchanged into the early modern period; Cessi (1944), McNeill (1986), Lane (1973), Queller (1986), Romano (1987), Martin and Romano (2000).

the former two afflicted even representative England, it is the failure to integrate the broader polity that accounts for the ultimate weakness of the regime.62

Devolution to oligarchy is also observable in a case that did retain an executive, Venice; this was also the most long-lasting city-state regime, until the Napoleonic invasion in 1797.63 In many ways, Venice seems to reflect the narrative contested here. Its republican, elective character was affirmed when rising mercantile groups ended the de facto dynastic succession of doges in 1032, further installing two elected judges to restrain dogal power. These restraints were strengthened when the doge lost militarily to Byzantium in 1172 and was assassinated, leading to the transformation of the dogeship into a republican magistracy. Other institutions, such as the Great and Minor Councils or the judicial tribunal of the Forty and the State Attorneys, further controlled the doge.64

This period also ushered a wave of fiscal innovation, from limited-liability to double-entry accounting.65 Venice thus seems to confirm the model of mercantile power limiting the ruler; it produced a regime that was praised even by contemporaries such as Machiavelli. In fact, however, as economic historians Puga and Trefler have shown, mercantile control eventually restricted participation to a section of the elite, especially after 1297. The nobility became a closed order, limiting access to maritime trade, and thus generating “political closure, extreme inequality, and social stratification.”66 Mercantile origins did not endogenously produce greater participation, as trade-based accounts assume.

Instead, maritime closure reoriented the city after the fourteenth century towards the surrounding countryside, the terraferma. Venice was more successful in this endeavor than other city-states, not least through renegotiating the tax burden in the fifteenth century.67 As in Lombardy, the big city-states were unable to dismantle rural federations operating under quasi-feudal conditions, which, however, created some economic dynamism in the region. The more ruthless domination of the countryside, the contado, by Florence, by contrast produced “a peculiarly inactive countryside,” ridden with “anomie.”68 In all cases, the rural population was not integrated into the civic machinery of governance and had few means of constitutional redress. “Inequality between town and country was intrinsic to city-states.”69 Although by 1300, the direct tax (estimo) per capita was twice as high in towns than in the countryside, this was reversed by the 1400s.70 City governance was deeply unequal in any case. Ninety percent (or more in places) of townsmen were equally disenfranchised and disadvantaged.71 Economic inequality

62 Martines (1972, 558), Becker (1960a), Brucker (1962), Jones (1997) Heers (1974), 2008).63 Hazlitt (1858), Lane (1966), 1973), Martin and Romano (2000), McNeill (1986), Norwich (1977), Queller (1986), Romano (1987).64 Lane (1973, 90, 92, 95-101).65 Puga and Trefler (2014, 767-8), de Roover (1965), Lopez (1971).66 Puga and Trefler (2014, 753).67 Epstein (1996, 109-10).68 Epstein (1996, 109).69 Jones (1997, 571, 566).70 Jones (1997, 155, 82), Brucker (1962, 92ff), Bowsky (1962, 11ff, 23), Epstein (1996, 103-4).71 Jones (1997, 573-6), Molho, et al. (1991, 172), Brucker (1962, 70).

was steep, with about five percent of “taxed population holding up to half or more of property or wealth and 50 per cent as little as one-twentieth or less.”72 For most historians, this forms a key in explaining the gradual decline of communal and republican regimes: “Without a widened franchise the culmination of divided oligarchy seemed fated to be dictatorship, party or personal dominion.”73

2. Cities in the Low CountriesCities in the Low Countries also achieved robust civic government from the

early middle ages.74 Many accounts focus on Holland, but until the fifteenth century, it was Flanders that was the most developed region. In 1400, its urbanization, at almost 40%, was double that of Holland; it was only in 1500 that the latter edged ahead.75 In both cases, comital power was fundamental in creating the conditions for participatory politics at the polity level.

Their constitutionalism is typically attributed to economic factors. A bold expression of this perspective, by the political scientist Carles Boix, ascribes it to “rich soils” and “agriculturally suitable areas,” which created population densities and urban growth; institutions were endogenous to technological and economic change.76 However, these agricultural conditions were the result of a precocious feat over nature, as will be seen below, and dependent on political power structures. Further, agricultural, urban, and commercial growth occurred in parts of premodern China and India, such as the Yangzi Delta and Gujarat,77 so how the European urban belt avoided both absolutism and underdevelopment must yet be explained. Military technology often serves this purpose. Towns with sufficient wealth could defeat the reactionary, land-based forces, ensuring the survival of parliamentarism, in such accounts, a view addressed below.78 But the equalizing effects of the gunpowder revolution only operated from the 1450s.

