Kinship,Property,and Authority

Tilly and Territorial Consolidation

The scholars who followed in the footsteps of Weber sought to explicitly flesh out the mechanisms of the transformations that Weber had sketched out. The neo-Weberian focus on the state was a major preoccupation of the so-called “second wave” of historical and political sociology in the 1970s and 1980s, ⁵ and spawned efforts towards greater conceptual clarity as well as interest in the origins of the modern state from pre-modern forms of political organization, including the sociological causes and consequences of variation in the patterns and timing of state formation. ⁶

What emerged from this process of fleshing out the mechanism suggested by Weber with a model of state formation, explicitly and without remorse, coercive in nature? This model of state formation can be called the ‘warfare’ model because it places violence and large-scale organized warfare at the very center of European political development. This model starts in the year 1000, which is characterized as the basic starting point for an 800-year process of conquest, elimination, and the necessary adaptation that this Darwinian world imposed upon those actors struggling for survival. Two critical points need to be made here: (1) while territorial consolidation is at the heart of the model because its overarching logic requires territorial consolidation through violence, conquest, and warfare, the actual emphasis in the warfare model is elsewhere; and (2) the warfare model is fundamentally interested in the consequences of existence in this precarious world for the administrative structures of the state, which then become a proxy for the state itself. Territorial consolidation is a requirement, therefore, of the entire model.

The argument of the warfare model is that war forced ‘states’ into existence by creating an environment in which survival depended upon the formation of standing permanent armies, which in turn required institutions for the collection of revenue plus permanent bureaucratic structures to maintain and control these new military organizations. ⁷ The states that failed to do this were eliminated by conquest; the progressive consolidation of European territory from literally hundreds of political units in the medieval period, to roughly two dozen by the nineteenth century is held to be a testament to the critical role that warfare played in eliminating polities that failed to create modern military institutions and the bureaucratic structures that underpinned them. The classic summation of the argument is Tilly’s:

Most of the European efforts to build states failed. The enormous majority of the political units which were around to bid for autonomy and strength in 1500 disappeared in the next few centuries, smashed and absorbed by other states-in-the-making. The substantial majority of the units which got so far as to acquire a recognizable existence as states during those centuries still disappeared. And of the handful which survived or emerged into the nineteenth century as autonomous states, only a few operated effectively—regardless of the criterion of effectiveness we employ. The disproportionate distribution of success and failures puts us in the unpleasant situation of dealing with an experience in which most of the cases are negative, while only the positive cases are documented. ⁸

The requirements of warfare necessitated the creation of increasingly larger, more complex and thus expensive, military organizations. These increasingly permanent standing armies had to be underpinned by an extractive bureaucratic apparatus and provided, for the first time, a plausible basis for the assertion of territorial control in its modern sense (i.e. a monopoly on the use of legitimate force in society over a defined and delimited territorial space).

The problem with this approach is twofold. First, it asserts that the logic of political competition and therefore of the accumulation of power in this system is based on (a) coercion and (b) coercion driven by a logic of ‘centralization’ and ‘rationalization’ that is taken to be self-evident. Second, as will be the central focus of section 2 of this article, this approach never seeks to explain the actual patterns of behavior observed in this period. Instead of war and violence, the underlying cause and logic of territorial consolidation in Europe was a consequence of the particular and peculiar logic of dynastic accumulation. The famous aphorism, ‘Bella gerant alii, tu Felix Austria nube!’ (let others wage war, you happy Austria marry!), captures a logic of political relationships in which war and violence are at best second-order phenomena.

The Return of Authority

In contrast to the focus of hard power and its institutions, a different trend in historical and political sociology can be discerned. The most significant scholars in this post-Tilly wave are Philip Gorski and Julia Adams. Gorski and Adams have both sought to address the state formation literature through the lens of different categories of social institutions—specifically the institutions relating to the organization of religion in the case of Gorski and kinship in the case of Adams. What Gorski has sought to establish in his work is that essential to understanding the rise of certain polities to great power status in the early modern period is the disciplinary revolution wrought by Calvinist forms of communal organization. To understand the Prussia of Frederick the Great, in this framework, requires understanding how Prussia mobilized its resources and manpower, and this, according to Gorski cannot be properly done without accounting for the disciplinary revolution wrought by Calvinism. The normal concerns of European high politics become comprehensible only by understanding the emergence of ‘state’ bureaucracies in their proper context. The nature of ‘state’ power, in this framework, is inextricably linked to categories of institutions that, at first glance, have little to do with the traditional concerns of the state.

