States of Credit: Size, Power, and the Development of European Polities (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by David Stasavage

Author:David Stasavage [Stasavage, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-07-04T21:00:00+00:00

THE CAROLINGIAN PARTITION HYPOTHESIS

While Rokkan’s and Tilly’s analyses are very plausible, in focusing on initial economic conditions, both ignore the possibility that prior patterns of state development and collapse may have influenced the subsequent distribution of city-states and territorial states across Europe.3 It is often emphasized that political fragmentation and weakness of princely authority favored efforts by European cities to establish autonomy. Following along these lines, we can investigate the political events that produced this fragmentation. Rather than depending exclusively on initial levels of economic development, I wish to argue that a further explanation for the pattern of city-state development in Europe can be found by examining the history of the Carolingian Empire and the manner in which it collapsed. In the year 800 A. D. the area that would eventually become part of Europe’s “city belt” lay at the Carolingian Empire’s core. By 900, as a result of a series of events that one might term “historical accidents,” what had formerly been the core zone of the empire became a peripheral border zone flanked by larger and more cohesive kingdoms to the East and West.4 I will suggest that it was this curious and accidental pattern of collapse that helps explain why European city-states emerged predominantly in a central longitudinal band running from the present-day Low Countries to Northern Italy. In so doing, I will be following an established historical tradition that suggests that the partition of the Carolingian Empire had very long-term consequences for the political map of Europe. To construct the following brief account, I have drawn on work by a number of different historians of the period.5

In the year 843, as part of the Treaty of Verdun, the Carolingian Empire that covered much of Western Europe was divided into three separate territories. Each of these territories formed a roughly longitudinal band: (1) West Francia covered territory centered around present-day France, (2) East Francia covered territory centered around present-day Germany, and (3) Lotharingia, also referred to as the Middle Kingdom, covered a central portion of territory running from the present-day Netherlands to Northern Italy but never evolved into a single state.6 This territorial division is shown in figure 5.1, though it should be emphasized that this map is actually an approximation, because the original text of the Treaty of Verdun has been lost. A range of authors have emphasized the importance of the Treaty of Verdun in shaping the future political development of Europe. For Henri Pirenne (1936: 86), “This was the first of the great treaties of European history and the one with the most enduring consequences.” In a preface to his discussion of the Treaty of Verdun, Fernand Braudel remarked that “history thus tends to provide frontiers with roots, as if they had been caused by natural accidents; once incorporated into geography, they become difficult to move thereafter.7 Within this group of authors, most scholars also take pains to emphasize how the location of the dividing lines was determined by temporary political circumstances involving the

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