Other economic approaches typically see political institutions as endogenous to market exchange. Merchants can create the necessary dispute resolution mechanisms through private order arrangements, as with Avner Grief’s Maghribi traders.79 Or, competition itself can force cities to create the stable conditions necessary for trade, as Oscar Gelderblom has argued.80 These approaches offer non-state alternatives to Douglass North’s neo-institutionalism, which saw the state, once effectively constrained, as key actor.81 For Van Zanden, Buringh, and Bosker,

72 Jones (1997, 234-5).73 Jones (1997, 581-650), Epstein (2000)*. Of course, other factors also contributed; Jones (1997, 524-83).74 Tilly (1990), Spruyt (1994).75 Bairoch, et al. (1988, 259). De Vries, who uses a different metric, also places the Netherlands below Belgium in 1500; de Vries (1984, 32).76 Boix (2015, 209, 204).77 Pomeranz (2000, 7-8), Wong (1997).78 Boix (2015).79 Greif (1994), Greif (2006).80 Gelderblom (2013).81 North (1981), North (1990).

institutional constraints emerged through the incorporation of new economic classes after 1200.82

These are compelling narratives, but the historical record shows that, extending backwards in time, the institutional preconditions for these developments were present before 1200.83 Although economic growth was underway by 1050, trade flourished in the 1100s, especially through cooperation with the English: Flanders was dependent on imports of English wool, which were highly sensitive to the relations between rulers.84 Towns grew in the 1100s, surpassing Italy. The textile trade reached its peak in the thirteenth century, then it declined.85 The 1100s are therefore key.

The question is whether this growth had commercial, bottom-up propulsion or whether political authority, either of counts or bishops, was instrumental. Although some commercial expansion can be explained without much reference to central authority,86 that of its extension over a whole region cannot. The alternative proposed here is threefold. Rulers provided the necessary infrastructure and support, as the economic historian Shelagh Ogilvie has argued in her exhaustive discussion of guilds.87 The weaker comital power was and the more autonomous the cities in the international scene, the more conditions for economic growth weakened. Second, the rulers’ capacity to compel subjects under fairly uniform legal frameworks owed much to feudal patterns of relations, which shaped representation as well. Finally, since Flemish counts were weaker than English kings, representative practice suffered in the Low Countries. The pattern in early Holland was similar.88

First of all, in both Flanders and Holland, the rich soils were not a natural given, but the product of an astonishing program of intervention, the reclamation of land from the marshes below sea level, the building of dikes, canals, and dams—of “taming the Waterwolf,” as the Dutch termed it.89 Available land was originally poor and unable to feed its population.90 Historians differ on the role of counts before the 1110s,91 but the question is not simply how trade begins to grow (for which counts may have been less important), but how it extends polity-wide to lift an entire region. Even if counts lacked the power to carry out these large hydraulic projects alone early on, they had regalian rights over land and “gave the coasts to the abbeys on condition of diking and turning them into agricultural or pasture land.”92 Counts also provided incentives, for instance, the offer of personal freedom and the

82 van Zanden, et al. (2012).83 Nicholas (1992, 124-149), 1992, 117).84 Nicholas (1992, 116), 1991, 34). 85 Nicholas (1992, 203-4).86 Gelderblom (2013). Cf. Dumolyn and Lambert (2014).87 Ogilvie (2011).88 Key sources remain however untreated; Burgers (2011). Much scholarship exists in Dutch, of course.89 TeBrake (2002). Similar dynamics applied in Italy; Curtis and Campopiano (2014).90 Nicholas (1991, 28).91 Dhondt (1948) is challenged by Nicholas (1991).92 Nicholas (1992, 98, 99), 1991, 24-5, 27).

right to own land or to self-government.93 But for trade to grow the coasts had to be connected to the interior: “Philip of Alsace [(1168-1191)] accordingly evolved a master plan to provide the Flemish coast with ports that could be linked with interior towns such as Bruges.” Finally, “counts had sponsored most canal construction before 1200,” though cities undertook the task subsequently. Even before 1200, therefore, the role of counts was key. The expense after all was “immense.”94 The next section will show that the 1100s was when counts asserted their powers.

The Flemish counts were, however, directly responsible for clearing lands after 1230.95 Further, trade after 1200 depended on the agreements for safe conduct between English and Flemish rulers—a crisis in their relations in 1270-4 was, for instance, “catastrophic” for the Flemish economy.96 Similarly, a “centralized, bureaucratized state” may not have existed in Holland, but this does not mean the absence of central authority, as discussed in the last section.97 Although initiative for communal works may have often lied with the communities, resolution of conflict depended on higher authority.98 Faced with need, collective action is not hard to mobilize; the real difficulty is that, absent an authority that neutralizes contrary interests, initiatives flounder. But in Holland, the chief administrator of the board formed by communities to regulate such conflicts, the Rijnland Water Board, was the bailiff, the highest-ranking officer of the count. This was particularly necessary, because after 1150, simple drainage techniques could not address soil subsidence—complex hydraulic works were required.99

Second, city growth was also not independent of comital authority—commercial activity did not suffice to turn settlements into the major trading urban centers that many Flemish towns became, concentrating between 20 and 36 percent of the population by 1500.100 Cities became independent around the turn of the twelfth century, but the Truce and Peace of God movements, which eventually became the Peace of the Count (pax comitis) before the 1120s was critical.101 From the 1160s, Philip granted urban charters that provided crucial rights, including relating to trade, to all major cities.102 These shaped the legal and judicial structure of cities, in ways discussed next.