The principal focus of Julia Adams’ study of the Dutch Republic during the “Golden Age” is the way in which the evolution of patrimonial authority during early Dutch state formation speaks to Tilly’s perspective on the emergence and consolidation of modern states. Adams has sought to frame the traditional questions of the state formation literature through the lens of gender and kinship. Despite successful resistance to Spanish absolutism and the resurrection of the estates as the political backbone of the federated Republic, the House of Orange sought, and occasionally succeeded in doing so, to translate its dynastic claims to the Staadholdership into more absolute kind of sovereignty. The context of the Eighty Years’ War and the military leadership of William the Silent and his successors did have the effect, she asserts, of solidifying the dynastic character of the Staadholdership. It was not merely the relative ease of extracting resources or the formidability of representative government which limited the expansive designs of the House of Orange during war time, but also the peculiar form of estatist and urban-mercantile patrimonialism that emerged in the formative period of Dutch state formation: a decentralized patrimonialism which both limited the power of the staadholder and placed limits on the extent of war-related bureaucratization. “War grows states,” she writes, “just not necessarily modern ones.” ⁹ As is the case with Gorski, Adams too embeds the nature of the power of the Dutch ‘state’ firmly within the context of institutions that, in the traditional framework of state formation, have little to do with matters relating to the ‘state’ and its power within society. This article, in connecting territorial consolidation to logics of the social institutions relating to property and kinship, seeks to add to the perspectives presented by Adams and Gorski; we need to return to more traditional questions of authority and place the development of bureaucracies and the state within its proper sociological context.

I now turn to a more extensive examination of how the European power politics were impacted by dynastic social organization in the context of territorial consolidation. The central point made below is that dynastic social institutions can explain more efficiently how European power politics operated than simply focusing on the bureaucracy. The central problem is not the emergence of certain categories of bureaucracies; it is instead the nature of authority in the society as a whole. But before examining what, if not war, caused European territorial consolidation, it is first necessary to take brief look at what European war was about.

Political Violence and its Limits

While space limitations do not permit a satisfying account of political violence in medieval and early modern Europe, it is necessary to say something about this subject before moving on to the empirical study that forms the heart of this article. What follows is a highly condensed and schematic summary of theoretical and empirical work fully developed elsewhere. ¹⁰

The laws and customs of Latin European warfare recognized two fundamental kinds of wars: (1) bellum romanum (also called guerre mortelle) or total war, and (2) bellum hostile or limited war. What determined which of these categories a conflict fell into was the identity of the contestants. Total war was conducted against three categories of actors: 1) heretics, 2) rebels, and 3) infidels. Limited war was reserved for ‘internal’ conflicts; that is, between opponents who recognized each other as equals. The key point for the purposes of this article is that by definition the very rules of conflict differed depending upon the purpose of the violence. Bellum romanum was characterized by high levels of symbolic and physical violence exercised against social enemies. This was a type of conflict that was no-holds-barred and was fought with a lack of restraint that had, at its roots, conflicts over social relationships. ¹¹

Bellum hostile, on the other hand, is what most people think of as being typical of medieval and early modern European warfare. These were the highly ritualized conflicts conducted with all the pageantry that a militarized aristocracy could muster. What is critical to bear in mind is that these two different kinds of war were grounded in two fundamentally different sociological contexts. Total war, which involved the kinds of ‘total’ mobilizations and all-out violence that the term implies, was conducted only under certain social conditions. And, contrary to the image conveyed by the warfare model, these wars were not about the elimination of groups or states; they were about the social relationships between groups that required institutional arrangements in order to co-exist. The violence in these conflicts was a mechanism to determine constitutional relationships between various categories of social actors—and since these were, by definition, non-territorial in nature, they play no role, ironically, in the territorial conquest model of the warfare school.

Limited war, on the other hand, was grounded in a different logic entirely. Understanding why requires taking a closer look at the society in question. The society that emerged by the 11^th century was organized for the benefit of property holders, and above all property in the form of land. In all premodern agrarian societies, land and authority over the people who work the land are the most important sources of social power. The exact ways in which land is held, exploited, and transmitted differ from society to society (and the precise ways in which these functions are carried out are profoundly important to the overall power structure of the society), but in all cases elaborate institutional frameworks designed to categorize and differentiate landholding emerge as a part of the status system. What all property holders want across time and space is security of tenure in the form of stable and predictable property rights regimes. What is distinct about medieval Europe is the emergence of a particular formalized system of political power that was held as property and transmitted by the same laws, norms, and customs governing the transmission of ‘private’ property. To be a landlord in this system meant, by definition, sharing to varying degrees in aspects of public authority. Medieval Europe created an amazingly elaborate system of property rights in which both landholding and public authority were divisible and transmittable. Over time the exact forms of property rights evolved and the relative importance of certain institutional forms of property rights declined or increased depending upon local conditions and circumstances—though from roughly the year 1000 to roughly the French Revolution, one of the fundamental logics of political competition in European society at all levels was driven by the politics of property (especially land).

