How do Marxists deal with medieval geopolitics, and specifically with the dynamics of war in the Middle Ages? I’ll address this question by tackling what I consider to be the best Marxist work on the topic published in the last two decades: Benno Teschke’s extended 2003 study of the relationship between social property relations and geopolitical systems — The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations.
While the study’s primary purpose was the debunking of what Teschke called “the myth of 1648”, several chapters were devoted to analyzing medieval geopolitical relations. Teschke’s main argument in this connection was twofold: first, that “the constitution, operation and transformation of geopolitical orders are predicated on the changing identities of their constitutive units”; and, second, that “social property relations… primarily define the constitution and identity of these political units”. On this view, medieval geopolitical relations were largely a product of the contradictory strategies of social reproduction pursued by enserfed peasant producers on the one hand and an exploitative nobility on the other. “These strategies” he argued “determined the territorial and administrative properties of the medieval polity… and reveal the character of medieval geopolitics as a culture of war driven by systematic reinvestment in the means of coercion and (geo)political accumulation”.
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Somewhat more specifically, Teschke characterizes medieval war in the following terms. First, he argues that war in the Middle Ages was a function of “political accumulation”: given the nature of feudal mode of exploitation, rival lords used armed force to acquire wealth-generating land and to compel peasants to work that land and surrender whatever economic surpluses it generated. Teschke then goes on to analyze what he identifies as the two principal forms of war in medieval Latin Christendom. The first of these was the “feud” – a form of organized violence endemic to the medieval Latin Christendom. This he explains as being a form of “legal redress” arising out of the inevitable and ubiquitous conflicts between subordinate lords attempting to maximize their autonomy and superordinate lords seeking to impose their will and maintain the obedience of their vassals.
The second major form of war addressed by Teschke is the war of conquest and colonization. In this connection, he argues that the violent expansion of post-Carolingian medieval Latin Christendom was a function the development of primogeniture and the subsequent problem of excess noble cadets. Against the backdrop of localized appropriation and a culture of war, these developments, he argues, necessarily drove landless warriors to seek their fortunes beyond the frontiers of Latin Christendom. The result: four waves of violent conquest – the Spanish Reconquista, the German Ostsiedlung, the crusades and the Norman conquests – that greatly expanded the boundaries of Catholic Europe.
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While Teschke introduced an important socio-political dimension to the study of medieval geopolitics writ large, ultimately his work suffers from two shortcomings that fatally weaken its capacity to illuminate the causes and character of war in the high- and late-Middle Ages. To begin with, Teschke’s account fails to provide a convincing explanation for one of the most distinctive and significant elements of medieval geopolitical relations: the “crusades”. Teschke explains this geopolitical phenomenon in terms of a confluence of two sets of material interests: those of the Church and those of the lay nobility. The interests of the former, Teschke argues, stemmed from the need to protect ecclesiastical land and treasure from increasing lordly encroachment in the aftermath of the feudal revolution. These interests led the clergy to pursue a number of strategies intended to pacify the armed nobility, one of which entailed re-directing lordly violence “into external conquest”.
The interests of the latter, derived from the fundamentals of feudal social property relations and the intensification of land-hunger following “the introduction of primogeniture that restricted noble access to the political means of appropriation”, revolved around the need to acquire wealth-generating land and peasants. As these two sets of interests converged in the eleventh century, they produced a number of expansionary geopolitical thrusts, one of which was the crusades to the Holy Land. Viewed in this way, the crusades were little more than a feudal land-grab – one with a thin “religious veneer” to be sure – but a land-grab just the same.
The problem with this account is twofold. With respect to the motives of the Church, the notion that the crusades were a further stage in the evolution of the peace movement – i.e. that they were motivated by the desire of ecclesiastical officials to protect the material interests of the Church by re-directing lordly violence – while once popular, no longer enjoys much support among crusades historians. The standard view today is that the Church’s motives have to be sought in the religiously derived values and interests of the post-Gregorian papacy – and especially in its core belief that the “reformed” Church had a duty to intervene actively in the world to promote justice and spread the Christian faith. With respect to his treatment of the motives of the crusaders, there is little support in contemporary crusades historiography for the claim that the crusades were an artifact of land hunger, demographic pressure or desire for a “share of the spoils”. Indeed, the last two decades or so of specialized crusades research has definitively refuted the claim that the crusaders were land-hungry noble cadets or wealth-seeking colonialists, emphasizing instead their religious motivations.