8.2.1.1Flanders: Conditional Land-Holding, Comital Power, Justice, and Assemblies

Early Flanders shows the same connections between conditional land-holding, ruler penetration of localities through judicial structures, and representative activity

93 Curtis and Campopiano (2014, 6).94 Nicholas (1992, 110, 129, 126, and chapter 5).95 Nicholas (1991, 27).96 Nicholas (1992, 164-6, 176-8).97 TeBrake (2002, 489ff), van Bochove, et al. (2015, 13), van Bavel, et al. (2012, 352), Dijkman (2011, 12), van Bavel (2010, 63).98 TeBrake (2002, 492-3).99 TeBrake (2002, 494).100 de Vries (1984, 39). Buylaert’s 2015, 34) figure is for the county of Flanders alone.101 Koziol (1987), Dhondt (1948).102 Ganshof (1951), 1949, 77-8), van Werveke (1965).

as England. To the degree that comital power was challenged by cities in the thirteenth century and later, this undermined polity-wide integration and representation. It is not an accident that assembly activity took off in the fourteenth century, when counts reasserted their authority. Flanders thus shows a similar pattern to Italy: its communal and commercial periods were preceded by one of institutional learning under the count. However, the greater capacity of the count enabled a stronger polity-wide regime, with greater cooperation between town and countryside.

Comital power in Flanders was thoroughly feudal; conditional land holding underlay, for instance, the capacity to intervene in land development.103 Nonetheless, a key difference with the English and French monarchies was that “the prince’s right to the aid and counsel of his vassals was not a significant aspect of his centralization of power.” The nobility was much weakened in Flanders, due to the disproportionate growth of the cities. So, “Flemish centralization was administrative and tax-related and had minimal linkage to the feudal aids and incidents; for the towns were so wealthy so early that they provided money far in excess of what the count could realize from the much weakened landed nobility.”104 Yet this divergence also accounts for the weaker constitutional structure of the polity: the greater commercial wealth of the cities undermined the integration of the countryside and weakened the hold of the count. This also meant that he could not mediate international competition in trade as effectively, which decreased the international role of Flanders by the fifteenth century.

The count “was the most eminent warlord in Flanders, the wealthiest landowner, and the feudal lord of the most prominent men of the land.”105 In the twelfth century, Flemish counts only trailed after Henry II of England and Frederick Barbarossa and were prominent enough to be appointed emperors of conquered Byzantium.106 Their powers were predicated on control of land. By 1200, their territorial holdings were considered “immense” by local standards:107 they were about the size of Catalonia or Burgundy (about 12,000 square km). Their territories included some of the most important cities, such as Ghent, Saint-Omer, Bruges and Ypres, which spearheaded the commercial expansion of the region. Comital power was originally weak,108 but after 1128, Thierry of Alsace (d.1168) and his son Philip increased the power and wealth of the county, at the expense of the nobility and in alliance with the towns.109 This secured the de jure monopoly on violence and establishing peace, just as English kings had done.110 Revolts and conflict were

103 Ganshof (1949, 28-57).104 Nicholas (1992, 159, 160).105 Demyttenaere (2003, 153), Hirbaut (2001).106 Nicholas (1992, 150).107 Dhondt (1950, 7), Lot, et al. (1957, 365), Ganshof (1949, 108-10). Sources cite “an important yet unpublished thesis” by M. L. Voet for an assessment of the comital domains; Postan and Habakkuk (1966, 795), Dhondt (1950, 7). The main source regarding revenues and hence jurisdiction is the Gros Brief of 1187; Verhulst and Gysseling (1962).108 Verhulst (1999, 125).109 Verhulst (1999, 127-131), Dhondt (1950, 9-19).110 Koziol (1987).

however still rampant, more than in England but less than in Italy, reflecting weaker relative power.111

Landholding was conditional, also as in England. Counts granted fiefs to local lords, even previously allodial ones.112 The feudal relationship was originally strong, as failure to perform obligations led to confiscation of property; many confiscation registers survive.113 Counts also insured that “Flemish nobles could no longer wage war in the service of foreign lords.” Below the nobility, subjects gradually received the right to construct their houses on land which the Count or the landlord owned, as long as they paid a ground rent (landcijns) for the use of the land occupied,”—paralleling the English legal structure, but with relative freedom.114 Term leaseholds were widely spread by the fourteenth century.115

Land-based power also helped shape comital control of the judicial system. Twelfth-century counts replaced the hereditary feudal viscounts who administered justice in both cities and countryside, from the old system of castellanies, with comital bailiffs.116 Vassals performed judicial service within this framework, as in England.117 Seigneurial courts did not have the independence observed in France—comital institutions prevailed.118 It is not an accident that Flemish fiscal organization has been compared to that of the English in the early twelfth century, “ahead of that in Normandy and they French royal domain.”119