An implication of this state of affairs is that the laws governing the devolution of property were by definition laws governing power relationships. Disputes over property are probably the most frequent form of conflict in most societies and so it was in premodern Europe. What is different about premodern Europe from other landed agrarian societies was the degree to which property and public authority were intertwined and formalized. This means that disputes over inheritance (again, one of the most frequent form of conflicts in all societies) were, if the inheritance in question were large and important enough to the overall stability of the society, by definition formal competitions over position in the status system. The key point to bear in mind is that competition over property in this society had to be conducted on the basis of the legitimacy of the claims of the contestants because in a society of property holders the terms on which claims to property were transmitted was of the utmost concern to all property holders. The assertion of a claim to property had to be done in such way as to minimize the consequences of a change in ownership to other stakeholders in the system of property relations. The issue here is not the willingness of particular individuals to escalate disputes beyond the norms and customs governing violence—undoubtedly many individuals did in fact do that and many more would have used unrestrained violence to obtain the favorable resolution of a property dispute. The issue instead has to do with the willingness of other stakeholders in the overall system to permit the emergence of precedents that threatened their own tenure over their own property. This means that disputes over property strictly speaking, even when involving violence, were conducted according to rules, and that these rules structured the amount and timing of the violence that was permissible in the pursuit of individual selfish goals.

The discussion undertaken thus far has been focused on the internal logic of political violence within Latin Europe. The logic of conflict and violence on the frontiers of Latin Christendom unfolded within a profoundly different institutional context from that of the internal logic. On the frontiers of Latin Christendom, Latin Christians did indeed engage in territorial conquest in a sense closer to that implied by the state formation literature than anything that had occurred internally within Latin Christendom. However, as we shall see below, even in those cases where there was territorial conquest, the state formation literature has misspecified the correct unit of analysis. While on occasion existing Latin European polities did indeed extend their territorial extents through conquest on the frontiers of Latin Christendom, much more fundamental to this process of expansion was the extension of a particular kind of society. The issue, for the purposes of this article, is what precisely was expanding when Latin Christians conquered non-Latin Christian peoples.

About the year 1000, Latin Christians began a period of rapid and profound expansion, first into neighboring ‘European’ societies (i.e. England and from thence Wales and Ireland through military conquest and settlement; Scotland, Scandinavia, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary through religious conversion; and the Baltic Northeast, Iberia, and Sicily through crusades and militant settlement) and then into the non-European world (Syria and Palestine at first and unsuccessfully and then the Americas). Note though that this profound and mostly permanent expansion of the boundaries of Latin Europe was not principally or even mostly a phenomenon involving the expansion of states. In the case of Scotland, Scandinavia, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, it was through the religious conversion of formerly and preexisting ‘barbarian’ principalities that this expansion was achieved; in those cases like England and then Wales, Ireland, and Scotland which had been ‘Christian’ prior to 1066, their religious institutions were sufficiently different from those obtaining in the core of Latin Christendom to mark them as alien and deviant forms of Christianity, requiring rewiring to be brought into the ‘mainstream’ of Latin Christian laws, norms and customs. In these cases, the external expansion of Latin Christendom meant the incorporation of formerly Pagan Vikings, Slavs, and Magyars polities into the community of Latin European societies through a voluntary and cooperative process of institutional transformation somewhat akin to the modern process of applying for membership in the European Union. Much more profound than the political violence involved in this process of incorporation was the institutional transformation of these formerly alien societies into kindred societies with kindred institutions (above all in this period religious institutions and therefore by definition those institutions relating to kinship, property and authority). Even in those cases where military conquest preceded the process of institutional transformation as in England, Wales, Ireland, the Baltic, Iberia, and Sicily, this shift in the institutional profile of these alien societies was not fundamentally a consequence of the actions of a state. Much more integral to the process of conquest was the movement of Latin peoples into alien societies and their militant transformation of the pre-existing social institutions of those societies into Latin European ones through settlement. While rulers could indeed initiate and order the process of settlement and institutional replication, this phenomenon was in no way dependent on the actions of a state. In all cases the phenomenon of conquest required social actors to implant themselves and their institutions in alien lands and among alien peoples, and to then use violence and coercion, but also positive incentives to transform these new landscapes into irreducibly Latin European ones.