Peter the Hermit leads the first crusade
Second, Teschke also fails to provide a convincing account of the causes and character of what might be called the “public wars” of medieval Latin Christendom – i.e. wars fought by “states” to defend their rights and advance their interests. To be fair, Teschke’s analysis of medieval geopolitics is really a study of high medieval geopolitics – he provides some analysis of the late medieval period (which he characterizes as a period of “non-exclusive territorial anarchy”), but doesn’t really probe the logic of this system in the same way as he does the earlier period (which he calls “personalized anarchy”). If he had, he would have had to pay much more attention to the distinctive political logic of this period introduced by the revival of public authority. Perhaps ironically, then, although his is a political Marxist account, politics as such do not figure very prominently in his analysis of later medieval international relations. While Teschke has much to say about the expansion of Latin Christendom during the high Middle Ages, and clearly recognizes that an important transition took place in the late Middle Ages, he has little to say about political competition and conflict within Latin Christendom during the late medieval era.
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Perhaps ironically, Teschke’s account relies on a problematic understanding of “interests.” On the one hand, while there are important differences among its classical, structural and neoclassical variants, Realism is to a great extent premised on the assumption that states’ primary interests – survival, power, security, wealth – are material and objective, analytically separable from subjective ideas, norms and institutions. Reflecting this, Realists argue that, whatever the rhetoric of Church officials and the lay warriors who actually did the fighting, the crusades were really motivated by nothing more than the (timeless) pursuit of power and wealth.
On the other hand, and at the risk of eliding important differences among various sub-traditions, Marxist theories are also premised on the assumption that core interests are material and objective – in this case, derived not from the structures of anarchy, but from an agent’s location within a mode of production/exploitation. In Teschke’s political Marxist account of the crusades, the crystallization of a new pattern of social property relations (banal lordship) in the aftermath of the feudal revolution gave rise to a class of predatory nobles whose primary interest lay in maximizing wealth through the acquisition of productive land. This “land hunger”, coupled with the self-interested efforts of the Church to redirect lordly violence away from its own material possessions, in turn gave rise to a strategy of “political accumulation” focused on conquering and colonizing the Holy Land. In common with the Realist account, ultimately this analysis of Church and crusader motives is rooted in objectivist and materialist assumptions.
Again, there are at least two problems with such accounts. First, there are serious empirical challenges to the claim that the desire for material gain underpinned the crusades. Indeed, the current consensus among specialized crusade historians is that neither the Church nor the typical crusader were primarily motivated by such interests. This is supported by theoretical work that demonstrates that actors can be motivated by a range of interests – moral, axiological (norm-driven), etc. – that do not directly affect their material well-being.
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Second, and perhaps more importantly, there are significant conceptual challenges to the assumption that actors can in fact even have “objective” interests – that is, interests that are independent of human thought. Interests are not analytically separable from ideas, but are the products of inherently social interpretive processes – processes that produce specific and meaningful understandings of what constitutes both an actor’s interests and threats to those interests. On this view, interests cannot merely be assumed; they must be specified through a careful examination of the forms of knowledge, consciousness, “common sense” and identity that allow social actors to understand – and thus act in – the world.
Taken together, these weaknesses pose serious challenges to the historical materialist argument that war in later medieval Latin Christendom was a function of social property relations. Put simply, a close examination of the religious and public wars of the era – grounded in contemporary state-of-the-art historiography – strongly suggests that it is not sufficient, as Teschke does, to reduce a varied and complex “international” system like Latin Christendom to a single unit-type and then explain system dynamics in terms of the constitutive logic of this unit-type (social property relations). Rather, as I have argued in an earlier column, the medieval geopolitical order must be understood as comprising two basic types of war-making unit, each with a distinctive constitutive logic (and entailed interests and motives): the Church and the State. When attempting to grasp the logic of any given world order, this suggests the need to map both the constellation of unit-types comprising that order as well as the socially constructed interests of each unit-type. Social property relations may well be part of the equation – indeed, as John France has ably demonstrated, understanding the logic of high medieval “proprietary war” requires attention to precisely these relations – but it simply does not constitute a sort of master variable capable of explaining the geopolitics of medieval Latin Christendom.