This was equally the case in and around cities. From the 1160s, Philip of Alsace, a legal innovator in many respects, standardized urban law in Flanders.120 These comital law codes were crucial for commercial growth, not least by changing marital laws, as the historian David Nicholas has argued.121 But trade required at least pockets of peace beyond the city walls, at the supra-local level, and this also depended on the count. Law was gradually homogenized under the banner of the utilitas publica, which based the count’s superior right to impose the peace on Roman law. All “major crimes were considered offences against the count and his pax comitis,” so he alone had jurisdiction over them. This state-building enterprise, through the twelfth century, produced a communal identity that transcended local urban contexts—though not as effectively as in England, as we will see.122 As

111 Nicholas (1991, 20-21).112 Ganshof (1949, 58-64), Nicholas (1992, 67). 113 Dumolyn (2000, 520, with references from the 11th to the 15th centuries), Hirbaut (2001).114 van Bochove, et al. (2015, 21), Nicholas (1992, 104).115 Nicholas (1992, 127-8) .116 Blommaert (1915), Ganshof (1939, 45-6), Ganshof (1932, 10), 1939, 45, 52), Duesberg (1932), Nicholas (1992, 87-9).117 Ganshof (1939, 52-3).118 Ganshof (1939, 45). Comital authority had limits, however, as it lacked jurisdictional sovereignty; appeals were submitted to the Paris Parlement, since the count was a vassal of the French king; Nicholas (1992, 188). Appellants from urban courts were pressured not to take their cases there, but the legal condition remained one of subordination.119 Lyon and Verhulst (1967, 86).120 Nicholas (1992, 120-1).121 Nicholas (1991, 39), van Caenegem (1966).122 Dumolyn (2000, 488), 2007, 113), Dhondt (1950, 6), Boutemy (1943, 53-55).

historian Jan Dumolyn has argued, the basis of this identity was “the eleventh- or twelfth-century urban sworn association partially empowered to regulate and govern its own affairs by a contractual relationship with the prince.123

Yet counts did not grant autonomy to cities: urban tribunals operated in cooperation with the count, unlike in France or Germany.124 They were managed by aldermen (schepenen, scabini Flandrie), who were initially chosen by the count.125 Aldermen were judicial officials, with jurisdiction initially over crimes and wrongs but eventually also over administrative and economic matters. They particularly regulated the critical wool trade with England, probably since the 1160s, certainly since the 1240s.126 Counts originally appointed aldermen for life, though by the 1200s annual selection prevailed127—but this simply allowed the count more power to contain the patriciate, not greater municipal independence.128

Eventually, however, comital appointment was replaced by a system of cooptation, which endogenously transformed the institution towards greater autonomy: new members were selected by sitting members, though some remained at the discretion of the count.129 By the 1240s, aldermen had thus escaped the count’s control.130 In other words, periods of institutional gestation under the leadership of the count took place before the institutions begun to develop relative self-rule.131 Yet that autonomy, large though it looms in accounts of commercial growth, had negative implications for the creation of a polity-wide representative regime, as seen below.

The early stages of representative activity connect the same themes identified throughout the book, judicial integration, imposition of collective responsibility, and petitions. This is obscured because, as for Italy, scholars note the emergence of assemblies only in their mature form, after 1300, when indeed commercial growth had made the cities formidable.132 Some scholars in fact only consider meetings after 1400.133 Even before 1300, however, a comital council is observed since the 1050s, just as in England and France (the curia comitis or “het hof”). It was itinerant and originally composed of the count’s vassals. It dealt with any affair related to fiefs and vassalic obligations—this is where vassals’ cases were judged, as with the English Parliament. Especially important were infractions of the king’s peace.134 Vassals also had judicial duties and accompanied comital officers in itinerant inquests.135 A structure of obligation also bound the towns as well. When the count recognized the ‘commune’ or sworn association of Saint-Omer, for instance, he “imposed a duty of collective vengeance if a citizen’s injuries at the

123 Dumolyn and Haemers (2015, *).124 Ganshof (1939, 49-50), Gilissen (1954, 541).125 Ganshof (1939, 51), Dumolyn (2000, 489).126 Boone (2010, 463).127 Duesberg (1932, 29, 31).128 Dumolyn (2015, 398).129 Gilissen (1954, 555-7).130 Ganshof (1939, 55).131 Verhulst (1999, 144, 127-31).132 Blockmans (1976, 216).133 van Zanden, et al. (2012).134 Ganshof (1939, 47-49), 1949, 103).

hands of an outsider were not redressed.”136 The capacity to impose a collective frame of responsibility was key for institutional development in Flanders as well.