While on occasion pre-existing polities did indeed expand their territorial extents through conquest and militant settlement (primarily in Iberia) this was not invariably or even mostly the case elsewhere. In the British Isles, for example, it is more accurate to say that ‘Normans’ conquered England than it is to say that ‘Normandy’ conquered England (as indeed it was ‘Normans’ and not ‘Normandy’ that conquered southern Italy and Sicily). Nor was the Latin expansion in the Baltic or indeed in Palestine or Syria ‘state’ phenomena. What all of these cases had in common was that the process of conquest led, above all and fundamentally, to the extension of a particular kind of society and not the extension of particular polities. In order to conqueror and hold territory in the medieval and early modern period, Latin Europeans had to possess it in a demographic sense. Conquest was not, therefore, fundamentally about states at all; it was, instead about social groups moving into alien lands and holding them demographically. This was as true in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during the ‘reconquest’ of Hungary by the house of Austria as it had been in the ‘reconquest’ of Iberia or of Sicily centuries earlier. In all cases conquest implied first and foremost the expansion of a particular society. Only secondarily and occasionally did preexisting Latin polities also expand. The warfare model of European political development has, therefore, misunderstood what territorial expansion meant in medieval and early modern Europe. It was above all the expansion of a particular kind of society (defined in institutional terms) and not the expansion of states. The external competition with Muslims and Pagans did not, therefore, generate anything like the logic of competition that the warfare model of European political development leads us to expect.

What this implies about the warfare model in the state formation literature is that there is an empirical and theoretical problem that can only be described as fundamental. Since the literature makes no distinction between different kinds of war and instead treats the phenomenon as an undifferentiated whole, it is difficult to make a more tightly argued critique of it. Suffice it to say that European dynasts would indeed seek to mobilize the maximum amount of resource—but, contrary to Tilly et. al., the ‘maximum’ was defined by the social conditions that generated conflict in the first instance. Dynastic wars were wars about rank, status, and title; achieving these at the expense of legitimacy and stability could never have been in the interests of a ruler, no matter how important the property in question.

The Succession

Before undertaking a more detailed examination of the transformation of kinship around the year 1000, it is first important to place the problem of kinship and its relationship to public authority in a broader context. All organizations have to solve the basic problem of the peaceful and orderly transmission of office from one generation to the next. Typically, in the case of monarchies (even in elective monarchies), some form of kinship is a crucial factor in determining the succession. It is common to refer to closely related individuals who successively occupy the highest office of the land as ‘dynasties’; thus, we hear of dynasties of Roman emperors, dynasties of Ottoman sultans, dynasties of Mughal emperors, and even of merchant and industrial dynasties in more recent times. Most of the time, there is a presumption that a reasonably competent adult son of a reigning monarch will have at least a strong claim to succeed his father.

However, most societies, including those mentioned about (the Roman, Ottoman, and Mughal empires among many other examples) fail to establish clear and incontestable lines of succession. This was especially true of the Roman Empire, where there was no law of the Roman succession despite repeated attempts over many centuries to legislate the order of the succession. ¹² In practice the Roman imperial succession, from the very beginning under Augustus, was determined by the Army, typically through civil war. Of course Roman families at the top of the hierarchy used kinship as a tool to enhance their rank and status, and of course Roman imperial families used ‘kinship diplomacy’ to strengthen their social standing and legitimacy within the overall political system. The issue is not whether kinship mattered, but how. The Roman Empire never became a dynastic hereditary monarchy despite attempts to turn it into one, and so the use of kinship in the Roman political system operated in a fundamentally different institutional setting from that of medieval and early modern Europe. The issue then has to do with the consequences of blood ties (and adoption was possible in the Roman system but not in the Latin European one). In the Roman political system, blood did not create automatic presumptions that an individual would succeed to the imperial office. An implication of this discussion is that the Roman imperial political system had a major institutional design flaw; an imprecise and open successional system led repeatedly to civil war. And, when Rome faced significant external invasions in the fourth and fifth centuries, the ‘barbarian’ invaders would enter into the Roman political system as major players in the constant turmoil caused by unstable successional institutions. While the Roman successional system did not lead to the fall of the empire, it did pose potentially lethal challenges once the contestants in the civil wars sought to mobilize barbarian armies in the pursuit of the imperial office. ¹³

