Europe in 1300

Nation-States …

This concludes the tour, but I have to take a moment to talk about nation-states. The tour has presented many maps to you and has listed numerous monarchs of one sort or another. It is very easy to look at the maps and to think of these places in modern terms, as nation-states. That would be a mistake that will lead to all sorts of confusion.

… Did Not Exist

The term "nation-state" is a political science term with a precise meaning. The word nation comes from the Latin natio which means something like "a people". The best example, at least if you are American, is from the American Indians—think Sioux Nation or Cherokee Nation. The word has less to do with political boundaries than with cultural identity.

The term "state" means the formal government, so "nation-state" means the aligning of a specific government with a specific cultural group. The notion is very much not medieval. It's modern. Nineteenth century, to be precise. It's the invention of European philosphers and politicians who thought the best way to make a stable government was to have everyone speak the same language, share the same cultural values, and have the same history. As an aside, Americans have always struggled with this because we have never had this sort of cultural unity. Indeed, we made rather a proud point of not needing it, once upon a time. But that is not my concern here. The question here is, how did people think about politics and political entities in the late Middle Ages?

Localism Ruled

People thought of themselves in local terms, and by local here I mean very local. To use another common word that had a different meaning then from now, people thought in terms of their country. For us, "country" is synonymous with "nation-state". In the Middle Ages, "country" meant the cultural locality from which you came. Let's take an example from France.

A map of France in 1300 doesn't look too much different from a modern map, if you look only at the national boundary. Trim a bit here, add a bit there. But almost no one called themselves French. Instead, a man living in, say, Angoulême, would have identified himself first and foremost as a denizen of that town. Secondarily, if talking to an outsider, he would call himself a Poitevin—a man of Poitou (Poitiers). A Breton (from Brittany) would have been deeply insulted to be called French. He didn't even speak French!

Only if traveling in a foreign country would our man of Angoulême be called a Frenchman, based mainly on language. Now, I say that knowing that if this fellow were in Gascony, that would be considered by both parties a "foreign country"! The man's loyalty was to his lord first, and then to the Count of Poitou. The King of France was a remote power who rarely entered into his life. He did not pay taxes to "France" and was not answerable to "French" law unless it were something like treason against the king. In fact, when travelling abroad, the Poitevin would be more likely to identify himself as a Christian than a Frenchman.

This orientation was stronger in some places, weaker in others. It was, for example, less strong in England, though identification with the shire was still very marked, especially in certain areas such as Northumbria or Cornwall. The tendency was much stronger in Germany and Italy, where there was almost no identification with the "country" of German or Italy. So, for example, the Italian merchants in London were called "Lombards" or "Italians" regardless of where they came from in Italy. Similarly, there was the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice—the House of the Germans—which was applied to anyone speaking any sort of flavor of the German language. A man of Florence called himself a Florentine or maybe a Tuscan, but never "Italian" nor would any other Italian have used such a term.

We do see some changes in this over our two hundred years. It's most striking in France and England, where the Hundred Years War really did start to create a sense of national identity, particularly in England. This was manifested first in language. In 1300, the language of the English court was still French. In 1500, it was solidly English.

We see it in Italy right at the end of our course, and again war was the agent of the change, though in Italy it has a different tone under the influence of humanism. It was always strongly literary and rhetorical, with little result in practical politics.

We see it right at the end of our course in Spain as well, consciously cultivated by the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. Again at the end of our course, we see an attempt made in Germany under Emperor Maximilian, but the effort was only at the imperial level and was not at all effective.