As the argument in this book suggests, collective responsibility engenders collective demands. A major impetus for representative activity from the 1270s was the same wave of petitions we have seen in England and France in the same period. Social unrest escalated in response to the economic crisis of the period. It triggered strong conflict, not just violent riots (enemies would be expelled and their houses demolished), but also in the judicial and legislative arena, expressed through such petitions.137 These grievances were presented to the count, often in assembly frameworks or in the alderman’s court; they brought together the social groups that economic approaches see as independent agents of institutional change.138 These petitions, as well as the rebellions they precipitated, presented familiar grievances, as Dumolyn has extensively shown: taxes that were regressive and not well-applied, corruption of comital officials, and participation in the council through nomination of aldermen, among others.139

However, qualifications need to be made to a trade-based approach. First, this communal spirit was forged in opposition to the count. Once again, as just argued, collective action that appears to be born though commercial interest alone, emerges through a preceding structure of obligation, imposed from above. And it is typically artisans, i.e. workers, not merchants that spearhead these demands. Further, in as much as cities became too powerful to remain in a system under the count’s direction, integration was impeded and a polity-wide regime less effective. In fact, much of the period can be examined through the conflict between the “Three Cities” (Ghent, Bruges, and Ypres) and the “Commun Pays” of Flanders brought together by the count. Finally, the government of the thirteenth-century Flemish cities was not exclusively mercantile, but was instead ‘patrician,’ composed also of urban landowners, especially in some cases, like Ghent.140 The dynamic relation between these groups determines in fact much of the social history of the period.

Comital power greatly fluctuated, as towns became increasingly assertive in the thirteenth century:141 by the 1300s, the cities were referred to collectively as the “bonnes villes,” rather than by reference to the “scabini Flandrie,” which had expressed urban corporate identity under comital authority since the 1200s.142 This left the count unable to deal with the Three Cities, when they attempted to divide the county in the early 1300s.143

135 Ganshof (1932, 53). Judicial functions were transferred to a separate institution in the thirteenth century, composed of councilors and great feudatories; this became a supreme court, while the ‘council’ became an advisory body; Nicholas (1992, 234).136 Nicholas (1992, 120).137 Dumolyn and Haemers (2015).138 Dumolyn (2015, 387, 396).139 Dumolyn (2015, 395, 399, 400).140 Nicholas (1992, 133), Kerhervé (1987, 116).141 Verhulst (1999, 144), Derville (2002).142 Dhondt (1950, 28), Boone (2010, 463), Blockmans (1998, 56).143 Dhondt (1950, 29ff), Blockmans (1998, 56).

Commercial growth had indeed empowered the artisanal class and the guilds, ushering the “corporative” stage in Flemish politics, which spread to other cities.144 In the famous battle at Courtrai, Flemish urban groups routed the French cavalry. But this occurred because the Flemish count was too weak to manage the English and French rivalry or control his nobles who defected to the French.145 1302 does signify a victory of urban groups against feudal aristocracy—guild corporations acquired a position in the governing Council of cities.146 But what was almost democratic within a city is not the same as polity-wide representation. Instead , the lack of unity among the towns produced internal conflict and defeat.147 The French prevailed two years later, because the cities were fragmented. While the Brugeois were winning, the other cities “left the field, a pattern that would recur and plague concerted Flemish military actions for the rest of the medieval period,” leading to a punitive peace with the French.148

Ironically, the heavy taxation raised to meet the French fines ushered the first polity-wide system of revenue for the count.149 Representative activity picked up in response to these pressures. But it included the “Commun de Flandre,” which integrated all three orders, clergy and nobility included. Some were summoned due to their vassalic relationship with the count.150 But assemblies also included smaller towns and the castellanies, which together shouldered 70% of the tax burden. Only a third of taxation was paid by the Three Cities and the artisanal groups increasingly leading them.151

It is not possible therefore to assert that representative institutions “emerged and remained in place in those areas that had a sufficiently wealthy and cohesive class of “burghers” that could block the landed and monarchical elites and sustain the process of endogenous growth that eventually led to the industrial revolution.”152 Burghers and artisans may have created precocious pockets of radical politics, but that does translate into a polity-wide representative regime. The Three Cities, augmented by the rural district of Bruges (known together as the “Four Members”), had a continuous history of informal meetings averaging at about 30 per year in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, dealing with commercial policy.153

But that is not the same as polity-wide representation. For the latter, you needed participation from all groups across society, the rural population and the clergy and nobility. This was achieved under the direction of the count. Steep conflict with the big cities in the 1300s was handled judicially, with charters confiscated after 1328, making the comital council, the Audientie, the final point of

144 Dumolyn and Haemers (2015), Dumolyn (2015, 384).145 Nicholas (1992, 168-9, 186ff), Dumolyn (2007, 113-4), Boone (2010, 465). Cf. Boix (2015).146 Boix (2015), Gilissen (1954, 563-5).147 Gilissen (1954, 563-4).148 Nicholas (1992, 195).149 Nicholas (1992, 186), Dhondt (1950, 37).150 Dumolyn and Haemers (2015, 166*check), Dhondt (1950, 36), Ganshof (1932, 5).151 Dhondt (1950, 32, 37).152 Abramson and Boix (2017, 25).153 Blockmans (1998, 56), Blockmans (1976, 216).