Similarly, the successional practices of the Ottoman Empire differed in fundamental ways from those of the Latin European monarchies of the late medieval and early modern periods. ¹⁴ The contrast between the two can be used to arrive at a deeper understanding of dynasticism and its uniqueness. Ottoman sultans, like all Islamic ruling families, practiced polygamy. A central part of the imperial household was the harem in which the wives and concubines of the sultan were maintained. Unlike European rulers who, for the purposes of producing legitimate successors, were restricted to one lawful wife at a time (and, as Henry VIII found out, for whom divorce was not necessarily a simple matter), the sultans of the Islamic world could produce legitimate heirs with as many women as they pleased. The status of their mates was irrelevant to the issue of the succession; the mothers of sultans could be of any religious, social, or legal status (including slaves and Christians). The successional practices of the Latin Christian world were, then, firmly grounded in the institutional structure of western Christianity and were not transplantable to societies in which family structures and property rights were so different from those obtaining in Latin Europe. The Ottoman succession was open to all sons of the deceased sultan with no legal restrictions on the pool of potential claimants, other than paternity and age at the time of the succession (Islamic custom held that the successor had to be a male of full age and of sound mind). Under conditions of polygamy, the numbers of potentially legitimate successors equaled the total number of sons sired by the deceased ruler. The Ottoman succession was therefore governed by imprecise laws and customs, with no nonviolent way to distinguish between the claims of the contestants. Essentially, “Whichever Ottoman prince succeeded in securing the empire’s capital, Treasury, archives and in winning the support of the Janissaries [the slave army owned by the sultan], ulema, bureaucracy and Palace officials, was the legitimate sultan. In practice after 1421, the support of the Janissaries became a fundamental factor in the succession.” ¹⁵

Civil war was an endemic consequence of this system of succession. Under these circumstances, the Ottomans devised a ‘solution’ to the problem of the succession: legalized fratricide. From the early years of the empire the successful claimant eliminated all other potential claimants to throne by killing them. Under Mehmet II (reigned 1451–81) this practice became legally codified: “For the welfare of the state, the one of my sons to whom God grants the sultanate may lawfully put his brothers to death.” ¹⁶ Indeed Selim I (1512–20) took this one step further; not only did he kill all of his brothers upon his accession in 1512, he also killed all of his sons save one (Süleyman the Magnificent). In the early modern period, the Ottoman succession was literally a zero-sum game for the contestants.

In both of the cases discussed above, the imperial succession owed nothing to property law, and partibility as practiced by early medieval Germanic kingdoms was never an option contemplated by the Ottomans (or most other monarchies). The discussion undertaken thus far has been designed to emphasize, comparatively, the central importance of the successional system to the overall stability and character of the polity as a whole. While all monarchies have to develop systems of succession, most do not manage to institutional non-violent selection mechanisms. While I retain the term ‘dynasty’ in this article for simplicity sake, I do not wish to imply any commonality between the Latin European system and other monarchical systems. For the purposes of this article, dynasticism is a system of succession based on fixed rules regulating kinship in a society in which political power was held and transmitted

The European Family

The nature and structure of public authority and its connection to kinship in the period preceding the year 1000 were fundamentally different than those that emerged during the centuries under consideration here. While public power and kinship were intimately linked in the post-Roman Germanic world, the exact manner in which these were configured were profoundly different, as were the observable consequences of these institutional arrangements. There are two significant points that needs to be made about Frankish kinship and power relations. First of all, outside of the royal clans of Frankish Europe, political power was not formally held and transmitted by the laws governing ‘private’ property; instead, officers and the aristocrats who occupied these offices did not own them in any way. Second of all, the structure of Frankish families (initially including the royal families) was, in the language of historical anthropology, that of the ‘clan’ (Sippe) rather than that of the nuclear family (Geschlecht). This meant that claims to authority based on kinship could be made by a wide range of male relatives and that there were no clear lines of authority flowing across generations.

The consequence of this underlying social institutional structure on the high politics of Germanic Europe was profound. The consequence of partible inheritance practices under conditions of a loose kinship system meant that Frankish high politics was defined by predictable waves of internecine violence within the ranks of those who had, however distant, some form of kinship to the ruling family. This meant that as a consequence of the underlying social institutional structure of Germanic politics and society, that there was profound instability in the political system; a failure to reform the underlying rules, customs and practices of inheritance repeatedly led to paralyzing strife over the highest office of the land. Furthermore, a logical and inevitable consequence of partible inheritance practices was the dissipation of political power. In a society in which power was based on land, repeated partition inevitably lead to weaker landlords. This meant that in early medieval Europe, the only way for a ruler to ensure that he came into the full inheritance of his predecessor was to fight and kill his closest male relatives—and, unlike in the Ottoman system, the number of potentially legitimate claimants to a throne equaled the number of male relatives (both through the male and female line) who possessed some form of charisma. It is important to underline that unlike the Ottoman system, in which the contestants were immediate and close blood relatives (i.e. typically brothers, half-brothers and the father’s brothers) and therefore the victor in these contests had to kill only his immediate male kin, in Germanic successional conflicts the exact number of potential rivals who had to be eliminated in order to reverse partition and succeed to an undivided inheritance was potentially vast. The Germanic successional system was troublesome and disruptive (as well as being lethal to the contestants) under normal circumstances; during the ‘barbarian’ invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries, the invasions intersected with political systems that were already subject to political and social stresses resulting from the uncertainties of the successions. Once Latin Europe experienced roving bands of armed outsiders, they intersected and impacted the already precarious stability of the lands they intruded into. Early medieval political institutions were simply incapable of coping with external marauders under conditions of internal political strife. By the tenth century, the overall consequence of invaders intersecting with the preexisting institutional pathologies of the early medieval world was the disintegration of ‘public authority.’ The system of dynastic lordship that developed by the year 1000 emerged within this context, and it is the consequences of this set of institutional arrangements relating to kinship, property, and public authority that the rest of this article is concerned with.