By Andrew Latham
How do Marxists deal with medieval geopolitics, and specifically with the dynamics of war in the Middle Ages? I’ll address this question by tackling what I consider to be the best Marxist work on the topic published in the last two decades: Benno Teschke’s extended 2003 study of the relationship between social property relations and geopolitical systems — The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations.
While the study’s primary purpose was the debunking of what Teschke called “the myth of 1648”, several chapters were devoted to analyzing medieval geopolitical relations. Teschke’s main argument in this connection was twofold: first, that “the constitution, operation and transformation of geopolitical orders are predicated on the changing identities of their constitutive units”; and, second, that “social property relations… primarily define the constitution and identity of these political units”. On this view, medieval geopolitical relations were largely a product of the contradictory strategies of social reproduction pursued by enserfed peasant producers on the one hand and an exploitative nobility on the other. “These strategies” he argued “determined the territorial and administrative properties of the medieval polity… and reveal the character of medieval geopolitics as a culture of war driven by systematic reinvestment in the means of coercion and (geo)political accumulation”.
Somewhat more specifically, Teschke characterizes medieval war in the following terms. First, he argues that war in the Middle Ages was a function of “political accumulation”: given the nature of feudal mode of exploitation, rival lords used armed force to acquire wealth-generating land and to compel peasants to work that land and surrender whatever economic surpluses it generated. Teschke then goes on to analyze what he identifies as the two principal forms of war in medieval Latin Christendom. The first of these was the “feud” – a form of organized violence endemic to the medieval Latin Christendom. This he explains as being a form of “legal redress” arising out of the inevitable and ubiquitous conflicts between subordinate lords attempting to maximize their autonomy and superordinate lords seeking to impose their will and maintain the obedience of their vassals.
The second major form of war addressed by Teschke is the war of conquest and colonization. In this connection, he argues that the violent expansion of post-Carolingian medieval Latin Christendom was a function the development of primogeniture and the subsequent problem of excess noble cadets. Against the backdrop of localized appropriation and a culture of war, these developments, he argues, necessarily drove landless warriors to seek their fortunes beyond the frontiers of Latin Christendom. The result: four waves of violent conquest – the Spanish Reconquista, the German Ostsiedlung, the crusades and the Norman conquests – that greatly expanded the boundaries of Catholic Europe.
While Teschke introduced an important socio-political dimension to the study of medieval geopolitics writ large, ultimately his work suffers from two shortcomings that fatally weaken its capacity to illuminate the causes and character of war in the high- and late-Middle Ages. To begin with, Teschke’s account fails to provide a convincing explanation for one of the most distinctive and significant elements of medieval geopolitical relations: the “crusades”. Teschke explains this geopolitical phenomenon in terms of a confluence of two sets of material interests: those of the Church and those of the lay nobility. The interests of the former, Teschke argues, stemmed from the need to protect ecclesiastical land and treasure from increasing lordly encroachment in the aftermath of the feudal revolution. These interests led the clergy to pursue a number of strategies intended to pacify the armed nobility, one of which entailed re-directing lordly violence “into external conquest”.
The interests of the latter, derived from the fundamentals of feudal social property relations and the intensification of land-hunger following “the introduction of primogeniture that restricted noble access to the political means of appropriation”, revolved around the need to acquire wealth-generating land and peasants. As these two sets of interests converged in the eleventh century, they produced a number of expansionary geopolitical thrusts, one of which was the crusades to the Holy Land. Viewed in this way, the crusades were little more than a feudal land-grab – one with a thin “religious veneer” to be sure – but a land-grab just the same.