appeal even for citizens of smaller towns against their own governments.154 This was strongly resisted by the cities, with variable success.155 It was part of a policy of repression of cities by the counts.156

The next major phase of institutional activity came under Burgundian rule (imposed after dynastic marriage, not war) and it moved along the same dimensions: the dukes of Burgundy returned to the institution of the “Pays Commun,” not the “Bonnes Villes,” i.e. they upheld an inclusive institution, not one confined to the urban sector. This is when we see veritable estate representation, including the nobility and clergy, from 1385—not just urban governance. Critically, the Flemish nobility was now committed to supporting “the common good” of the Burgundian state, “abandoning the traditional autonomism of the Flemish urban political elites.”157 But the various local entities that had their own Estates, Brabant, Hainault, Liège,158 and polity-wide representation required superseding them. These centrifugal forces were further ensconced by cities adopting the imperative mandate, not full powers, for their representatives—the center of authority remained local.159

The Burgundian Estates began to meet in 1404 and retained a strong presence thereafter.160 As economic approaches would predict, assemblies were highly focused on economic matters (35%), followed by fiscal and jurisdictional concerns (20%).161 Participation was indeed propelled by the deep social conflicts that trade generated. However, as the historian Wim Blockmans has argued, economic and social differences kept groups separated in Flanders, and it was the prince that brought them together, as in the crises of the fifteenth century.162 When the first Estates General were held in 1464, they had centuries of institutional learning behind them, moreover.163 But it retained the imperative mandate and whilst it voted on taxes, it never legislated. So, technically, it does not fulfill the conditions of this study. Even though it governed as an executive for a brief period in the sixteenth century, particularism undercut its power, leading its eventual eclipse in 1632.164 Only some Provincial Estates continued into the seventeenth century, when they were actively supported by the French monarchs who realized their superior capacity in raising debt.165

In short, the Flemish assemblies focused on by social scientists in the 1400s emerged out of a prehistory of institutional interaction which became polity-wide only when counts had an advantage in power.166 Accordingly, the assumption that differences with the east must be attributed to the fact that in “Byzantium and the

154 Ganshof (1939, 58).155 Nicholas (1992, 236-7). 156 Dumolyn (2000), Boone (2010, 467-8).157 Dumolyn (2006, 431).158 Buch (1965, 35).159 Buch (1965, 37).160 Dumolyn (2008).161 Boone (2010, 471), citing Blockmans (1978a).162 Blockmans (1976, 236-7).163 Buch (1965, 38-9).164 Buch (1965, 37-8).165 Potter and Rosenthal (1997), 2002), Swann (2003).166 van Zanden, et al. (2012, 14).

Ottoman Empire there were no independent cities with which to negotiate,” does not capture the mechanism quite right: the greater the city independence, the less constitutional the polity-wide outcome.167 Instead, in “contrast to the communal movements in many Italian, French and German cities, the Flemish communal movement did not feature violent upheavals and confrontations with the authority of local lords or bishops. Rather, it was a process of gradual and steady urban emancipation, sanctioned by strong Flemish counts who seem to have realized at an early stage that granting privileges of jurisdiction and limited self-rule and liberating merchants from excessive tolls and arbitrary seigniorial violence also served their own economic interests.”168

8.2.1.2Holland: Conditional Land-Holding, Comital Power, and Collective Responsibility

International trade shifted from Bruges in the 1200s, to Antwerp in the late 1400s, and Amsterdam by 1585.169 The decentralized nature of the Dutch Republic after 1571 has made trade, central weakness, and growth appear associated. Yet this growth was predicated on strong central powers at the local level (attested by the highest taxation levels in Europe). Moreover, Dutch decentralization, for at least some historians, explains the problem of Dutch decline after the eighteenth century, at the economic and then at the political level. So this path cannot be seen as optimal for polity-wide representative institutions and the political and economic growth these are assumed to generate.

Sociologists have explored the cultural and network-based dimensions of this rather exceptional combination of bottom-up rule with commercial interests to great effect.170 However, as economic historians are increasingly emphasizing, that the Republic was decentralized did not mean the units were as well. In fact, they functioned “as a single economy.”171 For this to happen, counties had to function as political units as well and the foundations for this condition went back to the medieval period. These developments are only now beginning to become available to non-specialists and the image they present echoes the main claims advanced in this book.

