GUILDS AND THE POLITICS OF MEDIEVAL TOWNS
PART FOUR: GUILDS, OLD AND NEW
This post is an installment in a longer series on Guilds, Old and New. To review a full index of all the installments to this series, see the introductory, part one of the series, here.
As has already been seen on this Substack, particularly in the scholarship of Mack Walker, on the history of the German hometowns, during the Middle Ages the fate of the emerging, increasingly heterarchical, craft guilds was closely tied to the likewise pluralist medieval towns. Black too spends a good deal of attention on the history of this free town-free guild connection. As he observes, there were in fact two regions of Europe in which this connection was most emphatic and influential: Italy and of course Germany. In this installment Black focuses particularly on these dynamics within the Italian context. In the next installment attention turns toward that history unfolding within Germany – particularly as related to the Reformation.
Focusing, then, primarily on Italy, Black tells a story of both growing urban freedom and increasing heterarchy of, and through, the guilds. Particularly in the case of guild hegemony, though, this was a hard fought victory. Though, implicitly invoking Peter Turchin’s notion of the surplus elite, and Italian realist ideas of the circulation of elites (both notions discussed in my book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars), Black does emphasize how the scions of a ruling patriciate faction helped ease the way into influence of the emerging guilds. Over long years of power struggle, both in political contests and sometime open warfare, eventually the guilds emerged as the dominant force in such medieval towns. And indeed a common arc is recognized here: the heterarchy of the towns or communes dovetailed with the increasing heterarchy of the guilds within and through those towns or communes. The result was what Black characterizes as the spread of “guild republics.”
As usual, we leave Black some considerable leash in telling his story:
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries craft-guilds assumed political power in a great number of towns. The original communes had developed into oligarchies dominated by a patriciate of leading families, usually with a mixture of landed and commercial wealth. Power had gravitated from the general assembly to the small council. Both newly enriched merchants and (in large cities) the urban proletariat had an interest in political change. But the core of this new ‘people’ (popolo) or ‘community’ (Gemeinde) was generally the artisans with their ready-made guild organization. In towns and cities all over Europe both guild and neighbourhood provided a means of popular organization which in Italy from the later twelfth century was already developing into a ‘commune within a commune’.
From the early thirteenth century these groups began to take over political control of the cities, first in Italy and then in northern Europe. They were helped by family rivalries within the patriciate; their leaders were often scions of old families, or new merchants seeking a political voice.
Sometimes, notably in the great textile centres of Flanders, the movement generated considerable violence. Family and class divisions were intensified, and power see-sawed from one group to another. By 1300 central and northern Italy was dotted with guild republics, of which Perugia is an outstanding example. After the battle of Courtrai (1302), guild government developed in Flemish cities, and, from about 1327 onwards, in Germany, especially the south and west.
Where craft-guilds were prevented from establishing political power – in great cities like Florence, Cologne and Liege – there were repeated attempts to reverse this iron law of oligarchy; sporadic risings took place during the later Middle Ages, with brief periods of craft-guild ascendancy.
The rise to power of the guilds through the towns had an additional wrinkle in Black’s assessment. While the towns and communes became the vehicles of guild ascendancy and hegemony, achieving such heterarchy through the towns also occasioned the opportunity to create institutions and practices which mitigated what could have been a relentless war for resources, expanding from the battles with the patriciate into a relentless war between the guilds themselves. Such a result would have been self-defeating, but its avoidance could not be assumed, especially in light of the extended battles by the guilds to gain power within the towns and communes. The towns, then, by way of their town charters became also instruments through which the guilds were able to establish peaceful relations and productive interactions between themselves. Much of such development Black notes across central and southern Europe, though again here he’s primarily focused upon Italy.
In Germany particularly, political sentiment continued to focus upon the old ideas of the city as community (universitas, Gemeinde, commune), of friendship, communal unity and honour. In Italy too the terms commune and universitas continued to be used interchangeably with civitas; sometimes, however, universitas was used more specifically to mean the ancient constitution with its broadly-based citizen assembly, in contrast to the oligarchy of the small council.
Ideals of peace and the common good filled a similar need as counter-balances to the centrifugal forces of guild, family, party or class.
The Stoic juxtaposition of utile et honestum (the useful and the honest or honourable) featured often in town documents. This was also a statement of sound commercial practice, as in Dundee’s motto, prudentia cum candore. Combined with the concept of mutual aid, it appeared in the first treaty of the Swiss cantons (1291): ‘Honesty is upheld and public utility is assured when a quiet and peaceful condition is duly established...each community (universitas: sc. canton) has promised to help the others with all its power and effort...and to come to their aid in every eventuality’.