Dynastic Authority

Much of what constitutes the emergence of the dynastic order in Europe flowed from the consequences of changing both the nature of political authority and the restructuring of the European family unit. Both of these changes—in the nature of the property rights regime and in the nature of structure of the family—were inextricably bound to one another, and together restructured the basic fabric of European political order.

In the ninth and tenth centuries, as mentioned above, Europe underwent a profoundly destructive and disruptive cycle of external invasions and experienced, as a consequence, varying degrees of institutional collapse. It is in the context of this social upheaval that two significant developments occurred in European social organization: (1) the emergence of political office and authority as a form of ‘private’ property, and therefore divisible and transmittable by the same laws, customs, and norms governing the transmission of ‘private’ property; and (2) the transformation of the European family along two significant dimensions: (a) the emergence of primogeniture and (b) the recognition of female inheritance rights including claims to property, to which aspects of public authority were attached. The key point to bear in mind is that while family and office were fundamental to both the early medieval worlds and to the period circa 1000 to circa the French Revolution, the precise and specific ways in which kinship was connected to public authority differed, and these differences led to different kinds of political and social orders.

The exact process by which a new property rights regime emerged in Latin Europe by roughly the year 1000 is beyond the scope of this article. What is significant is that it emerged in the context of a profound political and social crisis. The first step in this radical transformation of core social institutions was the disintegration of public authority. The high political offices of the Carolingian world had been held at the pleasure of the ruler. Slowly, in a process beginning at the highest levels, the officeholders secured lifetime tenure of their offices and then translated them into hereditary possessions. This implied that, under conditions of partible inheritance regimes, the fragmentation that had begun at the highest levels slowly but surely worked its way down the hierarchy, creating the ‘feudal’ pattern of fragmented landholdings tied to aspects of public authority. Under the prevailing institutional frameworks, there was no logical end to how far the partitioning of public authority could go.

Primogeniture emerged within this context. ¹⁷ It has been such an artifact of the ancien régime that its true novelty is difficult for moderns to appreciate. Primogeniture altered inheritance practices by restricting the paternal inheritance to the oldest surviving son to the exclusion of younger brothers, who were disinherited. ¹⁸ The objective was to concentrate the familial resources in the interests of maintaining and enhancing the wealth and social standing of the entire family, which remained the basic unit of political life in this world.

That the Latin European aristocracy was able to disinherit its younger sons in good conscience is attributable to the unique structure of Roman Catholicism. The Roman Catholic Church had, for reasons beyond the scope of this article, evolved rules that profoundly impacted society. The emergence of dynasticism occurred within the context of a Church that was by far the best organized and wealthiest institution in society. The structure of the Church impacted the emergence of dynasticism in two significant ways:

Primogeniture halted the fragmentation of estates and principalities by transmitting patrimonial lands to the eldest son while disinheriting younger sons who could be provided for in four ways: (1) they could be placed in the Church; (2) they could be married off to heiresses (see below); (3) they could be provided for out of collateral inheritances; and (4) they could be forced to make their own way in the world by joining the military retinues of greater lords and hope for suitable rewards (above all fiefs of their own). ¹⁹ This shift in successional practices came with an additional cost; the Church gained control over the institution of marriage and, in doing so, made it more difficult for lords to transmit their estates to a legitimate son. ²⁰ The high frequency of failures of families in the male line made the question of further inheritance an urgent question and led to the second major innovation in property rights—female inheritance. ²¹

Female Inheritance and Dynastic Unions

The Salic Law, the sixth century legal code of the Franks, had barred females from inheritance. This exclusion of women did not, however, extend to their male offspring, who were potentially legitimate heirs. The Salic Law was updated on numerous occasions until the time of Charlemagne, and then fell into abeyance in the ninth century. ²² In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the laws of dynastic inheritance were refined and clarified to cover the scenario of the absence of legitimate sons. In essence, the question was whether daughters and their offspring were to be privileged over more distant male relatives. Initially, two different answers were provided to the question. In matters of ‘private’ property (i.e. excluding land to which political power was attached), daughters came to be privileged over more distant male relatives, but in the case of fiefs, daughters continued to be excluded. Over time, however, the customs governing the devolution of ‘private’ property came to be applied to fiefs and principalities.