The “prehistory” of the Dutch Republic, as exemplified mainly by the county of Holland, shows a comital authority that was effective enough to control noble power. In particular, counts imposed taxation and a court system that was indispensable for the economic practices that allowed Holland’s growth. This was all predicated on a land regime controlled by the count. Although economic historians have emphasized the “absence of a truly feudal past” in Holland, this refers to the greater freedom of peasants from manorial lords and servile obligations.172 But this freedom typically materializes when rulers are powerful enough to break or circumvent the power of manorial lords, as happened in England. This was

167 van Zanden, et al. (2012, 13).168 Dumolyn and Haemers (2015, *).169 Gelderblom (2013, 16).170 Adams (1994), Gorski (2003).171 de Vries and van der Woude (1997, 111, 189, 172-94).172 de Vries and van der Woude (1997, 159-65).

especially put into play during the reclamations of the marshlands between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries, where comital power coordinated change.173 Far from a “naturally” propitious agricultural environment, Holland was a feat of technical coordination over nature.

Additional evidence suggests comital power. The nobility and especially the church had limited reach and jurisdictional powers,174 which in turn weakened class barriers between subject and the state,175 even more so than in England. In the words of economic historians de Vries and van der Woude, Holland in the Middle Ages was no “society of orders.”176 The nobility did not have separate jurisdiction, similarly to England and opposite France. Comital power, at the same time, also meant that towns had limited legal or political coercion over the countryside, unlike the one observed in Italy or occasionally even Flanders.177 de Vries attributes this to competition between cities.178 This undoubtedly contributed, but competition in itself cannot establish stable equilibria.

Instead, all these elements flowed from an integrated judicial system under the count, through which city action was coordinated.179 From “the tenth to thirteenth centuries, the counts and bishops established a political structure consisting of local jurisdictions administered by government agents (sheriffs) and villagers.” As in England, “nobles and clergymen did not preside over jurisdictions of their own,” with some limited exceptions. This made the system polity-wide and overseen by the counts of Holland, “consisting of regional courts of appeal and a supreme court in The Hague, and later in Malines.”180 As in England again, a sheriff ensured compliance throughout the county, though he and other officials were checked by the inquests we’ve seen elsewhere.181

The comital court system was fundamental for economic growth. Land markets depended on secure property rights, which meant registration of transactions. Even in England, this occurred often in manorial courts, certainly also in France and in Flanders. In Holland, however, the economic historian Jaco Zuijderduijn has shown that “in most regions, the role of lords and notaries in the field of registration was almost non-existent.” Public courts were used, eventually, even in small villages. Since, even by the mid-seventeenth century, “only 8 per cent of the villages in Holland had become subject to urban jurisdiction,” this demonstrates a remarkable infrastructural power of public authorities throughout the polity. In fact, by the sixteenth century, village courts were “interchangeable” with central ones, as far as the confidence of market actors in the security of property rights was concerned, which suggests a highly effective homogenization of

173 van Bochove, et al. (2015, 13), van Bavel, et al. (2012, 352, 366-7), Dijkman (2011, 12).174 Zuijderduijn (2010, 370), 2014, 22), van Bavel, et al. (2012, 355).175 van Bavel, et al. (2012, 366-7), de Vries and van der Woude (1997).176 de Vries and van der Woude (1997, *), Zuijderduijn (2010, 370).177 Zuijderduijn (2010, 367), 2014, 22-3), van Bavel, et al. (2012, 360).178 de Vries (2001, 81). See also Gelderblom (2013).179 van Bavel (2016, 149).180 Zuijderduijn (2014, 21-3).181 Zuijderduijn (2010, 367), Nicholas (1992).

the market.182 In some parts, judicial conveyance was made mandatory by public authorities in the fifteenth century.183

Mortgages were also a key financial instrument facilitating market exchange in land. They were however registered in public courts, often using juries, not seigneurial ones.184 In fact, public courts were strengthened in 1351 when count William V forbade noblemen and clerics from settling disputes.185 And one of the key elements for the marketization of the economy, the development of short term land-lease contracts, was far advanced in regions of the northern Netherlands, where it reached three-quarters by the 1400s—public authority was again key for contract enforcement.186

How did this affect representative practice? Lack of accessible sources, especially for the early period, makes it impossible to answer conclusively, but some general points can be made.187 For instance, the county of Holland was run by the commune concilium, which was attended by lesser gentry and was thus distinct from the curial council that was composed of vassals under William III (1304-1337).188 So a similar institutional structure existed as in England and France and the count engaged in similar judicial activities regarding complaints by subjects, as evidence from registers of the counts of Holland shows.189 But little is available about the composition and functioning of the early institution.

By the time of the Dutch Republic, however, a clear and distinct structure had emerged, with the Estates-General separate from the local assembly.190 The former had a strongly decentralized character, underscored by representatives with limited mandates—the type we have seen undercut representative practice in France.191 The lack of full powers was “used to score a tactical point.” This caused such problems that the Chancellor, asked “sarcastically” whether their authority was “also limited in the number of times they were allowed to drink on the journey.”192 By contrast, the voting system at the local level was able to procure impressive results, not least in taxation; it provided about 80% of the Republic’s revenue, with Holland producing 60% of that.193 As the economic historians Karaman and Pamuk have shown, at a per capita level this appears to have been the most impressive revenue extraction level in the premodern period, as it exceeded that of all other units at the time.194 The infrastructural and especially judicial power of the county was necessary for this, although exploring the direct links remains to be done.