Only guilds were spoken of – in guild towns, that is, or during periods of guild rule elsewhere – in terms implying, or even enthusiastically endorsing, their legitimacy as corporate groups within the whole. Italian civic parties were never sanctioned in this way. Family was recognized, overtly, as a basis of authority only in those Italian cities where despotism was established. The guilds in question might be the traditional crafts, or the political guilds (amalgamations of allied trades) specially formed for communal participation. Such a guild was called Zunft in Germany, where zünftlich government emerged as a distinctive and – to its supporters – friendly and co-operative type of regime. Often such guilds were denominated as the ‘members’ of the city (e.g. the Flemish lede). Proponents of popular guild government at Florence in 1343 claimed that it was right and proper for that city to be ‘ruled through the crafts and craftsmen’; while in 1380, the renowned Florentine chancellor Salutati, defending the Ciompi regime against its exiled opponents, accused the latter of planning ‘to wipe out the most honourable colleges of the crafts of our city, through which (after God’s grace) we are what we are, and without which there is no doubt that the name of the Florentines would disappear from the face of the earth’.
As further illustration of these dynamics, Black quotes the constitutional agreement signed at Brunswick (1445) between the (old) council, the guilds and all householders:
We, the council...and we the masters [sc. of the various guilds named] and the common guild brothers of all the aforesaid gilden, and we the householders of the commonalty (hovetlude der menheit) and the whole commonalty in all five districts have legally agreed by mutual treaty and for the benefit of the whole to help each other with all our might to withstand all those who might conspire against the council, the guilds and the whole manhood of the city of Brunswick. The recognition of sub-groups was thus combined with insistence upon the ‘whole’.
This emphasis upon the whole or organic mutualism and commonality of the medieval town under the influence of the craft (and political) guilds was another major theme described by Black. Toward this end, he also quotes Salutati, the chancellor of Florence:
What could be sweeter, more joyful, more pleasing than that the welfare of your city should reside in the hands of merchants and artisans? For they naturally love liberty, since they are liable to be more heavily oppressed by the pangs of servitude. They desire tranquility, in which alone they can usefully perform the crafts they are devoted to.1
In another instance, Black observes:
A leader of the pro-popular revolt at Florence in 1527 declared that ‘liberty is nothing other than equality among the citizens’. Equality in this context meant fiscal fairness, open access to the law courts for all burghers, and the eligibility of all full citizens for political office. It too was widely advocated by popular opponents of oligarchy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence.
As we saw with Grossi, the Renaissance began to give way to modes of thinking, particularly juridically, that would eventually contribute to the undermining of legal pluralism – and so at least by extension the legitimacy foundations of guild heterarchy. Black concludes, though, that at least in the short run, Renaissance humanism did not undermine communal liberty of the guild republic:
The new language of Renaissance humanism did not significantly affect the substance of political beliefs, which continued to be grounded ‘in communal political traditions rather than in humanist writings’. The traditional ideals of sworn association and the assembly of armed citizens provided the model and inspiration for popular government: the revival of Latin culture provided new conceptual tools to articulate and justify this.
Though, as we saw with Grossi, some of those new tools, such as natural law, did indeed contribute to the undermining of heterarchical pluralism – legal and political. And Black too concedes that eventually in Italy such communal bonds became subject to factionalism.
In Italy, city-states achieved wider dominance than elsewhere, but they were also more prone to factionalism and despotism (Signoria). In Germany, the only other region of self-governing cities in the later Middle Ages, conflict between patriciate and guilds was more often resolved by power-sharing based upon compromise. Several Italian critics noted that German cities enjoyed greater harmony and more popular participation…
With this allusion to a sublimated version of German-envy on the part of some Italian defenders of guild pluralism, Black invites us into the next installment of this series, in which we consider some unique dimensions of guild pluralism and liberty. Though that final installment on Black also will provide occasion to consider his reflections upon the poverty of guild scholarship. So, if you want to be among the special elect who get to see that post first, and haven’t yet, please do…
And if you know some one else who’d be interested in the kind of thing we do around these parts, please…
Meanwhile: Be seeing you!
Obviously, as I hope was made clear in the lengthy series of installments unpacking Grossi’s history of European law, while there may be some initial truth to Salutati’s claim, it’s not particularly scalable. What it misses, of course, is that merchant polities require trade routes, which eventually demand military protection, which eventually require massive administrative expansion, which tends to lead the polity into the same space biased society and managerial class regime as we have today.