The ability of women to inherit and transmit ‘public’ rights and offices in addition to strictly ‘private’ property constituted the second key component of dynasticism. ²³ This second aspect of dynastic inheritance practice, when coupled with primogeniture, led to the formation of a new kind of polity that was unique to Latin Europe: dynastic unions. ²⁴ Dynastic unions were polities comprised of two or more separate political entities, united in the person of a common ruler who had inherited them through legitimate succession. In other words, they were conglomerations of territories (or empires) united as a consequence of the laws of succession.

Generally, in the absence of near male heirs, estates, principalities, and kingdoms were permitted to pass through daughters. The consequence of female inheritance under conditions of feudal lordship was that when nobles married heiresses, they “took both her and her lands.” There had of course been heiresses for centuries, but up until the twelfth century, daughters had been permitted to inherit ‘ordinary’ property—not property that was coupled with political power. “From now on, however, as a result of a new development in inheritance custom we find daughters being allowed to succeed to principalities and kingdoms. The twelfth century is a ‘century of heiresses.’” ²⁵ It is no accident that one of the dominant themes of medieval romance literature is the knight errant in pursuit (often violently) of heiresses!

From an institutional standpoint, female inheritance made possible the peaceful consolidation of property that formerly could only have been united through conquest. Predictably, actors quickly adapted themselves to the incentive effects provided by this new transaction strategy. Marriages now took on an entirely different significance, and the acquisition of an heiress became as much of an imperative for ambitious dynasts as the launching of military campaigns aimed at territorial conquest. “To an ambitious politician capturing heiresses came to be at least as important as capturing castles.” ²⁶ A new type of polity was born. A dynastic composite monarchy was a ‘personal union’ of two or more principalities in the person of a common ruler brought about by the marriage of two heirs. Under this political system there was, over time, a general tendency for the concentration of more and more estates, principalities and wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer families. ²⁷

It is critical to underline the fact that the territorial consolidation outcome that is the central focus of this article required both primogeniture and female inheritance simultaneously. Without female inheritance, the process of consolidation under a primogeniture regime would have been extremely slow, since only male relatives would have inherited. Without primogeniture, there would have been no institutional mechanism for consolidation at all, since under a partible inheritance regime, the fragmentation process would have continued indefinitely. One without the other would have produced a very different political system in Europe. The outcome of territorial consolidation only occurred as a consequence of the conjunction of female inheritance and primogeniture.

The Fragility of the Dynastic Family

Interestingly, this tendency toward concentration was exacerbated by the fragility of the direct male line in dynastic families, which led to dynasties arising and then dying out at what today would seem like a very rapid pace. E. Perroy has estimated that the noble family lasted on average for three to six generations in the male line. ²⁸ This meant that at each succession there was only a fifty percent chance of an adult male succession in the direct line. ²⁹

There were many reasons for this fragility, as may well be imagined. Aside from the everyday perils that afflicted the entire medieval and early modern worlds, among the aristocracy the perils of discharging the obligations of dynastic lordship took its toll. As Jonathan Dewald explains:

Historians of several countries have established the dimensions of this dying out and replacement process, and it could be astoundingly rapid. Among the lesser nobility of fifteenth century France, about one-fifth of the family names disappeared with each generation; in the course of a century, most of the group had been replaced by new families. More or less the same happened in Germany. In lower Saxony, just over half of the noble families disappeared between 1430 and 1550; in two regions of the Rhineland, fewer than one-fifth of the fifteenth century noble families survived in 1550. In Spain, only six of the noble families prominent in 1300 survived among the fifty-five titled nobles of 1520. And the same process had been seen in England. Of 136 peerage families in 1300, fewer than half survived in the male line by 1400, and only sixteen survived in 1500. ³⁰

Dynasticism and Territorial Consolidation

The collective impact of the replacement of partible inheritance by primogeniture, the innovation of female inheritance, and the fragility of families brought about by the vagaries of medieval life had a dramatic consolidating effect. Table 1 shows the decline in the number of ruling dynasties that took place in Latin Europe over the 310-year period from 1300–1610.

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Table 1.

The Number of Ruling Dynasties in Latin Europe, 1300–1610 ³¹ .