182 Zuijderduijn (2014).183 van Bavel (2008, 23).184 van Bavel, et al. (2012, 355, 357), Zuijderduijn (2014, 25).185 van Bochove, et al. (2015, 14).186 van Bavel (2008, 31, 38), van Bavel and Schofield (2008).187 See, however, Burgers (2009), Kokken (1991), Ward (2001).188 Scholarship is mostly in Dutch; Burgers (2011, 109-10).189 Burgers (2011, 107-8). 190 Tracy (1990), Gorski (2003), Gorski (2003).191 Marongiu (1979, 232), Koenigsberger (1978, 214-5), 1988).192 Koenigsberger (1988, 113-114).193 Gorski (2003, 47). It was split between 18 votes for towns and one for the nobility in Holland, but varying elsewhere.194 Karaman and Pamuk (2013, 605).

8.3 Conclusion

The above section on the historical origins of city-states has aimed to show the similarities between their origins and those with territorial representative institutions, such as England. Land rights were controlled by counts or lords and public administration involved jurisdiction, a pattern that in northern Italy was still operative into the eighteenth century, when princely governments dominated.

The critical difference with Italian city-states that allowed Flanders to sustain effective institutions was that “the counts of Flanders always remained in place as the ruling power.”195 This extended more broadly for the Low Countries, “where the towns did not succeed in winning complete autonomy. They did not cease to form part of the territorial principalities within which they had sprung up.” This also ensured the participation of the countryside, which Blockmans identifies as crucial in the case of the franc of Bruges.196 “Their institutions had a mixed character, half princely, half urban.”197 In Holland, as de Vries has noted, government was institutionalized at the provincial level,” so as to check the unmediated rule by cities.198

Failure on this dimension, on that of integration and centralization, is accepted as one of the major causes of institutional and regime failure in the Italian cases: “The question we need to answer is, why could urban republics not become effective territorial republics;”199 the answer seems to be that “the conflict between landed and commercial interests was seldom resolved successfully.” Republican governments were not able to coopt rural landlords in a structure that permitted the “jurisdictional integration” needed by the commercial classes. Political insecurity and fragmentation, multiple customs duty systems and unregulated weights and measures systems undermined the conditions necessary for growth.200

England, by contrast, was distinguished by a wide network of small urban centers. It shows very low rates of urbanization in the conventional databases that only include cities above 5,000 inhabitants (4.4%, compared to 22.4 in Belgium and 20.8% in Italy).201 But about half of the urban population of England was living in small towns, between 300 and 2,000 inhabitants, around 1300.202 These were “local outlets and collection points” providing “vital points of contact between the different levels of the commercial economy.”203 But they were integrated into a network of commercial centers because of the capacity of the English crown to regulate internal affairs and create ‘free-trade’ areas.204 There is a tendency to consider cities as engines for growth, yet most economic transactions occurred in the countryside: the lay landed elite had a combined total income of around £425,000 in 1300, urban households, including rich merchants, had a worth of

195 Blockmans and Prevenier (1999, 7).196 Blockmans (1978b, 194)*.197 van Werveke (1965, 28), see also Gilissen (1954, 541-3), Lyon (1978).198 de Vries (2001, 81).199 Epstein (2000, 298).200 Epstein (2000, 298), Jones (1997, 233). 201 Bairoch, et al. (1988, 259, 297), 1988).202 Dyer (2002).203 Dyer (2002, 12, 16), Beresford (1967).204 {Britnell, 1981 #436;, 1978 #437}.

£800,000, whereas that of the lower-class rural population exceeded £3 million.205 It was the English crown’s capacity to harness all social groups across this territory which was mediated through its parliamentary structures and which enabled its later growth.

In other words, if Europe’s urban development “outpaced that in the Islamic world,” it is not because “the development of forms of local participative government in Europe…made cities less dependent on the state.”206 If anything, it is where cities were integrated into a polity-wide institutional structure that participatory institutions were more resilient.

The claim in this work is that strong central power is necessary for collective institutions and action. City-republics and semi-autonomous cities confirm my hypothesis at one remove: there, such power operated at a prior historical point. Collective action was sustained over time in republican cities even after central executive authority was removed. How this happened is an intriguing and enduring problem, which has received much historical attention. Nonetheless, in my analysis of the Hungarian case in chapter 10, I argue that such equilibria are ultimately not sustainable in the long term. The same problem that inhibits collective action in the first place eventually undermine its continuation and lead to a collapse of time in the long term: the lack of a strong executive. That all city-republics in the end reverted to some form of autocratic government seems to confirm this point. That medieval Catalonia, analyzed next, better preserved its institutions even under external rule, just like Flanders, is also related to the stronger comital presence at critical points in the history of their institutions.

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