The problem with this account is twofold. With respect to the motives of the Church, the notion that the crusades were a further stage in the evolution of the peace movement – i.e. that they were motivated by the desire of ecclesiastical officials to protect the material interests of the Church by re-directing lordly violence – while once popular, no longer enjoys much support among crusades historians. The standard view today is that the Church’s motives have to be sought in the religiously derived values and interests of the post-Gregorian papacy – and especially in its core belief that the “reformed” Church had a duty to intervene actively in the world to promote justice and spread the Christian faith. With respect to his treatment of the motives of the crusaders, there is little support in contemporary crusades historiography for the claim that the crusades were an artifact of land hunger, demographic pressure or desire for a “share of the spoils”. Indeed, the last two decades or so of specialized crusades research has definitively refuted the claim that the crusaders were land-hungry noble cadets or wealth-seeking colonialists, emphasizing instead their religious motivations.
Second, Teschke also fails to provide a convincing account of the causes and character of what might be called the “public wars” of medieval Latin Christendom – i.e. wars fought by “states” to defend their rights and advance their interests. To be fair, Teschke’s analysis of medieval geopolitics is really a study of high medieval geopolitics – he provides some analysis of the late medieval period (which he characterizes as a period of “non-exclusive territorial anarchy”), but doesn’t really probe the logic of this system in the same way as he does the earlier period (which he calls “personalized anarchy”). If he had, he would have had to pay much more attention to the distinctive political logic of this period introduced by the revival of public authority. Perhaps ironically, then, although his is a political Marxist account, politics as such do not figure very prominently in his analysis of later medieval international relations. While Teschke has much to say about the expansion of Latin Christendom during the high Middle Ages, and clearly recognizes that an important transition took place in the late Middle Ages, he has little to say about political competition and conflict within Latin Christendom during the late medieval era.
Perhaps ironically, Teschke’s account relies on a problematic understanding of “interests.” On the one hand, while there are important differences among its classical, structural and neoclassical variants, Realism is to a great extent premised on the assumption that states’ primary interests – survival, power, security, wealth – are material and objective, analytically separable from subjective ideas, norms and institutions. Reflecting this, Realists argue that, whatever the rhetoric of Church officials and the lay warriors who actually did the fighting, the crusades were really motivated by nothing more than the (timeless) pursuit of power and wealth.
On the other hand, and at the risk of eliding important differences among various sub-traditions, Marxist theories are also premised on the assumption that core interests are material and objective – in this case, derived not from the structures of anarchy, but from an agent’s location within a mode of production/exploitation. In Teschke’s political Marxist account of the crusades, the crystallization of a new pattern of social property relations (banal lordship) in the aftermath of the feudal revolution gave rise to a class of predatory nobles whose primary interest lay in maximizing wealth through the acquisition of productive land. This “land hunger”, coupled with the self-interested efforts of the Church to redirect lordly violence away from its own material possessions, in turn gave rise to a strategy of “political accumulation” focused on conquering and colonizing the Holy Land. In common with the Realist account, ultimately this analysis of Church and crusader motives is rooted in objectivist and materialist assumptions.
Again, there are at least two problems with such accounts. First, there are serious empirical challenges to the claim that the desire for material gain underpinned the crusades. Indeed, the current consensus among specialized crusade historians is that neither the Church nor the typical crusader were primarily motivated by such interests. This is supported by theoretical work that demonstrates that actors can be motivated by a range of interests – moral, axiological (norm-driven), etc. – that do not directly affect their material well-being.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, there are significant conceptual challenges to the assumption that actors can in fact even have “objective” interests – that is, interests that are independent of human thought. Interests are not analytically separable from ideas, but are the products of inherently social interpretive processes – processes that produce specific and meaningful understandings of what constitutes both an actor’s interests and threats to those interests. On this view, interests cannot merely be assumed; they must be specified through a careful examination of the forms of knowledge, consciousness, “common sense” and identity that allow social actors to understand – and thus act in – the world.
Andrew Latham is a professor of political science at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author, most recently, of The Idea of Sovereignty At the Turn of the 14th Century. You can visit Andrew’s website at www.aalatham.com or follow Andrew on Twitter @aalatham
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Top Image: Map of Europe and the Mediterranean from the Catalan Atlas of 1375
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