Year	1300	1350	1400	1450	1500	1610
Number of Dynasties	12	9	9	8	8	5

The number of dynasties ruling the sixteen kingdoms of Latin Europe shrank from twelve in 1300 to five in 1610. The trend is clearly towards increasing concentration of territory in fewer and fewer hands. Equally important is the fact that this trend was not a consequence of conquest. The kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united as a consequence of the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile; the kingdoms of England and Scotland were united as a consequence of James Stewart, king of Scotland, succeeding Elizabeth Tudor as her legitimate heir; the ‘empire’ of Charles V was a consequence of his being legitimate heir to the house of Castile-Aragon (itself a dynastic union) and the house of Burgundy-Austria (also a dynastic union)—and so on and so forth. The institution of dynastic succession, driven by the contingency of birth, marriage, and death in the leading princely families of Europe, determined the distribution of power in Europe.

Partible Inheritance in Early Modern Europe

While primogeniture became the dominant form of inheritance practice among the nobility of late medieval and early modern Europe, there were ever diminishing zones where partible inheritance persisted into the seventeenth century. We can, therefore, get an idea of the impact of primogeniture by comparing the experience just described with that of those areas of Latin Christendom that adopted the reform much later. The comparison between those zones of Latin Europe that adopted primogeniture and those that did not constitutes an almost perfect natural experiment that allows us to observe the differential outcomes of the adoption of primogeniture. The most important of the areas where partible inheritance persisted was the Holy Roman Empire (henceforth the Empire).

The Empire was an elective monarchy comprised of estates of varying constitutional status possessing territorial lordship (Landeshoheit). With the exception of the ecclesiastical principalities and the imperial cities, these lordships were fiefs of the Empire subject to hereditary tenure and governed by princes with varying titles (prince, archduke, duke, count palatine, margrave, and landgrave). ⁴¹

The patchwork of miniature principalities that stands out so markedly on maps of the early modern Empire was a product of the nature of partible inheritance in the Empire. “In the thirteenth century there were around ninety spiritual princes and only thirteen secular ones. A hundred years later, the second group had grown to a little more than forty. By 1582 it numbered forty-six, a number made even more impressive in light of the territorial losses that secularization in the name of the Protestant reform had brought to the spiritual principalities.” ⁴² The obvious advantages of primogeniture notwithstanding, the custom of partible inheritances remained prevalent in Germany until the end of the seventeenth century. The core issues at stake in the debate between partible inheritances and primogeniture were related to the vital problem of sustaining the dynasty. Too many male children made providing for them a problem and was in any case the source of discord within the dynasty; too few male heirs and the basic survival of the house came into question. ⁴³

In contrast to their brethren to the west, German princes continued to use partible inheritance to provide for their younger sons. ⁴⁴ The results of partible inheritance can be best illustrated through the case of the house of Wettin (Saxony). ⁴⁵ In 1485 the primary division of the house of Saxony was made whereby electoral Saxony and ducal Saxony were separated between the Ernestine Wettins (electoral Saxony) and Albertine Wettins (ducal Saxony); control of these dignities was reversed by the emperor Charles V as a result of the Schmalkaldic War (1547). The Albertine Wettins adopted primogeniture relatively early for a German princely house (although not consistently) in 1499. In 1652, however, John George I, elector of Saxony, established three lines of Albertine Wettins—Saxony-Weissenfels, Saxony-Merseburg and Saxony-Zeitz—which maintained quarrelsome relations with one another until 1746, when the lands of electoral Saxony were finally reunited and primogeniture reestablished in the Albertine line. The Ernestine Wettins of ducal Saxony, however, maintained the custom of partible inheritance, and the various branches of the house proliferated.

By 1600, two basic branches of the Ernestines had appeared—Saxony-Weimar and Saxony-Gotha. These two branches gave rise to eleven further divisions—four from Saxony-Weimar and seven from Saxony-Gotha. By the early eighteenth century, the four cadet branches of Saxony-Weimar had failed, leading to the reestablishment of primogeniture in Saxony-Weimar in 1717. By the early eighteenth century, the seven branches of Saxony-Gotha became four and these began to introduce primogeniture in their houses—Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg (1685), Saxony-Gotha-Hildburghausen (1703), Saxony-Gotha-Coburg (1746) and Saxony-Gotha-Meiningen (1802). These Kleinstaaterei, as they would be contemptuously called by German nationalist historiography, were devoid of economic or military logic and can be only explained by dynasticism (indeed, contemporaries in France, England, and even the princes themselves realized that the custom of partible inheritance was creating polities unable to fulfill the proper functions of a ‘state’). ⁴⁶

The laws and customs of inheritance explain both the consolidation as well as the fragmentation that occurred in Germany. War, coercion, and violence are simply inadequate tools with which to explain the basic power configuration of Europe. A return to a more sociological perspective captures what the deterministic mechanics of violence do not. ⁴⁷